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:
Allison Arai is an MD/PhD student at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and just completed her PhD in Neuroscience.
Wenjing Chen is a first year resident in Internal Medicine Residency at Case Western Reserve University/University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center.
Ozzie Aery Fallick and Emily Aery Jones were married in 2017 and live in Palo Alto, California. By day, Ozzie works as a software engineer at Wing Aviation, and by night, he studies the blade, fencing competitively for Cardinal Fencing Club at Stanford University.
Emily Aery Jones graduated with a PhD from UCSF in 2019 and is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Neurobiology at Stanford University, where she studies how the brain encodes & remembers space using mice in mazes and teeny tiny electrodes. She has been together with Ozzie Fallick since 2008, and they were married in 2017.
Pin-Joe Ko finished his PhD in biology at Stanford (dissertation published in Cell Chemical Biology), and is working at SyntheX, a biotech startup in San Francisco.
Yifan Li does science, having finished his PhD at UC Berkeley.
Li Ma graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in Computer Engineering and moved to the weird city of Austin Texas to do CPU design for Arm. Everyone is welcome to come visit once this whole virus thing is over! Would love to see y'all!
Urja Mittal is working as an attorney in Washington, D.C., having just finished up a judicial clerkship in San Francisco.
Sanjeev Muralidharan is moving from Atlanta to Seattle, working with Amazon Air.
Anand Oza is a software engineer at Google in NYC. In his spare time, he enjoys video games and competitive programming.
Elizabeth Partan is defending her PhD in human genetics at Johns Hopkins, and is moving into science communication.
Kristen Rosano is in her last year of pediatrics residency at Washington University in St. Louis.
Eric Wan is the Chief Operating Officer of Whole Systems Healthcare, having obtained his MPH and MBA from Johns Hopkins. He is considering another career switch.
Jenny Zhang is a first-year pathology resident at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Chenyu Zhao is a software engineer at Google.
Xinyi Zhou finished their Ph.D. in the joint UCB-UCSF bioengineering program and is now working at a Bay Area medtech codevelopment company, Triple Ring Technologies.
Follow Magnet alumni news on Twitter: @blairmagnetalum