How to author your own story

Producing educated, well-informed students who are attractive to employers is merely the baseline. Sending effective, civically minded, globally engaged, lifelong learners into the world is our mission. Clearly, post-collegiate life is as complex and challenging as ever. Today, careers and entire industries can emerge and disappear within a few years, a phenomenon only expected to accelerate in the future. Life after college is no longer about what you are, but how you are. It’s about your ability to think, create, adapt, and collaborate, not the title listed on your business card. It’s about knowledge and know-how.

To confront this reality head-on, we spent the past three years researching, analyzing, and discussing the ways our students learn and what today’s world will demand from them. With the help of more than 100 faculty spread over 12 committees, along with substantial input from students, parents, alumni, and employers, we set about redefining our undergraduate learning experience by creating our first-ever University-wide general education program. The result is the BU Hub: a comprehensive agenda of curricular, extracurricular, and lifelong learning.

“Traditionally, general education has been thought of as foundational—the first two years and then you choose your major and move on,” says task force cochair Elizabeth Loizeaux, associate provost for undergraduate affairs and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English. “This new curriculum is explicitly not that. It will be integrated across all four years. And it will be not just courses, but cocurricular experiences as well.”

Drawing on the vast range of courses from our 10 undergraduate schools and colleges, all of which are now open to the entire undergraduate student body, the new BU Hub might see engineering students studying the arts, business majors investigating religious thought, aspiring educators exploring computer science. To facilitate such cross-disciplinary exploration, students will master a variety of capacities: communication; philosophical, aesthetic, and historical interpretation; social and scientific inquiry; and quantitative reasoning. Another capacity—diversity, civic engagement, and global citizenship—was designed to go beyond the classroom and workplace, facilitating graduates’ ability to contribute to the good of society throughout their lifetimes.

“Our students will gain the skills and knowledge they need to thrive in the world at the same time as they’re developing their professional and intellectual specialization,” says Bruce Schulman, task force cochair and a professor of history at the College of Arts & Sciences. “Maybe you’re going to be an engineer, but now you’re also going to learn how to present and sell your design, and how to write an effective proposal to get it funded.”

Another distinguishing feature of the BU Hub is a cross-college challenge. Students from different schools and majors will collaborate on a semester-long project. Along the way, they will develop team-building, research acumen, and conceptual and communications skills—attributes vital to any workplace.

University Provost and Chief Academic Officer Jean Morrison says the new curriculum not only represents the latest phase in BU’s maturation as one of the nation’s leading research universities, but aims to deliver on the value proposition. “We are a research university, but we’re also deeply engaged in education. Our mission is to educate and help undergraduates develop the skills and capacities necessary to compete in a global, interconnected world.”

Citizenry 101

Civic engagement at home, and around the world, builds on a long-standing tradition on campus, dating back to our founding in 1839. From bringing philosophy into homeless shelters to crafting sustainability plans for the University to logging miles for autism awareness, below is a sampling of ways our student community gave back last year:

• BU’s annual Global Days of Service saw community members from Atlanta to Kyrgyzstan to Shanghai volunteer 10,752 hours over the course of one month.
• The Community Service Center, which provides opportunities for students to make a difference in the lives of residents in the Greater Boston area, fielded 4,000+ volunteers in over 70 yearlong programs and one-time events, completing more than 100,000 hours of service.
• Thanks to a $2,000 grant from the University, philosophy major Clarinda Blais (CAS’17) created the Free Philosophy Project, which brings discussions of free will and happiness and moral responsibility to homeless shelters across the city. Her initiative has since spread to 11 shelters for women, men, and families in Boston and Cambridge, Mass.
• Over in the athletics department, our student-athletes took up a variety of causes last year. More than 20 athletes and coaches volunteered at the 14th annual Greater Boston Walk Now for Autism Speaks fundraising and awareness event at the Xfinity Center in Mansfield, Mass. In October, some 100 BU student-athletes laced up for the American Cancer Society’s walk on the Charles River Esplanade. And in April, the women’s soccer team and spirit squad took part in the Walk MS Boston for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
• Katie Jane Mossburg (ENG’20) and Raymond Rosenbloom (CGS’16, Sargent’18) were awarded the Santander Urban Impact Microgrant, which offers funding to students to pursue community-centered projects. The pair put the grant toward the Gavin Foundation, a treatment house in South Boston where they both volunteer, helping residents with their résumés and sharpening their professional skills.
• Andrea Somoza (COM’17) spent BU’s Alternative Service Breaks working at Iniciativa Comunitaria in Puerto Rico, a community-based nonprofit that promotes health, education, and prevention services to special populations that have been marginalized by the traditional health system.
• Two environmental leaders on campus, Rachel Eckles (CAS’17) and Ryan Peters (ENG’17), were recognized this year by the University’s sustainability department. Eckles’ work with the City of Boston and the University’s Climate Action Plan Task Force helped both groups understand the challenges of measuring climate impacts from the waste stream of BU and the city. Peters has been a vocal advocate for clean energy on and off campus and a driving force in building a more sustainable culture and infrastructure at BU.

Student Thinkubator

The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) was created at Boston University 20 years ago to nurture student curiosity, spark their imaginations, and cultivate relationships with faculty beyond the classroom. Last year, our undergraduates collaborated on innovative projects in a variety of places, from outer space to inner space, and everything in between.

• Phillip Teng (ENG’19) helped construct magnetic sensors to study the phenomenon of the auroras for a NASA-funded satellite research mission. Working with Joshua Semeter, an electrical and computer engineering professor, Teng was part of ANDESITE, an interdisciplinary project funded by NASA and run by students to study changes in Earth’s magnetic field caused by interactions with space, such as the aurora.
• Victoria Smith (CAS’18, Pardee’18), an economics major, spent last summer researching gun violence and the firearm industry under the guidance of Michael Siegel, a professor of community health sciences at the School of Public Health. Smith won a UROP Outstanding Student Researchers Award for her work.
• Varnica Bajaj (ENG’19) worked in the lab of regenerative medicine pioneer Christopher Chen. Her project focused on building an in vitro cell-culture–based device that can mimic the complex kidney filtration function. This technology would allow researchers to study a variety of diseases in a controlled, cost-effective environment without live animal testing.
• Lena Huang (Sargent’17) researched the risk of falls at home after bariatric surgery. She gathered data that could lead to more targeted therapies and a reduced risk of falling. Huang worked with Simone V. Gill, an assistant professor of occupational therapy and director of the Sargent Motor Development Lab.
• David Baylies (ENG’17), a mechanical engineering major and music lover, created an electronic trumpet that does a better job mimicking the real thing than current electronic versions. He was guided by R. Glynn Holt, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the College of Engineering.
• John Hunter (CAS’19), an astronomy major, worked with Professor Alan Marscher in studying blazars, the extremely energetic plasma jets that emanate from supermassive black holes in the centers of active galactic nuclei.

Going the distance

Even before taking the helm at the Technology Development office last year, Michael Pratt served in its technology transfer and business development sections, and he has been all-in when it comes to moving the innovative work of BU researchers into the hands of the public. And if it meant getting himself hooked up to IVs for 27 hours for one of his researchers’ clinical trials, well, that’s what he was going to do.

“I believed in Ed’s work,” Pratt says.

In 2015, Technology Development helped Ed Damiano, a professor of biomedical engineering at the College of Engineering, navigate a mountain of licensing and intellectual property agreements to start Beta Bionics, Inc., as a public benefit corporation. The company’s mission is to serve the type 1 diabetes community by getting Damiano’s bionic pancreas through final clinical trials and the regulatory process and into commercialization. Damiano credits Pratt’s office with guiding him and his Beta Bionics partners through “an incredibly complex licensing deal involving many stakeholders, under an absurdly short timeline, and through the 2015 holiday season.”

Pratt’s job is to connect people from two different worlds—academia and industry. “It’s an important responsibility to try and commercialize these technologies so more people can benefit from all the hard work that goes into research and discovery,” he says.

Gustavo Mostoslavsky
An associate professor of medicine and microbiology and codirector of BU’s Center for Regenerative Medicine, Mostoslavsky was named the 2017 Innovator of the Year by BU and the Technology Development office. He was recognized for his work in developing STEMCCA, licensed to Millipore/Merck and adopted by more than 700 laboratories worldwide, a tool that makes it simpler and more efficient to generate induced pluripotent stem cells, which can develop into gut, liver, lung, muscles, skin, nerves, and almost any other cell type.

Getting a discovery to market can take years—if it gets there at all—and Pratt says Technology Development’s goal is to help faculty navigate the paperwork, and the inevitable obstacles, as smoothly as possible, while at the same time protecting their interests. “We’re not a gatekeeper,” he says. “We’re an enabler. We want people to view tech transfer not as an administrative burden, but as an office that helped them through this difficult process and didn’t hold them back.”

Other faculty endeavors Technology Development helped facilitate last year:

• Pulmonary physician-scientist Avrum Spira teamed up with Janssen Research & Development, one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, as well as the company’s venture capital subsidiary, Johnson & Johnson Innovation. Janssen is investing more than $10 million in Spira’s research into biomarkers for the early detection of COPD and lung cancer. “Janssen is becoming involved in the process as a partner from the very beginning,” says Spira, a professor of medicine, pathology, and bioinformatics at the School of Medicine. “It’s science done with application in mind at the earliest stages—not science for science’s sake.”
• Carmela Abraham, a School of Medicine professor of biochemistry and of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics, founded Klogene Therapeutics, Inc., to develop novel treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, based on boosting the levels of the protein Klotho in the brain. Last year, Klogene won a $1.49 million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health to help move the research forward.
• Digital Health Corp, a healthcare company focused on developing affordable, at-home therapy solutions, this summer acquired the BU-born Constant Therapy. The company grew out of groundbreaking research at the lab of Swathi Kiran, a College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences. Constant Therapy designs mobile applications for customizable therapy for people with speech, language, cognition, memory, and learning disorders caused by traumatic brain injury, stroke, aphasia, and learning disorders.
• Guavus, Inc., a BU-born pioneer in big data analytics platforms, signed a merger agreement last spring with Thales, a global technology leader for the aerospace, transport, defense, and security markets. Founded in 2006 by BU grad Anukool Lakhina (CAS’01, GRS’01,’07) not long after receiving his doctorate in computer science, Guavus enables businesses to use their own data the instant it’s captured, in order to become more efficient and profitable. Its suite of offerings is built upon a technique developed by Professor of Computer Science Mark Crovella with funding from the National Science Foundation and licensed from BU.
• Faculty spin-out companies report they’ve raised more than $100 million in capital investments during the past fiscal year, including $10 million (and another $7 million in 2016) for Aquinnah Pharmaceuticals, a firm focused on neurodegenerative diseases, cofounded by Ben Wolozin, a professor of pharmacology, experimental therapeutics, and neurology at the School of Medicine.

the genius of generosity

“My great-grandfather was one of the great philanthropists of his time,” says Rajen Kilachand, a BU trustee and chair of the Dodsal Group, a global development company based in Dubai. “He gave practically his entire fortune to the village from which his ancestors came. This was an example handed down generation to generation of what philanthropy was about—it was our duty in life to support those less fortunate than ourselves.”

Fulfilling that family duty, Kilachand (Questrom’74, Hon.’14) became the largest donor in Boston University history, with a $115 million gift for life sciences and engineering research that promises to accelerate discoveries to solve some of humanity’s most vexing problems.

The first part of Kilachand’s astounding contribution directs $15 million toward the new, state-of-the-art Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering (see story on Combining Disciplines), which brings together life scientists, biomedical engineers, and neuroscientists from across the University. Standing at the heart of the Charles River Campus, the $150 million center will be home to some 160 researchers, postdoctoral students, and staff, as well as 270 graduate students.

Helping fuel their efforts will be the second part of Kilachand’s donation—a $100 million endowment called the Rajen Kilachand Fund for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering, which will support, in perpetuity, pioneering research at the intersection of the life sciences and engineering. All told, these commitments represent a quarter-billion-dollar investment in interdisciplinary basic science research that could help rewrite the story lines for patients suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, accelerate our understanding of memory and speech, and deliver on the promise of synthetic biology to make molecules and tissues that mimic natural function and improve our lives.

“This magnificent and visionary new gift from Rajen Kilachand is the capstone of our efforts to generate philanthropic support for the University,” says BU President Robert A. Brown. “A center like the Kilachand Center and the resources from the fund will have enormous impact, because they fund the very best people, who have the very best ideas and create the very best outcomes.”

Kilachand has shown generosity to the University before. In 2011, he gave $25 million to establish the Arvind & Chandan Nandlal Kilachand Honors College. One year later, he gave $10 million for a facelift of Kilachand Hall. Those gifts, plus his latest, constitute one of the 50 largest gifts to higher education in the United States.

“I give to BU and to education in the United States because I am a firm believer that there is no country like the United States for higher education and research,” Kilachand says. “No place does it with such integrity and honesty. I really believe that in the coming century, leaders at all levels of society must have a very strong sense of the importance of ensuring that some seven billion people have an opportunity to have a good education and quality healthcare. Maybe I’m asking for utopia, but unless you at least dream about it, it’s not going to happen. It’s not even going to get close.”

Turbo-Charging The Talent

From the get-go, the Campaign for Boston University has set its sights high to cultivate our promising young faculty. Thanks to the generosity of distinguished donors, alumni, and BU’s Technology Development office, nine Career Development Professorships were awarded last year to faculty recognized as future leaders within their fields. Meet them all below:

Arturo Vegas
The assistant professor of chemistry was one of several Peter Paul Career Development Professorship recipients.

• Jerry Chen, a College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) assistant professor of biology, is the winner of the Stuart & Elizabeth Pratt Career Development Professorship. A neuroscientist who uses the sensory input from the whiskers of mice to study the relationship between local circuits and long-range networks in the brain’s neocortex, Chen says he hopes his research will further our knowledge of the central nervous system in mammals.
• Charles Chang, a CAS assistant professor of linguistics, was one of three recipients of a Peter Paul Career Development Professorship. Chang’s research explores the dynamics of language acquisition and development, focusing on the ways individuals’ native languages influence, and are influenced by, the phonological systems of heritage or later-learned languages.
• Daniel Cifuentes, an assistant professor of biochemistry at the School of Medicine (MED), was also awarded a Peter Paul Career Development Professorship. Cifuentes examines the early stages of embryo formation and the role RNA plays during this period, with a “long-term goal of understanding how we develop from a single egg into a whole new organism,” he says.
• Arturo Vegas, a CAS assistant professor of chemistry, was the third Peter Paul Career Development Professorship recipient. Vegas uses his research in synthetic biology to develop novel chemical tools, materials, and approaches for targeting therapeutics to diseased tissues, with a focus on cancer and diabetes.

• John Ngo, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, was the recipient of the Reidy Family Career Development Professorship, which recognizes College of Engineering (ENG) and Questrom School of Business faculty. Ngo’s research applies principles of evolution, chemistry, and engineering to develop new tools for visualizing, measuring, and controlling biomolecules in cells and organisms.
• Joshua Campbell (ENG’12,’12), a MED assistant professor of computational biomedicine, received the Ralph Edwards Career Development Professorship, given to MED junior faculty. Using bioinformatics, Campbell’s research in DNA and RNA sequencing works to help detect and treat lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at an earlier stage by identifying unique genomic mutations and then targeting them with novel therapies.
• Keith Brown, an ENG assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a CAS assistant professor of physics, received the first Moorman-Simon Interdisciplinary Career Development Professorship, funded by a gift from BU Overseer Ruth Moorman (CAS’88, SED’89,’09) and her husband, Sheldon Simon. Brown’s research focuses on how the nanostructure—between the microscopic and molecular levels—of materials affects the way light, heat, electrons, and molecules move through systems.
• Jessica Simes, a CAS assistant professor of sociology, has been awarded the first University Provost’s Career Development Professorship, funded by a $2.5 million anonymous gift to support junior faculty working in academic areas with “the greatest potential for impacting the quality and stature of the University, as determined by the provost.” Simes’ research merges studies of urban inequality and poverty with computational techniques, using innovative data analysis to better interpret the concentration of mass incarceration in disadvantaged communities.
• Marcus Bellamy, a Questrom assistant professor of operations and technology management, received the Isabel Anderson Career Development Professorship, funded by the estate of longtime Boston philanthropists Isabel and Larz Anderson. Bellamy’s research specializes in innovation and management of global supply chains, using analytics and visualization techniques to help businesses identify and understand clusters, patterns, and trends.

The Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre will stage its first production in 2018. Rendering by Elkus Manfredi Architects.