Creativity and innovation lead to personal and professional success, as well as world-improving discoveries. To nurture these life-changing skills, CAS provides students with a wide range of powerful experiences in and out of the classroom.

Courses, cocurricular activities, internships, community engagement initiatives, and research projects give students countless opportunities to engage creatively, employ innovative approaches, and contribute to the common good while strengthening their own skills and experiences.

Here are some of the ways our students showed outstanding creativity and innovation during the past year:

Displaying Undergraduate Originality

  • Four BU students, including three CAS undergraduates, designed a new app called B Scanner—short for “bias scanner”—that helps identify unbiased information resources on the internet. The students developed the app as part of the BU Spark! Innovation Fellowship Program and received the Judges’ Choice award at BU Spark’s Fall Demo Day.
  • Six CAS students and their faculty mentors participated in undergraduate research projects that are donor funded—on topics ranging from criminal justice reform to the availability of mental health resources for Black women—as part of the new CAS Social Sciences Undergraduate Internships in Social Justice and Sustainability. For example, Madison Tyler (CAS’21) worked with Sociology Lecturer Max Greenberg on an ongoing research project this year that is looking at how young people in low-income areas feel about the teachers, law officers, counselors, and church representatives tasked with supporting them. Working in collaboration with Greenburg, Tyler pored through hundreds of interviews with at-risk youth and their caregivers. Eventually, her work could help create more supportive community programs for kids in the future.
  • During Innovate@BU’s annual New Venture Competition, Rishab Nayak (CAS’21, GRS’22) shared an award for Mount, a start-up that provides electric scooters for short-term vacation and rental properties. In addition, three BU alums, including CAS alums Albert Jiminez (CGS’16, CAS’18, Wheelock’21) and Yasmin Morais (CAS’18), received an award for their start-up, RefEd, a mobile education platform designed to increase access to education among refugee children.
  • BU’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) supports beginning researchers in many ways, including by helping to connect undergraduates with faculty mentors for memorable research opportunities. Some noteworthy projects include: computer sciences major Tabitha Oanda (CAS’22) collaborated with Biomedical Engineering Professor Michael Economo on a cross-disciplinary research project in the Biomedical Engineering Lab on how brain activity affects animal behavior.

In October, more than 275 undergraduate students presented research they conducted during the 24th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium. Read the program from the event.

Promoting Partnerships with Faculty

GRS promotes a culture of collaboration between grad students and our faculty, which are among the world’s most respected researchers in their disciplines. These partnerships lead to a wide range of exciting research projects in a dazzling array of subjects.

In both the lab and the field, our graduate students tackle research projects with impressive creativity. Here are a few who were rewarded for their efforts this year:

  • History PhD candidate Elizabeth Hameeteman received the 2021 Larry Gelfand–Armin Rappaport–Walter LaFeber Dissertation Fellowship from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for her dissertation project, “Water for a Thirsty World: Desalination, Development, and the Quest for Water in the 1950s and 1960s.”
  • History PhD candidate Patrick Browne received the Shotwell Fellowship, a donor-funded award that assists history PhD students in their final year of dissertation writing. His work is tentatively titled “The Ordeal of Homecoming: Northern Civilians and Returning Union Veterans of the Civil War.”
  • Anthropology PhD candidate Gana Ndiaye has been named a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars for the dissertation “’Plastic Migrants’: Race, Performance, and the Making of a Senegalese Muslim Community in Brazil.”
  • History PhD candidate Jamie Grischkan has been awarded the Samuel I. Golieb Fellowship in Legal History at the New York University School of Law for the 2021/22 academic year.

Setting an Example of Excellence

Our students aren’t the only ones showing exceptional creativity and innovation. Here are just a few notable achievements from our accomplished CAS/GRS faculty:

  • The New York Times spotlighted exciting work from Senior Research Scientist Jeffrey Baumgardner, Research Assistant Professor of Astronomy Luke Moore, and undergraduate Sarah Luettgen (CAS’21). They co-authored a study published in JGR Planets about the moon’s comet-like tail and how BU’s all-sky-imaging cameras have helped them study it.
  • Assistant Professor of Physics Indara Suarez received a five-year, $750,000 Early Career Award from the Department of Energy. Her project, “Discovery in the 4th Dimension: Shining Light on the Dark Sector,” plans to utilize the data acquired by the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to search for long-lived particles and shed further light on how the dark matter
  • When people across Massachusetts struggled to get appointments for COVID-19 vaccines in early 2021, a CAS researcher stepped in to help. Jonathan Huggins, an assistant professor of mathematics and statistics, along with his wife, Diana Rastegayeva, designed the Massachusetts COVID Vaccination Help The site booked appointments and helped users navigate the obstacles that stood between them and their jabs.
  • Associate Professor of Religion and African American Studies Margarita Guillory was named a 2020/21 Jeffrey Henderson Senior Research Fellow at BU’s Center for the Humanities. In her upcoming book, Africana Religion in the Digital Age, she looks at some of the ways in which the internet has influenced religious practices.

Watching Ideas Grow

Where does innovation come from? How does a spark of an idea grow into a discovery? Find out by watching The Journey: How New Ideas Are Born, a video series in which CAS faculty discuss some of their most exciting research findings and tell the origin stories behind their ideas.

Speaking of innovation, construction on our Center for Computing & Data Sciences is coming along beautifully. Scheduled to open in 2022/23, this eye-catching building combines stunning architecture with state-of-the-art functionality and the latest advances in environmental sensitivity, all with the goal of facilitating creativity and innovation in data sciences.