A growing number of researchers have begun devel­oping cre­ative ways to mea­sure suc­cess from a quan­ti­ta­tive point of view, from ana­lyzing cita­tion pat­terns to number-​​crunching pres­i­den­tial elections.

On Monday, at a day­long con­fer­ence, more than two dozen econ­o­mists, physi­cists, math­e­mati­cians, and social sci­en­tists con­vened to dis­cuss the quan­ti­ta­tive laws and pat­terns gov­erning high achieve­ment. The inau­gural Sci­ence of Suc­cess Sym­posia was hosted by Harvard’s Insti­tute of Quan­ti­ta­tive Social Sci­ence and orga­nized by Northeastern’s Center for Com­plex Net­work Research, which cur­rently focuses on sys­tems biology and social networks.

“We’re trying to math­e­mat­i­cally describe and pre­dict what it means to have suc­cess and how to achieve it,” said net­work sci­en­tist Albert-​​​​László Barabási, Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor of Physics and director of the Center for Com­plex Net­work Research.

Suc­cess, he said, is a col­lec­tive phe­nom­enon. “In a way,” he explained, “you are suc­cessful because others around you believe you are.”

Barabási will con­tinue this dis­cus­sion as the fea­tured guest on the Col­lege of Science’s weekly Twitter chat on Wednesday at noon.

The speakers at Monday’s sym­po­sium ranged from experts in net­work sci­ence to jour­nalism. Two North­eastern researchers— Chaoming Song, a research assis­tant pro­fessor of physics, and Nicola Perra, a post-​​doctoral research asso­ciate in the Lab­o­ra­tory for the Mod­eling of Bio­log­ical and Socio-​​technical Sys­tems—pre­sented their work. Perra out­lined his frame­work for map­ping and ranking sci­en­tific pro­duc­tion and con­sump­tion around the world and Song dis­cussed the ability to accu­rately assess the long-​​term impact of a sci­en­tific dis­covery based on cita­tion patterns.

Brian Uzzi, a pro­fessor of lead­er­ship at North­western University’s Kel­logg School of Man­age­ment, delved into the role of nov­elty in achieving suc­cess. He ana­lyzed more than 17 mil­lion papers in the Web of Sci­ence data­base to test the common claim that novel com­bi­na­tions of prior work inspire fresh thinking and inno­v­a­tive solu­tions to chal­lenging prob­lems. He found papers that inject nov­elty into oth­er­wise excep­tion­ally con­ven­tional com­bi­na­tions of prior work are twice as likely to be among the most highly cited.

“Nov­elty does lift impact but only when imbedded in high con­ven­tion­ality,” Uzzi explained. “Real inno­va­tion pushes along both fron­tiers simultaneously.”

The phe­nom­enon is not con­fined to the sci­en­tific field. Film­makers Joel and Ethan Coen injected nov­elty into their run-​​of-​​the-​​mill screen­play for Blood Simple, Uzzi said, by ran­domly rear­ranging scenes and then rewriting the script based on the unusual combinations.

“In the end,” he said, “they came up with some­thing incred­ible by adding nov­elty to convention.”

Duncan Watts, a prin­cipal researcher at Microsoft, explored the rela­tion­ship between suc­cess and social influ­ence in an arti­fi­cial music market.

In his oft-​​referenced 2006 study, Watts and a team of researchers at Columbia Uni­ver­sity asked some 14,000 sub­jects to down­load and then rank 48 songs by little-​​known indie bands. The researchers found that sub­jects who received feed­back on which songs were lis­tened to and liked the most by other par­tic­i­pants tended to favor those songs too. If a few early lis­teners liked a par­tic­ular song, it tended to suc­ceed; if they dis­liked a song, it tended to fail.

“Indi­vidual and col­lec­tive deci­sions are influ­enced by the obser­va­tions of the choices of others,” Watts explained. “The pop­ular songs become more pop­ular and the unpop­ular become more unpopular.”

“This does not mean suc­cess should not be rewarded,” he added, “but sug­gests that winner take all mar­kets are less mer­i­to­cratic than they seem.”

Josh Gos­field and Camille Sweeney played the role of con­fer­ence out­lier, taking a qual­i­ta­tive approach to elu­ci­dating the secrets to success.

For their book The Art of Doing: How Super­achievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well, Gos­field and Sweeney inter­viewed dozens of high achievers, from Emmy award-​​winning actor Alec Baldwin to Major League Base­ball Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra.

The most accom­plished people, they dis­cov­ered, share sev­eral traits sep­a­rating them from the rest. For example, of the super­achievers they inter­viewed for their book, all shared a ded­i­ca­tion to fol­lowing their dreams. “If you want to pursue your dream,” said Gos­field, “you shape life around your inspi­ra­tion. Not the other way around.

“Pur­suing a goal requires more time, effort, per­se­ver­ance, and dis­ap­point­ment than you can ever imagine,” he added.

Many of the super­achievers prac­ticed active lis­tening, which Gos­field defined as an “act that puts you in a recep­tive state to take in knowl­edge and learn.”

Take Erin Gruwell, the high school teacher who inspired the 2007 film Freedom Writers by encour­aging her low-​​performing stu­dents to pen journal entries detailing their struggles.

“Gruwell jet­ti­soned the tra­di­tional cur­riculum and became a stu­dent of her stu­dents,” Sweeney said. “They showed her their scars and bullet wounds,” Gos­field added. “They told her about their lives of gang related vio­lence and broken homes.”

In closing remarks, David Lazer, an asso­ciate pro­fessor of polit­ical sci­ence and com­puter and infor­ma­tion sci­ence at North­eastern, chal­lenged the symposium’s speakers to design sys­tems that empha­size quality. In the after­math of the Boston Marathon bomb­ings, Lazer and his research team devel­oped an appli­ca­tion for Android phones to help better under­stand how people use social net­works during times of crisis.

“We want to iden­tify quality rather than amplify the noise,” he told them.

Originally published in news@Northeastern on June 19, 2013.

Throughout her North­eastern expe­ri­ence, rising senior Kaitlyn Duffy has explored a range of sci­ence and security-​​related topics from an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary per­spec­tive in the class­room, on co-​​op, and abroad.

Duffy entered North­eastern as a chem­istry major, with plans to minor in crim­inal jus­tice and pursue a career in foren­sics. But she was soon cap­ti­vated by the pos­si­bil­i­ties of inves­ti­gating these areas from a wider, more global lens.

“My inter­ests evolved to taking a more transna­tional view of crim­inal studies, dis­aster pre­pared­ness, and counter-​​terrorism,” said Duffy, now a double major in chem­istry and polit­ical sci­ence who is in the Honors pro­gram. “It’s sim­ilar to my orig­inal focus on foren­sics, but now from a larger viewpoint.”

Duffy’s expe­ri­en­tial learning oppor­tu­ni­ties began in 2011 with a co-​​op at INTERPOL Wash­ington, the United States National Cen­tral Bureau. Though she interned in the drug divi­sion assisting on case work related to inter­na­tional drug traf­ficking and crime, she saw first­hand how closely many inter­na­tional, fed­eral, and state agen­cies com­mu­ni­cate and work together to dis­tribute infor­ma­tion and inves­ti­gate crime.

On a Dia­logue of Civ­i­liza­tions pro­gram in Switzer­land last summer, Duffy studied dis­ar­ma­ment diplo­macy, sim­u­lated inter­na­tional nego­ti­a­tions with diplo­mats from the United Nations and NATO, and helped draft a mock human­i­tarian treaty on the use of land mines. Then, on her second co-​​op, she worked at Risk Solu­tions Inter­na­tional LLC in New York, a firm that pro­vides con­sulting and tech­nology solu­tions to oper­a­tional risks orga­ni­za­tions face. Her work involved assisting in research for emer­gency man­age­ment plan­ning and helping draft risk-​​related doc­u­ments for the firms’ clients.

Now, Duffy is one of about 200 under­grad­u­ates selected for the Naval Research Enter­prise Intern­ship Pro­gram this summer. Through the 10-​​week pro­gram, under­grad­uate and grad­uate stu­dents par­tic­i­pate in research in a Depart­ment of Navy lab­o­ra­tory; Duffy will com­plete her time at the Naval Post­grad­uate School in Mon­terey, Calif. After her intern­ship, she will return to Wash­ington to co-​​op at the State Department’s Bureau of Inter­na­tional Secu­rity and Nonproliferation.

Duffy devel­oped her interest in crim­inal studies and sci­ence as a kid. She grew up reading murder-​​mystery novels and dreamed of one day becoming a marine biol­o­gist. Born in New Jersey, Duffy and her family lived abroad in Aus­tralia and Sin­ga­pore for sev­eral years before returning to the United States in August 2001. She recalled the ter­rorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 taking place on her second day of fifth grade, as she was still get­ting accli­mated back to Amer­ican life.

“I’ve really only known America since 9/​11,” explained Duffy, who said the attacks influ­enced her interest in pur­suing a career a security-​​related field.

Duffy said each of her North­eastern expe­ri­ences has yielded new insights, skills, and oppor­tu­ni­ties. For example, her co-​​op at INTERPOL inspired her to take an inter­na­tional law course, and she expects that her knowl­edge of forensic sci­ence will serve her well during her lab intern­ship this summer.

“These expe­ri­ences and the skills I’ve learned have always been applic­able to what I’m working on next,” Duffy said. “Whether it’s cur­rent events or what I’m learning in the class­room or on co-​​op, it’s all been interconnected.”

Originally published in news@Northeastern on June 17, 2013.

“Do I go straight to grad school or should I try to find a full time job—that’s a really huge ques­tion and you can’t Google it,” said recent grad­uate Lauren Sears. She opted for the latter, but with a bit of a twist: She is con­tin­uing a two-​​year-​​long research assist­ant­ship in Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor of Psy­chology Lisa Feldman Bar­rett’s Inter­dis­ci­pli­nary Affec­tive Sci­ence Lab­o­ra­tory.

Sears is one of some 100 under­grad­u­ates to work in the lab this year alone. Many of them agree that the value of the expe­ri­ence is not lim­ited to hands-​​on research training, but also includes the men­tor­ship they get from working side by side with grad­uate stu­dents and post docs. “I got so much advice from them,” said Sears.

Another stu­dent, fifth-​​year Anna Neu­mann, said the lab has pro­vided her much more than a tra­di­tional research assist­ant­ship. “The lab has a bunch of fruit on the tree, and if you climb high enough you can get what­ever fruit you want,” she said. “If you put in the time, you get ten­fold back.”

From left to right, Dalal Alhomaizi, Anna Neumann and Lauren Sears, three of over 60 undergraduate student researchers in Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory.

The lab is focused on one main ques­tion: What are emo­tions? But the projects stu­dents work on span a cross sec­tion of dis­ci­plines, methods, and inves­ti­ga­tions. Sears has been working on a project aimed at under­standing whether dif­ferent indi­vid­uals’ feel­ings and phys­i­o­log­ical reac­tions to arousing and evoca­tive stimuli can pre­dict how they will react to emo­tional infor­ma­tion out­side of their aware­ness. The team mea­sures things such as heart rate, skin con­duc­tance, facial muscle move­ments, and res­pi­ra­tion to deter­mine if our phys­i­o­log­ical response can be a pre­dictor of how they react to the unseen.

Recent grad­uate Dalal Alhomaizi is using a sim­ilar approach to study an entirely dif­ferent ques­tion. “We’re looking at how con­cepts play a role in how emo­tions are con­structed,” she said. Here, a com­puter screen in the lab quickly flashes words rep­re­senting par­tic­ular emo­tions in front of a par­tic­i­pant who has been tasked with labeling the emo­tion rep­re­sented in each image. In this case, the team is exam­ining how lan­guage plays a role in our con­cept of emotion.

Neu­mann works on a project studying peo­ples’ shifting per­cep­tions of food. For instance, if a par­tic­i­pant is pre­sented with an image of a baby sheep before being asked to com­ment on how appe­tizing a plate of lamb chops looks, he might have a dif­ferent response than if the order were reversed.

“What’s really cool about working with Dr. Bar­rett,” said Neu­mann, “is that she has changed the field so much that we’re always at the fore­front of it, right at the edge of where this sci­ence stands.” Sears and Alhomaizi shook their heads in agreement.

Originally published in news@Northeastern on June 11, 2013

We once thought it took a genius to be suc­cessful, but this is simply not the case. “In spite of all the claims to the con­trary, suc­cess is a col­lec­tive phe­nomena: You are only suc­cessful because many of us think that you are,” said Albert-​​László Barabási, dis­tin­guished pro­fessor of physics and director of Northeastern’s Center for Com­plex Net­work Research. Hence the fin­ger­prints of suc­cess are spread around society, leaving detectable, mea­sur­able, and pre­dictable traces that sci­en­tists can now use to examine one of the most desir­able traits of the human experience.

On Monday, June 17, in an inau­gural sym­po­sium on the Sci­ence of Suc­cess, Barabási and his col­leagues across a horizon of dis­ci­plines will dis­cuss the many ways this emerging field can and will impact every­thing from pol­i­tics to internet memes.

The topic of suc­cess is diverse to say the least. While sci­en­tists first began inves­ti­gating the phe­nom­enon with respect to their own field, it reaches into vir­tu­ally every other sector of society. The same methods can be used to under­stand how an Olympic ath­lete gets the gold as for how a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date becomes president.

Because of this diver­sity, the tools and per­spec­tives vary, engaging social sci­en­tists, com­puter sci­en­tists, econ­o­mists, physi­cists, and math­e­mati­cians alike. The goal of the upcoming sym­po­sium is to bring these diverse com­mu­ni­ties together to expand the con­ver­sa­tion and its impact.

The day-​​long event is orga­nized by the Center of Com­plex Net­work Research at North­eastern Uni­ver­sity and will be hosted by the Insti­tute of Quan­ti­ta­tive Social Sci­ence at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity.

The speakers come from within and out­side of the U.S. and include aca­d­emic and industry leaders in busi­ness, man­age­ment, jour­nalism, and physics to name a few, and will dis­cuss a broad range of topics. For example, Duncan Watts, prin­ciple researcher at Microsoft Research, will examine the suc­cess of “cul­tural objects,” like movies, books, and music. An orga­ni­za­tional behavior researcher from Har­vard Busi­ness School will argue that leaders are usu­ally unim­por­tant and indis­pens­able for soci­etal growth, taking a close look at the few times when they aren’t. Authors Camille Sweeney and Josh Gos­field will dis­cuss their book, “The Art of Doing,” in which they inter­viewed dozens of “super­achievers” about their strate­gies for suc­cess. Northeastern’s Chaoming Song will dis­cuss the pre­dictability of sci­en­tific dis­covery based on the under­standing of cita­tion patterns.

Originally published in news@Northeastern on June 11, 2013

After 33 years at Northeastern University, Dr. Donald Cheney is retiring, leaving behind countless grateful students and a long list of accomplishments in biology and marine science.

THE EARLY YEARS
Cheney attended UMass-Amherst, where he received his bachelor’s degree in Botany in 1967. After graduating, he went to work at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole for three years and realized marine biology was his true calling. He attended the University of South Florida, earning his PhD in Biology and Marine Biology in 1975, but he missed New England.

“I came back to work as a postdoc at the University of New Hampshire’s Jackson Estuarine Laboratory,” he says. “In 1979, I was a Guest Investigator at both the University of New Hampshire’s Jackson Estuarine Laboratory and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Environmental Systems Laboratory. And, in 1980, I started as an Assistant Professor at Northeastern.”

Prof. Donald Cheney

Cheney says he was drawn to Northeastern for the unique opportunity to work at a marine laboratory in the Boston area.

And the rest is history.

HIS CAREER
Cheney received early funding from government agencies and private companies, including one from a company in 1990 worth over $575,000 — helping him to produce four patents.

“However, in more recent years, my research has gone decidedly more environmental,” he says. “Lately, I’ve been studying the causes of seaweed blooms, and how they can be used to remove toxic compounds like PCBs from the marine environment, as well as how they can pose a threat to estuarine food chains and even humans.”

One of the things Cheney says he is most proud of is his role in the development of and years of teaching at the Marine Science Center (MSC).

“Through this program, I and other teachers have been able to educate and influence a huge number of students about the wonders of our oceans and the problems they face,” he says. “I think this, plus the 18 graduate students I have had, and the more than 20 grad student thesis committees I’ve served on, is the thing I am most proud of. I really believe that as time goes on, our papers become less read and influential, but the students we influence, influence others that influence still others.”

WATCHING NORTHEASTERN TRANSFORM
Cheney says he can hardly believe how much Northeastern has changed for the better over the years.

“Today, I am beaming with pride of where I’ve taught,” he says. “I am proud of our beautiful campus, the way we treat our students, and our loving, caring, and academically-excellent faculty. What has happened at the MSC is a fine example. With our new hires, we have said in a loud voice, ‘We are no longer happy to be just a small marine lab, we are what’s happening in marine biology, ecology, and engineering.’”

NURTURING FUTURE GENERATIONS
In addition to his legacy as a researcher and professor, Cheney has established a scholarship intended to help graduate students at the MSC when they most need the money — during the summer.

“During the fall and spring semesters, graduate students can usually get TAs, but not during the summer,” he says. “In the summer, they or their advisor has to have a grant or they are out of luck. Now that I am retired, I am in position where I can help out our graduate education program financially. It gives me great joy to do so and I hope that it will encourage others to do the same.”

When a scout hon­eybee returns to the hive, she per­forms a “waggle dance,” looping and shaking her rear end in par­tic­ular pat­terns to direct her com­rades toward the jackpot of nectar and pollen she’s found. Her move­ments com­mu­ni­cate the direc­tion and dis­tance of the nectar source, pro­viding a vector along which the other bees can now travel. As they fly through the air, the flow of optical stimuli across their periph­eral vision tells the bees how far they’ve trav­eled and when to turn.

The whole oper­a­tion is the nuanced output of the bees’ neural cir­cuitry, the product of eons of evo­lu­tionary opti­miza­tion. Now that the hon­eybee pop­u­la­tion is in steep, inex­plic­able decline, the loss of its spe­cial­ized pol­li­na­tion prac­tices threatens crop via­bility across the globe.

But if hon­ey­bees dis­ap­pear com­pletely, a team of sci­en­tists at North­eastern, Har­vard Uni­ver­sity, and CentEye, Inc. has a plan. Using Harvard’s ground­breaking pop-​​up man­u­fac­turing tech­nique, the team can rapidly gen­erate inex­pen­sive swarms of minia­ture flying robots, which could some day pol­li­nate an entire field of crops.

Anthony Westphal, left, a postdoctoral candidate studying marine and environmental sciences, Joseph Ayers, center, Professor of Neurophysiology and Behavior Biomimetics, and Dan Blustein, right, a doctoral student in biology, test autonomous flight components using a radio controlled helicopter as part of the RoboBees project, which aims to develop miniature, coordinated flying robots.

“But, a swarm of micro-​​robots could be used for a lot of dif­ferent things,” said Dan Blus­tein, a grad­uate stu­dent at Northeastern’s Marine Sci­ence Center. They could be used for traffic and weather mon­i­toring or to safely inves­ti­gate a leak at a radi­a­tion plant, for instance.

“A lot of the tech­nology of this stuff, if you can shrink it down that small, get the power require­ments that low,” said post-​​doctoral researcher Anthony West­phal, “it really does open up a lot of win­dows in terms of what can be useful.”

Blus­tein and West­phal are mem­bers of pro­fessor Joseph Ayer’s bio­mimetic research lab, which inves­ti­gates the neural net­works of var­ious animal species and repli­cates them in robotic sys­tems. The lab first began inves­ti­gating the neural net­works under­lying behavior in lob­sters and lam­prey and to date has pro­duced sev­eral gen­er­a­tions of RoboLob­sters and Robo­Lam­prey that sense and respond to their envi­ron­ment using an elec­tronic neural net­works of neu­rons and synapses that mimics the animal model’s brain. These under­water sys­tems are being devel­oped for under­water mine countermeasures.

“There are many sim­i­lar­i­ties between bees and lob­sters,” said Blus­tein. While the other groups on the RoboBee team are working to master the body design and its sen­sory equip­ment, the bees wouldn’t get very far without an instinc­tive method for responding to the envi­ron­ment. Optical flow data col­lected by visual sen­sors on the bee’s head needs to be trans­lated into adap­tive move­ment in one direc­tion or another.

“Most arti­fi­cial intelligence-​​based robots are con­trolled algo­rith­mi­cally,” said Ayers, the prin­ciple inves­ti­gator on the National Sci­ence Foundation-​​supported research. This means the designer must pre­dict and gen­erate com­puter pro­grams for every pos­sible con­tin­gency of the envi­ron­ment in which the robot oper­ates, he explained. Animal behavior, in con­trast, is con­trolled by neu­ronal and synaptic net­works that the team mimics in what they call “bio­log­ical intelligence.”

“We are adapting con­trollers derived from animal ner­vous sys­tems to the con­trol of robotics,” said Ayers. The unique thing with the hon­ey­bees is it’s the first time anyone has attempted neuronal-​​based bio-​​mimicry with a flying plat­form. Moving in three dimen­sions intro­duces a host of new com­pli­ca­tions, which the team is now addressing.

Col­leagues at Har­vard have intro­duced a group behavior com­po­nent that will allow the RoboBees to not only to orga­nize pol­li­na­tion mis­sions, but to pass along what they’ve learned in some robotic ver­sion of the waggle dance.

Originally published in news@Northeastern on June 7, 2013

How does sus­pense affect heart rate? Or what can be learned from mod­eling and ana­lyzing bacteria’s move­ments or exam­ining the dif­fer­ences in coor­di­na­tion due to hand dom­i­nance with and without visual feed­back? These are just a few exam­ples of the range of research topics explored by first-​​year stu­dents last month in the Summer Dis­covery Expe­ri­ence, an inten­sive summer ini­tia­tive run by the National Sci­ence Foundation-​​funded PRISM pro­gram.

In this four-​​week immer­sive pro­gram, stu­dents expe­ri­ence hands-​​on research in math­e­matics, physics, and biology, and receive an intro­duc­tion to basic research and data analysis methods—all under the guid­ance of fac­ulty and stu­dent men­tors. The summer pro­gram is taught by three fac­ulty mem­bers: Dagmar Sternad, pro­fessor of biology and elec­trical and com­puter engi­neering; Alain Karma, pro­fessor of physics; and Christo­pher King, pro­fessor of math­e­matics.

The summer pro­gram is one of the activ­i­ties offered throughout the year by PRISM, run by an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary team of five fac­ulty mem­bers that also includes Rick Porter, pro­fessor in math­e­matics, and Christos Zahopoulos, director of the Center for STEM Edu­ca­tion. Other com­po­nents of PRISM include a week-​​long inno­v­a­tive math­e­matics course held in the late summer, a fall lec­ture series, and an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary class in the spring. Together, these com­po­nents are designed to attract and engage stu­dents through math­e­matics and sci­ence research as well as peer mentoring.

The summer pro­gram, Sternad said, gives stu­dents an advan­tage by famil­iar­izing them with research tech­niques and oppor­tu­ni­ties early on in their under­grad­uate expe­ri­ences. She noted it’s also an envi­ron­ment in which stu­dents get the freedom and flex­i­bility to explore their inter­ests, test out their the­o­ries, and solve prob­lems without the worry of being graded.

“In this pro­gram, stu­dents can follow their own noses,” Sternad said. “They define their own research ques­tions and encounter their own prob­lems and chal­lenges. It is the chal­lenges encoun­tered when they opti­misti­cally want to solve a problem that present an eye-​​opening expe­ri­ence for them.”

During the first three weeks of the Summer Dis­covery Expe­ri­ence, stu­dents get a crash course in topics ranging from random walks to heart arrhythmia and move­ment con­trol through both instruc­tion and hands-​​on prac­tice. At the end of each week, all stu­dents give pre­sen­ta­tions on the research projects they con­ducted. In the fourth week, they divide into groups and select a spe­cific research project of their own choice and design, usu­ally related to one of the topics encoun­tered in the pre­vious three weeks.

Dena Guo, a rising second-​​year stu­dent, found the summer pro­gram a par­tic­u­larly enriching learning envi­ron­ment. “The thing I liked most was that it focused on the process and how we approached our prob­lems, rather than whether our answers were right or wrong.” Her group’s final project involved cre­ating an algo­rithm to ana­lyze a patient’s elec­tro­car­dio­gram, specif­i­cally the rate and reg­u­larity of heart­beats. Guo also cred­ited the summer pro­gram with exposing her to Sternad’s Action Lab, which opened her eyes to many exciting poten­tial research opportunities.

Eric Holtzman, a rising third-​​year stu­dent, also attested to the program’s impact. He par­tic­i­pated in his first year, and this year he served as a mentor. He explained how he learned even more the second time around from guiding other stu­dents’ perspectives.

Through the summer pro­gram, Holtzman had also learned MATLAB, a high-​​level lan­guage for numer­ical com­pu­ta­tion, analysis, and visu­al­iza­tion. He said these skills helped him to land a co-​​op this summer at the Allen Insti­tute for Brain Sci­ence in Seattle.

“It’s amazing to see the stu­dents arrive without any pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence and then see how far they come in solving their prob­lems,” Holtzman said. “The skills they learn, par­tic­u­larly under­standing data analysis, are incred­ibly useful in the research they’ll be doing later on.”

Originally published in news@Northeastern on June 6, 2013

The American Fisheries Society created the fellowship in 2007 to honor Steven Berkeley, a dedicated fisheries scientist who integrated the fields of marine ecology, conservation biology, and fisheries science to improve fisheries management. Berkeley was a long-time member of the AFS and a member of the first Board of Directors of the Fisheries Conservation Foundation.

Conroy earned his M.S. in Environmental Science at the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory. For his Masters work, Conroy concentrated on the causes and consequences of partial migration in young-of-the-year striped bass Morone saxatilis.

Conroy is interested in how populations interact in marine environments, and how they are affected by anthropogenic factors such as fishing and climate change. He is currently studying the role that intrapopulation diversity plays in the stability and resilience of Atlantic cod Gadus morhua populations and its importance to the management of this essential fishery.

The fellowship is awarded based on relevance of proposed research, academic achievement, and anticipated future contributions by the applicant. Conroy will receive his award at the AFS annual meeting in Little Rock, Arkansas in September. The announcement will also be featured in an upcoming edition of Fisheries magazine.

When he was a kid, Mehmet Ates would take the dead bat­teries from his family’s appli­ances and crack them open with rocks in the back yard. “I wanted to figure out how they worked,” he said.

The stan­dard nickel-​​metal hydride bat­teries, how­ever left the future chemist dis­ap­pointed: once opened, they revealed nothing but a fine black powder.

Matthew Trahan never split open bat­teries, but he did have a strong appre­ci­a­tion for the out­doors and his envi­ron­ment. As a chem­istry stu­dent in Mis­souri he real­ized he wanted to change society by improving the tech­nolo­gies essen­tial to the devel­op­ment of elec­tric vehicles.

Today, Ates and Trahan, both grad­uate stu­dents in the same lab, are working with research pro­fessor K. M. Abraham to develop the next gen­er­a­tion of energy effi­cient lithium bat­teries. One of Ates’ child­hood bat­teries would have to be five to 20 times larger in order to store the same amount of energy as one of the teams’ exper­i­mental bat­teries, he explained.

Rec­og­nized with the phys­ical and life sci­ences award at the Research, Inno­va­tion, Schol­ar­ship, and Entre­pre­neur­ship expo ear­lier this year, the duo is working in two arms of Abraham’s lab. Ates is devel­oping a next-​​generation lithium-​​ion battery—a lithium rich ver­sion of the bat­teries that today power every­thing from cell phones to elec­tric vehi­cles. As the lightest ele­ment avail­able for bat­tery pro­duc­tion, lithium pro­vides an extremely effi­cient venue for energy storage. “One gram of lithium con­tains many more atoms”—the energy storing unit in the material—“than one gram of nickel,” explained Ates.

Com­mer­cial lithium-​​ion bat­teries cur­rently are com­posed of a lithi­ated graphite anode and a cobalt oxide cathode. Next gen­er­a­tion, “lithium rich” bat­teries, which research groups around the world are studying, use manganese-​​oxide instead. Abraham’s team is adding a metal com­pound to the system to increase the energy reten­tion capacity of this already-​​better bat­tery by 40 percent.

But still, even the best-​​case sce­nario for the lithium-​​rich bat­teries isn’t sat­is­fac­tory for Abraham. “My brother lives in Philadel­phia, 304 miles away,” he said. “That takes five or six hours to drive.” If he wants to drive an elec­tric car there today, he’d have to stop at least once during the trip to charge the vehicle—a process that can take many hours, he said.

In 1996, Abraham pub­lished a paper demon­strating a new kind of lithium bat­tery that uses plain old air as the cathode, instead of cobalt– or manganese-​​oxide. Nearly two decades, this is the bat­tery Trahan is working on now.

With increased gov­ern­ment pres­sure to develop clean energy alter­na­tives, people are finally real­izing the utility of the so-​​called lithium-​​air bat­tery. There is a world­wide effort to per­fect this bat­tery, capable of storing five to 10 times more energy than the lithium rich manganese-​​oxide bat­teries, and 20 times more energy than the stan­dard nickel-​​metal hydride battery.

“We are rev­o­lu­tion­izing lithium-​​ion and lithium air tech­nology,” Abraham said.

Originally published in news@Northeastern on June 6, 2013

While inves­ti­gating drug-​​protein inter­ac­tions at the Broad Insti­tute of Har­vard Uni­ver­sity and the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nology, Jay Duffner real­ized he would need advanced training in his field to be a com­pet­i­tive member of the biotech­nology industry.

Duffner turned to Northeastern’s Pro­fes­sional Sci­ence Master’s pro­gram in Biotech­nology, which fea­tures a unique approach to grad­uate edu­ca­tion that includes training in busi­ness prac­tices in addi­tion to the sci­ence and tech­nology courses offered in tra­di­tional master’s programs.

“I wanted to keep my ties with industry, and North­eastern pro­vided a good oppor­tu­nity to gain a master’s, learn more, and to apply what I was learning in the work­place,” said Duffner, who is one of the first grad­u­ates of program.

Jim Leung, aca­d­emic director of the biotech­nology PSM pro­gram, has seen first-​​hand the need for qual­i­fied job can­di­dates like Duffner throughout his 30 years working in the bio­phar­ma­ceu­tical industry. “We always have a great demand for well-​​trained people,” he said. “It had been quite an effort to fill those posi­tions because the skills are pretty specialized.”

Fif­teen years ago, acad­emia took notice, and with the help of funding from the Sloan Foun­da­tion, uni­ver­si­ties estab­lished a new kind of grad­uate pro­gram specif­i­cally designed to fill that need.

“The Pro­fes­sional Sci­ence Master’s degree was designed to be the sci­en­tific equiv­a­lent of the MBA,” said pro­fessor Graham Jones, chair of the Depart­ment of Chem­istry and Chem­ical Biology. With a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the nation’s nearly 3 mil­lion unfilled jobs span­ning the biotech­nology industry, biotech PSMs have a unique and impor­tant role in today’s economy, he said.

Cel­e­brating its 10th anniver­sary this year, Northeastern’s PSM pro­gram in Biotech­nology is expanding to the Seattle campus, accepting appli­ca­tions for the fall and has become a model for others around the country. This is thanks in no small part to the efforts of pro­gram director Cyn­thia Bainton, who last fall received an award from the National Pro­fes­sional Sci­ence Master’s Asso­ci­a­tion for her out­standing con­tri­bu­tions to the PSMinitiative.

Bainton noted that the industry is con­stantly evolving, and as a result, pro­grams like Northeastern’s need to be flex­ible and respon­sive to what’s hap­pening in the real world. For instance, if industry requires job seekers to have exper­tise in drug product for­mu­la­tion, then pro­grams must adapt their training to meet that need. Northeastern’s pro­gram recently revi­tal­ized its cur­riculum for just that reason and now offers three new tracks, including ana­lyt­ical sci­ences and phar­ma­ceu­tical technology.

Unique from master’s and PhD pro­grams, 30 per­cent of the stan­dardPSM cur­riculum is ded­i­cated to so-​​called “plus courses,” which train stu­dents in every­thing from lead­er­ship and ethics to intel­lec­tual prop­erty law and tech transfer. At North­eastern, the other 70 per­cent is spent in the class­room with world-​​leading aca­d­emic and industry experts.

But the cen­tral com­po­nent of any PSM is work experience—which aligns strongly with the university’s global lead­er­ship in expe­ri­en­tial edu­ca­tion. At North­eastern, that takes shape through grad­uate co-​​op place­ments, a crit­ical fea­ture that sets Northeastern’s pro­gram apart. Leung and Jones agree that Northeastern’s edge lies in its com­mit­ment to pro­viding high-​​quality intern­ship expe­ri­ences. “We regard our­selves as industry facing,” Jones said. “That’s in our DNA.”

During his second year of the pro­gram, Duffner trans­ferred to Momenta phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, where he used his co-​​op to bring a new set of tools into the company’s reper­toire. “I learned how to per­form gene expres­sion analyses, some­thing I had never done before,” he said. This effort even­tu­ally turned into a plat­form that nearly every divi­sion of the com­pany now makes use of. Today, Duffner works as a senior sci­en­tist there, employing a new gen­er­a­tion of co-​​op stu­dents from his alma mater.

The suc­cess of Northeastern’s pro­gram is vis­ible: Every PSM stu­dent who applies for a job after grad­u­a­tion receives one. With a unique set of skills unat­tain­able through any other edu­ca­tional pro­gram, PSMstu­dents are filling the industry’s void, said Leung.

Originally published in news@Northeastern on June 4, 2013