Magnet Alumni News: Fall 2016

The Foundation has created a new Magnet Alumni Twitter account (@blairmagnetalum) that follows and shares news from the Magnet and its alumni!

Headlines:

Drew Linzer '94 developed the 2016 Presidential Election Forecast for Daily Kos Elections, which is predicting that the math looks bad for Donald Trump.
Cynthia Addai-Robinson '98 plays a government investigator in The Accountant, now in theaters, co-starring with Ben Affleck, Anna Kendrick, J.K. Simmons, and John Lithgow. She is also co-starring with Ryan Philippe in the new series Shooter, which will be on USA Network starting November 15th. Addai-Robinson has done numerous interviews about her roles this fall, including with Marie Claire, Ebony, Collider, and Rolling Out.

Awards:

Jean Fan '09 won a Gold Medal at the 2016 Moonbeam Children's Book Awards for her Little Book of Big Dreams.
Bendeguz Offertaler ’15 was recognized with a Freshman First Honor Prize at Princeton University, where he also received the Manfred Pyka Memorial Prize in Physics.
Josephine Yu '16 won a $10,000 scholarship as a 2016 Davidson Fellow.

Transitions:

Joshua Fischman '90 has re-joined the faculty at the University of Virginia School of Law. He has a Ph.D. in economics from MIT, and his research focuses on judicial decision-making.
Rahman Culver '96 (@mrculverteaches), has returned to Blair as a teacher in the Social Studies Department. The Class of '96 held a 20-year reunion picnic this fall.
Anna Browne Ribeiro '99 joined the faculty of the University of Louisville Anthropology Department. Her research relates to human-environment interactions, Amazonian archaeology, geoarchaeology, colonialism and critical historiography, and community archaeology anthropology.
Yevgeny Brudno '00 (@brunolab) is joining the faculty of the UNC and NC State Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering Department, where his lab will focus on using chemistry and materials to create new drug delivery platforms.
Jessica Shang '04 joined the faculty at the University of Rochester as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Her research focuses on the study of the interaction between solid bodies and their fluid environments.
Jeremy Goodman '06 joined the faculty at the University of Southern California as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy. He works on metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic.

Publications:

Joshua Weitz '93, a professor at Georgia Tech, recently published an article in Royal Society Open Science, Inferring phage–bacteria infection networks from time-series data. His group also has another paper in pre-print in Physical Biology, Emergence of increased frequency and severity of multiple infections by viruses due to spatial clustering of hosts.
Aaron Klein '94, a Brookings Institution fellow, wrote a report encouraging the next President to invest in infrastructure.
Carl Miller '97, a Mathematician at NIST and Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland, co-authored Robust Protocols for Securely Expanding Randomness and Distributing Keys Using Untrusted Quantum Devices in the Journal of the ACM.
Ananth Hirsh' 01 is is publishing a hardcover omnibus of his Johnny Wander webcomic through Kickstarter!
Richard Chen '13 was interviewed in the Johns Hopkins News-Letter about his SRP research on rail guns for the USS Zumwalt.

Alumni features in this newsletter:

Computer Science for All: Pat Yongpradit '96 is promoting K-12 Computer Science education at Code.org
Educational Entrepreneur: Varun Gulati '06 is developing educational software in Silicon Valley
Class of 2006 Update: The Class of 2006 checks in for their 10-year reunion