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…
YouTube at the Bench
As a graduate student at Princeton University, Moshe Pritsker tried in vain to grow a culture of embryonic stem cells from instructions laid out in the methods section of a journal article. A colleague with…
Those TAs with Thick Accents
Progress has been made in recent decades on ensuring that foreign graduate students at American universities have sufficient facility in the language--English, in the case of the United States--that they're likely to be teaching in.…
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…
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…