Research Excellence
College of Arts & Sciences researchers continued to push the boundaries of human understanding this past year across a variety of disciplines.
Understanding the Human Brain
Researchers at CAS embrace the longstanding tradition of collaboration and recognize the value and power that it can offer when trying to find answers to complex challenges and questions. One challenge for those studying the human brain is that the immense volume of data produced by new imaging and recording technologies requires new kinds of analysis, calling for collaboration among physicists, mathematicians, and neuroscientists. Three CAS professors are currently working across disciplines to address different issues in three major areas of brain research:
- Mathematician and William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor Nancy Kopell directs the Cognitive Rhythms Collaborative, a group of mathematicians and scientists who work together to advance our understanding of the brain dynamics underlying cognitive functions such as sensory processing, attention, learning, memory, and motor planning.
- Associate Professor of Mathematics & Statistics Mark Kramer works with statistician and Professor Uri Eden to develop network models to map the rhythms of epileptic seizures in order to find ways of controlling them in the most intractable cases.
- Stephen Grossberg, professor of mathematics & statistics, works on what philosophers dubbed “the hard problem of consciousness,” the problem of explaining our phenomenal experiences, like the quality of redness or the sound of a clarinet. He has proposed a mathematical theory that explains how neural mechanisms and dynamical brain states give rise to subjective properties of individual conscious experiences.
Tackling the Urban Environmental Challenge
Professor Pam Templer is primary investigator (PI) on a newly awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Traineeship (NRT) grant to Boston University. The NRT awards are given to support future workplace development in STEM fields in areas of high-priority interdisciplinary research. The grant Templer received will go toward “Boston UniverCity: Partnering Graduate Students and Cities to Tackle Urban Environmental Challenges.” This new $3 million, five-year program will train students from the interdisciplinary PhD program in biogeosciences (students from biology, Earth & environment, archaeology in CAS, and the environmental health PhD program in the School of Public Health). Lucy Hutyra, CAS Earth & environment associate professor, is serving as co-PI on the grant, along with Jonathan Levy, an environmental health professor from BU’s School of Public Health.
High-Tech Humanities
Professor of Philosophy Juliet Floyd and Assistant Professor of Philosophy Russell Powell are also collaborating to bring together humanities scholars across a wide range of disciplines with social and natural scientists and experts in big data and computational analysis. Powell and Floyd, along with James Katz, Feld Professor of Emerging Media at the College of Communication, received a $175,000 Mellon Foundation grant to help fund the Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series. This past April, the international symposium Journalism and the Search for Truth in an Age of Social Media took place at BU as a result of this grant. The symposium brought together scholars and researchers across a variety of disciplines, including computer sciences and the humanities, in order to analyze the effects of the technological revolution of news and journalism and its larger impact on the philosophical, social, and ethical understanding of everyday life.
Rising Higher
This year, U.S. News & World Report ranked BU 37 on the list of top national universities and 32 on the list of top global universities, a measurement based mainly on research accomplishments and statistics related to the quality of faculty and students. Several Graduate School of Arts & Sciences programs received acknowledgment as among the strongest in the country, including: economics (23), English (42), and psychology (39). In June, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) released its World University rankings and BU climbed eight spots to number 81, while several CAS departments were ranked “among the world’s elite institutions,” including life sciences (41 out of 1,117), arts and humanities (63), natural sciences (94), and social sciences and management (96—QS combines those fields).
BU and CAS are more committed than ever to providing the best possible facilities for our researchers in order to enhance and support their efforts. This year, BU opened the doors to the Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering on Commonwealth Avenue. The new nine-story building will house neuroscience research, systems and synthetic biology research, and other research endeavors. This new, ultramodern facility provides shared, flexible lab space, meeting rooms, and other common areas to enable collaboration and will house some of the most important research done at CAS.
Research Highlights
The following are some examples of the impactful research going on at CAS:
Biology: Assistant Professor Jerry Chen received a grant from the Whitehall Foundation, which awards grants to assist scholarly research in the life sciences. The overall goal is to better understand behavioral output or brain mechanisms of behavior. For his award, Chen will be investigating the role for inter-areal cortical dynamics during sensory perception.
History: Benjamin Siegel, assistant professor, received the ACLS Fellowship for work on his new project, The Nation in Pain: American Bodies and Indian Pharmaceuticals in an Age of Distress. Siegel examines the interlinked rise of the American opioid epidemic and the Indian pharmaceutical industry, showing how American pain and Indian agriculture have been linked over the last century.
Psychological & Brain Sciences: Professor and Director of BU’s Center for Systems Neuroscience Michael Hasselmo is the principal investigator on a five-year, $7.5 million Office of Naval Research (ONR) grant aimed at investigating the connection between how human brains learn rules and how this might be translated into computer programs, particularly for autonomous systems.
Psychological & Brain Sciences: Professor Chantal Stern is the principal investigator on a $1.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation for a state-of-the-art Siemens 3 Tesla magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner to be used in the new Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering.
Physics: Professor Claudio Chamon was named a 2017 Simons Fellow in theoretical physics. The Simons Fellows program provides funding to faculty for up to a semester-long leave from administrative and teaching obligations with the aim of increasing research creativity and productivity. Chamon’s research focuses on topological phases of matter in 3D.
Religion: Michael Zank, professor and director of BU’s Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, was a recipient of the BU Center for the Humanities (BUCH) Jeffrey Henderson Senior Research Fellowship for his work on his forthcoming book—Jerusalem: A Brief History. In addition to Zank, eight other CAS faculty members received BUCH Fellowships to continue work on their books.
Sociology: Jessica Simes, assistant professor, received the University Provost’s Career Development Professorship. The three-year professorship will enable Simes, an emerging leader in the field of data science, to pursue important and timely research around her field of study related to mapping inequality.
Student Research
Leah Williams, a cell & molecular biology PhD student in the Gilmore Lab, was awarded a three-year NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Williams will be working toward exploring the involvement of the immune-related transcription factor NF-kappaB pathway in an endangered coral, Orbicella faveolata, in hopes of providing a molecular explanation for how coral bleaching occurs. She will also be continuing her outreach as a mentor to undergraduates and high school students in the NSF-REU and GROW programs at BU.
Incoming Fall 2017 PhD student Brandon Güell, who is joining the Warkentin Lab as part of the ecology, behavior & evolution program, was also awarded a three-year NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He will be focusing on elucidating how and why closely related species exhibit diverse phenotypic responses. Specifically, he is interested in examining the evolution and mechanisms that underlie plastic traits in tree frogs throughout Central America. He plans on conducting comparative analysis of the ontogeny of mechanisms underlying adaptive plastic hatching in phellomedusine tree frogs. He is interested in adaptive phenotypic plasticity, animal behavior, cue use, and predator-prey interactions.
Biology & science education undergraduate Joanna Lee of the Finnerty Lab was awarded a three-year NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Lee created transcriptomes for the economically crucial queen conch, Lobatus gigas, in order to find morphological and genetic differences between two hypothesized morphs of L. gigas to guide management strategies. Starting fall 2017, she will be a student in the biotelemetry lab at UC Davis.
Annual Report 2016/2017
From the Dean
The 2016/17 academic year was an exciting one for the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. We made tremendous progress on important fronts, including working to increase faculty and student diversity, providing enhanced experiential educational opportunities, expanding our research impact, and enhancing our academic programs.
Improving Undergraduate Education
Providing a world-class undergraduate education is no easy task, but at CAS it is part of our core mission. In 2016/17 we made curricular improvements, launched new career preparation programs, increased access to our world-class education, and gave our students a space to call their own, the CAS Think Tank.
Strengthening Graduate Education
The Graduate School of Arts & Sciences’ evolution continued in and out of the classroom, with a 10% increase in master’s applications in 2016/17 and continued high PhD acceptance rates affirming the strength of our programs.
Enhancing a World-Class Faculty
The quality of CAS’ academics and research depends on the quality of its faculty, and so we work hard to hire the best and brightest. In 2016/17, CAS hired 30 new professors across the humanities and the social, natural, and computational sciences.
Conducting Pathbreaking Research
Discoveries and innovations at CAS helped put BU at 32nd on the list of U.S. News & World Report’s top research universities in the world. Our faculty earned numerous prestigious awards and grants, helping to advance human understanding in the fields of biogeoscience, religion, computer science, and biology, just to name a few.
Building Our Future Together
In 2016/17, the seventh year of the Campaign for Boston University, numerous alumni, friends, and parents have helped to raise $121.6 million for CAS—far exceeding our aggressive goal of $100 million.
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