Inquiry

Organic growth

Anonymous — Fri, 20 Sep 2019 00:45:03 +0000

Anonymous Thu, 09/19/2019 - 19:45

(Photography by John Zich)

Fall/19

A note from the dean of the Physical Sciences Division.

At the University of Chicago, interdisciplinary research between physical, biological, and medical sciences is leading to life-changing scientific and technological breakthroughs. In the Physical Sciences Division we have a physicist “squishing” cells to study force (“Living Matter”). We have a geophysical scientist taking to the seas and lakes to plumb microbial diversity and evolution (“Small Bugs in Large Ponds”). And we have a computer scientist using electrical muscle stimulation—the kind employed for physical therapy—to build musical skills and empathy (“Instrumental”).

Scientists, physicians, and engineers at the University are working together to improve the way we live, approaching research from all directions. Many people view scientific fields as part of a pipeline leading from fundamental research to practical application: math to physics, physics to chemistry, chemistry to biology, biology to medicine. But science isn’t so linear.

For the physical and mathematical sciences, adding life to the equation isn’t simply the next step. It can create new “building blocks that don’t exist in physics,” according to biophysicist Margaret Gardel, inspiring novel scientific fields and technologies. Science is a feedback loop, with discoveries framing brand-new questions and catalyzing work in other fields.

Seeing where projects intersect, how breakthroughs might seed new subfields, often happens serendipitously. This is why PSD spaces are designed with exchange and dynamics in mind. Chemists and biophysicists commingle in the Gordon Center for Integrative Science. Astrophysicists and molecular engineers brush shoulders in the Eckhardt Research Center—perhaps sharing a cup of coffee in the Quantum Café. And any scientist visiting the John Crerar Library can’t help but notice the new Center for Data and Computing, an incubator for multidisciplinary data science and artificial intelligence inquiry that fuses fundamental and applied research.

Perhaps an incubator is an apt descriptor for UChicago’s science sphere: a safe environment at the ideal temperature with abundant resources to nurture growth.

Science & Medicine

Physical Sciences Division

Light hearted

Anonymous — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 18:59:44 +0000

Anonymous Wed, 08/21/2019 - 13:59

(iStock.com/magicmine)

Maureen Searcy

Inquiry

09.03.2019

Chemist Bozhi Tian illuminates pacemaker technology.

Sometimes the heart needs a hand, like when it beats too quickly, too slowly, or out of sync.

Our hearts have an innate electrical system that controls their rhythm, and when that system malfunctions, physicians may opt for a pacemaker. This matchbox-sized device consists of a battery, a computerized generator, and electrodes that attach to the heart. When the pacemaker detects an abnormality, it sends a little burst of electricity to get the heartbeat back on track.

Traditional pacemakers, first used in humans in 1958, come with inherent risks. They’re “not freestanding,” explains associate professor of chemistry Bozhi Tian. The need for a battery pack increases the device’s size, “making implantation a more invasive procedure.”

The size also causes irritation, which can lead to an inflammatory response. The device can get coated with immune cells and fibrous material from the extracellular matrix—the network of proteins and carbohydrates found in the space between cells. This type of biofouling, Tian says, “reduces the pacemaker’s electrical signal transduction efficiency because signals will get lost.”

His team has developed a potential solution: a wireless pacemaker powered by light. The device is based on existing solar cell technology, but shrunk down to the nanoscale—a mesh of silicon nanowires embedded in polymer for support.

An optical microscopy image of the silicon nanowire mesh shows high-density random nanowires supported over a polymer framework. (The density increases contact area between the wires and the heart muscle cells; the random configuration is easier to manufacture.) (Image courtesy Bozhi Tian)

Silicon, a semiconductor that serves as a building block for computer chips, is an ideal material because it has “a lot of electronic and optical functions you can play with,” says Tian. “You can convert light energy into electricity.”

Working with both cultured cells in a dish and isolated rat hearts, Tian’s team attached the mesh to heart muscle tissue and then scanned the mesh-coated area with a laser, delivering pulses of light. The mesh in turn produced electricity, activating the heart cells to beat at the same frequency as the flashes. Scanning, rather than the direct application of light, is more efficient and safer for the cells, which can be damaged by too much energy.

While traditional pacemaker surgery is considered minimally invasive, with the device implanted through a small incision in the chest, Tian’s mesh could be delivered even less invasively, via needle injection. The surgeon would even target areas of the heart with pacemaker cells, mostly found in the sinoatrial node close to the right atrium wall. These cells naturally generate electrical impulses, and that energy flows throughout the heart, causing it to pump.

Light could be delivered in a few different ways, including through an optical fiber. After injecting the mesh, a fiber about the diameter of a human hair could be plugged into the same hole, with one end touching the mesh and the other exposed to the outside world, able to guide light to the pacemaker.

Traditional pacemakers can be permanent or temporary. If an irregular heartbeat is caused by something acute and reversible, such as drug toxicity or infection, a pacemaker may be needed only until the underlying problem is solved, and this is the type Tian’s light-powered mesh is aimed at replacing.

Nanostructure silicon can dissolve inside a human body within a few weeks, making it optimal for transient applications. (Silicon degrades into silicic acid, which can be filtered by the kidneys, so in small enough doses, it’s safe for humans. The polymer support for the silicon can be biodegradable as well.) “You would inject one dosage, apply the light pulses, and then treat the patient for a short window, perhaps a few days,” says Tian. “Then there’s no need for additional surgery” to remove the device.

Much of the work in Tian’s lab has the potential to directly improve medical care. This project builds on technology originally developed to stimulate neurons, a concept pioneered by Ramya Parameswaran, PhD’18, an MD/PhD student who completed her biophysics degree in Tian’s lab and is now finishing her medical training at the Pritzker School of Medicine.

“At this stage we certainly hope to work with medical doctors because that’s how we make real impact,” says Tian, “but we must first optimize the technology,” improving the device’s optical pacing, efficiency, and power demands. Tian predicts they might be ready to approach clinicians in a couple of years—if they keep up this pace.

Science & Medicine

Chemistry

Physical Sciences Division

Instrumental

Anonymous — Sat, 17 Aug 2019 19:53:39 +0000

Anonymous Sat, 08/17/2019 - 14:53

(Photography by Anne Ryan)

Maureen Searcy

Inquiry

08.29.2019

Computer scientist Pedro Lopes integrates technology with anatomy to reimagine the role of “human” in human-computer interaction.

The sparse room is almost blindingly bright: white floors, white walls, white exposed ductwork, and a primary-yellow door. Articulated fume extraction pipes (think robot arms with suction cup hands) extend from the ceiling and a Styrofoam human head sits on the bench. Above the white noise of fans and beeping electronics plays the otherworldly whine/hum/squeal of a theremin—the classic B-movie UFO sound effect. If Stanley Kubrick and Ed Wood had teamed up to imagine the year 2019, it might have looked something like Pedro Lopes’s lab in the recently renovated John Crerar Library.

Pedro Lopes stands outside one of his labs in the John Crerar Library. (Photography by Anne Ryan)

In the center of this futuristic space stands Marco Kaisth, Class of 2021, himself a study in retro styling in a Western yoke shirt, plaid cropped pants, and mod boots. Kaisth waves his arm through the air, his fingers fluttering as if playing invisible strings—and the music fluctuates. That’s how you play a theremin, moving your body through the instrument’s electromagnetic field to produce sound. But it’s what you can’t see that’s most interesting: the theremin, in a sense, is playing Marco. He can feel the music. His fingers are moving involuntarily.

The details of this work aren’t yet published and must remain under wraps for now, but the crux of the project represents a theme in Lopes’s research—reversing the flow of control within human-computer interaction and reimagining the nature of the relationship between humans and technology. In Lopes’s office one floor up, relocated from the lab to give his students “acoustic space,” Lopes writes H-C-I vertically on a scrap of paper, like a ladder with the H on top. “In HCI, a human controls the computer.” What if you put the computer on top? And how would that affect our sense of control? (Some may dread a Matrix-like future, but Lopes qualifies that the computer must still be programmed by a human. Whether that’s better than being controlled by artificial intelligence is debatable.)

Marco Kaisth, Class of 2021, plays a theremin. (Photography by Anne Ryan)

The field of human-computer interaction (HCI) is difficult to define, even by experts, except in the most redundant way: it’s how humans interact with computers. Before Lopes joined the computer science department as an assistant professor in January, UChicago had no dedicated professors in HCI, though Neubauer Family Assistant Professor Blase Ur and Neubauer Professors Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng all count HCI projects among their work.

Ur, who takes a human-centered approach to studying computer security and privacy, says the field looks at how to design computer systems to better meet users’ needs and habits. Researchers adopt techniques from sociology and psychology to understand how people use computers and other technology in practice, which is often distinct from what the designers intended.

Zhao and Zheng, a married team who operate a joint lab, study human behavior as illuminated by data. Zhao conducts empirical research with a slant toward security, trying to model and predict human behavior, while Zheng focuses on mobile computing and sensor data, gathering information from wearables to better understand the behavior of, for instance, patients and caregivers, which could help make health care more efficient and predictable.

In this vein, some of Lopes’s work follows the conventional HCI venture of developing technology to record, facilitate, or enhance human action. Wearable tech—a booming subset of HCI research—features prominently in Lopes’s lab, including stretchy electronics, ideal for biometric sensors of the type Zheng might use to gather hospital data.

Take, for example, visiting PhD student Steven Nagels, who brought his work on stretchable circuitry when he joined the Lopes Lab in January. The material combines comfort and flexibility for a variety of wearable applications. (Nagels, one of several lab members whose expertise lies outside of computer science, specializes in electrical engineering and materials science. Lopes intentionally devised his team to include diverse specialties to best suit the many facets of HCI.)

In a lab filled with computers and electronics components, Nagels pulls out a floppy square of silicone with an embedded circuit. He alligator-clips the circuit to a power source, and a green LED lights up inside the patch. He then twists, folds, and stretches the square, and it returns to its original shape, still illuminated. A normal circuit board has rigid electrical connections; such treatment would break the wires. Nagels solved this problem by creating chambers within the silicone and pouring in metal that remains liquid at room temperature. A constant liquid state makes for flexible conductivity.

Steven Nagels demonstrates a stretchable circuit. (Photography by Anne Ryan)

“Such resilience means engineers could put electronics in places normal circuit boards can’t go,” says Nagels, and makes the technology extremely promising for wearables, particularly those meant for skin contact. Stretchy electronics could sit on the body for extended periods without hindering your movement. They could be incorporated into any kind of material, even a sweatshirt that can be easily removed. (Laundry involves water, heat, and mechanical force—all enemies of electronics—but Lopes and Nagels, now back at his home institution, Hasselt University in Belgium, seem confident that this material will eventually be washable.)

Wearable tech is a broad field: it includes the ubiquitous fitness tracker, as well as experimental equipment that scrambles surveillance, like the microphone-jamming bracelet that Lopes, Zheng, and Zhao are developing. But what if the technology—skin-adhered electrodes, for instance—was used to deliver information instead of gather it, to control the human rather than the human’s environment? This is how some of Lopes’s work differs from that of his HCI colleagues.

Beginning this line of inquiry as a graduate student at the University of Potsdam in Germany, Lopes looked at the ways technology interfaces with anatomy. For biosensors, the human body is the input, transmitting information to a computer. Perhaps he could make the body the output, reacting to computer processing.

In the realm of movement, which is of particular interest to Lopes, there are a couple of ways to flip the flow: devices based on mechanical actuation and those that use electrical muscle stimulation (EMS). Mechanical actuation for wearable technology involves motorized equipment, like robotic exoskeletons—your body is simply along for the ride. In contrast, EMS sends signals to your muscles, making your body a computer peripheral device. You, the human, are the printer, the monitor, the speaker, receiving information and acting on it. This is the technology Kaisth’s theremin project relies on.

Electrical muscle stimulation uses a pair of electrodes stuck to the skin to deliver small jolts of electricity to muscles, making them involuntarily contract. (The concept traces back to 1791, when Luigi Galvani discovered that electric current made an inanimate frog leg twitch, partially inspiring Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.)

“When a burst of electricity enters the first electrode, it wants to come out of the second,” Lopes explains. “As it travels through the medium that is your body, it crosses your skin, and most people say it tingles because it’s a form of vibration.” The electrical impulses then encounter nerve cells connected to muscles, or the muscles themselves. When the muscles feel current, “they do what they always do, which is to contract.”

Lopes first started experimenting with EMS at the University of Potsdam’s Hasso Plattner Institute, exploring eyes-free interaction for wearables. He focused on proprioception—the ability to sense the orientation and movement of your body within its environment. (Close your eyes, stretch out your arms, and then touch your index finger to your nose. That ability comes from proprioception.)

One of his applications dealt with gesture recognition: Lopes wondered if your smartphone, connected to you by electrodes, could deliver information by moving your body. Perhaps the phone compels a person’s finger to move in the shape of a “5,” as an alert for five unread messages, or in a heart shape to indicate a message from a close friend, he explains on his website.

Lopes also realized that EMS could be used for more than notification; it could be used to train or teach the muscles directly, similar to its use in physical therapy for rehabilitating muscle function. For instance, a wholly unfamiliar object could itself teach a person how to use it.

To demonstrate the concept, Lopes developed a prototype that uses an EMS-wired device worn on the hand and forearm and a multicamera setup to track the user’s hand proximity to an object. A video shows people wearing the contraption trying to pick up a white cube. When one woman nearly grasps the cube, her fingers jerk away. “It doesn’t want to be grabbed,” she laughs. The instrument had been programmed to “tell” the user of its unwillingness to be held by stimulating the muscles to back off. Other participants try to spray paint a design on cardboard, but the spray can “instructs” them to shake it first.

The participants are then given a specialty tool, a magnetic nail sweeper, whose function is not intuitive. The wearable device instructs them how to grasp the tool and gather scattered nails and then how to pull a release bar to drop them into a bin. “In a wild future, you could wire up and learn by doing rather than reading an instruction manual,” says Lopes. He notes that the same could be achieved with an exoskeleton, but “I wanted to see if we could do it without being so instrumented,” with a more seamless human-technology interface.

The learning could skip the brain entirely and go straight to muscle memory, but whether your body actually retains the lesson remains to be seen. Lopes is collaborating with Shinya Fujii, a neuroscientist at Japan’s Keio University, to investigate whether EMS could build drumming skills. (Fujii is a drummer while Lopes is a turntablist, playing turntables as if they were full-fledged instruments.) After training beginner drummers through “passive action,” or electrical stimulation of the arm muscles, they found that the drummers did improve, but not much more than had they spent time practicing.

What was notable was the striking improvement in the nondominant hand and the speeds the drummers were able to reach while wired up. “We’re making people drum as fast as the world’s fastest drummer,” says Lopes. Maybe such conditioning will lead to unfair competition advantages—electrical doping of sorts. “Shinya said that if this changes the rules, he’ll be happy. And I agree.”

Lopes emphasizes that he and his collaborators use medically compliant devices in their research that are carefully calibrated for human use and have fail-safes to prevent injury. Still, a small amount of current can be dangerous. “You can kill yourself with a 9-volt battery,” he says, so any projects that involve human subjects go through an institutional review board. Lopes also believes in the value of open source; in 2015 he and a colleague in Hannover, Max Pfeiffer, designed a device that safely leverages standard EMS generators and made the source code and schematics public to help researchers begin exploring EMS.

In a UChicago lab that is relatively new, Lopes and his team still experiment with EMS, the work that was his baby for so long, which he “could talk about till dinner.” But he wants the lab to grow from that technique to explore other ways humans can bond with technology. “We’re trying to see if we can do that with more human capabilities, human skills, human senses.”

The reversed directionality of Lopes’s work raises questions of agency—both physical and philosophical. First the easier scenario: what it feels like to resist EMS impulses. If you insist on grabbing the “unwilling” white cube, “it feels literally like you’re resisting a force,” explains Lopes. “In other projects, we’ve used that as a trick to create the feeling of weight” in virtual reality. (See “Similitude” below.)

The system is designed to recognize when the user is resisting the stimulation and disconnect. And because EMS-instructed action can only be as strong as the human’s own muscles, it can also be overcome by the strength of the human's own muscles, unlike a mechanized exoskeleton. When asked if someone could hack such a device to compel you to act against your will, Lopes stresses that any technology can be vulnerable to infiltration, but the strength limitation offers protection.

Willingness poses a different set of issues. If technology inspires action (or aids function through nerve-integrated prostheses, for instance), it can “feel like this alien force,” says Lopes—you think and something else acts. This is particularly troublesome with exoskeletons because of the external nature of the hardware. For such technology to feel natural, it needs to “synchronize or harmonize with your intention,” actuating at a speed faster than possible without the device (in the scientists’ terms, achieving “preemption”) but slowly enough that the person feels they initiated the action.

Lopes and Jun Nishida, a postdoc in his lab, collaborated with Shunichi Kasahara, an associate researcher at Sony, to explore how fast they could accelerate human reaction without compromising people’s sense of agency. With their ring fingers wired to receive EMS, subjects were asked to tap a touch screen when a target appears. The researchers programmed stimuli to be delivered at different speeds, measured reaction time, and asked the subjects to record their sense of agency.

The paper, published in May in the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, showed that stimulating the subjects 160 milliseconds after the target appears sped up reaction time by 80 milliseconds while preserving the strongest sense of agency. That is an incredibly short window, where the subject feels just a shadow of external impulse, barely distinguishable from their own intention. This finding might help optimize wearable technology for the most natural experience.

While research based on self-reported sense of agency involves metaphysical elements, the experimental design can be quantified. Time frames can be measured; data patterns can be analyzed; conclusions can be formed. But not all of Lopes’s work revolves around an answer. Sometimes the question is what matters, and “art seems to be a good way to not just ask the question but also inject it into people’s minds. It’s like an Inception thing.”

In 2015 four musicians—one on bass, one on guitar, one on vibraphone, and Lopes on turntable percussion—played in front of 80 people in the now-shuttered media space Spektrum Berlin. In a video posted on Lopes’s website, the music is a din of discordant sounds, and the players jerk and lurch like marionettes, which in a way they are. The audience is full of puppeteers controlling the quartet through a web app. They can make the musicians play or stop playing by tapping the performer’s name on their smartphone screen, which sends a stream of electrical muscle stimulation.

(The instruments, even the guitar and bass, are treated mostly as percussion tools. EMS isn’t yet precise enough for sophisticated, targeted movement because of the layered nature of muscles. Using EMS to teach writing or violin is quite a ways off. Dancing is probably not as distant because it requires coarser motion, says Lopes—a welcome prediction for the pathologically unrhythmic.)

At the end of the roughly 12-minute performance, the audience members’ screens appear to glitch and they see a closing message posing the question: Were the audience members in control or were they being “played?”

The “conductive ensemble,” as Lopes calls it, was an art piece designed to provoke thought about the notion of control in relation to social networks and their pervasiveness.

Between 2016 and 2018, one of Lopes’s art installations, called Ad Infinitum, was staged at five exhibition spaces around the world, including Austria’s Ars Electronica. The piece, created with Patrick Baudisch (Lopes’s PhD adviser at the time) and several fellow graduate students, comprises a box into which visitors insert their arms. Cuffs close down on their forearms and deliver mild electric shocks that cause their wrists to involuntarily pivot, forcing them to turn a crank; the device is harvesting kinetic energy to power itself. The only way to be released is to convince another participant to take your place at the other end. The installation likely hosted 200,000 arms over its exhibition life.

The creators call the installation a parasite that lives off human energy. It “reverses the dominant role that mankind has with respect to technologies: the parasite shifts humans from ‘users’ to ‘used.’” As described on its website, Ad Infinitum is a “critical take on the canonical HCI configuration, in which a human is always in control.”

Lopes’s art doesn’t always provide an answer to the question; that’s not the point, after all. But he “started valuing art as a mechanism to do research.” Sometimes art works better than empirical methodology to explore an idea, so he takes “that route rather than the hypothesis-testing approach.” When his team brainstorms, often there’s an outlier that they realize would make a great art project. (Several lab members are also artists.) “It’s such an interesting space to probe people’s imaginations.”

Questions of flow and directionality and control only matter so long as there’s a disconnect—no matter how minuscule—between humans and computers, but Lopes’s grand overarching goal is to achieve complete fluidity between technology and us. In fact, his research group is called the Human Computer Integration Lab, emphasizing the expanded scope beyond simple interaction.

“A good interface matches your expectations,” says Lopes. It feels natural and does exactly “what it afforded you to do.” By moving certain interfaces to the body itself, he’s removing instrumentation, making for a more organic experience. You shouldn’t know where you end and the tech begins.

“Good HCI has no I—it just happens,” says Lopes. “So my secret objective for the field is to destroy it.”

Similitude

Pedro Lopes’s research concerns our experiences interacting with technology. His team is also exploring whether HCI (human computer interaction) can be used to strengthen empathy by placing us into other people’s experiences through technology.

Virtual and augmented reality offer one such path. Virtual reality (VR) has come a long way since the 1980s, when it first emerged in the form most closely related to current technology. Today VR visuals are more refined; programs can run on phones and “look incredible now. People in graphics would be horrified with what I just said,” Lopes notes, asserting that virtual displays can always be improved, “but the visual clarity of VR has certainly stabilized.”

A convincing virtual world must take into account more senses than vision, though. When what you see in VR doesn’t sync with what you feel—for instance, if you bump into a virtual table but feel no thud, or feel something not represented in your headset—it’s a reminder that you’re in a simulation. One of Lopes’s graduate projects was to develop electrical muscle stimulation (EMS)-based haptic feedback for virtual objects. Inside the simulation, you could pick up a book and feel its weight or feel physically impeded by doors and walls.

Lopes is also interested in exploring tactile feedback, such as the feeling of liquid, but the complexity of human anatomy and physiology makes imitating certain sensations complicated. Stimulating a muscle to contract, mimicking the force required to lift a weight, is fairly simple because motor neurons are relatively easy to isolate and activate. Pressure, pain, temperature, olfaction—these senses rely on a combination of sensory neurons and exist on a spectrum.

Graduate student Jas Brooks, LAB’12, SB’16, is exploiting that complexity to create “thermal illusions for virtual reality,” developing technology that will make someone in a VR simulation perceive a change in temperature without actually changing the ambient temperature of the space. Both a computer scientist and an artist, Brooks is testing ways to manipulate the trigeminal nerve, found in the nose and mouth, which responds to both smell and thermal changes.

Jas Brooks, LAB’12, SB’16, wears a virtual reality headset. (Photography by Anne Ryan)

A full-sensory VR experience will improve immersion and make gaming more thrilling, but Lopes is “not so excited about the infinite mimicry of VR because we already have this beautiful reality. I don’t want to create an escaping method.” Rather, he wants to create opportunities for solving problems that can’t easily be solved physically, such as overcoming social anxiety or treating body dysmorphia and related eating disorders.

Postdoctoral fellow Jun Nishida, who specializes in designing experiences and technologies that allow people to “maximize and share their physical and cognitive capabilities to support each other,” began working with empathy building as a grad student at the University of Tsukuba, Japan. One of his projects was engineered to help people better understand the visual perception of children and smaller people by affixing a camera to the wearer’s waist, allowing them to see at that level through a headset. Getting that perspective can be useful for teachers and caregivers as well as industrial and interior designers who might realize that counters or doorknobs are positioned too high for some people. The experiment also revealed that from that point of view, participants felt more vulnerable, requiring a larger amount of personal space for a comfortable, nonthreatening interaction.

Nishida has also developed ways to replicate others’ experiences using EMS to simulate medical conditions. As part of his master of engineering thesis, he stimulated the muscles of spoon designers to feel the tremors experienced by patients with Parkinson’s disease. Compared to a control group, the designers then created spoons that are easier to pick up and hold with minimal tension and vibrations.

This type of technology could transform the medical industry as well. Physicians could experience a specific type of pain or impairment, possibly altering their treatment. Male doctors could experience female conditions, ultimately leading to reduced gender disparity in medicine. And of course, bedside manner—which has received renewed attention in medical schools—would benefit from a strong dose of empathy.

Science & Medicine

Computer science

Physical Sciences Division

Small bugs in large ponds

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 18:45:31 +0000

Anonymous Mon, 07/22/2019 - 13:45

The research vessel Lake Guardian sails on behalf of the US Environmental Protection Agencyʼs Great Lakes National Program Office, gathering environmental data to gauge the health of the Great Lakes. Maureen Coleman and her team were aboard the ship for their spring 2019 fieldwork. (Photography by Courtney Winter)

Lucas McGranahan

Inquiry

07.22.2019

Maureen Coleman’s lab samples the teeming microbiome of the Great Lakes.

“There’s a lot of interest lately in the human microbiome,” says Maureen Coleman, an assistant professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences. “But lakes also have a microbiome.”

If you swallow a drop of water from Lake Michigan, she explains, it will contain roughly a million bacterial cells and 10 million bacteriophages—tiny viruses that infect bacteria and may outnumber every other organism (micro and macro) on Earth. Coleman’s lab studies how such communities of microbes adapt, interact, and coevolve.

UChicago researchers are fortunate to have an excellent model system for studying bacteria and their hangers-on right in their backyard. This system is not just Lake Michigan but the Great Lakes as a whole. “It was shocking to me when I arrived here in 2012 that no one had yet systematically characterized the microbiome of the Great Lakes,” Coleman says. Her lab is now doing just that, in collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency. (The EPA has tracked water quality and some multicellular organisms in the lakes since 1983, but its research had not included the systematic sampling of bacteria, archaea, and viruses.) A forthcoming paper in the journal Environmental Microbiology details some results of the lab’s work completing the first microbial time series—a comparison of populations in water samples drawn from the same sites over time—that covers all five Great Lakes. They completed their spring 2019 sampling in May and are gearing up for their eighth summer on the water.

Maureen Coleman prepares for work aboard the R/V Blue Heron, the research vessel her team sailed on to sample Lakes Michigan and Superior, from Milwaukee to Duluth, for their eighth summer on the water. (Photo courtesy Maureen Coleman)

Why dip your toes into such an ambitious research program? Because microbes perform a number of vital ecological functions. For one, Coleman says, they process all of the runoff from land, including “all of the fertilizer, all of the pesticides, all of the pollution from Chicago—although not our sewage because we send that down the river.” They are also fundamental to the food web. “If you’re interested in fisheries, for instance, you need to care about what’s happening at the very bottom of the food web as well.”

Moreover, microbes serve as “sentinels for change” by indicating shifts in environmental conditions. Coleman cites a 2014 incident in which drinking water in Toledo, Ohio, was tainted by a toxin produced by a bloom of cyanobacteria in Lake Erie. Detecting shifts like these and understanding how they occur can help scientists predict and mitigate some of the harmful effects of climate change or changes in land use.

The Great Lakes “each have their own unique character—Lake Erie is really, really different from Lake Superior—and yet at the same time, they’re connected,” Coleman says. While this makes them a theoretically interesting system, the lakes are also inherently valuable, supplying a staggering 20 percent of the world’s liquid fresh water. Keeping this precious, sought-after resource in good shape is, in large part, a matter of following the microbial signals.

Real-world challenges such as these are what motivate Coleman, whose PhD from MIT is in civil and environmental engineering. “I am in no way qualified to build a bridge or anything,” she says, laughing. “But I do still carry with me that desire to solve problems, as opposed to just studying basic science for the pure love of theory and fundamentals.”

Coleman describes fieldwork and lab work as complementary: discoveries in the wild can inspire hypotheses that you test back home. In the lab, Coleman’s team uses a technique called transposon sequencing to knock out genes from microbes and observe the resulting functional differences. “With this approach you can do global-scale gene deletions and then test the functions of all of these genes essentially in parallel.” Such experiments are in demand: scientists have gotten so good at discovering microbial genes that thousands more have been identified than are well understood.

The scope of the unknown in microbiology is a familiar and humbling fact to Coleman. Her PhD research was on the photosynthetic cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus—an organism that, despite being among the most abundant bacteria on Earth, was not discovered until 1986, by a team including Coleman’s adviser Sallie “Penny” W. Chisholm. Today’s sequencing technology, Coleman says, “gives us a new tool to figure out how much we don’t know.”

Science & Medicine

microbiome

Water

Physical Sciences Division

Living matter

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 17:44:36 +0000

Anonymous Mon, 07/22/2019 - 12:44

Image of a migrating fibroblast shows myosin in purple and actin in blue. (Image courtesy Patrick Oakes)

Jeanie Chung

Inquiry

07.22.2019

How Margaret Gardel accidentally became a biophysicist.

Margaret Gardel, the Horace B. Horton Professor in the Department of Physics and the College, found her area of study through a series of serendipitous events. Her graduate research at Harvard focused on filamentous actin, a polymer found within cells in multicellular organisms.

In living cells actin drives cell motion and is essential in building multicellular tissue. Gardel was interested in the ways actin (as part of a polymer network inside cells) deforms in response to external mechanical stress, but in a physics lab the approaches used to study those types of properties had been developed for traditional polymeric materials—think of Jell-O or Silly Putty. Those materials don’t spontaneously move or build complex multicellular organisms.

Near the end of graduate school, Gardel was increasingly bothered by this gap. How can we make measurements to understand the materials that living cells use to support their physiology?

Through a chance exchange with a collaborator, Gardel attended a physiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory after she finished her PhD. There she met cell biologists willing to teach a physicist about the inner workings of cells. She also met Clare Waterman, who convinced her to leave her postdoc position and move across the country to join her cell biology lab at the Scripps Research Institute, where she learned how to image the polymer networks inside cells while they crawled and built adhesions with the external matrix and each other.

Since Gardel had taken only one biology course as an undergraduate, her time with Waterman proved critical. She was used to thinking of material building blocks as passive structural elements. But proteins and other building blocks used by living organisms are mechanochemical enzymes—that is, they can convert chemical energy to do local mechanical work. Likewise, local mechanical forces also impact their chemical reactivity. Thus, living materials provide building blocks that don’t exist in physics, inspiring new types of research.

For example, Hooke’s law of elasticity, which addresses force on objects, doesn’t always work the same way on living materials—which move spontaneously, change shape, react, and change their chemistry. “There’s lots of more-intricate properties happening,” she says.

Gardel’s lab—its URL is squishycell.uchicago.edu—seeks to understand how physical forces such as pressure and deformation act on individual cells. The lab’s two main areas of inquiry complement each other: One seeks to understand the physics of how living cells adhere and move. The other, she says, seeks to build cell-like material “from scratch.”

Mosaic shows force transmission across a cell. (Image courtesy Patrick Oakes)

To address these challenges, Gardel collaborates with labs across the Physical Sciences Division, as well as in the Biological Sciences Division. For example, UChicago cell biologist Michael Glotzer developed a genetically encoded tool to control the localization of proteins within living cells using light. With this tool, Gardel’s lab has studied how cells respond to local changes in force either internally or at points where they connect with other cells. In the second research area, Gardel is working on a materials project with UChicago biochemist David Kovar building active materials: gels and fluids that contract the way muscles do.

If scientists can understand how biological materials adapt, they'll learn new types of design principles. There are undoubtedly dozens of applications for these design principles in medicine alone, but Gardel is most interested in figuring out how things work. Scientists have wanted to understand cells since first seeing them under a microscope, and unlocking the biochemistry and genetics of cells has answered a lot of questions.

“What 20th-century biology has given us is knowledge of what’s under the hood,” she says. However, she adds: “We still don’t know how each of the components work together to facilitate the complex cell physiology.”

Force amplifier

As Margaret Gardel leads the scientists in her lab toward discoveries in “living matter,” she hopes they learn from each other as well as from her. She recalls her graduate adviser at Harvard, David Weitz, saying, “If I’m the only person you’ve learned from in graduate school, you’ve wasted your time.” She gives her lab members the same advice.

Fostering a collaborative environment is an important part of scientific research today, she says. So is acknowledging—and then trying to reduce or eliminate—unspoken or unconscious biases. Gardel considers herself one of many women in science of her generation who “really felt like gender was not an issue—until we got to the higher stages and realized it is.”

Gardel says she has always felt well supported at UChicago. However, as she’s progressed in academia, serving on grant review committees, participating in speaker selection for conferences, and interacting with journal editors, she has become “more aware of all these interactions that occur that are not necessarily based on the quality of the science.”

She now feels more strongly about calling out these biases—even just talking about them in stories like this one—and being a “more vocal advocate for people who aren’t in a position to advocate for themselves.”

Science & Medicine

Biological sciences

Physics

Division of Biological Sciences

Physical Sciences Division

Science fare

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Apr 2019 20:54:04 +0000

Anonymous Thu, 04/04/2019 - 15:54

(iStock.com/Angelina Melik-Akopian)

Maureen Searcy

Inquiry

04.09.2019

Physicist David McCowan, SM’08, PhD’14, explains food science to lay readers in the Takeout.

As a student, David McCowan, SM’08, PhD’14, studied theoretical condensed matter, focusing on the liquid-to-glass transition. As a UChicago laboratory instructor, he teaches physics majors to develop science intuition, to punch holes in everything they learn. And as a food-science columnist for the Takeout—part of the Gizmodo Media Group—he explains why you shouldn’t put a fork in the microwave. (Hint: it’s more about the shape than the metal.)

This interview has been edited and condensed.

How did you start writing about food science?

I had been following food and pop culture journalist Kevin Pang, who used to work at the Chicago Tribune and wrote for magazines like [now-defunct] Lucky Peach. When he joined the A.V. Club in 2016, Kevin put out a call for writers who were not food journalists. He wanted different voices for his new venture the Takeout, so I threw my hat in the ring. I’d already written about food, though not from a science angle; I’d mostly written about people or restaurants or spirits for Chicago Foodies. He loved that I’m a physicist, so I started writing the Food Science column in late 2016 and publish a new article every month or two.

How do you decide what to dig into?

As soon as anyone finds out you’re writing about food science, they have ideas for you. I get questions from Kevin, my wife, random people. Not all are in the realm of physics. A lot of my column is about chemistry, biology, and even engineering. Being one step removed from the subject matter is sometimes helpful because I know exactly when I’ve learned enough to understand it. With physics I’ve always got the exceptions in my head and have to hold back.

I’ve written about whether it’s safe to eat deli meat with that metallic sheen [it is], how to saber a Champagne bottle, and the difference between butter and margarine.

How do you research these stories?

For physics stories, I’ll figure out as much as I can on my own. For other science, I’ll turn to journal articles occasionally but usually I talk to people. For the margarine story I spoke with Elaine Khosrova, author of Butter: A Rich History, who was a great font of knowledge, and from there I could approach the margarine angle.

Stories like how to revive soggy French fries are fun because you can experiment. So a combination of seeing what experts think and trying out what I can at home. But articles like the metal-in-the-microwave one, that’s more theoretical.

You wouldn’t actually stick a fork in the microwave.

No. But that was a good story for me because it’s all about electrodynamics. Your microwave is setting up electric fields in the metal, and the fields get very strong at points. A curved metal sculpture should distribute the electric fields fine. Metal racks that come with microwaves—all smooth curved rods. You won’t have any electric arcing.

But a fork or crumpled foil—they have points and edges where electrons can bunch up, and when there are too many electrons in one place, they want to jump through the air to find a better spot. That’s bad news.

Even though I advise on what in principle is microwave safe, like a perfectly smooth metal bowl, I don’t know if your bowl has a micropit that would blow up your microwave. There’s always a big asterisk.

What’s your favorite story so far?

“How to Play God with Fruit: A Guide to Ripening,” because it touches on how weird the plant kingdom is. My favorite part of the research was about figs. We think of them as fruit, but they’re more like an inside-out flower, and they get pollinated by wasps. The crazy part, though, is that these two creatures are completely dependent on each other for survival.

 The wasps need a place where their offspring can grow up safe, so females will burrow into male figs—the kind we don’t eat—and lay eggs inside. The mother dies in there, but when her babies are born, they mate, the female wasps collect fig pollen, and the wingless males chew an exit path out of the fig. Their job done, the males die while the females escape and look for their own figs to crawl into. Sometimes they mistakenly pick a female fig—the kind we do eat—where the flower’s structure prevents her from laying eggs. She successfully pollinates the fig before she dies, and the fig ripens into the fruit we love. So every fig you eat has at least one dead wasp in it.*

In ancient Egypt, the fig tree species and associated wasp got geographically separated. So the trees would bear fruit, but they never got pollinated and would never ripen. Someone figured out that if you cut the fruit open, it would eventually ripen, but no one knew why.

Today we know the answer. If you score a fig, it goes into defense mode and releases the stress hormone ethylene, which also is the hormone responsible for ripening. So the cut figs are screaming in death and telling all their fig friends that they’re about to die too, and then they all ripen together.

These types of stories are great because you find fascinating research and can also offer practical advice. You have a banana that’s not ready to eat—this is what you do.

Do your writing and teaching ever cross paths?

I write a lot of science every day, working on lab manuals and helping students with their formal scientific writing. I try to convince them how similar science writing should be to work in other classes. Scientific writing is hard to read—passive voice, clinical, dispassionate—because of archaic conventions that don’t serve the reader. You can’t be completely conversational in journal articles, but there’s no downside to writing more accessibly.

I tell my students that the paper they write on Dante’s Divine Comedy has a lot more in common with lab reports than they realize. They’re presenting a thesis, arguing it, and providing support. Sometimes the students’ takeaway is that labs are like taking a journey through Inferno, but that’s not quite my point.

*Fellow fig lovers: An enzyme digests the wasp. So those crunchy things? Seeds.

Physical Sciences Division

Seeing spots

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Nov 2018 20:50:06 +0000

Anonymous Mon, 11/12/2018 - 14:50

Physical Sciences Division alumni and friends receive copies of the Magazine with a bonus cover spotlighting Inquiry—a special section of stories from the PSD.

Maureen Searcy

Inquiry

11.26.18

Rumor has it that artificial intelligence image recognition sees giraffes everywhere—but that might be a stretch.

The Fall/18 issue of the University of Chicago Magazine features photographer Henry Horenstein, EX’69, whose diverse portfolio includes shots of honky-tonk musicians, horse races, and wildlife. A close-up of a giraffe, part of a series called Animalia, graces the cover.

Art director Guido Mendez spotted this photo as he flipped through one of Horenstein’s photography books. Its choice as the cover wasn’t immediate, but then an interesting thing happened: the editorial staff started seeing giraffes everywhere.

Editor Laura Demanski, AM’94, drove by a towering giraffe-shaped lawn ornament while on safari in Leelanau County, Michigan. A stock photo company sent a promotional email with a contest: find a specific photograph in its image library of two giraffes on an airport tarmac and be entered into a drawing for an Amazon voucher. A cosmologist mentioned giraffes to me during an interview about dark matter.

It was a sign! Or a case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Or synchronicity, if you believe Carl Jung.

The giraffe-noting cosmologist was Brian Nord, whose essay on artificial intelligence in astronomy was published in the Fall/18 Inquiry. Nord uses neural networks to search photographs of the universe for gravitational lenses. While describing this AI image recognition technology, he noted its ability to “find giraffes in images better than humans can.”

While digging into Nord’s throwaway line, I discovered the connections go even deeper. Apparently Computer Vision, Microsoft’s image identification and processing software run on the Azure cloud, is “notorious for seeing giraffes everywhere due to a rumored overabundance of giraffes in the original dataset.”

Why would there be so many giraffes in the training set? Well, in 2016 Microsoft partnered with the Wild Nature Institute, a conservation organization that conducts field research, including a project studying giraffe populations by photographing thousands of giraffes and identifying them by their unique spot patterns. The process is time consuming, so Microsoft used Azure’s machine learning technology and an object detection algorithm to train a model to recognize these giraffes.

As Nord explains in his essay, the way AI learns is a bit of a black box. Does Azure really see giraffes everywhere, and if so, why? As anecdotal evidence (or pure coincidence), Mendez came across an image of orange cranes—tagged as giraffes. The resulting design for the Inquiry cover, inspired by those misidentified machines, plays on the abilities—and limitations—of AI image recognition.

For the record, Computer Vision did not see giraffes in this particular image of port cranes in Gothenburg Harbor, Sweden. So perhaps it is just a tall tale.

Science & Medicine

Astronomy

Physical Sciences Division

Network building

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 21:21:44 +0000

Anonymous Mon, 11/05/2018 - 15:21

(Photography by John Zich)

Angela V. Olinto

Inquiry

Fall/18

A note from the dean of the Physical Sciences Division.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly valuable in data-dependent research. AI can be used to simulate, and thereby defend against, malicious hacking (see “Data Mind”). It can help scan images of an expanding universe, searching for hints about dark matter and dark energy (see “Distortion”). Neural network-aided research extends far beyond the physical sciences, informing and illuminating fields of medicine, economics, and social sciences.

As a result, the Department of Computer Science and its growing focus on data science and machine learning finds itself in an influential position to offer new technology, techniques, and theory applicable to nearly every research field.

I begin my tenure as dean of the Physical Sciences Division during an exciting time for the Department of Computer Science, with the addition of eight new faculty members for the 2018–19 academic year and a new home in the renovated Crerar Library. The library is also housing a computer science partner, the newly launched Center for Data and Applied Computing.

The center will support and encourage ambitious research and provide a collaborative space to apply new computation insights to projects across campus and the full spectrum of science. The work that emerges will exemplify UChicago’s commitment to both fundamental and applied science.

On a June episode of TechCentral.ie’s Tech Radio podcast, Michael Franklin, the Liew Family Chair of Computer Science, emphasized that data science is not dispassionate, and that data should not and cannot be separated from the people who provide, collect, analyze, and technologize that information. “As we’re building data science as a field,” he said, “we need to make sure that the human component is front and center in what we’re doing.”

In the pursuit of artificial intelligence, where we’re attempting to create thinking machines in our own image, that human component is even more crucial, a reminder that the work done in the Physical Sciences Division is part of and informed by the far larger human network.

Science & Medicine

Physical Sciences Division

Let’s do the time warp again

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Oct 2018 17:22:27 +0000

Anonymous Fri, 10/05/2018 - 12:22

(UChicago Photographic Archive, apf7-02633r, University of Chicago Library)

Sean Carr, AB’90

Inquiry

10.08.2018

Science and emotion in A Wrinkle in Time.

Last spring Madeline L’Engle’s classic novel A Wrinkle in Time was timely again, thanks to Disney’s Oprah-starring film adaptation. Published in 1962, the book tells the story of Meg Murry, the gifted but troubled child of two scientists who travels (or, in the language of the novel, “tessers”) through space-time to rescue her physicist father from an alien intelligence known as IT. The novel provided a leaping-off point for a May panel discussion at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore about women in science, feminist physics, and multiple other topics.

The panelists were Chloe Lindeman and Joohee Bang, both finishing their first years as graduate students in the Physical Sciences Division; Sophia Vojta, AB’18, then a fourth-year majoring in physics and Fundamentals: Issues and Texts; and Tamara Vardomskaya, PhD’18, a linguist who writes science fiction and fantasy. “I did do a math degree when I was an undergrad,” she noted.

The following, which barely scratches the surface of their wide-ranging conversation, has been edited and condensed.

Reading and rereading

Bang: I first read A Wrinkle in Time when I was 11, in Korean.

Vojta: I also first read this novel when I was quite young, probably about eight or nine. I’ve read it in English and German. I tried to read it in French once. That was a mistake. But this was a very formative novel for me.

Lindeman: I have only read this novel in English. I must have read it as a kid—I remember a couple of scenes—but I just read it in these past couple of weeks, so it’s still very fresh in my mind.

Vardomskaya: I actually read the other two volumes, A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, when I was about 11 or 12, and I only read this book a couple of years ago. I just reread it a couple of days ago.

Women in science

Lindeman: There are so many prominent female science-related figures in the novel. Mrs. Murry is the most obvious one. She’s actually my favorite character because certainly in that time and even today, the idea of having a career and also having a family can be really difficult. And she combines these two things in an interesting way. She has her lab in her home, in her garage. She makes it work. Even as her partner is gone for several years, she’s able to create this life where she has a family and also is doing her work as a scientist. They’re not distinct for her. Her family is also her science life.

Vojta: I wanted to know more about her: Tell me about your bacteria. I want to know about your work. While I agree that this character encapsulates something powerful about the necessary relationship between family and work, I wish that we had seen more of the work.

Science and emotion

Lindeman: Meg breaks down into tears a lot. She’s a child, but some people have seen this as the author’s bias—that women tend to react this way more than men. One of the very few female physics professors at Haverford College, where I did my undergrad, posted an article on her door about a woman who cried at her thesis defense. It was an extremely stressful experience, and that’s OK. That doesn’t make you any less of a scientist. Everyone has emotional responses to things. That’s not something we can get rid of.

Bang: I was a history major before I transitioned to chemistry and then physics. When my friends and family heard that I’d made that decision, they felt I didn’t really fit in this realm because I was really emotional, and that meant I wasn’t the type of person who could study things that require reason and logic. But I don’t think emotions and thinking about things in a rational way are the opposite of one another.

Vojta: We have this idea that science is objective and that we’re in pursuit of a beautiful, pristine truth, and that perception and personal investment has nothing to do with what we see in a scientific experiment. I think that’s a faulty idea both in terms of what you choose to study—science is often about studying that weird thing you’re obsessed with—but also in terms of what you see when you look at an experiment. I think there’s an intrinsic connection between our emotions and our way of perceiving. Whether that’s a problem for science or not is a different question. But I don’t think they’re separable from one another.

Vardomskaya: There was a study of a person who had suffered a type of brain damage that shut down his emotions. He was completely rational. You would expect he was like Mr. Spock. But it turned out that it took him three hours to decide what he was going to have for lunch. You need your emotions to make decisions. You need emotions to figure out what to focus on. “I feel good about having a sandwich, therefore I’m going to have a sandwich.”

Reading list

We asked you what stories inspired your interest in science. Here are some of your answers.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
Bloodchild and Other Stories by Octavia Butler
Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Snowball Earth: The Story of a Maverick Scientist and His Theory of the Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life as We Know It by Gabrielle Walker
"The Comet" in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. DuBois
The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

For more recently written recommendations, check out the following books:

Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Stephen Pinker
Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance by UChicago historian Ada Palmer

Science & Medicine

Physics

Physical Sciences Division

Origins

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 22:15:26 +0000

Anonymous Tue, 09/18/2018 - 17:15

(Photography by John Zich)

Maureen Searcy

Inquiry

09.21.2018

Angela Olinto brings high energy to the deanʼs office.

This past July, Angela V. Olinto, the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the College, began her appointment as dean of the Physical Sciences Division.

Previously chair of Astronomy and Astrophysics (2003–06 and 2012–17), Olinto is best known for her contributions to the study of quark stars, primordial inflation, cosmic magnetic fields, and the origin of the high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos arriving on Earth from distant galaxies.

What are your current research projects?

I am the principal investigator of two related efforts: the EUSO-SPB2, the second super-pressure balloon carrying the Extreme Universe Space Observatory telescope, and the conceptual design of a NASA space mission named POEMMA: Probe of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics. Both are designed to discover the origin of the highest-energy particles and to study their sources and interactions.

Once you track ultra-high-energy cosmic rays back to their source, what can you learn?

There are two complementary questions that we’d like to answer. One is in astrophysics: What are the scientific underpinnings of the highest-energy events in the observable universe? The second is in fundamental physics: How do particles with energies 10 million times larger than those we can create in the laboratory behave? For example, itʼs possible that by studying the behavior of such high-energy neutrinos, we may find that there are extra dimensions of space.

How do fundamental research and applied science fit into the PSD?

The PSD’s mission is to discover, apply, and disseminate the fundamental laws of nature and reason. That includes both fundamental research and applied sciences, which are interconnected and crucial for the future of humankind.

An example is the Parker Solar Probe, launched in August with a mission to study the origin and evolution of solar wind. The study started by [professor emeritus] Gene Parker in 1958 created the field of heliophysics, essential for space missions and civilization on Earth. For instance, heliophysics helps us understand the effect of solar wind on our power grid and satellite communications.

How will you balance your roles as dean and researcher?

The two roles inform each other, as my research now consists of leading large groups of scientists around the world toward common scientific goals. Keeping up with my research involves a time-management challenge, given the attention I like to dedicate to our dynamic and inspiring Physical Sciences Division. Iʼm lucky to have a brilliant team in place at the dean’s office that has been incredibly helpful and insightful as I learn more about the other departments and their objectives.

As dean, what goal do you hope to achieve this year?

I hope to meet all 250-plus faculty members in small groups and learn about their achievements and aspirations.

Finally, how did you become interested in astrophysics?

As a teenager, I was first fascinated by the power of physics—in particular by its simplicity in describing the natural world. Just four forces plus matter particles can explain all that we observe on Earth? I wished human behavior could be that simple!

As I studied these forces and the complexity of our universe, the idea that observations of out there can inform the physics of down here became even more intriguing.

Science & Medicine

Astrophysics

Physical Sciences Division