Magnet Alumni News: Winter 2021

Awards and Recognition:

• • Lorrie Cranor '89 was elected to the 2020 Class of Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (cmu.edu)

  • Last summer, many alumni mentored Blair senior research projects, and two of those students were recognized as Science Talent Search Scholars. If you are interested in mentoring a student research project this summer, please contact Ms. Bosse (Angelique_P_Bosse@mcpsmd.org)

    • Nick Stone '04, astrophysics faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, mentored Chris Tong's project, Signatures of Second Generation Exoplanet Formation.

    • Mike Winer '15, a physics graduate student at the University of Maryland, mentored Yash Anand's project, Developing a Toy Model for Quantum Chaos Theory: Entanglement Entropy of Bipartite System Under Random Real Hamiltonians.

Research Publications:

• • Shira Robinson '90, Supremacy Unleashed: the Ongoing Erosion of Palestinian Citizenship in Israel (Routledge Handbook of Citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa)

  • Charissa Chang '91, et al., The Liver and Insulin Resistance: The Important Convergence of Endocrinology and Hepatology (Insulin Resistance)

  • Jeffrey Hostetler '92, et al., Reconstructing population dynamics of a threatened marine mammal using multiple data sets (Scientific Reports)

  • R. Landy et al., and Hormuzd Katki '92, Using Prediction-Models to Reduce Persistent Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Draft 2020 USPSTF Lung-Cancer Screening Guidelines (Journal of the National Cancer Institute)

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

  • Joshua Weitz '93, et al., Awareness-driven behavior changes can shift the shape of epidemics away from peaks and toward plateaus, shoulders, and oscillations (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

  • P. Dhigra, et al., and Minjoo Larry Lee '94, InP quantum dots for dislocation-tolerant, visible light emitters on Si (Applied Physics Letters)

  • B.A. McGregor, et al., incl. Atish Choudhury '95, Results of a multicenter, phase 2 study of nivolumab and ipilimumab for patients with advanced rare genitourinary malignancies (Cancer)

  • J. Plowman and Amir Caspi '96, A Fast, Simple, Robust Algorithm for Coronal Temperature Reconstruction (The Astrophysical Journal)

  • P. Yang, et al., and David Hu '97, Intestines of non-uniform stiffness mold the corners of wombat feces (Soft matter)

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

  • O. Grujic, et al., and Jason Ernst '98, Identification and characterization of constrained non-exonic bases lacking predictive epigenomic and transcription factor binding annotations (Nature Communications)

  • M. Abdallah, D. Ni, and Amanda Simson '98, Evaluation of biochars derived from food waste for synthesis gas production via pyrolysis and CO2 gasification (Biomass and Bioenergy)

  • Jean Lee '99, et al., Migration, externalities, and the diffusion of COVID-19 in South Asia (Journal of Public Economics)

  • S. Boumi and Adan Vela '99, Improving Graduation Rate Estimates Using Regularly Updating Multi-Level Absorbing Markov Chains (Education Science)

  • Aleta Quinn '01, Transparency and secrecy in citizen science: Lessons from herping (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science)

  • S.A. Hurvitz, Jennifer Caswell-Jin '02, et al., Pathologic and molecular responses to neoadjuvant trastuzumab and/or lapatinib from a phase II randomized trial in HER2-positive breast cancer (TRIO-US B07) (Nature Communications)

  • Jennifer Helgeson '02, et al., Rationally bounded in a storm of complex events: Small businesses facing natural hazard resilience during a pandemic (Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy) (pdf)

  • S.M. Hirsh, Bingni Wen Brunton '02, and J.N. Kutz, Data-driven spatiotemporal modal decomposition for time frequency analysis (Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis)

  • Michael Sidorov '03, et al., Visual Sequences Drive Experience-Dependent Plasticity in Mouse Anterior Cingulate Cortex (Cell Reports)

  • Melis Anahtar '04, et al., Clinical assessment and validation of a rapid and sensitive SARS-CoV-2 test using reverse-transcription loop-mediated isothermal amplification without the need for RNA extraction (Open Forum Infectious Diseases)

  • Ning Bao '04, et al., More of the bulk from extremal area variations (Classical and Quantum Gravity)

  • Wilma Bainbridge '05, et al., Distinct Representational Structure and Localization for Visual Encoding and Recall during Visual Imagery (Cerebral Cortex)

  • Abigail Fraeman '05, et al., Evidence for a Diagenetic Origin of Vera Rubin Ridge, Gale Crater, Mars: Summary and Synthesis of Curiosity's Exploration Campaign (JGR Planets)

  • R.A. Blaustein, et al., and Erica Hartmann '05, Toothbrush microbiomes feature a meeting ground for human oral and environmental microbiota (Microbiome)

  • Greg Howard '06, The Migration Accelerator: Labor Mobility, Housing, and Demand (American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics)

  • C.D. Bell, Jordyn Wolfand '07, and T.S. Hogue, Regionalization of Default Parameters for Urban Stormwater Quality Models (Journal of the American Water Resources Association)

  • E. L.-W. Majumder, Elizabeth Billings '13, et al., Cognitive analysis of metabolomics data for systems biology (Nature Protocols)

  • Clare Singer '14, et al., Top-of-atmosphere albedo bias from neglecting three-dimensional radiative transfer through clouds (Earth and Space Open Archive)

Science and Tech News:

• • Lorrie Cranor '89 was interviewed in c|net about creating strong passwords.

  • Wei-Hwa Huang '93 was interviewed in Science News.

  • The COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool developed by Joshua Weitz' 93 was featured in the Washington Post: Covid risk and tracking tools: How to use them safely

  • In Science News for Students, David Hu '97 explained how giant pumpkins get so big.

  • The Chan Zuckerberg Science Initiative interviewed Rahul Satija '02 about his Seurat Software Toolkit: Pointing the Way in Single-Cell Analysis

  • Quinn Shen '11 shared computer vision research that he completed with the help of high school students, including two Blair seniors (LinkedIn)

Political Advocacy and Commentary:

• • Josh Fischman '90 discussed the conservative shift of the Supreme Court in the New York Times: As Trump Leaves the White House, His Imprint on the Judiciary Deepens

  • Aaron Klein '94 shared his top 5 financial regulatory priorities for the Biden administration.

  • Gautam Mukunda '97 is hosting a new podcast: Nasdaq's World Reimagined

  • Sarah Oh '00 is senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute. She recently wrote in The Hill about municipal broadband.

  • Elizabeth Green '02 was interviewed about the future of local news by former Presidential candidate Andrew Yang (YouTube)

  • Eric Hysen '07 co-led The Refugee Admissions Project, a joint project of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement and the National Conference on Citizenship.

  • Sherman Leung '12 wrote about racial disparities in bone marrow donation.

  • Michelle McGhee '14 wrote an interactive visual essay about representation in Crossword Puzzles: Who's in the Crossword?

  • Alice Park '17 helped to create an extremely detailed map of the 2020 election for The New York Times.

  • Sophia Weng '20 joined the executive board of the Harvard Political Review.

Entertainment and Sports:

• • Cynthia Addai-Robinson '98 has joined the cast of Amazon's forthcoming Lord of the Rings series (Hollywood Reporter)

  • Neil Dalal '14 covers the Washington Wizards for Hoop District. In December he wrote about the end of the John Wall era. (The Sports Daily)

  • Ryan Handel '18 is the sports editor for the Brown Daily Herald. In November he reported that the Ivy League cancels winter sports due to COVID-19.

Follow Magnet alumni news on Twitter: @blairmagnetalum