Magnet Alumni News: Fall 2020

Pandemic News:

• • Naomi Cleghorn '89 was one of the local scientists interviewed in a Dallas News article: No travel? No labs? How researchers at UT-Arlington, UT-Dallas stayed curious in the COVID-19 pandemic

  • Lorrie Cranor '89 was one of the privacy experts interviewed by the New York Times in the article, Digital Hygiene in the Zoom Era

  • Joshua Weitz '93 was one of the professors interviewed for a Time magazine article on COVID-19 models; he recently wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Viral testing mitigates COVID’s spread

  • Jennifer Helgeson '02 led a survey of business owners on resiliency during the COVID-19 pandemic (nist.gov)

  • Jonathan Gootenberg '09 is part of a group at the Broad Institute developing a new CRISPR-based test for SARS-CoV2 (WBUR)

Recent Scientific Publications:

• • J. Wu and Samie Jaffrey '89, Imaging mRNA trafficking in living cells using fluorogenic proteins (Current Opinion in Chemical Biology)

  • P. Haidet and Wendy Madigosky '91, Towards an evolution of interprofessional practice: Lessons learned from two jazz piano trios (Patient Education and Counseling)

  • M.P. Rivera, Hormuzd Katki '92, et al., Addressing Disparities in Lung Cancer Screening Eligibility and Healthcare Access. An Official American Thoracic Society Statement (American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine)

  • C. Cammarota, T.M. Finnegan, et al., and Dan Bergstralh '93, An Axon-Pathfinding Mechanism Preserves Epithelial Tissue Integrity (Current Biology)

  • V. Prabhu, et al., and Nicole Hindman '93, Current State of Membership Diversity Among North American Radiology Societies: Analysis of Public Information on Society Websites (Academic Radiology)

  • Iyad Obeid '93, et al., Signal Processing in Medicine and Biology (Springer Nature)

  • J. Lachance, C.N. Simonti, and Joshua Weitz '93, Large sample spaces do not imply biological systems are 'fine-tuned' (Journal of Theoretical Biology)

  • S. Fan, et al., and Minjoo Larry Lee '94, Current-Matched III–V/Si Epitaxial Tandem Solar Cells with 25.0% Efficiency (Cell Reports Physical Science)

  • J. Wright et al., and Caleb Fassett '98, Modification of Caloris ejecta blocks by long-lived mass-wasting: A volatile-driven process? (Earth and Planetary Science Letters)

  • Brad Buran '99, et al., Optimizing Auditory Brainstem Response Acquisition Using Interleaved Frequencies (Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology)

  • Elinor Lichtenberg '99, et al., Bumble bees are constant to nectar-robbing behaviour despite low switching costs (Animal Behaviour)

  • J. Kaplanis, et al., and Kyle Retterer '99, Evidence for 28 genetic disorders discovered by combining healthcare and research data (Nature)

  • L. Necib, et al., and Robyn Sanderson '99, Evidence for a vast prograde stellar stream in the solar vicinity (Nature Astronomy)

  • S. Palvai, et al., and Yevgeny Brudno '00, In Vivo Targeting Using Arylboronate/Nopoldiol Click Conjugation (Bioconjugate Chemistry)

  • D. Erman, S.V. Sam, and Andrew Snowden '00, Strength and Hartshorne’s Conjecture in high degree (Mathematische Zeitschrift)

  • D.A. Parikh, et al., and Jennifer Caswell-Jin '02, Understanding patient perspectives on window of opportunity clinical trials (Journal of Clinical Oncology)

  • A.J. Petty, Melodi J. Whitley '03, et al., Pyoderma gangrenosum induced by secukinumab in a patient with psoriasis successfully treated with ustekinumab (American Academy of Dermatology Case Reports)

  • S.E. Turbett, Melis Anahtar '04, et al., Evaluation of Three Commercial SARS-CoV-2 Serologic Assays and their Performance in Two-Test Algorithms (Journal of Clinical Microbiology)

  • Ning Bao '04, et al., Cosmological decoherence from thermal gravitons (Journal of High Energy Physics)

  • J. Hu and Erica Hartmann '05, Anthropogenic chemicals and their impacts on microbes living in buildings (Microbial Biotechnology)

  • M. Chen, et al., incl. Shwetadwip Chowdhury '06, Multi-layer Born multiple-scattering model for 3D phase microscopy (Optica)

  • D.E. Orange, Vicky Yao '07, et al., RNA Identification of PRIME Cells Predicting Rheumatoid Arthritis Flares (New England Journal of Medicine)

  • J.C. Jimenez, Jack Berry '08, et al., Contextual fear memory retrieval by correlated ensembles of ventral CA1 neurons (Nature Communications)

  • Jean Fan '09, et al., Single-cell transcriptomics in cancer: computational challenges and opportunities (Experimental & Molecular Medicine)

  • S.B. Borelle, et al., incl. Miranda Bernard '11, Predicted growth in plastic waste exceeds efforts to mitigate plastic pollution (Science)

  • E.J. Davis, Avikar Periwal '14, et al., Protecting Spin Coherence in a Tunable Heisenberg Model (Physical Review Letters)

  • A. Hardt, Jared Marx-Kuo '15, et al., Characters of Renner monoids and their Hecke algebras (International Journal of Algebra and Computation)

Awards/Recognition:

• • Arec Jamgochian '12 was recognized as one of the HIVE Ventures 30 Under 30 Armenians in Tech.

  • Samantha Xiao Cody '13 was interviewed in the Masters Review Blog about her award-winning short story, "The Driver."

Music/Film/Podcast/Video:

• • Forbes Graham '95 will perform in a November concert via videoconference: The Disappearance of Music

  • David Andalman '97 started a podcast about catching breaks in film and TV (davidandalman.com)

  • Cynthia Addai-Robinson '98 is starring in a new film, Always and Forever, set for release in November (Essence)

  • Lynn Favin '01 was in the cast of an online production of Henry VI, part two (The Show Must Go Online)

  • Alison Cardy '02 is a career coach who hosts her own podcast, To a Billion With Joy, now in its third season.

  • Abigail Fraeman '05 was interviewed about the NASA Curiosity rover's exploration of Vera Ridge (wemartians)

Political Analysis/Commentary:

• • Maneesh Agrawala '90 led the project that developed the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, a tool for searching and visualizing what is being discussed on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. (NiemanLab)

  • Josh Fischman '90 helped to conduct An Empirical Analysis of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Record on the Seventh Circuit, discussed in a FiveThirtyEight article: How Conservative Is Amy Coney Barrett?

  • Craig Rice '90 is the vice chair of the Human Services and Education Steering Committee for the National Association of Counties (mymcmedia)

  • Pat Yongpradit '96 shared the 2020 State of Computer Science Education. (@MrYongpradit)

  • Aaron Klein, Class of ‘94, was quoted in an article about the Federal Reserve’s role under the Cares Act (Washington Post)

  • Elizabeth Todd-Breland '00 was quoted in an article on The Undefeated: COVID-19 unveils an America that always sees itself in Black and white

  • Sarah Oh '00 reviewed business documents considered in Congress's review of documents related to Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple: Is There Evidence of Antitrust Harm in the House Judiciary Committee’s Hot Docs?

  • Elizabeth Green '02 has launched Votebeat, a pop-up project funding local reporters to cover election administration and voting in key states (NiemanLab)

The Class of 2010 shared updates, ten years after graduation: