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India’s IT Guy

The year was 1969. F. C. Kohli had just computerized control of the power grid serving the city of Mumbai (then known as Bombay.) It had been an impressive feat for him as general manager of Tata Electric, a sign he was well on his...

Starry-Eyed Astronomer no more

"Curiosity Rover Lands on Mars." This was headline news on the day I went to meet Jane Luu, defense systems engineer and award-winning planetary astronomer. Early in her career, Luu scoped the cosmos, studying the dark void beyond Neptune. With her Ph.D. adviser David Jewitt,...

Just Herself

Nergis Mavalvala, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, can check off a whole lot of boxes on the diversity form. She isn't just a woman in physics, which is rare enough. She is an immigrant from Pakistan and a...

A Computer Scientist In a Lab Coat

In 1994, the world was on the verge of the dot-com boom and Ron Weiss, a graduate student in the computer science program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, had just earned a master’s degree for his work on a Web application...

The Storyteller

As the sun began to set on the longest day of the summer, Kevin Brooks, PhD '99, surveyed the small crowd that had gathered in a tiny Cambridge art gallery to hear him tell stories. A seasoned performer, he needed no microphone as he launched into...

Space Cadet

In 2011, I wrote about microbiologist Kate Rubins, PI at the Whitehead Institute, who got picked to be an As Can (Astronaut Candidate). She trained for 2 years, got a chance to go to the International Space Station and is now back on earth. Ed...