India’s IT Guy
The year was 1969. F. C. Kohli had just computerized control of the power grid serving the city of Mumbai (then known as Bombay.) It had been an impressive feat for him as general manager…
Starry-Eyed Astronomer no more
“Curiosity Rover Lands Safely on Mars.” This was headline news on the day I went to meet Jane Luu, defense systems engineer and award-winning planetary astronomer. Early in her career, Luu scoped the cosmos, studying…
Just Herself
Nergis Mavalvala, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, can check off a whole lot of boxes on the diversity form. She isn't just a woman in physics, which is…
A Computer Scientist In a Lab Coat
In 1994, the world was on the verge of the dot-com boom and Ron Weiss, a graduate student in the computer science program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, had just earned…
The Storyteller
As the sun began to set on the longest day of the summer, Kevin Brooks, PhD '99, surveyed the small crowd that had gathered in a tiny Cambridge art gallery to hear him tell stories. A…
Space Cadet
In 2011, I wrote about microbiologist Kate Rubins, PI at the Whitehead Institute, who got picked to be an As Can (Astronaut Candidate). She trained for 2 years, got a chance to go to the…