{"id":62190,"date":"2019-09-20T09:44:25","date_gmt":"2019-09-20T13:44:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/?p=62190"},"modified":"2020-07-07T16:10:46","modified_gmt":"2020-07-07T20:10:46","slug":"the-transformers","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/law\/record\/articles\/2019\/the-transformers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Transformers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bostonia<\/em> interviews seven researchers\u2014including Dean Onwuachi-Willig\u2014who are impacting, and in some cases, revolutionizing, the human experience.<\/h2>\n

\"illustration
\nBoston University\u2019s research enterprise is booming.<\/strong> Over 4,000 faculty across nearly 1,700 laboratories have catalyzed more scientific and social innovation than ever, attracting a torrent of new grants and funding awards. Last year, they pulled in nearly 20 percent more dollars than the previous year, rocketing BU past half-a-billion dollars in research funding.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really exciting to see the trajectory that BU has been on since 1997, when I joined as a faculty member, to when President Brown came on board in 2005\u2026. It\u2019s a different place,\u201d says Gloria Waters, vice president and associate provost for research. \u201cFaculty from so many different disciplines are coming together to solve societal problems.\u201d She says the Rajen Kilachand Fund for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering, which supports promising multidisciplinary research teams with a $100 million research endowment, \u201chas already achieved its major goal of catalyzing collaboration.\u201d<\/p>\n

BU\u2019s $579 million in research funds last year, compared to $345 million in 2015, signals just how much collaborative work is happening within the University and around the world. Examples are everywhere, from Beijing to Boston, from Comm Ave to Albany Street, where a multidisciplinary team of scientists at BU\u2019s <\/span>National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories<\/a> <\/span>(NEIDL) is working with live Ebola virus and other lethal contagions inside its Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, the highest level of biosafety containment used for infectious agents that pose extreme danger to humans.<\/p>\n

The <\/span>Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering<\/a> <\/span>was designed by director Azer Bestavros, a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and a College of Arts & Sciences professor of computer science, to make the power of data science accessible to astronomers, zoologists, and every type of researcher in between. Through the institute\u2019s <\/span>SPARK!<\/a> <\/span>program, undergraduate researchers partner with start-ups, municipalities, social change engines, and industry giants. Bestavros, meanwhile, has been nurturing a breakthrough of his own: a data analysis method known as <\/span>secure multiparty computation<\/a>, which allows for consumer data to be analyzed for the public good without revealing anyone\u2019s private information.<\/p>\n

The <\/span>BU Initiative on Cities<\/a> <\/span>is using research to direct urban planning and societal change. Codirector <\/span>Katharine Lusk<\/a> <\/span>has played a key role in Boston\u2019s drive to be the first city in the country to achieve pay equity for women. She\u2019s partnered with the Hariri Institute on <\/span>SCOPE<\/a> <\/span>(Smart-city Cloud-based Open Platform and Ecosystem), a National Science Foundation Partnerships for Innovation Project at BU that digitally connects innovators from around the city to make data-driven decisions that reduce pollution and traffic congestion, monitor greenhouse gas emissions, schedule and dispatch police and traffic details, and more.<\/p>\n

On a broader scale, the <\/span>Global Development Policy Center<\/a> <\/span>at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies is researching the most effective strategies to support financial stability, sustainable energy, and human well-being.<\/p>\n

At the Johnson & Johnson Innovation Lung Cancer Center, a research alliance launched in 2018 between BU and Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC (JJI), director <\/span>Avrum Spira <\/span><\/a>(ENG\u201902) is bringing unconventional <\/span>lung cancer research<\/a> front and center. His own research has revealed that genetic differences related to the immune system may play a key role in the early development of lung cancer. Spira, a School of Medicine professor of medicine, pathology, and bioinformatics and the Alexander Graham Bell Professor in Health Care Entrepreneurship, has also helped direct JJI pilot funding to BU roboticists, environmental health specialists, stem cell engineers, and molecular biologists, who are using the money to carry out unconventional, high-risk research on lung cancer cures.<\/p>\n

Embodying that unconventional approach, engineers and biological scientists in the <\/span>Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences & Engineering<\/a> <\/span>are reimagining the boundaries between their disciplines. Chantal Stern, a CAS professor of psychological and brain sciences and director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Center on the ninth floor, is part of a robotics and neuroscience team learning how humans and animals navigate their environments so they can mimic those mechanisms in artificially intelligent, self-driving cars and robots. Just down the hall, <\/span>Steve Ramirez<\/a> <\/span>(CAS\u201910), a CAS assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences and a member of the Center for Memory & Brain and the Center for Systems Neuroscience, is using optogenetics\u2014a technique that uses genetic engineering to make brain cells activate when light is shined on them\u2014to learn how to identify specific memories and then enhance or suppress them. His research could unlock new doors to treating memory-related disorders like anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.<\/p>\n

\"An<\/p>\n

The Equalizer<\/h2>\n

How law influences disparities in gender, race, and education.<\/h4>\n

Angela Onwuachi-Willig<\/strong> remembers watching the video of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man who was shot and killed by a Charleston, S.C., police officer during a daytime traffic stop in 2015. She says that as she watched, she thought, \u201cThere probably won\u2019t even be a conviction in this case, in such an obvious case. I\u2019m a lawyer\u2014I should believe in our legal system more than the average citizen. It was a life-changing moment for me. I began to see the impact of these repeated acquittals on my own psyche. As a sociologist, I had to wonder, what effect were they having on African Americans as a group? I distinctly remember [the video] being the moment I could no longer watch tapes [of police shooting African Americans] because I already knew what the outcome was going to be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Onwuachi-Willig, a prolific academic writer and researcher, studies how law influences disparities in gender, race, and education. She is working on a new research project that seeks to understand how the legal outcome of cases concerning the killing of unarmed African Americans by police or quasi-police create cultural trauma for blacks in the United States.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are repeated instances of nonindictments or acquittals in these cases. What effect does that pattern have on African Americans as a group?\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s interviewing people of all races, ages, and socioeconomic backgrounds to get a better picture of how the tragedies and legal outcomes like those in the Walter Scott and Trayvon Martin shootings forever change a group, the way the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till\u2014and the acquittal of his murderers\u2014rocked the country. In today\u2019s internet news era, stories of black killings travel broader and faster, which is both a pro and a con culturally, Onwuachi-Willig says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s negative for African Americans. We always knew these things were happening. We saw it and lived it, but there\u2019s an increased trauma in witnessing these events unfold, and seeing what the legal outcomes are. It\u2019s hard not to feel victimized, again and again. The positive for African Americans, though\u2026we were always complaining about police brutality and unjust killings, and many whites did not believe us. Now, for many whites who are willing to acknowledge what they are seeing in these [videos of police violence against unarmed blacks], their eyes have been opened to our reality, and I think that\u2019s been a major positive. Now, there are more allies than there were before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Read<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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