Advocating for Science on Capitol Hill

Grad students learn to lobby for policy, funding Graduate students in the sciences learn how to advocate for science on Capitol Hill in the Making Our CASE: Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering workshops. Photo by Nicolas Raymond via Creative Commons license. The federal government funds about 80 percent of the research conducted at Boston […]

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Show Me the Data

First BU Data Science Day draws cross-disciplinary crowd Azer Bestavros, director of the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering (center), and the cochairs of Hariri’s first BU Data Science Day, Prakash Ishwar (left) and Dino Christenson (right), were delighted by the large, cross-disciplinary crowd that came together to talk about how data […]

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UROP Student’s Project: A Thinking Robot

Self-directed ‘bot can identify objects In the following video, watch Emily Fitzgerald’s artificially intelligent robot. “That is a ball.” “I do believe that is a cone.” “Seems like a wonderful book.” The voice is mechanical and flat, and anyone offering such banal commentary and sounding so bored would surely bomb in a job interview. But […]

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Digital Learning Initiative Announces New Grants

Support for faculty developing online education innovations Helping disadvantaged students is a national goal; BU’s Mark Greenman is testing whether technology can better teach them physics. Could a cousin of the much-heralded MOOC help disadvantaged high school students take college-level classes? That’s what BU’s Mark Greenman and colleagues are test-driving in a project that is […]

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BU Satellite Team Gets Big Boost from NASA

Wireless sensors developed by BUSAT to be launched into space In the video above, BU Small Satellite Program students discuss and demonstrate their mini-satellites, which NASA will launch. On March 10, 1989, a solar eruption blasted plasma toward Earth. Canadian utility Hydro-Quebec noticed a hop-skip-and-jump in the voltage on its grid two days later. On […]

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Two from BU Cited for Encouraging Women in STEM

Lauded by magazine for their inspiration Elise Morgan (left), a College of Engineering professor of mechanical engineering and of biomedical engineering, and Cynthia Brossman, founder and administrative director of BU’s Learning Resource Network (LERNet) are cofounders of BU’s Summer Pathways outreach program. Morgan photo by Cydney Scott; Brossman photo courtesy of Brossman. The average annual […]

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Photonics Center Programs Promote Diversity in STEM Fields

NSF sponsors summer research by undergrads, high-school teachers Lauren Strong (left), with Helen E. Fawcett (GRS’97), an ENG research assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is one of 11 college undergrads participating in a new program funded by the National Science Foundation designed to promote diversity in STEM fields. Photos by Cydney Scott. Lauren Strong, a […]

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Gut Reactions

New grants put software to work on bioenergy and human microbiome Daniel Segrè, associate professor of bioinformatics, biomedical engineering and biology, uses mathematical modeling to understand the microbiome. Photo by Cydney Scott. Daniel Segrè studies very unusual microbes. They don’t live in petri dishes, guts, or on dirty kitchen countertops. In fact, they don’t live […]

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