Magnet Alumni News: Summer 2020

Awards and Recognition:

• • Samantha Xiao Cody '13 won the Master's Review Winter Short Story Award for New Writers for her story, The Driver.

  • Neil Davey '14 won the Worshipful Company of Marketors’ 2019 Award for Outstanding Performance in Marketing for a case study he co-authored on Azuri Technologies: A Novel Distribution Strategy for Solar Solutions in Emerging Markets.

  • Across the country, members of the the Class of 2016 were elected to Phi Beta Kappa and recognized at (virtual) commencement: Alexandra Melinchok and Lucy Wen (UMD); Noah Levine and Zachary Williams (U.Chicago); Arnold Mong (Princeton); Ari Goldbloom-Helzner (Brown); and Gabriele Pleitez-Gomez (Denison)

  • Perry Beamer '18 won the 2020 Joseph and Beth Duckett Award, recognizing the most outstanding junior philosophy major at UMD.

Academic Appointments, Promotions, Doctorates:

• • Rahman Culver '96 is the new Diversity and Inclusion Instructional Coordinator at Blair. (@mrculverteaches)

  • Cynthia Chang '01 was awarded tenure at the University of Washington, Bothell. (@drcynthiacchang)

  • Rahul Satija '02 is the director of the new Center for Integrated Cellular Analysis in New York City.

  • Hao Ye '02 joined the University of Florida as Reproducibility Librarian. (@Hao_and_Y)

  • Nathan Blustein '06 defended his Ph.D. Dissertation in Music Theory at Indiana University (@rhapsodyinblu)

  • Purnima Balakrishnan '09 defended her Ph.D. Dissertation in Physics at Stanford; she is now a Post-Doc at NIST in Gaithersburg.

Research Publications:

• • Naomi Cleghorn '89 et al., The Palaeo-Agulhas Plain: A lost world and extinct ecosystem (Quaternary Science Reviews)

  • S. Zacarra and Samie Jaffrey '89, A Unified Model for the Function of YTHDF Proteins in Regulating m6A-Modified mRNA (Cell)

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

  • C.M. Cammarota and Dan Bergstralh '93, Cell Division: Interkinetic Nuclear… Mechanics (Current Biology)

  • Amir Caspi '93 et al., A new facility for airborne solar astronomy: NASA's WB-57 at the 2017 total solar eclipse (The Astrophysical Journal)

  • Joshua Weitz '93 et al., Modeling shield immunity to reduce COVID-19 epidemic spread (Nature Medicine)

  • Alenda Chang '94, Rambunctious Games: A Manifesto for Environmental Game Design (Art Journal)

  • M. Lovett-Barron et al., incl. Aaron Andalman '95, Multiple convergent hypothalamus–brainstem circuits drive defensive behavior (Nature Neuroscience)

  • Franklin Wright '96 et al., Fibrinolysis Shutdown Correlation with Thromboembolic Events in Severe COVID-19 Infection (Journal of the American College of Surgeons)

  • Jonah Berger '98, How to Persuade People to Change Their Behavior (Harvard Business Review)

  • Luke Bergmann '98 and N. Lally, For geographical imagination systems (Annals of the American Association of Geographers)

  • Elinor Lichtenberg '99 et al., Noisy communities and signal detection: why do foragers visit rewardless flowers? (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B)

  • Ani Manichaikul '99 et al., Identification of novel epithelial ovarian cancer loci in women of African ancestry (Cancer Epidemiology)

  • Alex Winder '99, Anticolonial Uprising and Communal Justice in Twentieth-Century Palestine (Radical History Review)

  • C.T. Moody, S. Palvai, and Yevgeny Brudno '00, Click cross-linking improves retention and targeting of refillable alginate depots (Acta Biomaterialia)

  • L.W. Clark, N. Schine, et al. and Jonathan Simon '00, Observation of Laughlin states made of light (Nature)

  • S.V. Sam and Andrew Snowden '00, Regularity bounds for twisted commutative algebras (Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society)

  • Jennifer Caswell-Jin '02 et al., Linking insurance claims across time to characterize treatment, monitoring, and end-of-life care in metastatic breast cancer (Journal of Clinical Oncology)

  • Sophia Strike '03 and M.E. Puhaindran, Tumors of the Hand and the Wrist (JBJS Reviews)

  • Alex Berger '04 et al., Anchor versus Suture for Attachment of Vaginal Mesh in Robotic-Assisted Sacrocolpopexy: A Randomized Clinical Trial (American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology)

  • Nick Stone '04 et al., Rates of Stellar Tidal Disruption (Space Science Reviews)

  • M. Ballesteros and Emily Tsui '04, Sulfur transfer reactions of a zinc tetrasulfanido complex (Dalton Transactions)

  • R.G. Luthy, Jordyn Wolfand '07, and J.L. Bradshaw, Urban Water Revolution: Sustainable Water Futures for California Cities (Journal of Environmental Engineering)

  • V. Rai, Dan Quang '08 et al., Single-cell ATAC-Seq in human pancreatic islets and deep learning upscaling of rare cells reveals cell-specific type 2 diabetes regulatory signatures (Molecular Metabolism)

  • Allison Arai '10 et al., High-affinity binding of LDL receptor–related protein 1 to matrix metalloprotease 1 requires protease:inhibitor complex formation (Biochemistry)

  • Yifan Li '10 et al., Electrochemically scrambled nanocrystals are catalytically active for CO2-to-multicarbons (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science)

  • Arec Jamgochian '12 and M.J. Kochenderfer, Stochastic Model Predictive Control for Scheduling Charging of Electric Vehicle Fleets with Market Power (IEEE International Conference on Connected Vehicles and Expo)

  • Jared Duker Lichtman '14, Almost primes and the Banks–Martin conjecture (Journal of Number Theory)

  • M. Attia, S. Kripalani, Isha Darbari '15, and R. Sheppard Nickel, Parents of Children with Sickle Cell Disease Are Interested in Preimplantation Genetic Testing (The Journal of Pediatrics)

  • Daniel Schäffer '19 et al., Functional Innovation in the Evolution of the Calcium-Dependent System of the Eukaryotic Endoplasmic Reticulum (Frontiers in Genetics)

The COVID-19 Pandemic:

• • Joshua Weitz '93 led the development of a COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool, described in Scientific American.

  • Cory Choy '03 is a producer of the Mobilize podcast, which recently featured episodes discussing the COVID-19 pandemic:

    • Kristin Mink '03 talked about the Masks 4 America Initiative.

    • Stanley Liu '00 was interviewed as one of three medical workers on the frontlines of the pandemic.

  • Erica Hartmann '05 answered questions in the Chicago Tribune about assessing your COVID-19 risk at restaurants, gyms, the office and more.

  • Jonathan Gootenberg '09 and his collaborators at MIT developed a CRISPR-based test for COVID-19, as reported in The New York Times.

Black Lives Matter:

• • Craig Rice '90 was interviewed by WTOP in June: For Black fathers, this Father’s Day is different

  • Rosamond King '92 wrote Two Poems on Liberation published in Hyperallergic. She also wrote "Words, Race, and the Pandemic," published in The Progressive.

  • Rahman Culver '96 and Halima Aziza '96 wrote about their Blair Magnet experiences in the Washington Post: Our Black family disrupted the barriers to equal access

  • Jason Rubenstein '00 has started writing a blog in the Times of Israel. At the end of June, he wrote: The Statues Must (Not) Come Down

  • Elizabeth Green '02 shared Chalkbeat’s pledge to readers that Black Lives Matter.

  • Jean Fan '09 wrote a Juneteenth Reflection about biases in hiring underrepresented minority scientists.

  • Samantha Xiao Cody '13 wrote about Magnet Programs, Segregation, and the Anti-Blackness of the Asian Model Minority Myth.

Science and Technology:

• • Lorrie Cranor '89 shared tips for using a password manager in Wired.

  • Robert Pless '90 talked about his research with the 30-ton "Field Scanalyzer" agricultural robot in the Wall Street Journal.

  • David Weinstock '90 was interviewed by Silver Quest about his cancer research.

  • David Hu '97 was interviewed in Chemistry World: In situ with David Hu

  • Caleb Fassett '98 was recognized as the NASA Scientist Who Discovered Next Mars Rover Landing Site (New York Times)

  • Greg Novick '99 was interviewed by Silver Quest about his work developing the Apple iPhone.

  • Anna Barth '17 created a video on Entropy & The Origin of Life.

Politics and Activism:

• • Aaron Klein '94 wrote in Politico: The Small Business Relief Program Is Still Broken

  • Gautam Mukunda '97 wrote in The American Prospect: Unsanitized: Republicans, Predators and the Pandemic

  • Alex Berengaut '99 was among the attorneys representing the University of California at the U.S. Supreme Court in their successful effort to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy (pdf).

  • Sarah Oh '00 filed comments with the FCC regarding the 5G Fund for Rural America (pdf)

  • The efforts of Erik Agard '11 to promote inclusivity in crossword puzzles were featured in Time magazine, The Crossword Revolution Is Upon Us, and in The Atlantic, The Hidden Bigotry of Crosswords

  • Kaden Sukachevin '16 started the Sunrise Movement at Walla Walla University.

Follow Magnet alumni news on Twitter: @blairmagnetalum