Monthly Archives: April 2012

I am the proud owner of a nearly finished first draft of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad dissertation. When I started writing, I realized that I couldn’t aim for perfection because perfection would paralyze me. I don’t know that I’ve been aiming for terrible, but letting go of the idea that my first draft had to be brilliant has helped me put a lot of words on my computer screen. Read the rest of the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. photo by Brian Taylor

Dan Chavas has won this year’s Max Eaton Prize for the best student paper at the American Meteorological Society’s 30th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology held last week in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Dan is trying to understand what determines the size (i.e. diameter) of a hurricane, which is not well understood and in nature is relatively independent of how fast its fastest winds are. The work he presented used a computer model of a hurricane in a simplified physical environment to determine the fundamental aspects of this environment that serve to modulate the final size of the model storm. For more information on Daniel’s research, read this article.

The Addir Fellows-MIT Interfaith Dialogue and The Technology and Culture Forum will bring Dr. Thomas Groome of Boston College to speak on campus on May 3 at 7:30pm in the MIT Stata Center, Roo 32-D461. Dr. Groome is a Professor of Theology and Religious Education, and will address Ethics & Religious Faith: Is one possible without the other? Dinner will be served; RSVP to ora@mit.edu. Addir is a word in Ancient Samarian that means “bridge”. The Addir Fellows Program aspires to build bridges of dialogue and understanding.

 The Center for American-Russian Engagement of Emerging Leaders (CAREEL) recently announced Brian Spatocco’s acceptance to the Kremlin Fellows Program. Spatocco, a graduate student in Materials Science and Engineering and the Graduate Student Council President, is one of only 15 student leaders selected nationwide to participate in the Summer 2012 Kremlin Fellows Program, an exchange program sponsored by the Russian Federation’s Federal Agency on Youth Affairs. Read more

The UNBOUND: Speculations on the Future of the Book event will be taking place from Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 6:00 PM to Friday, May 4, 2012 at 8:00 PM.  This symposium explores the future potential of the book by engaging practitioners and performers of this versatile technology to ask some key questions: is the book an artifact on its deathbed or a mutable medium transitioning into future forms? What shape will books of the future take? Grounded in this technology’s history, we will reflect critically on possible futures, promises, and challenges of the book, showcasing practices by writers and artists, putting them in conversation with scholars and thinkers from across the disciplines who are framing discourse and questions about book-related technotexts. This symposium hopes to foster a lively discussion where audience members participate and invoke their multiple perspectives of the book. This is a free event; register through Eventbrite.

A joint entry by David Fenning (Presidential Fellow) and Doug Powell, the Impurity to Efficiency Simulator, won second place in this year’s De Florez Competition for the category of Graduate Design. The competition had 38 applicants in four categories, all of which competed against each other for a total of $18,000 in prize money. The categories were Undergraduate Engineering Design, Undergraduate Engineering Science, Graduate Engineering Design and Graduate Engineering Science. Applicants try to “sell” their products and judges look at the entries’ level of creativity, innovation, practical application, scientific basis and design skill. For more information and the full list of this years’ winners, please visit April 2012 MechE News.

Lisa Freed has two doctoral degrees, two full-time jobs and two teenagers. Needless to say, her life is never dull. Freed is a highly respected scientist in the field of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine who has focused much of her research on cardiac tissue, developing new solutions to regenerate hearts damaged by heart attacks. She currently leads collaborating teams at Draper Laboratory and MIT, and she lectures at MIT and Harvard. Her latest research leverages the strengths of both Draper and MIT to develop tissue scaffolds that more closely mimic the three-dimensional shapes and mechanical properties of real tissues — hopefully leading to improved cell growth, healthier organs, and ultimately better health and quality of life for patients. She also advises teams at all levels, from NASA scientists to a team of 9- to 13-year-olds competing in the FIRST LEGO League. Continue reading the article on masshightech.com. photo courtesy of Mass High Tech

On April 6, the Student Advisory Committee to the Presidential Search released their preliminary report, entitled “The Student Perspective on the MIT Presidency.” Drawing upon the responses they received from six town hall meetings, each of which were attended by between 10 and 60 people, as well as hundreds of student responses from online forms, paper questionnaires, focus groups, and informal discussions, the SAC described in their 20-page report what they found to be the most important challenges, desires, and concerns of MIT. This preliminary report does not contain the list of candidates that the SAC would like to nominate.  Continue reading the article on The Tech Online Edition.

The 2012 MIT Sustainability Summit is being held on Friday, April 27th at the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center.  Speakers and panelists include leaders from business, technology, and academia.  Sessions include Scaling Social Enterprise, Promise of Big Data, Geoengineering, Socially-Mediated Collaboration, Transportation, and more.  Register at http://sustainabilitysummit.mit.edu/, and for more information, contact sustainabilitysummit@mit.edu.

From cognitive neuroscience to theoretical physics, this year’s National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellows from the University of Houston (UH) have their sights set on careers in fields ranging from medicine to energy.

Darren Seibert is a biomedical engineering major and also a member of the Honors College. He is working toward understanding the neural computations underlying visual perception. He has had the opportunity to collaborate on projects that use functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, with Michael Tarr’s lab at Carnegie Mellon University and electrophysiology in Dr. James DiCarlo’s lab at MIT. Continue reading about Seibert on the University of Houston News website.

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.  Join peer counselors and MIT Violence Prevention and Response on Sunday, April 22 from 7:00pm to 8:00pm in the Sidney Pacific Graduate Residence, Seminar Room, for dinner and discussion concerning sexual assault portrayal in the media, and how this shapes popular beliefs about this issue.  Dinner is provided, but please bring your own dishware.  For more information, contact sunnyvb@mit.edu

In spite of all that, I am writing now—in my first position as an assistant professor—to offer a few words of advice on how you can have a successful doctoral experience in the sciences, if you accept a few realities of the graduate-student lifestyle. I was a full-time, fully financed (which is of critical importance unless you are independently wealthy) graduate student. I had a paid position as a teaching assistant, which means, of course, that you do a lot of work without any credit. Here is what I learned.  Read the rest of the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  photo by Brian Taylor

We MIT kids are a messed up bunch. Alright, fine, I haven’t been immersed in enough collegiate environments to say that we are more or less messed up than anyone else our age, but still — we have problems. Over the last three and a half years, I’ve met a lot of people who are having a really crappy time and think there’s no feasible way to improve their lives. I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill, overworked MIT students, I’m talking about people whose relationship with life is tenuous at best. People who are suffering because of their anxiety, lack of motivation, sadness, or whatever else. I’m extrapolating from what I’ve seen first-hand, but it’s a safe bet that there’s a silent fraction of MIT students who are experiencing some kind of depression but not addressing it.  Continue reading the article in The Tech Online Edition.

Graduate student Dorothy Brown (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) will receive a 2012 Latino Science and Engineering Award at a celebration to be held on Monday, April 23rd.  The event will take place at 7:00pm in the Microsoft Horace Mann Conference Center at One Memorial Drive, Cambridge, and will feature national leaders from MAES, SHPE, and SACNAS, as well as an astronaut and a state senator.

At the wildly-successful MBA Charity Auctions last semester students bid on big-ticket items like professional sports tickets and shopping trips to New York. But one lucky student bid on and won a group hug from the Caribbean Pelicans. It went for $50 and the winner scored an embrace with six MBA ’12 students. Group hugs are what the Pelicans, a close-knit group, are known for. The Pelicans are just one of several teams in the Caribbean Cohort, or “ocean.” At the start of the MIT Sloan MBA program, all students are divided into oceans and then divided further into multiple teams, to support their success in the first-semester MBA Core. The Core teams, assigned by the MIT Sloan administration, are designed to be as diverse as possible. The students spend nearly three-and-a-half intense months together, but then typically disband and go their separate ways after the Core ends.  photo by Amy MacMillan

Chilean citizens have the opportunity to apply for the CONICYT Advanced Human Capital Development Program.  Prospective candidates must also be graduate students or incoming graduate students (with a letter of admission from MIT).  Visit their website for links to details and applications (for Masters students / for PhD students). For incoming Masters students, the fellowship may be granted for a maximum period of two years.  For continuing students, the fellowship will be granted for the time remaining to complete time remaining in the program (up to two years).  For Masters students, the application call will close on May 17, 2012.  Read more

12:15pm to 1:15pm
68-150 (Biology Building)
http://www.doodle.com/sg4mb22knbbdryce
Maximum participants 14 Read more

The Graduate Student Council has announced its newly elected officers for the 2012-13 school year.

GSC President: Brian Leonard Spatocco (spatocco@mit.edu) – Materials Science and Engineering
GSC Vice President: Aalap Shirish Dighe (dighe@mit.edu) – Mechanical Engineering
GSC Treasurer: Eric Victor (evictor@mit.edu) – Chemistry
GSC Secretary: Bomy Lee Chung (bomy@mit.edu) – Chemical Engineering

Congratulations to Brian, Aalap, Eric, and Bomy, who will formally begin their new roles on May 9th, 2012!  The current officers will be training and transitioning the new team over the next month.

SDM student Eugene Kwak literally had a front-row seat in the ambitious private-sector space race. Kwak, who is a member of the SDM class that entered in 2012, was the lead flight termination systems engineer for the Falcon 9, the first liquid-fuel spacecraft launched into orbit by a private company, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX). After launching from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on June 4, 2010 (Kwak’s 31st birthday), the unmanned rocket completed two orbits around the earth. Read the rest of the article on News@MITSloan. photo by Amy MacMillan