Magnet Alumni News: Spring 2018

Awards and Scholarships:

• • Lorrie Cranor '89, a Carnegie Mellon professor, received the 2018 SigChi Social Impact AwardJared Duker Lichtman ’14, a senior at Dartmouth, won a Churchill Scholarship (dartmouth.edu)

  • Neil Davey '14, a senior at Harvard, won a Gates-Cambridge Scholarship (dnaindia)

  • Emily Lathrop '13, a UCSD graduate student (@UCSDJacobs), won an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

    • Frederic Koehler '12, an MIT graduate student, was recognized with an Honorable Mention

    • Three in the Class of 2014 also won NSF Fellowships: Jessica Shi (Princeton), Shaun Datta (MIT), and Jared Duker Lichtman (Dartmouth)

Prizes and Competitions:

• • • Erik Agard '11 won the 2018 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (New York Times)The finals were recorded live by the Wall Street Journal's Ben Zimmer: YouTube

    • Agard constructed the New York Times crossword puzzles for February 7th, March 22nd, and April 8th

• • Rosamond King '92 is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award

  • Danny Bates '01 coached the Wheaton Science Bowl Team at the National Science Bowl (Facebook)

  • Michelle McGhee '14 is one of the captains of the Stanford Women's Ultimate Team, who qualified for the USA Ultimate Women’s Division I College Championships (usaultimate.org)

Academic Publications:

• • E.I. Smith et al. (incl. Naomi Cleghorn '89), Humans thrived in South Africa through the Toba eruption about 74,000 years ago (Nature Letter)

  • A.V. Grozhik and Samie Jaffrey '89, Distinguishing RNA modifications from noise in epitranscriptome maps (Nature Chemical Biology Perspective)

  • M.R. Luskin, M.A. Murakami, S.R. Manalis, and David Weinstock '90, Targeting minimal residual disease: a path to cure? (Nature Reviews Cancer Opinion)

  • Samit Dasgupta '95 and J. Voight, Sylvester's problem and mock Heegner points (Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society)

  • H. Fu and Carl Miller '97, Local randomness: Examples and application (Physical Review A)

  • Jonah Berger '98 and G. Packard, Are Atypical Things More Popular? (Psychological Science)

  • D. O'Sullivan, Luke Bergmann '98, and J.E. Thatcher, Spatiality, Maps, and Mathematics in Critical Human Geography: Toward a Repetition with Difference (The Professional Geographer)

  • Mark Lundquist '99 et al., Phosphatidylinositol-5-Phosphate 4-Kinases Regulate Cellular Lipid Metabolism By Facilitating Autophagy (Molecular Cell)

  • T.W. Hazlett, Sarah Oh '00, and B. Skorup, Mobile Phone Regulation: The Effects of Prohibiting Handset Bundling in Finland (Journal of Competition Law & Economics)

  • N. Jia et al., and Jonathan Simon '00, A strongly interacting polaritonic quantum dot (Nature Physics Letter)

  • C. Mayer et al., and Rahul Satija '02, Developmental diversification of cortical inhibitory interneurons (Nature)

  • Jessica Shang '04, H.A. Stone, and A.J. Smits, Flow past finite cylinders of constant curvature (Journal of Fluid Mechanics)

  • M. Anderson et al. (incl. Michael Forbes '05), Identity Testing and Lower Bounds for Read-k Oblivious Algebraic Branching Programs (ACM Transactions on Computation Theory)

  • Jeremy Goodman '06 and B. Salow, Taking a chance on KK (Philosophical Studies)

  • D. Bertsimas, John Silberholtz '06, and T. Trikalinos, Optimal healthcare decision making under multiple mathematical models: application in prostate cancer screening (Health Care Management Science)

  • Jordyn Wolfand '07 et al., Multiple pathways to bacterial load reduction by stormwater best management practices: tradeoffs in performance, volume, and treated area (Environmental Science & Technology)

  • Urja Mittal '10, Litigation Rulemaking (Yale Law Journal)

Talks and Presentations:

• • Maneesh Agrawala '90 gave a talk on Deconstructing Charts and Graphs (YouTube) at the National Academy of Sciences Sackler Colloquium

  • Benjamin Jun '92 gave a talk about Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Smart Contract Fundamentals at the RSA Conference

  • Pat Yongpradit '96 gave the opening talk at the Ignite STEM Conference (@MrYongpradit)

  • Several alumni attended the 2018 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference:

    • Caleb Fassett '98 presented Re-Analysis of Observations of Crater Degradation on the Lunar Maria Accounting for Anomalous Diffusion (pdf)

    • Abigail Fraeman '05, celebrating 2000 sols on Mars, presented Curiosity's Investigation at Vera Rubin Ridge (pdf)

  • Alex Lockwood '03 participated in a panel at the 2018 Space Symposium about the James Webb Telescope (@sarahcruddas). In March, PhD Comics (@PHDcomics) shared a video from a few years ago (YouTube), when Lockwood had an opportunity to meet Stephen Hawking.

Interviews and Media:

• • Lorrie Cranor '89 was interviewed in Wired on Why So Many People Make Their Password "Dragon"

  • Matias Duarte '92 was interviewed by Co.Design about Google's Material Theming

  • Danyel Fisher '93 was interviewed in the Data Stories podcast about his book, Making Data Visual

  • David Hu '97 was featured in a Science Friday video about his research: The Very Hungry Maggot

  • Gautam Mukunda '97 was interviewed by Slate's The Gist about President Trump's unfiltered leadership style; he was also quoted in an Atlantic article about the broken office of the Presidency

  • Jonah Berger '98 participated in a conversation on Heleo about "Unsafe Thinking"

  • Andy Mills '99 was interviewed by the Department of Energy about his memories of winning the 1999 National Science Bowl

  • Sarah Oh '00 is co-hosting a new podcast about tech policy: Two Think Minimum

  • Samantha Henig '02 was recently interviewed in Crain's New York Business about her work as editorial director of audio for the New York Times, overseeing podcasts like The Daily

Business and Entrepreneurship:

• • Danyel Fisher '93 is leaving Microsoft Research to join a system monitoring startup, Honeycomb (Medium)

• Paul Shin '97 and Jessica Shin '98 were interviewed by the Miami Herald about their dental industry startup, Apollonix

  • Elizabeth Green '02 is celebrating the growing newsroom at Chalkbeat, the non-profit education news organization she co-founded

  • Holman Gao '08 wrote about his experience cold-calling customers for his startup, BoostMySchool

  • Sherman Leung '12 wrote about the Product Case Study format for the Path to Product community

  • Huey Shih '14, is part of a group of Harvard students that founded Checkmate, a mobile app for diabetes management

  • Karina Chang '16 and Lawrence Zhao '17 are Accel Scholars at UC Berkeley (@CelticsWpn)

Politics and Activism:

• • Joshua Weitz '93 wrote a guest commentary in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution encouraging Georgia universities to speak out in support of students' right to protest

  • Aaron Klein '94 wrote for Brookings Institute about the College Endowment Tax. He also recently wrote about the effect of banking regulations on the marijuana industry

  • Drew Linzer '94 is the Director of Civiqs, an online political polling operation - he recently announced a Public Opinion Results Dashboard

  • Gautam Mukunda '97 wrote in the Harvard Business Review about staff turnover in the White House

  • Samir Paul '06 wrote a guest commentary for Maryland Matters about the student-led movement for gun control

  • Amanda Chan '08 joined student government leaders at Harvard Law School to highlight the mental health crisis in the legal profession

  • Many alumni were interviewed for a Washington Post story about sexual harassment by retired magnet teacher, Mr. Walstein

    • Elizabeth Green '02 was interviewed by FOX 5 News the day the story was published

    • Rose Feinberg '06 wrote a letter to the editor, supporting her fellow alumni

Featured in this Newsletter:

• Aaron Hughes '93 was the top cyber policy official at the Pentagon

• Beth Weinstein '97 is interviewed about her career at Goddard Space Flight Center

• Jiehae Park '98 adapted MacBeth to the drama of college applications

Share your own news below or by e-mailing alumni@mbhsmagnet.org. You can keep up with Magnet alumni news by following @blairmagnetalum on Twitter.