News
ENG Prof Elected Fellow of National Academy of Inventors
David Bishop a prolific real-world innovator
David Bishop, director of BU’s new Engineering Research Center, holds 47 US patents for micromechanical inventions. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi.
In the late 1990s, with an expected explosion in demand for internet bandwidth, the telecommunications industry was scrambling to devise switches that would rapidly transmit massive amounts of data—videos, music, photos, email.
David Bishop, a College of Engineering professor of electrical and computer engineering and head of the Division of Materials Science and Engineering, was then director of micromechanical research at Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories. He proposed applying MEMS—microelectromechanical systems, at the time a relatively new technology—to create a set of micromirrors that could be used to construct an optical switch.
“Everyone thought he was crazy,” recalls another Bell Labs scientist, Bishop’s longtime friend and colleague Alice White, an ENG professor and chair of mechanical engineering. “But he convinced them to invest in the project.”
Using 256 micromirrors, Bishop and his team of mechanical and electrical engineers, physicists, and chemists built what was then the world’s largest optical switch, the Lambda Router. “We went from research prototype to shipped product in 18 months,” says Bishop. He holds US patents for 47 micromechanical inventions, and the Lambda Router is the centerpiece of the portfolio that helped him win election in December as a 2017 Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI).
“It’s just kind of like me and this gizmo are in the room together and only one of us is getting out of here intact,” says Bishop. “Who is it going to be? Nothing ever works the first time. Nothing ever works in the first 10 times. If you’re lucky, it works in the first 100 times. Are you sufficiently convinced, to the point of being obsessive about it? Sometimes that’s what it takes—we’re going to make this thing work or die trying.”
With the announcement of the 2017 class of fellows receiving “the highest professional accolade bestowed to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society,” the NAI now has 912 fellows. Among them are more than 100 presidents and senior leaders of research universities and nonprofit research institutes, 29 Nobel laureates, and 142 fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
“It’s always nice to be acknowledged for the things that you’ve done,” says Bishop, who is one of the most highly cited researchers in micromechanics. He notes that BU’s other NAI fellows include Robert A. Brown, BU president, Theodore Moustakas, ENG Distinguished Professor of Photonics and Optoelectronics Emeritus, and Mark Grinstaff, ENG Distinguished Professor of Translational Research. “Those are amazing and wonderful scientists. So to be told you’re in the same club as folks like that is really quite an honor.”
“Dave’s ingenuity and talent for making things work is phenomenal,” says Thomas Bifano, an ENG professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Photonics Center. “We are fortunate to have him helping prepare the next generation of innovators at BU.”
“Professor Bishop has an impressive record of identifying real-world applications for his scientific and technical research and translating this research into patents and practice,” says Kenneth Lutchen, dean of ENG. Lutchen says that Bishop’s approach is reflected in his success as principal investigator on the BU team that competed successfully for the $20 million, five-year National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (ERC) grant awarded to BU in fall 2017 to synthesize personalized heart tissue for clinical use. Bishop is director of the new multi-institutional NSF Engineering Research Center in Cellular Metamaterials (CELL-MET).
Also a College of Arts & Sciences professor of physics, Bishop arrived at BU six years ago after a 33-year career at Bell Labs, where most of his inventions were born. “We always referred to it as a problem-rich environment,” he says. Inventions generally begin with a problem that requires solving: “How are you trying to make something smaller, bigger, faster, cheaper, better? What are you trying to accomplish?”
The problem that led to his team’s invention of the Lambda Router? “It was how to route very large amounts of data in optical networks,” says Bishop. “Networks consist of wires and switches. The wires carry the information, the switches decide where the information goes. Think of trains. There are tracks the trains ride on and switches which direct any given train to the right track.”
The “wires” in an optical fiber network are optical fibers made of “strands of glass, roughly the diameter of a human hair,” he says. “Such fibers are capable of carrying vast amounts of data, which far exceeded the ability of electronic switches—basically big computers—to route the information. What we did was build an all-optical switch using micromirrors.”
In 2009, the American Physical Society awarded Bishop the George E. Pake Prize “for his effective leadership of AT&T/Lucent/Bell Labs research during an especially turbulent time in the telecommunications industry, and for his seminal contributions to low-temperature physics research.”
It took Bishop’s unshakable confidence in the technology and in his team to make the Lambda Router work, says White, who will direct nanomechanics under Bishop’s leadership at CELL-MET. “He supported his team in every way, in whatever they needed. I can remember him driving samples around—MEMS chips—from Pennsylvania, where they were sometimes being made, to New Jersey, where they needed to be tested.”
Bishop “has made amazing advances in fundamental science, in solving hard problems,” she says. “The innovation piece means he’s then able to take some of these technologies and put them into real products in the real world. That is a combination you don’t see all that often. He inspires his team, respects every member of the team—including the secretary that’s making his appointments for him, the person in the factory—and the subtleties of what they do. He gets the best out of everyone. He does it by being confident that they can do more than they think they can.”
Bishop is now focused on the CELL-MET team and the task before them. “We’re trying to create cardiac patches,” he says. “Thousands of people around the world die from heart attacks every day. We’re trying to create a solution for that. That’s solving a world-class, big-time problem. When we succeed, that’s going to be an awful lot of people alive for their grandchildren’s weddings.”
Author, Sara Rimer can be reached at srimer@bu.edu.
You’re Invited: 2017 Menino Survey of Mayors
BU IN DC
You're Invited: 2017 Menino Survey of Mayors
On January 23rd, join the BU Initiative on Cities for an exclusive National Press Club briefing on its annual survey of the nation's mayors. RSVP today
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT
Ancient Advice for a Good Life
As we kick off 2018, what can Greek and Roman philosophers teach us about being happy?
Read more
FACULTY EXPERTS
A Fine-Tuned Map for CO2
NASA funding enabled BU scientists to create something remarkable for local governments: an hourly estimate of carbon dioxide emissions in every square kilometer of their community. Check it out
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...
BU's NITEO program to help students with mental health problems return to class was featured in STAT News... Susan P. Koniak of the BU School of Law editorializes against secret court settlements in The Washington Post... Wendy Mariner of the BU School of Public Health was quoted in The New York Times about the impact of repeal of the individual mandate... Rory Van Loo of the BU School of Law talks with National Public Radio about the legal issues facing Apple as a result of slowed iPhones.
Congress Sends Tax Bill to President
CONGRESS SENDS TAX BILL TO PRESIDENT
Both chambers of Congress approved the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (H.R. 1) this week, sending the measure to President Donald J. Trump for his signature. Unlike a previous version of the legislation voted on by the U.S. House of Representatives, the final bill preserves undergraduate and graduate student tax benefits, retains employer-provided tuition assistance, and allows private universities to access tax-exempt bonds for construction projects. However, the new law will impose a tax on the investment income of certain private university endowments and reduce tax incentives for charitable giving. The Massachusetts Congressional delegation opposed the bill, which is expected to be signed into law early next year.
CONGRESS PLANS ANOTHER TEMPORARY BUDGET
Congress appears poised to approve a short-term continuing resolution this week that will keep the government operating at current spending levels through January 19. This will be the third such resolution since the October start of the 2018 federal fiscal year. Federal agencies will continue to conservatively spend resources and limit new programs while they wait for Congress to negotiate an increase in the spending caps and write the bills which determine agency budgets.
BUZZ BITS...
- The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) led a group of scientific societies in urging the Trump Administration to rely on evidence-based policies and practices. The letter, which was sent on Tuesday, came in response to news reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to restrict the use of certain words in its budget materials.
- Last week, a working group of the National Institutes of Health Advisory Committee to the Director reported dissatisfaction with the eligibility rules for the Next Generation Researchers Initiative (NGRI). The working group will issue interim recommendations for a revised NGRI in June, and a final report in December 2018.
- Secretary of Energy Rick Perry announced he will reorganize the U.S. Department of Energy so that Undersecretary of Science Paul Dabbar will focus on innovation, basic scientific research, and environmental cleanup, and Undersecretary for Energy Mark Menezes will lead energy policy, technologies, security, and reliability. This returns the Department to a structure previously used between 2006 and 2013.
A NOTE TO OUR READERS...
With Congress heading towards a winter recess, Beltway BUzz will take a break from publication until January. Happy Holidays!
BU Scientists Get $3 Million NSF Research Traineeship Grant
Preparing new generation of researchers to tackle urban environmental problems
BU faculty Lucy Hutyra (from left), Pamela Templer, and Jonathan Levy are leading an NSF Research Traineeship program aimed at providing graduate students the technical, policy, and communications skills needed to help cities address multidimensional environmental and public health issues. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi.
More than half the world’s population lives in cities, which are increasingly vulnerable to air and water pollution, storm surges, heat waves, and other extreme weather. Urban areas consume 67 percent of global energy and emit 71 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide. In Boston, and cities across the country, growing traffic congestion increases emissions of pollutants that can raise rates of cardiovascular and respiratory illness. In short, cities are a very good place to start solving the planet’s environmental and climate change problems.
Pamela Templer, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of biology, and a team of interdisciplinary researchers from CAS and the School of Public Health are aiming a broad-based new teaching program at exactly that. The researchers have been awarded a $3 million, five-year National Science Foundation Research Traineeship(NRT) grant to prepare a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists to tackle urgent urban environmental problems through what is hoped will be a model graduate program for other universities.
Grant principal investigator Templer and her colleagues will train 60 graduate students in the CAS biogeosciences and SPH environmental health PhD programs with the technical knowledge, policy know-how, and communications skills needed to help cities address multidimensional problems at the intersection of the environment and public health.
“It’s very important that our students understand how to do basic science and publish their results in scientific journals,” says Templer, “but we also want to train them to ask scientific questions that will produce information that policymakers can use, so they can make a difference.”
Started by a group of CAS faculty in 2009, the biogeosciences program draws students primarily from the biology and the earth and environment departments, as well as from the archaeology program. Biogeoscience is the study of interactions among the Earth’s atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere. It includes research into how land cover, rising temperatures, and fossil-fuel emissions affect water and air quality. Templer and her colleagues believe theirs is the first graduate program to combine training in biogeoscience and environmental health.
“Graduates will be equipped to address foundational questions about the physical environment and to reduce the impacts of the environment on both ecosystem function and human health,” says Templer, who will direct the NRT program.
The BU program, Boston UniverCity: Partnering Graduate Students and Cities to Tackle Urban Environmental Challenges, was one of 17 projects sharing a total of $51 million in NRT grants to develop transformative models for interdisciplinary graduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. All of the projects are aimed at training students to address complex problems at the intersection of different scientific disciplines.
Lucy Hutyra, a CAS associate professor of earth and environment, and Jonathan Levy, an SPH professor of environmental health, are co–principal investigators on the BU grant and will be associate directors of the Boston UniverCity program.
“This program is building and institutionalizing a commitment of scientists as civic actors,” says Hutyra. “We have an opportunity, and arguably a responsibility, to take our basic science to the streets to solve the real-world problems of our community—and all of our communities. This grant creates a mechanism to do that.”
Hutyra and her colleagues believe that federal actions to relax environmental protections give programs like Boston UniverCity an even greater urgency.
“It’s the cities that are developing aggressive climate action plans,” says Levy, “and it’s well timed to have students who know how to actually engage with cities—to know who to engage with, where they can intervene in the process. We’re hoping these students can tackle the big problems relating to air, water, and climate that cities in the 21st century are facing.”
The program will connect students with city officials in Boston and other towns in the metropolitan area, and with private corporations and NGOs, so they can work on team-based collaborative projects that may shape environmental and land-use policies. Templer, Hutyra, and Levy, and other CAS and SPH faculty, already work with officials in Boston and other towns, and Carl Spector, Boston’s commissioner of the environment, is a member of Boston UniverCity’s external advisory council.
As part of its role in the new program, BU’s Initiative on Cities (IOC) will help connect students to government agencies that have expressed an eagerness to work with the University’s researchers on issues from reducing traffic congestion to planting trees to mitigate air pollution.
“The folks doing this important work on the city side often don’t have PhDs or deep scientific knowledge, so there is tremendous need for more direct involvement by the scientific community to help them measure and collect data and take action,” says Katharine Lusk, IOC founding executive director. “The hope is that we can build a model here that can be applied in other cities and universities so that students can more directly engage in the really sophisticated research that needs to be happening at the intersection of the urban environment and health.”
Because modeling and data analytics will be an important part of the training, the core faculty includes Eric Kolaczyk, a CAS professor of mathematics and statistics, as well as Mark Friedl and Nathan Phillips, both CAS professors of earth and environment, and Patrick Kinney, the Beverly Brown Professor of Urban Health at SPH.
The Boston UniverCity program builds on the hands-on research that Templer, Hutyra, Levy, and other CAS and SPH faculty have been conducting with graduate students to help Boston city officials address problems from methane gas leaks to traffic congestion. In one such project, Hutyra and PhD student Conor Gately (GRS’16) used mobile phone and GPS data collected by the Boston Metropolitan Planning Organization to figure out how fast vehicles were moving and used the speed to model air pollution and emissions from traffic, block by block.
“That was a fascinating scientific problem to undertake, but it’s fantastically applied as well because the city can use that information to identify key areas for policy interventions to make a difference in air quality,” says Hutyra.
As part of his work on the project, Gately, who is now a postdoctoral research scientist dividing his time between CAS and Harvard University’s department of earth and planetary sciences, “got a desk in the Metropolitan Planning office and worked side by side with the staff,” she says. “He’s a perfect example of what the NRT is trying to do, which is to integrate students with government agencies and policymakers to design research problems of the highest social relevance and produce precisely the data they need to inform solutions.”
Author, Sara Rimer can be reached at srimer@bu.edu.
BU Unveils Aggressive Climate Action Plan
COMMUNITY RESOURCE
BU Unveils Aggressive Climate Action Plan
The Board of Trustees approved a strategy to dramatically cut BU's greenhouse gas emissions and fund infrastructure improvements in preparation for flooding or heat surges. See the details
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT
Biosafety Lab Gets Green Light
Researchers at BU's National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL) will study life-threatening viruses under stringent safety specifications. Read more
ON THE CHARLES RIVER
Senator Warren Visits BU
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) discussed public health in a forum at BU's Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering on December 4. Check it out
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...
Tamar Frankel of the BU School of Law was featured in The Wall Street Journal as the "intellectual godmother of the fiduciary rule"... Mark Williams of the BU Questrom School of Business weighed in on the rapid rise of Bitcoin's valuein The Washington Post... Emily Rothman of the BU School of Public Health explains the causes of sexual harassment to The Wall Street Journal... Concussion researcher Ann McKee of the BU School of Medicine was named Bostonian of the Year... Kyna Hamill of the BU College of Arts & Sciences reveals the history of "Jingle Bells" on Boston.com.
FCC Rolls Back Net Neutrality Rules
BU IN DC
Kevin Gallagher of the Pardee School of Global Studies addressed a Center for Strategic and International Studies roundtable on Chinese development finance in Latin America on December 12.
FCC ROLLS BACK NET NEUTRALITY RULES
On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to repeal regulations that ensure Internet service providers give users equal access to all web content. Universities opposed the repeal of the "net neutrality" rules due to fears that access to research materials and educational content would be stifled, stating "that open and neutral access to the Internet is essential to our nation's freedom of speech, educational achievement, and economic growth." Legal challenges to the decision are expected imminently and Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) has announced he will introduce legislation to reverse the FCC's vote.
BUZZ BITS...
- On Wednesday, the House Education and the Workforce Committee passed its bill to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, setting up a possible vote by the full House of Representatives in January. The higher education community continued to express concern with the bill's proposed reduction in financial aid for students.
- The White House issued a space policy directive on Monday that instructs the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to work with private sector partners to return humans to the moon, followed by Mars exploration.
- The National Science Foundation (NSF) is seeking candidates to serve as Assistant Director of Education and Human Resources. Dr. James Lewis has been serving as acting director since Joan Ferrini-Mundy became NSF Chief Operating Officer in 2016.
GRANTS NEWS YOU CAN USE
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) released a Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) for the Defense Enterprise Science Initiative (DESI), which seeks to incentivize use-inspired basic research programs by partnering universities and industry to solve key defense challenges and address capability gaps. The BAA lists four topics: power beaming; highly-maneuverable autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles; soft active composites with intrinsic sensing, actuation, and control; and metamaterial-based antennas. Applicant teams are also encouraged to submit proposals for defense challenges not listed. AFOSR intends to issue four awards of $1.5 million each. Applications are due by February 28.
CAS Researchers Working to Predict Future Climate Change
Findings could have implications for carbon cycling
Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass., is a more than 3,700-acre ecological research area where scientists have been carrying out experiments since 1907. Photo courtesy of Mark Friedl and Minkyu Moon.
- Forests’ role in absorbing carbon from fossil fuel emissions is important
- Researchers study spring’s timing to understand how climate change affects forests
- Findings suggest spring is shifting earlier, with possible implications for carbon cycling
For most in the Northeast, the first few green leaves every spring are a welcome sign that the long, cold winter is finally coming to an end, and sweaters and boots will soon give way to shorts and flip-flops. For BU researchers, however, these leaves may also be a key to understanding how global climate is changing. Their research, which combines satellite data with on-the-ground measurements, suggests that as global temperatures rise, spring in the US Northeast is starting earlier. This shift has major implications for how carbon, a main player in global climate change, cycles through the ecosystem.
Mark Friedl, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of earth and environment, and doctoral candidate Minkyu Moon (GRS’24) used satellite imagery to determine that over the past few decades, trees in Harvard Forest, a more than 3,700-acre experimental forest in Petersham, Mass., have been sprouting leaves earlier in the spring. The pair, whose work is funded by NASA’s Terrestrial Ecology Program, also analyzed on-the-ground data of carbon uptake and found that the date when the forest starts taking up more carbon—an indicator that trees are photosynthesizing—has also shifted earlier, and to an even greater degree. Moon will present their preliminary results at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in New Orleans in December 2017.
Doctoral candidate Minkyu Moon (GRS’24) (left) and Mark Friedl, a CAS professor. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi.
Over the past century, humans have been churning out more and more carbon-laden emissions from fossil fuels. However, what happens to those fossil fuel emissions once they leave our cars, homes, or factories is a bit more complicated. “Only about half of what we’re pumping into the atmosphere is staying in the atmosphere,” Friedl explains. “The other half is being absorbed by the planet,” a burden that is split between the ocean and terrestrial ecosystems, namely forests. But how much carbon forests are taking up, and how much they will take up in the future, is an open question that relates to forest productivity, specifically how much trees are photosynthesizing and for how long.
“That’s kind of the prime motivation for doing this, trying to help us to understand how ecosystems are changing, and if the climate continues to warm, what that will do to the growing season of ecosystems, and how changes in the growing season will lead to increases or decreases in carbon sequestration,” Friedl says, “and then by extension, how that will impact the long-term balance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
To investigate the timing of spring in Harvard Forest, the researchers compared NASA satellite imagery from two sources: the MODISsatellite, which has been orbiting the globe daily since the early 2000s, capturing coarse resolution images, and the Landsat satellite, which has been orbiting for 30 years, but revisits each location on the Earth less frequently (once every eight days), gathering high-resolution images.
“The imaging sensors on the satellites are designed to capture the properties of vegetation,” Friedl explains, adding that the images are collected at wavelengths outside the visible spectrum that are particularly sensitive to the presence of plants that are actively photosynthesizing, so when leaves emerge in the spring, “we can see that timing quite clearly from the satellites.”
Friedl and Moon paired their satellite data with another unique dataset: three decades of on-the-ground measurements of carbon uptake from an eddy flux tower in Harvard Forest, which they used to pinpoint the timing of increased carbon uptake that occurs every spring when trees begin photosynthesizing again.
Harvard Forest houses the world’s longest-running eddy flux covariance tower—an instrument that measures the forest’s uptake and release of various trace gases, including carbon dioxide. Photo courtesy of the University of Arizona.
“We’re exploiting the fact that we’ve got in our backyard at Harvard Forest the longest continuously running carbon exchange measurement site on the planet, which has instruments that measure the uptake and release of a variety of trace gases, including carbon dioxide, from ecosystems,” Friedl says. “So it’s literally measuring how the ecosystem breathes.”
Their Landsat satellite data suggests that over time, leaf emergence in Harvard Forest has indeed shifted earlier (although they did not see a shift in the MODIS observations, which may have to do with the shorter time frame and coarser resolution), and their on-the-ground measurements tell a similar story: over the past few decades, the annual increase in carbon uptake has been occurring earlier in the spring. However, this trend towards earlier spring was more pronounced in the on-the-ground measurements than it was in the satellite data, a difference the team will investigate in follow-up studies. The team would also like to explore how a longer growing season affects the overall carbon uptake of Harvard Forest and expand their experimental approach to more sites.
Joshua Gray, a remote sensing scientist at North Carolina State University, calls the research “the whole soup to nuts package” for the way it extends further back in time and uses higher resolution images than previous satellite work, while also incorporating on-the-ground observations. Gray considers the research an important step towards understanding the complex relationship between climate change, the timing of spring, and carbon cycling.
“We need to understand how climate drives the timing of [spring], and then how the [timing of spring] affects the carbon uptake, so ultimately we can say how climate change will affect the carbon uptake in these forests,” he says, explaining that while it makes sense that a longer growing season would cause forests to take up more carbon, there are many other factors involved, so this may not necessarily be the case.
Trevor Keenan, an ecosystem scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, thinks the research is important not only because it establishes a multidecade trend of earlier springs in Harvard Forest, but also because it provides a concrete example of how climate change is already affecting ecosystems.
“Effectively, we’re changing the climate and ecosystems are responding, and we can observe that change from the ground and from space,” he says. “We can actually see things change like never before in human history. It’s quite striking as an indicator of the effects of climate change.”
Ultimately, the researchers plan on using their data to improve how climate models represent the timing of spring, which Friedl hopes will lead to better predictions of future climate change: “We’re trying to use this information to unravel this pretty complicated set of questions surrounding how the planet is changing and what the future holds in terms of ecosystems and ecosystem impacts on the climate system,” he says.
Author, Catherine Caruso can be reached at catherine.c.caruso@gmail.com.
Allen Questrom Professor and Dean Kenneth Freeman to Leave Post in June
National search planned to find a successor
Kenneth Freeman, Allen Questrom Professor and Dean in Management, will be leaving the position at the end of the school year. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi.
When Kenneth Freeman became the Questrom School of Business Allen Questrom Professor and Dean in Management in 2010, he opted for a tiny, highly visible, glass-walled office facing the building’s interior atrium instead of a fifth-floor executive suite.
“I find you’ve got to be genuine as a leader—accessible, transparent, and genuine,” Freeman says. “That’s why I live in this crazy office in the middle of the action, because we are here for the students in the end.”
He’ll be giving up that office in June when he steps down as dean. He says it’s the right time, both for him and for the institution. “I’ve never had a job I enjoyed more than this one, and we’ve made a lot of progress here, but it’s time for a change.”
Freeman jumps to a white board to sketch a quick chart of the stages of corporate growth—including the decline that can follow when leadership stays on too long. He’d like to avoid that corollary. “I think it’s important for organizations to go through the process of having a change in leadership on a fairly regular basis to ensure that the momentum is continued and sustained,” he says.
Under Freeman’s leadership, Questrom has undergone a period of remarkable growth. He presided over the $50 million transformative gift from BU trustee Allen Questrom (Questrom’64, Hon.’15) and Kelli Questrom (Hon.’15) and their foundation that led to the renaming of the school in 2015. “Previously we were one of only a small handful of top-50 business schools in the United States without a name,” Freeman notes. “The name Questrom is iconic in the world of business, and particularly retail—representing the highest integrity, genuinely caring for and treating people in all walks of life with dignity, fairness, and respect, and providing outstanding leadership. As the BU Questrom School of Business, we now have a permanent identity that enables us to raise the bar in recruiting and retaining outstanding faculty and staff and represents a source of distinction for applicants.”
Another significant change during Freeman’s tenure as dean has been the introduction of ethics and global citizenship as a major component in the Questrom curriculum and the endowment of the Susilo Institute for Ethics in the Global Economy by Indonesian businessman Harry Susilo, parent of two BU graduates.
“We firmly believe that our job is to help try to create students who, when they graduate, understand what it might mean to make an informed judgment,” he says. “Ethical leadership is really consistent with one’s values, what you think needs to be done in those very gray areas where it’s not always clear what the right and the wrong are.”
Freeman has also overseen an expansion in enrollment and significant curricular revisions at the school. Undergraduate enrollment has increased by nearly 30 percent and enrollment in the full-time MBA and professional evening MBA programs has also grown. He’s led the development of innovative MOOCs (massive open online courses) in digital product management and digital leadership, which has enabled students from around the world to earn a MicroMasters credential, as well as the growth of graduate offerings in mathematical finance, management studies, and digital innovation.
In addition, he has also helped to create two emerging University-wide research institutes at Questrom, the Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Institute for Health System Innovation & Policy.
Freeman chose a tiny, visible, glass-walled office facing the building’s atrium so he would be “accessible, transparent, and genuine.” Photo by Jackie Ricciardi.
“Dean Freeman has had a significant impact at the Questrom School of Business over the last eight years, dramatically strengthening its academic offerings and elevating its stature as a global destination for business education,” says Jean Morrison, University provost and chief academic officer. “From growing the school’s research portfolio in strategically vital areas around the global economy to expanding its digital presence to reach important new audiences, he has made Questrom an innovator and model in the training of business professionals and scholars.
“We are grateful for Dean Freeman’s service and energetic leadership and look forward to recognizing his many contributions to BU with an event next spring.”
One of the biggest lessons he has learned during his years at Questrom, Freeman says, is the interdependency between higher education and business. Schools need business to provide learning experiences, hire their students, and inform their research. Businesses need highly qualified, well-prepared graduates to hire. “It was an eye-opener for me to see how truly dependent we are on each other, and how in many respects far apart we have been in understanding each other and deciding we could be an effective ecosystem,” he says.
He was piqued in 2014 by Gallup poll data showing that more than 90 percent of academics thought they were doing a good or a great job preparing students for employment, while only about a third of employers felt the same way. “That’s a big gap. If I was in industry as a CEO, I’d say this is a turnaround situation. The customer called employers doesn’t seem to think we’re doing a great job, but we think we’re doing great. That usually leads to problems.”
So, he spurred Questrom to host the first-ever online Business Education Jam that year, essentially a three-day giant global chatroom bringing together industry, academia, and government to discuss the future of business education. Stickers from the event line one wall of the office he’ll be leaving in June.
A Questrom Dean Search Advisory Committee will be appointed soon to conduct a national search for Freeman’s successor.
Freeman, now 67, came to BU from a successful four-decade career in business. He joined Corning Incorporated in 1972 and moved to Corning Clinical Laboratories in 1995. The company was spun off as Quest Diagnostics. As its CEO and chairman, Freeman presided over a dramatic turnaround at Quest. By the time he stepped down in 2004, the company had become the leading provider of diagnostic testing and services. He then joined the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. as a managing director and partner.
As to what’s next, Freeman says a “very viable possibility” would be to remain at Questrom and teach. “I love engaging with the students to help them get where they want to go,” he says. “There’s something very special about the mission of helping the next generation get ready to make an impact on the world.”
Married for 45 years, father of two, and grandfather of four, he has also not ruled out a return to industry or some kind of public policy role. While he says he has no specific plans yet, he’s firm on one point: “I am not retiring.”
There’s one other, less likely, possibility for the next entry on his résumé. Freeman is an accomplished pianist and once considered a career as a musician. But he acknowledges that that’s a dicey way to make a living. “Eating is still important,” he says with a smile.
Author, Joel Brown can be reached at jbnbpt@bu.edu.
Winds of Change
CAS scientists look to coral reefs for how Pacific gusts influence global climate
Diane Thompson extracting a core from a live Porites coral colony at Kiritimati in 2012. Photo by Elizabeth Wiggins.
- Winds in the tropical Pacific are poorly characterized, yet affect climate worldwide
- Scientists use the chemical fingerprint of winds captured in coral to re-create wind records
- Their work will help them understand how Pacific winds relate to rates of global warming
In the 18th century, sailors’ understanding of trade winds allowed them to circle the globe in merchant ships, exploring and trading along the way. Today, scientists understand that these winds, which blow persistently from east to west in the tropical Pacific, influence weather patterns worldwide. Researchers at Boston University want to better understand this relationship between trade winds and climate change, so they’re tapping a curious source of information: trace metals hidden in coral reefs.
Coral cores extracted from pristine tropical coral reefs in the Pacific may seem like an unlikely tool for re-creating historical wind records, but Diane Thompson, a College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of earth and environment, and postdoctoral researcher Hussein Sayani are using them for just that. Researchers in Thompson’s Tropical Climate & Coral Reefs Laboratory are analyzing coral records to characterize the strength and direction of tropical Pacific winds over the past century, work that will help them better understand the relationship between wind patterns and global climate.
“Winds are really important for regulating the rate of global warming,” says Thompson. “But we haven’t been recording winds for very long, so we need some other way to look at them, and these coral records provide a window into past winds.”
Researchers remove a core from a fossilized coral colony. They hope fossilized coral cores will help them re-create wind records from thousands of years ago. Photo courtesy of Diane Thompson.
Thompson and Sayani are studying two sites in the tropical Pacific: Kiritimati (Christmas) Island and Butaritari Atoll. At each site, they are measuring manganese in corals to determine the strength of trade winds and El Niño winds over the past 100 years. Because strong winds from the west—typically El Niño winds—release trace metals trapped in the lagoon sediments that are then incorporated into coral skeletons growing on nearby reefs, manganese spikes in the corals record the fingerprint of weaker trade winds and El Niño conditions. Sayani is presenting their initial results at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting December 11, 2017.
Reliable wind records exist only from the 1970s; for information about earlier times, researchers have to rely on records of where large vessels sailed. Consequently, wind records are particularly sparse for the tropical Pacific region, where the doldrums, a low-pressure area of calm winds, discouraged ships from sailing. And yet wind patterns in the tropical Pacific can influence climate worldwide; strong trade winds in the tropical Pacific pull heat out of the atmosphere and drive it down into the ocean, causing global warming to slow, while weaker trade winds allow more heat to escape into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming.
“Obviously the climate is warming, but there are these natural variations,” says Thompson. “It turns out that winds in the Pacific are a big part of that story.” Weaker trade winds in the Pacific are also associated with stronger El Niño winds, she says, which can trigger extreme weather events all over the world.
Thompson and Sayani’s experimental technique takes advantage of natural geography and the way corals incorporate trace metals as they grow. Thompson first used it at the Tarawa Atoll in the tropical Pacific to study how variations in wind strength from 1894 to 1982 relate to the rate of global warming. The Tarawa Atoll’s lagoon is protected on the east and exposed to the west, surrounded by corals, and has manganese buried in its sediments. The trade winds blow from the east and hit the protected side of the island, leaving the manganese undisturbed. However, before and during El Niño events, short, strong wind bursts blow from the west, hitting the exposed side of the lagoon and stirring up the manganese.
Diane Thompson, a CAS assistant professor of earth and environment, and postdoctoral researcher Hussein Sayani are analyzing coral cores from sites in the tropical Pacific to figure out the relationship between wind patterns and global climate change. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi.
“Corals are incorporating these trace metals into their skeleton as these events occur,” Thompson explains, adding that manganese spikes indicate strong El Niño winds and weak trade winds, while no manganese indicates strong trade winds, with no El Niño winds. At Tarawa she found trade winds were weak during a period of global warming from 1910 to 1940 and strong when global temperatures were stable from 1940 to 1970. These results, published in Nature Geoscience in 2015, supported a link between Pacific winds and global climate.
Thomas Marchitto, a University of Colorado, Boulder, paleoclimatologist, is enthusiastic about the team’s experimental technique. “Winds over the tropical Pacific are important for the Earth’s climate, but there aren’t good proxies for winds or ways that we can quantitatively reconstruct them in the past, so it’s a really clever approach to use the manganese concentration in corals as a measure of these westerly wind bursts,” he says.
Now, Thompson and Sayani are applying this technique to two new tropical Pacific sites with similar geography: Kiritimati and Butaritari Atoll. They are analyzing coral cores at two-month intervals, and using the size and timing of manganese spikes to piece together the strength and timing of El Niño wind bursts over the past 100 years. So far, they have found that at both sites, manganese spikes match up with westerly wind bursts from the 1997–1998 El Niño event, and they are now measuring manganese in corals growing at Kiritimati during the 2014–2016 El Niño event.
A Porites coral colony, the species researchers most commonly use when extracting coral cores that help them re-create historical wind records from the past century. Photo courtesy of Diane Thompson.
Once they confirm that the technique works at the new sites, Thompson and Sayani hope to use their results to better understand how Pacific trade winds relate to the rate of global warming. Their research to date implicates tropical Pacific wind strength in regulating rates of global warming, suggesting that warming will likely accelerate in the coming decades when the cycle reverses and the trade winds weaken once again. They would also like to learn more about El Niño: Thompson explains that some El Niño events move all the way across the eastern Pacific, while others seem to lose steam in the central Pacific, a difference that “has big implications for climate. By reconstructing winds at these different sites we may be able to pull apart which type of El Niño events may have developed based on where the wind events occurred.”
Reconstructing past wind records is important for future climate predictions. “As we’re warming the planet, it’s not clear at all how variability in the tropical Pacific is expected to change,” Marchitto says. “The more we can reconstruct that in the past under different conditions and see if there are any consistent patterns, the more we can understand how that system may behave in the future.”
Kristine DeLong, a paleoclimatologist at Louisiana State University, says the team’s efforts are “really exciting for the world of paleoclimatology,” and she thinks their research could improve climate modeling in two main ways: it will provide modelers with more and better data to incorporate into models, and it will allow modelers to check their accuracy by comparing their outputs to the historical record.
While Thompson and Sayani want to eventually incorporate their data into climate models, their next step will be taking an even deeper dive into the past, attempting to use fossilized coral to reconstruct wind patterns from 3,000 to 5,000 years ago, a period when El Niño events started becoming stronger and more frequent.
“During that time there were natural changes in the climate system that we think had big implications on how and when and why El Niño events formed,” Thompson says. “And when you combine that with our understanding that winds are probably linked to rates of warming, using these fossil corals, we could understand why winds are changing in the first place and how they may have regulated past climate changes.”
Author, Catherine Caruso can be reached at catherine.c.caruso@gmail.com.
BU Trustees Approve Aggressive Climate Action Plan
Effort prepares University for global temperature rise
The BU Climate Action Plan adopted by the BU Board of Trustees recommends new building efficiencies, changes to renewable energy sources, and ways to make climate change a bigger part of the University’s curriculum and research. Illustration by Rubén D. Cerón Guevara (MET’19) and BU Metropolitan College Professor Madhu Dutta-Koehler.
- Plan reduces direct emissions to zero on BU’s campuses by 2040
- Makes buildings more energy-efficient, resilient to flooding
- Shifts away from fossil fuels to wind and solar sources
The Boston University Board of Trustees approved a Climate Action Plan on Thursday that will dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions across both the Charles River Campus and the Medical Campus and fund broad infrastructure improvements in preparation for flooding or heat surges in the coming decades.
The board voted overwhelmingly to adopt the plan, which includes capital improvements estimated to cost about $141 million over 10 years. The plan is the result of a yearlong analysis by the University’s Climate Action Task Force, an 18-member group of faculty, staff, and students.
“Today the Board of Trustees voted that Boston University commit to doing its part in mitigating the impact of anthropogenic climate change and to begin to prepare our campuses for the effects of global temperature increases,” Robert A. Brown, University president, said after the vote. “The work of the Task Force has given us a framework for moving forward with these important efforts.”
Scientists agree that reducing energy consumption is the key to mitigating climate change.
The plan’s centerpiece is the reduction of carbon emissions on the campuses to zero by 2040, a decade ahead of a similar effort by the city of Boston. Direct emissions include pollution from the fuel the University burns to heat and cool the campuses, electricity and steam it purchases, and the exhaust from the University’s vehicle fleet.
Many of the changes involve updating BU heating and cooling systems to make them more energy-efficient. To reduce the cost of the University’s electrical demand, the plan recommends purchasing power from renewable wind and solar sources.
The task force, convened by Brown in September 2016, was asked to create a strategy to help address the threats caused by extreme weather patterns and the increased likelihood of problems related to flooding and heat waves on the campuses.
The plan presented to the board outlined three courses of action, titled as BU GOOD, BU BETTER, and BU BOLD. The task force specifically recommended the BU BOLD plan because it offered the most aggressive timeline for the changes.
Although the task force report estimates $141 million over 10 years, new costs will be incurred after that. But the report predicts that the financial benefits of its earlier improvements could cover those costs.
Adopting the plan puts BU’s efforts on par with climate change initiatives at New York, George Washington, and Syracuse universities.
Task force chair Anthony Janetos, Frederick S. Pardee Professor, director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of earth and environment, said the timing is right to switch to renewable resources. Increasing competition in that sector has brought down market prices, and costs are even lower than they were a year ago when the task force began its work.
“This is a sweet spot that we’re in,” Janetos said, “and we’re positioned to take advantage of it.”
Task force member and BU Sustainability director Dennis Carlberg said the plan also includes a recommendation to create an academic Initiative on Climate Change and Sustainability, which would study ways to expand research opportunities on climate change and incorporate it into BU’s broader curriculum.
“All of our undergraduate students should be touched by this effort,” Carlberg said. “It’s going to take some work. But this is a great opportunity to develop courses and use the campus as a living laboratory.”
These illustrations show water levels during a one-in-100-year flooding event in Boston today (top) and in 2070 (bottom). The BU campuses are highlighted in red. The data come from the Woods Hole Group and are based on climate projections from the Boston Research Advisory Group, a team of the region’s top climate scientists. Mapping by Brett Sinica (GRS’18).
The plan also proposes a separate in-depth assessment of weather-related vulnerabilities at the BU Medical Campus, which sits in a low-lying area that’s extremely susceptible to flooding. The task force findings show that in the event of a one-in-100-year storm, the campus area could be a foot or more underwater by 2070.
The plan did not make recommendations about ways to curb indirect greenhouse gas emissions from faculty, staff, and student travel, University purchasing, or other transportation on campus. Those emissions are more difficult to quantify and are currently under study, Carlberg said, and for now, the effort means the University must lower its energy consumption 31 percent across the next 14 years.
“That’s aggressive, that’s bold,” he said. “This is critical work.”
Author, Meg Woolhouse can be reached at megwj@bu.edu.