Brandeis Magazine / Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

Brandeis ADMISSIONS EDITION / SUMMER 2017

magazine

They FLOCK! They SWARM! They WALK! Inanimate molecules mimic living organisms in pioneering Brandeis research

Simon Says Leadership guru Simon Sinek ’95 reveals the secret to workplace success

Kvelling About Yiddishkeit A Jew reconnects with his Eastern European past

Greetings from Brandeis!

This edition of Brandeis Magazine, created especially for you, explores the outstanding accomplishments of members of the Brandeis family who are working to create powerful, positive change around the world.

Our ninth president, Ron Liebowitz, just wrapped up his first year on campus. He is guiding the university as it builds upon its remarkable achievements, emphasizing academic excellence, a commitment to making the world a better place and student access to top-tier faculty.

You will find representations of these pillars illustrated throughout this issue.

Many Brandeisians make an impact beyond the university’s gates. See our story on Melissa Gersin ’05, for example, who thrilled new parents by developing a product — featured on the ABC reality TV show “Shark Tank” earlier this year — that instantly soothes newborns. She credits her Brandeis education for her ability to solve complex problems.

Stories like Gersin’s are not uncommon here. Every issue of Brandeis Magazine delves into the myriad successes of our students, faculty and alums. As you read this issue, remember that, at Brandeis, you’ll be encouraged to create your own compelling story.

I hope you will come out to chat with us as we travel all over the country this fall. Better yet, come to campus to meet many dynamic Brandeisians — and see them in action.

Sincerely,

Jennifer J. Walker Dean of Admissions

Contents

FEATURES 12 Scientific Minds Over Matter

By Lawrence Goodman Under a $20 million Materials Research Science and Engineering Center grant, Brandeis physicists are creating “active” matter that could one day animate self-healing artificial organs, drug-delivering nanobots and self-mending clothes.

18 The Workforce Whisperer

By Gregory Zuckerman ’88 Leadership expert Simon Sinek ’95 teaches employers and employees to live happier, more successful lives.

How? By focusing on their “why.”

44 DEPARTMENTS 2 The Brandeis Brief Canadian Supreme Court justice welcomed as the university’s 2017 Commencement speaker; at his rousing Inauguration, President Ron Liebowitz re-ignites the flame of the Brandeis mission; Intercultural Center celebrates its 25th anniversary.

24 A Fool in Yiddishland

By Lawrence Goodman Feh! Being Jewish doesn’t make you a Yiddish expert.

Lay off the shtik, and learn a few things you didn’t know.

28 The Mother of All Baby Calmers

By Laura Gardner, P’12 Fretful babies made maternity nurse Melissa Gersin ’05 squirm. So she designed and built the Tranquilo Mat, which — with funding from “Shark Tank” — is ready to de-stress tots and parents all over the world.

32 The Brandeis Questionnaire Daniel Shapiro ’91 34 Arts and Culture Brandeis media and public-affairs experts reveal the honest truth about fake news; the galaxy’s top Trekspert explores five decades of “Star Trek” magic.

40 Inquiry Manipulating fly genes to add arsenal to the ALS fight; drawing on high-energy physics to treat dry-eye syndrome; taking dizzying “flights” in the Graybiel Lab to learn about human perception.

44 Turning Points On the precipice of a book tour, an author finds her footing in a pair of red cowboy boots.

Cover: Illustration by Davide Bonazzi

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BrandeisBrief

COMMENCEMENT

M I K E L OV E T T

Canadian Supreme Court Justice Shines as 66th Commencement Speaker

R

osalie Silberman Abella, a justice on the Supreme Court of Canada and an expert on human-rights law, delivered the commencement address at the university’s 66th Commencement. “Justice Abella’s personal story and legal career are an inspiring example to our graduates of what we can accomplish when we use our education to the betterment of the world,” says President Ron Liebowitz. “She is a judge with whom our namesake Justice Louis D. Brandeis would have found much in common: a commitment to the protection of those who are not at the center of power in society.” Abella was among five distinguished individuals who received honorary degrees at the Sunday, May 21, ceremony, held at the Gosman Sports and Convocation Center.

Abella was born in a refugee camp in Stuttgart, Germany, to parents who had spent three years in Nazi concentration camps and whose 2-year-old son perished in Treblinka. In 1950, the Silberman family immigrated to Canada. By age 4, Abella had decided to become a lawyer, inspired by her father, who had been a brilliant law student in Poland before the war. But when he learned he would have to become a Canadian citizen, which would take five years, in order to practice law, he went into insurance instead to support his young family.

After earning an LLB from the University of Toronto, Abella was called to the Ontario Bar in 1972. She practiced civil and criminal litigation before becoming a jurist on the Ontario Family Court in 1976 at age 29, the youngest — and first pregnant — person ever appointed to Canada’s judiciary. Sixteen years later, she was appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal.

In 2004, she became the first Jewish woman appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada.

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Abella was the sole Commissioner of the 1984 federal Royal Commission on Equality in Employment, which created the concept of “employment equity” in an effort to end workplace discrimination against women, indigenous peoples, nonwhite minorities and persons with disabilities. The Rosalie Silberman Abella report was implemented in Canada and several other countries.

The other distinguished individuals who received honorary degrees at Commencement were: • Computer scientist Leslie Lam­port, MA’63, PhD’72, celebrated as the “father of principled distributed computing,” who won the 2013 A.M. Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computing.

• Provost and chief academic officer Lisa M. Lynch, P’17, who served as interim president at Brandeis from July 2015 through June 2016, and is the Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy.

• Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, the first AfricanAmerican to be elected to that post. He served two terms as governor, from 2007 to 2015. He is chair of the advisory board for Our Generation Speaks, an innovative leadership program created in partnership with Brandeis and MassChallenge.

• Barry Shrage, president of CJP (Combined Jewish Philanthropies), Greater Boston’s Jewish Federation.

BRICKS AND MORTAR

W I L L I A M R AW N A S S O C I AT E S , A R C H I T E C T S , I N C .

HOUSING ON CAMPUS: Brandeis is building a new residence hall to replace the student housing that used to be part of the Usen Castle complex. The new building — with 164 beds, it will offer on-campus housing for about 60 more students than the previous building accommodated — is scheduled to open before the start of the 2018 fall semester.

Designed by William Rawn Associates, the residence hall will offer full accessibility and will include needed study spaces, a large kitchen and a common room that seats

up to 100 for student gatherings or performances. Solar panels, and a geothermal heating and cooling system will make it the greenest and most sustainable building on campus.

Brandeis plans to retain Towers A and B, the most visible and iconic sections of the Castle site, for now as it evaluates opportunities for fundraising and restoration. Cholmondeley’s Coffee House, located in Tower B, will be renovated with student input this summer.

WEB EXCLUSIVE

Don’t miss “In the Crucible of the Congo,” by David Chanoff, PhD’73, available only online. Chanoff dissects the moral complexities faced by his son, Sasha, and Sasha’s colleague, Sheikha, aid workers who tried to evacuate a group of Tutsi refugees from the Congo in 2000.

Excerpt: On their first day in the compound, Sasha and Sheikha found and registered the 112 refugees on their list. The evacuation itself was three days away. They needed that time to rent buses to take everyone to the airport, hire armed guards and pay off any government officials who needed paying off.

An officer from the International Committee of the Red Cross, which oversaw the compound, approached Sasha and Sheikha, and pointed to a big tent off to the side. “We just brought in a group of widows and orphans,” he said. “We found them in one of the execution prisons. All their men were killed. They’ve been starved and abused.”

CO URT ESY S H OW O F FO RC E

‘Go See Them’

Somehow, these women and children had survived 16 months in the prison. Now, the Red Cross officer said, “they won’t last a week if you don’t get them out of here. Go see them.”

Sasha shook his head. “You know we can’t do this,” he said.

But Sheikha was already walking toward the tent.

Read more at brandeis.edu/magazine.

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‘ IT IS OUR At his Inaugur ation last year, President Ron Liebowitz outlined the university’s mission for a new gener ation.

Above: Liebowitz addresses the crowd at the Gosman Sports and Convocation Center.

PHOTO BY JÖRG MEYER

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I

n July 2016, Brandeis welcomed its ninth president, Ron Liebowitz, to campus. The former president of Vermont’s Middlebury College, Liebowitz has long been recognized as a leader in higher education. In 2009, Time magazine named him one of the 10 best U.S. college presidents. The native New Yorker received his BA in economics and geography at Bucknell University, and his doctorate in geography at Columbia University.

His lively Inauguration ceremony, held in November, drew hundreds of faculty, students, alumni, delegates and staff to the Gosman Sports and Convocation Center, and heralded an important new chapter in the university’s life. Faculty, senior staff

and delegates from 71 institutions donned academic regalia. Students cheered.

Alumni vied to congratulate Liebowitz.

In the galvanizing, candid address he gave at the event, Liebowitz emphasized Brandeis’ Jewish roots and openness to all, as well as its commitment to academic excellence in the liberal arts and world-class knowledge creation from its outstanding faculty. He praised Brandeis’ unique qualities yet spoke frankly of the complex challenges it has faced over the decades, and called for a new era of transparency and accountability in the university’s governance and administration.

The Brandeis Chamber Singers and University Chorus, led by Robert Duff,

CHARGE’ associate professor of the practice of choral music, performed “Chichester Psalms,” by Leonard Bernstein, H’59, a member of the Brandeis music department faculty from 1951-56.

Blessings bookended the event. Rabbi William Hamilton of Congregation Kehillath Israel in Brookline, Massachusetts, delivered the opening invocation.

The ceremony concluded with a short video featuring benedictions from eight faith traditions, delivered by members of the Brandeis community.

Board of Trustees Chair Larry Kanarek ’76 described the attributes that led the board to ask Liebowitz to become Brandeis’ president. “Ron is a good talker

but an even better listener, a strategic thinker, insightful but humble, energetic and warm,” Kanarek said.

The celebration included two guest speakers, Stephen Donadio ’63, the John Hamilton Fulton Professor of Humanities at Middlebury, and Christine Ortiz, the Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. Donadio chronicled his own path to Brandeis as a poor Italian kid from Brooklyn. Other elite institutions discouraged him from even applying; Brandeis offered him a full scholarship.

Ortiz urged Brandeis to set a strong example for all of higher education by tackling such challenges as transdisci-

plinary intellectual collaboration, educational technology, personalized learning and financial sustainability.

Provost and former Interim President Lisa M. Lynch, P’17, the Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy, praised Liebowitz’s good humor and ability to build bridges. “Ron, you’ve made a point of reaching out to listen to our community as you hone your vision for Brandeis’ future,” she said. “You’ve learned that we are an argumentative community, but I know that you’ve understood that we are also deeply committed to working with you to advance this most audacious and ambitious university.

“Ron, just keep on smiling.”

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BriefSpotlight

MY STORY

G A RY H E / I N S I D E R I M AG E S

Saren Keang, Heller MA’17

M

SNAPSHOT Hometown: Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Studies: Dual MA in sustainable international development, and coexistence and conflict.

Career goal: To become the executive director of UN Women.

Motto: “I didn’t come this far to come only this far.”

y mother quit school in third grade to work in a grocery store. My father, who was a passionate student, had to leave school after sixth grade because of the Cambodian civil war and the Khmer Rouge genocide.

My father supported us by making sugar from palm-tree fruits. Every day, he climbed palm trees. After he became ill, my mother became the breadwinner, selling meat, vegetables and cooking oil in remote areas. My three sisters and I helped her after school. I started helping when I was 8 years old.

When I was little, I cried to go to school with my older sister, and my father talked the teachers into letting me go. When my oldest sister got pulled out after fourth grade to help support the family, I got scared and pushed myself even harder.

My community puts a lot of pressure on girls to quit school and not go to college. “You will get married, and your husband will take care of you,” they say. Girls cannot go farther than the kitchen.

We are supposed to become somebody’s wife.

But my teachers believed in me and told my parents to keep me in school, no matter what. I

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always finished first in my class, so, finally, the teachers cut out my school fee.

People still had things to say about my future: Maybe I could be a teacher or a tour guide. I told them I knew exactly what I could be.

“”

My teachers believed in me and told my parents to keep me in school, no matter what.

When I was in 12th grade, someone from an NGO came to my school and suggested I apply to the Asian University for Women, in Chittagong, Bangladesh. I won a full scholarship, and majored in Asian studies and gender studies.

After I graduated, two foundations were ready to fund my graduate studies. Who would have guessed that a girl from a small Cambodian village would be choosing between fully funded studies in Durham, England, and Waltham, Massachusetts?

I am passionate about women’s issues and girls’ education. If girls are supported, they’re unstoppable.

MILESTONES

More Central Than Ever, the ICC Celebrates Its Silver Anniversary The university’s Intercultural Center (ICC) officially opened its doors a quarter century ago, buoyed by a simple yet profound hope.

The 31 enterprising students who in 1992 helped to found the dedicated space in the Swig Student Center wanted “to educate the Brandeis community about the cultures of people of color and to establish a central place on campus for all people to explore, share and honor each other’s cultural heritages,” says Madeleine Lopez, a lecturer in history who is the current ICC director.

At the time of the center’s founding, 11 clubs and organizations representing various cultures and traditions from around

the globe were part of the ICC family.

Since then, five more organizations have been added.

Lopez is continuing to expand the center’s operations by increasing collaboration with organizations and offices across the campus to host events and activities that promote community and celebrate diversity.

All students “need to learn how to interact with other cultures,” Lopez says. “The Intercultural Center fosters a welcoming community dedicated to the understanding of different cultures and issues of contemporary importance.”

Like many other students, Janice Fernandez ’17 found the ICC invaluable. A

psychology major from the Bronx who stumbled upon the ICC one day during her first year at Brandeis, Fernandez thought of the center as a second home.

She studied and spent time with friends there. She also served as a team leader for the ICC’s student staff, helping to organize events.

“At the ICC, you have the chance to be exposed to different perspectives,” Fernandez says. “That’s very important today, in light of societal and political changes.

“This is a space where you can feel safe, and be educated and supported by a community.”

— Julian Cardillo ’14

WELCOME

M IK E LOVE T T

Jackson Named SVP for Communications and External Relations Ira A. Jackson, a leader with deep roots in Boston who has served in government, business and academia, has joined the university as senior vice president for communications and external relations. Jackson will spearhead Brandeis’ relations with the community, government, businesses and other institutions locally, nationally and globally, and will assist the president and others in advancing and communicating Brandeis’ intellectual and institutional contributions.

“Ira brings a wonderful combination of skills, ideas and relevant experience to Brandeis,” Ira A. Jackson says President Ron Liebowitz.

“His ability to communicate and to implement new approaches will be useful as Brandeis embarks upon a period of renewal and transformation.”

Jackson served as chief of staff to former Boston Mayor Kevin White and later as commissioner of revenue under former Governor Michael Dukakis. He served as senior associate dean at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government during its formative years and later as director of the school’s

Center for Business and Government. He also served as president of the Arizona State University Foundation, as dean of the Peter F. Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University and, most recently, as vice provost at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

He served for a dozen years as executive vice president and director of external affairs at BankBoston. He has played leadership roles in many civic initiatives, including chairing the boards of the United Way’s Success by Six Campaign, the New England Council and the World Affairs Council of Boston, as well as being deeply involved with City Year, Facing History and Ourselves, and the New England Holocaust Memorial.

Jackson is a graduate of Harvard College, received an MPA at the Kennedy School, and completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.

“I am thrilled to join Ron Liebowitz and his talented colleagues at an institution that plays such a unique role in higher education,” Jackson says. “Brandeis’ commitment to social justice and to research that matters for society totally aligns with my values and life’s work.”

Jackson takes over from Judy Glasser, who served as interim senior vice president for communications for two years.

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BriefPerspective

Expanding Your Comfort Zone A Q&A with business professor Andy Molinsky on getting beyond career-limiting fear.

By Samantha Mocle

D

oes the prospect of networking at a conference or making small talk between business meetings make you want to curl up in a fetal position?

When you see confrontation brewing, is your first instinct to head for the hills? Helping others extend their personal and professional goals is familiar ground for Andy Molinsky, professor of organizational behavior and international management at Brandeis International Business School. His 2013 book, “Global Dexterity: How to Adapt Your Behavior Across Cultures Without Losing Yourself in the Process,” advised people who work in cultures other than their own on how to adjust their behaviors yet remain true to their authentic self.

Now Molinsky has written “Reach: A New Strategy to Help You Step Outside Your Comfort Zone, Rise to the Challenge and Build Confidence,” which was published by Avery in January.

Rooted in the observation that successful people are those most willing to tackle what they really, really don’t want to do, “Reach” outlines a three-prong approach to mastering the tasks you fear: develop a sense of conviction, customize your approach to the situation and avoid distorted thinking.

The book recounts anecdotes from people in a wide range of jobs — CEOs, farmers, investment bankers, clergy, military personnel and more — who explain how they were able to accomplish what originally seemed too daunting to try.

DAV I DE BO N A ZZI

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What inspired you to write this book?

I have always struggled to step outside my comfort zone. And when you search the internet for advice, much of it is purely inspirational: “Take the leap,” “Go for it,” “The magic happens only outside your comfort zone.” I’m an academic, so that line of thinking was completely unsatisfying to me.

What was missing was a road map for the way out — a set of tactics and strategies and insights that nudge you from fear and avoidance to actually making a change. I decided to write that road map by looking at the problem from an academic perspective but with a general audience in mind.

What makes you an expert?

I’m just like all the characters I profile in the book. I get nervous speaking in public. I have a hard time schmoozing with people I don’t know.

I hate giving negative feedback. But the fact that I struggle makes me attuned to the experiences of others.

How should we deal with situations we’d prefer to avoid?

First, understand your defenses, the reasons you’re avoiding this particular task or challenge. Without understanding them, it’s hard to move forward.

Then you have to find your personal motivation for doing the hard work of stepping out of your comfort zone. This is completely different for every person.

Next, you must find ways of personalizing your approach. Though it’s a universally challenging task, stepping out of your comfort zone is anything but uniform. In fact, that’s one of the most empowering aspects: Anyone can do it. You just have to find an approach that works for you.

What’s the worst advice you’ve heard on this subject?

That there’s only one way to do something outside your comfort zone, or that only people who have certain traits can do it successfully. This is just untrue. You can use aspects of your personality to your advantage if you’re conscious of your strengths. The whole one-size-fits-all approach is completely mistaken in my view.

What if we don’t actually want to leave our comfort zone in certain situations?

It boils down to knowing what your goals are.

You have to disentangle your true ambitions from rationalizations. If you could remove the anxiety, would the end goal be interesting to you? If the answer is no — even with the barriers removed, you still wouldn’t be motivated to do it — then this particular behavior or task might not be worth pursuing.

But if the answer is yes — if you weren’t so fearful, you’d love to be able to do the task — then it might be worth applying my strategies.

The book is filled with stories of people in different industries and at different leadership levels. Which is most memorable to you?

That’s a hard question. One story that really struck me came from an Episcopal priest, who described the challenges she experienced when administering last rites. I also loved the story of the New England goat farmer terrified of selling her handmade soap, which she was really proud of, at a local store.

Did writing the book require you to leave your comfort zone?

No. I love telling stories to a general audience.

It’s funny — academic writing is what forces me outside my comfort zone. It’s much more formal and structured. Though I’ve done my fair share of it over the years, it’s never felt quite as authentically “me” as writing this book.

“”

I ’m just like all the characters I profile in the book. I get nervous speaking in public. I have a hard time schmoozing with people I don’t know. I hate giving negative feedback. But the fact that I struggle makes me attuned to the experiences of others.

What’s your own comfort-zone kryptonite?

Ha! How many more examples can you fit into this article? Another very timely one is all the self-promotion I need to do to get myself known around the world as an author.

Flooding people’s inboxes or social-media feeds with self-promotional information is a real struggle for me. I’ve had to apply my own tools to develop the conviction that I have to establish this kind of presence if I want the book to do well.

Samantha Mocle is the digital communications specialist at Brandeis International Business School. For more information on “Reach,” visit www.andymolinsky.com.

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BrandeisBrief

Gifts That Keep on Giving From tying shoelaces to tying bonds of friendship, the Waltham Group helps Brandeisians help Waltham residents with gusto and grit: tackling homelessness and health problems, boosting student success, and acting as mentors. One of the oldest and largest student-service organizations at any U.S. university, the Waltham Group is celebrating its 50th year of doing good. Here’s a look at some of its numbers.

97,839

12,400 pints of blood collected since 1985

canned goods collected at Halloween for the Hungry over three decades

75,000

45 150 1991

math problems solved by tutors and students

2016

Number of tutoring matches each year

6,250 pairs of shoes tied since 1966

15,000 granola bars eaten at after-school programs 10 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

20,035

40,000

volunteers since 1966

hours volunteered every year

3,600 51,500 nails and boards used by Habitat for Humanity

Scrabble games played by C2E (Companions to Elders) matches

Number of parental gray hairs prevented by TIPS (Tutoring in Public Schools) volunteers: COUNTLESS

Wackiest items auctioned since 1971: 2 LARGE CANS OF PICKLES; 12 POUNDS OF SHRIMP

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DAV I DE BO N A ZZI

SCIENTIFIC

MINDS OVER

MATTER

P

hysics professor Seth Fraden, PhD’87, ticks off a list of potential applications of his research: self-mending clothing, self-healing artificial organs, nanobots that travel through the bloodstream to wipe out cancer cells, cyborgs that move with the agility and grace of human beings.

“You could take inanimate matter,” he says, “inject it with the right energy, and it comes alive. It crawls out of the test tube and starts giving you lip.”

Fraden and his frequent collaborator, physicist Zvonimir Dogic ’95, PhD’01, study “soft matter” — compounds like gels, liquid crystals, foams and polymers that exist somewhere between a liquid and a solid state. What’s unusual about their research is their use of cellular components to create soft matter. Put these two elements together — biological

Brandeis researchers are using cellular components to build new kinds of machines and materials. They walk. They flow.

They may fuel the next scientific revolution.

By Lawrence Goodman

molecules and squishy, inanimate materials — and you easily wind up in the realm of science fiction.

In 2008, Brandeis joined the ranks of Harvard, Yale, MIT and 17 other major research universities that are part of a long-term effort by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop revolutionary new types of machines and materials. The NSF, which designated each of these universities a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC), awarded Brandeis a $20 million 12-year grant.

MRSEC labs focus on active matter, which is composed of individual agents, each operating independently but also coordinating on a large scale. Bacteria, cancer cells, flocks of birds, swarms of insects and herds of mammals are all examples of active matter — every member of the group is autonomous yet synchronized with all the others.

SCIENTIFIC

MINDS OVER

MATTER

M I K E LOV ET T

Aparna Baskaran; Zvonimir Dogic ’95, PhD’01; and Seth Fraden, PhD’87.

The big push to understand active matter, an effort that is only two decades old, plays to one of Brandeis’ greatest strengths — its interdisciplinary approach within the sciences. Some 16 Brandeis biologists and physicists work side by side as part of MRSEC. Dogic and Fraden have emerged as pioneers in active-matter research, publishing papers in such prestigious journals as Nature and Science. It helps that they have known each other since Dogic was Fraden’s grad student at Brandeis.

Research in active matter won’t enable us to create life, just build inventions that look a lot like it.

These inventions will be self-powered, won’t need human direction or effort to operate, and will be able to morph into different shapes and patterns.

What took evolution millions of years to perfect, we’ll be able to whip up in a few hours in a test tube and harness for the benefit of humankind.

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Like most scientists, Fraden is careful not to over-hype his work. Although he recognizes the potential benefits and risks of unleashing something akin to Dr. Frankenstein’s monster on the world, he stresses we’re still in the earliest stages of this scientific revolution. But in the long run, he says, “the imagination’s the limit.”

A BLOB WITH A SHORT PAIR OF LEGS For almost a decade, Dogic’s and Fraden’s graduate students have been going to a small slaughterhouse outside Boston several times a month. It’s primarily a source of meat for local butchers, so, initially, the students’ request was highly unusual.

They wanted a cow’s brain. “At first, no one knew what to charge us,” says Stephen DeCamp, PhD’16, who worked with Dogic from 2010-16 and is now a postdoc at Harvard. “They just sort of made up a price.” The grad students were given

a brain scooped out of a severed skull. They put the organ in a plastic bag, placed it in an ice-filled cooler to keep it fresh and raced back to Waltham.

Cow neurons are rich in microtubules, hollow cylindrical rods that form the cytoskeleton, or scaffolding, of cells. In the lab, Dogic, Fraden and their staff members run the brain through a blender and a centrifuge, purifying the solution so the microtubules can be extracted.

In the late 2000s, when he was searching for a dissertation topic in physics, Tim Sanchez, PhD’12, asked Dogic if he could help him with his microtubules work, then in its earliest stages. Sanchez majored in physics at New College of Florida, in Sarasota, and had no experience in performing biology experiments in a lab.

Dogic suggested a raft of topics. Sanchez chose one of the hardest, a decision he soon came to rue. It was failure after failure. “How was work?” his wife would ask when he came home at night.

“Don’t ask,” Sanchez would say. This went on for several months.

As part of their experiments, Dogic and Sanchez put microtubules in a watery solution and added a cellular protein called kinesin. The vast and sprawling lattice of microtubules that gives the cell shape also acts as its highway system.

Kinesin travels these roads to deliver muchneeded nutrients, genetic information and other materials around the cell.

A kinesin molecule looks like a blob with a short pair of legs. It literally walks along the surface of the microtubules, lurching forward step by step.

Kinesin gets its energy from a molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Every step forward requires burning through an ATP molecule.

It’s actually an incredibly efficient process. About 2 ounces of ATP, recycled constantly, can power the human body for a day.

CILIA-POWERED DRUG DELIVERY Dogic — who grew up in Croatia, came to the U.S. as a high-school exchange student and stayed — encourages experimentation in his lab. His mentees sometimes feel like kids with a new chemistry set, throwing together compounds to see what happens.

“The atmosphere is playful,” says DeCamp, who worked alongside Sanchez. “It’s like these materials are our toolbox, and you just go in the lab and play with them.”

In 2010, Dogic advised Sanchez to take the mixture of microtubules, kinesin and ATP he’d been studying fruitlessly and throw in polyethylene glycol (PEG), a lubricious polymer often used in laxatives, which causes microtubules to bundle together. At his computer, Sanchez watched a time-lapse video of the biological components interacting. Most of what he saw he’d seen many times before — flickering microtubule rods moving around and changing directions. But on the periphery of the microscope slide was something he’d never seen before. There were shapes that looked like short, slowly undulating tails.

Sanchez walked down the hall to fetch Dogic, who was also stunned by what he saw. PEG had surrounded the microtubules, forcing them to gather together into bundles. They were now behaving like cilia, the hair-like structures that extend from the surface of cells. The whip-like beating of cilia expels mucus from our airways, for instance. Flagella, longer cilia, propel sperm.

The cilia manufactured by Sanchez were not real cilia. The cilia in our body are made from 650 proteins; Sanchez’s were made from two. They also beat

Dogic encourages experimentation in his lab.

His mentees sometimes feel like kids with a new chemistry set, throwing together compounds to see what happens. more slowly than real cilia. No one could use them to build cellular life-forms in a test tube. But one day they might be part of a drug-delivery system, used to precisely direct medicine to the right target.

Dogic’s and Fraden’s labs soon began another set of experiments involving microtubules. Sanchez had achieved his results by trapping the micro­ tubules along the outer edge of an air bubble. This suggested it didn’t just matter what compounds were used; the container in which they were placed mattered, too. This makes sense at an intuitive level. Microtubules, kinesin and ATP evolved to function inside the confines of a cell. The cilia had appeared on the edge of the air bubble, which seemed to indicate that something about the boundary’s shape and size influenced the cellular materials’ behavior.

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SCIENTIFIC

MINDS OVER

MATTER The researchers enclosed the microtubule-kinesinATP mixture in a droplet of oil. A video of the reaction showed two microtubules aligned parallel to each other. A kinesin molecule then came between them, connecting them like a tie between rail tracks.

The top of the kinesin pushed in one direction while the bottom pushed the opposite way. The micro­ tubules slid away from each other, and the structure broke apart. But the microtubules didn’t remain free-floating for long. New kinesin came along and bound each to a new partner.

All this movement was happening at the most microscopic level. Zoom out, though, and you could see a massive, relentless swirl of activity inside the oil droplet. “Whirlpools in a turbulent river” is how Dogic describes it. The patterns and behavior were entirely unexpected. No one had ever observed how these biological agents behaved en masse outside the cell.

The next set of experiments Dogic’s and Fraden’s labs performed involved a container shaped like a doughnut. As they changed the height and width of the doughnut, Dogic and Fraden discovered

A flock of birds don’t move together simultaneously.

Their flight pattern changes one bird at a time.

As Baskaran puts it, “A local conversation leads to a global transformation.” they could control the flow of the microtubules.

In fact, a very specific ratio of container height to container width resulted in a “coherent flow” — all the contents inside the doughnut moving in the same direction. You don’t even need a doughnutshaped container, they found. A tubular container with side openings at the right height and width created coherent flow as well.

Then Dogic and Fraden, joined by postdoc Kun-ta Wu, placed the microtubule solution on a flat surface. Wu didn’t apply pressure or tilt the container.

The solution simply started flowing. Even liquids need gravity to get moving. This one didn’t.

One day, this discovery may be the basis for selfpropelling liquids. Right now, to transport oil over vast distances, you have to pump it through a pipeline. Pump stations have to be built every 40 to 60 miles to generate enough force to move the fuel.

16 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

But if you added the right biological materials, the oil would start flowing on its own, much the way the microtubule solution does.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER There’s a small downside to the trial-and-error approach Dogic, Fraden and their staffs take. The results often prove startling and unprecedented, and the scientists don’t always know why they get them. “In a way, we’re the victims of our own success,” says Dogic. “We have to go back and figure out how it all happened.”

This is where assistant professor of physics Aparna Baskaran comes in. She figures out the underlying mathematics. Baskaran grew up in Chennai, a booming city on the Bay of Bengal in southern India. From childhood, she loved math.

“It always made more sense to me than people,” she says.

In college, she says, she realized that “math is just a tool.” If you want to answer the really important scientific questions, you have to go into theoretical physics.

Big-name theoretical physicists tend to focus on the very small (the subatomic) or very big (the cosmic). But Baskaran realized she could gaze at a flock of starlings in the sky and confront some of the most critical unanswered questions in science.

Starlings are an example of active matter. They fly in groups of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. They are undeniably destructive birds; they wipe out crops and spread disease. But their flight patterns are choreographed beauty. They plunge and turn, cluster and spread out, swirl and arc — a veritable ballet performed at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour. High-speed collisions? They don’t happen.

Even more astonishing, research and observations show that starling flocks, also called murmurations, are leaderless. Each animal coordinates its behavior on the basis of the behavior of its immediate neighbors. Neighbors are mimicked by their neighbors, who are mimicked by their neighbors, until all the members of a flock are in sync.

“A local conversation leads to a global transformation,” Baskaran says. In other words, the birds don’t move together simultaneously. Their flight pattern changes one bird at a time. A change in direction is like an idea that spreads like quick­ silver from one bird brain to another.

MI KE LOV E T T

Baskaran realized in grad school that physicists don’t have a good understanding of how starlings, operating in such a decentralized system, coordinate their flight patterns in such large numbers.

It’s an especially key question because examples of active matter abound in nature. Microtubules are active matter. Each one grows, shrinks and moves in coordination with the others throughout the interior of the cell. Since they make up the cell’s scaffolding, the cell is able to stretch and shift shapes in response to its environment. Outside the cell, microtubules behave the same way. The patterns they form emerge in the same way as the twists and spins of a starling flock.

Active matter is such a new field of study that Baskaran has only just begun to develop mathematical models to predict its activity. “The math that describes physical reality is so complicated when you’re talking about active matter,” she says.

But if she and other physicists working on active matter succeed, we will be able to harness its power to organize instantaneous responses to its environment. When you cut yourself, skin cells sense the break and build a new covering. If fabric had such an ability, it could autonomously mend a tear. We might even be able to create artificial human organs that can heal themselves.

Baskaran envisions a time when we can power electronics with the energy given off by bacteria.

Put your iPhone under a microscope; you’ll see it swarms with E. coli. If we could control the activity of these bacteria, getting them to consume nutrients and release energy, batteries might become obsolete.

For the time being, of course, this isn’t possible.

But Baskaran can dream. “Basically, I want to power my iPhone by feeding it a piece of rotten apple,” she says. “It’s my go-to vision in my imagination.”

Stephen DeCamp, PhD’16, and Tim Sanchez, PhD’12

Admissions Edition / Summer 2017 Brandeis 17

RO BERT ASCRO FT

THE

WORKFORCE WHISPERER

By Gregory Zuckerman ’88

To retain workers and customers, businesses have to inspire them.

Leadership maven Simon Sinek ’95 helps employers light that spark.

I

n 2005, Simon Sinek ’95 seemed to have it all: his own advertising and marketing business, high-profile clients like General Electric and ABC Sports, an upscale apartment in New York City, expensive vacations.

Yet his life felt empty. He was depressed, even paranoid, he writes in his 2009 book, “Start With Why”: “I was convinced I was going to go out of business. I was convinced I was going to be evicted from my apartment […] and that my clients knew I was a fraud.”

Sinek was hiding a secret — a well-paid job just wasn’t enough. He craved meaning. After a friend expressed concern about how he was doing, he came clean. “It was an amazing relief to admit my struggles,” he says today. “Superficially, life was good — but I was putting all my energy into acting happy. I had lost my passion and was embarrassed to admit I was struggling.”

Only four years later, Sinek delivered one of the most popular TED Talks in history, attracting more than 30 million views to date. “What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief?” he asked his audience. “Why do you get out of bed in the morning, and why should anyone care?”

Sinek argues that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it, citing companies like Apple and Starbucks, which sell a cause, not just a product.

He had discovered his purpose, he says. Now a best-selling author, inspirational speaker and leader­ship expert, he used his quest to recapture his own passion while helping others grow their businesses, manage workers and lead happier lives.

Sinek believes work without joy and fulfillment is squandered time. And the only way to achieve happiness, he says, whether you’re an employer or an employee, is by focusing on your true calling. Discover what drives you in life, and let that guide you.

“Very few people or companies can clearly articulate why they do what they do,” he writes in “Start With Why,” which has sold more than 700,000 copies in the U.S. “When I say why, I don’t mean to make money — that’s a result. […] Why does your company exist?”

20 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

MILLENNIAL BLUES Sinek argues that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it, citing companies like Apple and Starbucks that, he says, focus on providing a satisfying customer experience and selling a cause, not just a product.

To some, Sinek’s advice may sound like an update of decades-old workplace maxims. In the 1970s, organizational psychologists Greg Oldham and J. Richard Hackman explored how jobs could be changed to help workers experience more motivation and satisfaction. In the 1980s, mythologist/ writer Joseph Campbell offered his road map for a fulfilled life: “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”

Besides, many 21st-century workers don’t see meaning and happiness on the job as a particularly high priority. They simply yearn for consistent, dependable hours; living wages; and a return of traditional jobs, like manufacturing, that used to give hardworking semiskilled workers a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

Still, there’s evidence that employees, especially younger ones, are frustrated on the job. Last year, a Gallup Poll found only 29 percent of millennials (those born between 1980-96) felt engaged or emotionally connected at work — a lower percentage than other age groups. “They are indifferent about work and show up just to put in their hours,” wrote the Gallup analysts. The poll also found that 21 percent of millennials had changed jobs within the previous year, more than three times the number of older workers who job-hop.

Some observers blame the young employees themselves. It wasn’t so long ago, they note, that the financial world imploded and the nation struggled through a deep recession. The finger-wagging message: Pay your dues, just like we did; your time will come. There’s a reason it’s called work — you’re not meant to enjoy it.

Although Sinek does take young workers to task for their hair-trigger impatience, he is largely sympathetic to their challenges. He argues many of them aren’t “entitled” as much as they are the product of “failed parenting strategies.”

He goes on to note how they received medals in sports activities just for participating, or got into honors courses or scored top grades because their

COURT ESY S I M O N S I N EK

parents pleaded their case to teachers and school administrators. “[Kids] were told they were special, all the time,” he says in a recent video interview. “They were told they could have anything they want in life, just because they want it.”

Once in the working world, he says, they find out they’re not so special. And voilà: You’ve created “an entire generation with lower self-esteem.”

A 21ST-CENTURY DEVELOPMENT? Adding to the problem, young workers live in a world of hyper-connected technology, which breeds “a sense of impatience and instant gratification,” Sinek says.

This gets in the way of true satisfaction, he says: “Some things that really, really matter, like love, or job fulfillment, or joy […] take time.”

Much as recovering alcoholics make sure alcohol isn’t within reach, people can kick their technology

addictions by removing the temptation of phones and other technology, Sinek says. Each email he sends includes this request: “If you’re reading this while in a meeting or while eating a meal with someone, please put it away and read it later. The people you’re with are more important than anything in this email.”

Young workers are also facing significant market challenges. Jobs are going abroad. Industries are slashing their head counts by adopting new technologies. The nation’s fastest-growing employers, including Facebook and Alphabet (Google’s parent company), hire far fewer workers than comparable companies of past generations, reducing the number of prime jobs available. Job security has become illusory: American workers today have an organizational life expectancy of just 3.5 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Given all these workplace pressures, says Andy Molinsky, professor of international management Admissions Edition / Summer 2017 Brandeis 21

THEWORKFORCEWHISPERER and organizational behavior at Brandeis International Business School, we have limited evidence that today’s young workers are very different than their parents and grandparents were at their age.

“You could simply conclude from the data that young people have always been frustrated and disengaged” on the job, says Molinsky, author of the book “Reach: A New Strategy to Help You Step Outside Your Comfort Zone, Rise to the Challenge and Build Confidence.” He argues, moreover, that “all generations care about meaningful work,” not just the younger ones.

Sinek agrees with this analysis. “We all need to feel valued and valuable,” he says. “God bless [young workers], because they speak out and demand this thing that everyone wants.”

He isn’t the only one arguing that employers can do more to keep young workers happy. Last year’s Gallup Poll on worker satisfaction said as much.

“It’s possible that many millennials actually don’t want to switch jobs, but their companies aren’t giving them compelling reasons to stay,” the Gallup analysts said. “While millennials can come across as wanting more and more, the reality is that they just want a job that feels worthwhile — and they will keep looking until they find it.”

OBSESSED WITH ‘WHY’ A New Jersey native, Sinek studied cultural anthropology at Brandeis. “I loved the small classes, and the teachers were pretty remarkable,” he says, adding that he learned critical thinking and the power of formulating solid arguments from his adviser, anthropology professor David Jacobson.

After graduating, Sinek enrolled in law school but quickly decided the law wasn’t for him and left. “Try telling Jewish parents you’re dropping out of law school,” he quips.

He went on to found his advertising and marketing company. When professional disillusionment derailed him in 2005, he called on his anthropology background to find a solution. He began doing research on human behavior. He asked why companies like Apple, Harley-Davidson and Southwest Airlines were able to build fierce brand loyalty while others attracted few fans.

Sinek determined there’s “a very basic human need — the need to belong,” he writes in “Start With Why.” “Our desire to feel like we belong is so powerful that we will go to great lengths, do 22 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

irrational things and often spend money to get that feeling.”

To try to understand the underpinnings of this common need, Sinek began reading about the brain’s structure. He also spoke with experts, including UCLA’s Peter Whybrow, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist. Sinek learned that the outer neocortex layer is responsible for rational and analytical thought, and language. Two layers of the inner limbic brain, which govern emotional connections, determine our feelings, including trust, loyalty and love.

It was something of an aha moment for Sinek, who concluded that these brain structures help explain why we do what we do and like what we like.

The limbic brain “is where gut decisions come from,” he argues. “They just feel right. Our limbic brain is powerful enough to drive behavior that sometimes contradicts our rational and analytical understanding of a situation.”

Some academics and scientists say that the brain is more complex than Sinek believes, and that emotions and cognition are not as neatly compartmentalized as the limbic system theory (an idea first proposed in the early 1950s) suggests. Researchers, including neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux at New York University, argue that fear, like other emotions, depends on neocortical circuits that give rise to awareness that one is in harm’s way.

Nevertheless, Sinek believes consumers are drawn to products produced by Apple and HarleyDavidson, for instance, because these companies have figured out how to appeal to the limbic, feeling areas in our brain by successfully communicating their “why.” Companies that make rational pitches that appeal only to the neocortex will never win consumers’ loyalty, he says.

“The power of why is not opinion,” says Sinek.

“It’s biology.”

‘I HAVE A DREAM,’ NOT ‘I HAVE A PLAN’ Once Sinek had figured out what was missing in his life — “I was struggling because I knew what I did and how I did it, but not why I did it,” he says — he realized this discovery might help others, too.

He started asking probing questions of people he met: Why do your friends like you? What are your earliest happy childhood memories? Why do you get up in the morning? “I became obsessed with the concept of why,” he says. “When we know why we do what we do, we can find joy.”

At first, Sinek worked with friends and other individuals, helping them find their own inspiration. “I didn’t know what to do with my passion at first,” he says. “I didn’t think it was any kind of business. But I knew it inspired me.”

One day, while having breakfast with an old client in Vancouver, Sinek began explaining his new focus, scribbling circles on a napkin to illustrate his emerging view that every successful company has “why” at its core.

“This is amazing — can you show it to my CEO?” the client asked. Sinek ended up leading a session with the company’s executives, making $5,000 for his time. “I realized I can make a living helping other companies and entrepreneurs discover their own why,” he says.

His message spread. Soon, he was being booked for consulting and speaking gigs at big companies, at the Pentagon, and elsewhere. He realized he’d found his why — he enjoyed inspiring people. He liked helping them make lifestyle changes that allowed them to find happiness and maybe even change the world.

In addition to “Start With Why,” Sinek is the author of three more books, including “Find Your Why: A Practical Guide to Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team,” which will be released in September. “My ideas are thousands of years old,” he acknowledges. “But I’ve found a simple language that gets those who need to listen to listen.”

Sinek bristles when asked if he sees himself as a self-help guru.

“I don’t make anyone walk on hot coals,” he says. The most he will say is that he’s “a preacher for a cause.”

“I’m an optimist. I speak; I write; I teach; I advise,” Sinek says. “I’m trying to spread a message, but there are others doing it as well — I’m more interested in the ideas than the royalties.”

His clients see a direct connection between his ideas and their bottom line. “Simon’s work has made a profound impact in our talent attraction, retention and development, and ultimately in accelerating revenues and profits,” says Charlie Kim, founder of Next Jump, a company that creates technology for employee-discount programs.

Those reluctant to make life changes, even in the face of unhappiness, elicit a blunt response from Sinek. “Life has choices,” he says. “It’s irrespon-

sible not to focus on joy in your work. All I’m after is a little bit of awareness and self-improvement.”

Sinek teaches corporate executives and others to be better leaders by focusing on their organization’s key mission or purpose — the why. “Martin Luther King had an ‘I have a dream’ speech, not an ‘I have a plan’ speech,” he notes.

Companies and organizations succeed only if they determine their core mission, then use it to inspire both their customers and their employees.

“We follow those who lead not because we have to, but because we want to,” he writes in “Start With Why.” “We follow those who lead not for them, but for ourselves.”

Some of the companies Sinek cites as worth emulating because of their capacity to inspire a rabid following have run into trouble recently, raising questions about whether he cherry-picked his examples and was influenced by hindsight bias.

Harley-Davidson, for example, has loyal fans willing to tattoo the company’s logo on their bodies.

Yet the motorcycle maker has seen its sales and share price drop as it struggles to reach young riders.

“Life has choices,” Sinek says. “It’s irresponsible not to focus on joy in your work. All I’m after is a little bit of awareness and self-improvement.”

And Amazon has seen its sales soar, even though the company has been criticized for not focusing on employee satisfaction, undercutting another Sinek precept. He counters that Amazon could be headed for a downturn, noting that Walmart was also a high-flying company once but now is facing financial challenges amid its workers’ complaints.

Here is Sinek’s larger point: An edge in quality, price or service can dissipate. But a company that defines itself as an organization on a mission breeds loyal customers and employees.

“Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them,” he writes. “They hire already motivated people and inspire them.”

Gregory Zuckerman is a special writer for The Wall Street Journal and the author of “Rising Above: How 11 Athletes Overcame Challenges in Their Youth to Become Stars” (Penguin, 2016).

Admissions Edition / Summer 2017 Brandeis 23

A

Fool Yiddishland

By Lawrence Goodman

in

After taking an Eastern European Jewry class at Brandeis, I realized I was a schmuck for not knowing more about my past.

Illustrations by Benjamin Schwartz

S

everal years ago, I was asked to be a tummler at a Japanese wedding in New York.

Tummler is Yiddish for a person “who makes a racket,” a jester, entertainer and emcee all rolled into one. My friend, David, the groom, is Jewish, but his family was outnumbered by the bride’s, who flew in from Japan for the ceremony. It was an awkward arrangement at best: His relatives were mainly from the Five Towns on Long Island, and hers were from Nakameguro. David hoped I might provide some social lubricant.

Getting over the language barrier was tough. I noticed the groom did not translate my “Take my wife … please” joke out of fear a guest would take it literally. David’s great-aunt told someone she would never forget where she was the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. One of the bride’s friends told me he was eager to learn about American Jews because they controlled the world’s money supply.

After a dinner of sushi, datemaki and daifuku, it was time for a hora. It fell to me to explain the traditional Israeli circle dance to the crowd. Executing the moves — holding hands and circling around ad nauseam — struck me as a lot easier to do than the group karaoke of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” performed at the rehearsal dinner the previous night.

I wanted to distill the hora tradition to its essence. “Could everyone repeat after me?”

I said. “Chutzpah.”

All I got were murmurs and confused-looking faces.

“Now let’s try l’chaim.”

I was getting nowhere, and it didn’t help that at this moment the speaker system blared feedback. I was going to have to distill the essence down to its essence.

“Huch,” I said. “Everyone just say ‘huch.’”

The crowd voiced the universally recognized onomatopoeia for hocking a loogie.

Next, I fake-conjugated it.

“Hecch.” “Hicch.” “Hocch.”

The crowd repeated the words after me. Everyone was laughing.

IN RETROSPECT, this story says a lot about how little I knew about Yiddish. Jews spoke the language for hundreds of years while living in Eastern Europe. I’d reduced their experience to guttural sounds of phlegm clearing.

I knew Yiddish as a series of words and phrases my parents bandied about — yichus (pedigree), nachas (pride), tuchas (rear end) and alter cocker (old fart).

At Hebrew school, we learned about the Bible and modern-day Israel, skipping over Eastern Europe. I’ve forgotten everything I learned at Hebrew school, but if I hadn’t, I would say I was done a terrible disservice.

Last fall, I took the class “Yiddish Culture in the Modern World” at Brandeis alongside half a dozen undergraduate and graduate students. Taught by Ellen Kellman, assistant professor of Yiddish, the class was conducted as a seminar, with lots of discussion and provocative questions. Every now and then, Kellman livened things up by bringing in a music recording and letting us sing along.

Covering the mid-1800s to today, the course explored such topics as shtetl life, literature and theater, assimilation in America, and the revival of klezmer. To Kellman’s great credit, we didn’t spend a lot of time on the Holocaust. This was Eastern European Jewry on its own terms, not nostalgized, mourned or distorted by anger over the Nazi horror. We were not going to reduce the Jews in Russia, Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere to mere martyrs.

At its height, Yiddish was spoken by several million Jews living in Russia and neighboring countries. It’s a synthesis of German, Hebrew and, to a lesser extent, Slavic languages.

Sentences lilt upward at the end so that statements sound like questions, begetting more questions, until the whole thing has to be settled by the rabbi.

There’s no agreed-upon definition of shtetl, a small town or village where Jews lived in Eastern Europe. I discovered shtetls weren’t the isolated, insular places I’d always envisioned.

Gentiles lived there and intermingled with Jews. In addition to a temple, a marketplace, a school and a cemetery, shtetls usually included a church.

26 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

Nor was life so bad there, another surprise to me. Pogroms — anti-Jewish riots — were actually rare until the late 19th century. Jews found gainful employment as horse traders, purveyors of alcohol, shopkeepers, carpenters and shoemakers.

The scholar John Klier argues Jews emigrated to America not to flee oppression, which is what I always thought, but because of overpopulation and a lack of economic opportunity. Between 1800 and 1900, the number of Russian Jews skyrocketed from 1 million to 5 million. There weren’t enough jobs or plots of land to go around. Evidently, everyone kept busy by shtupping.

Yiddish was more than a language. It was a Weltanschauung — a worldview. It gave rise to great writers: I.L. Peretz, S. Ansky and, of course, Sholom Aleichem. It was the parlance of intellectual movements such as Zionism, socialism and Haskalah, a reformist effort to bring Enlightenment values to the shtetl.

In the late 1800s, when Israel still seemed an impossible dream to many, Jewish intellectuals advocated establishing an entire nation based on their mother tongue, a kind of Yiddishland where a secular culture and politics rooted in the Eastern European Jewish experience could thrive. It didn’t much matter where it was founded. “In the tropical heat of Africa and in Rio de Janeiro / In Mexico, in Cuba and Canada — / Yiddish ... makes the rockiest soil bear fruit,” the poet A. Almi believed.

WE WROTE THREE PAPERS for the class. My last focused on “Fiddler on the Roof.”

Along with the story of Exodus told on Passover, the 1964 musical is the foundational myth of American Judaism. Everyone loves “Fiddler.” As any theater producer not in a flyover state will tell you, you can’t revive it enough.

It’s based, with significant alterations, on “Tevye the Dairyman,” a story collection by Sholom Aleichem. Literary critic Ruth Wisse says the play, unlike the stories, proselytizes for conversion. In Sholom Aleichem’s original, Tevye’s daughter leaves her gentile husband, repents and never obtains her father’s forgiveness.

In another major departure from the Sholom Aleichem stories, at the end of “Fiddler” Tevye and his family leave for America. The original Tevye goes nowhere. His attempts to travel to Palestine, like most things in his life, don’t work out, and he remains stuck in Ukraine. “How lucky I was to be born a Jew and know the taste of exile and of always wandering, never sleeping where we spent the day,” Tevye says sarcastically in the final story. “Our old God lives!” he adds later.

“Fiddler” is the primary way most of us learn about Eastern European Jewry. It bathes that time in nostalgia, wistfully evoking a bygone world but offering the consolation that its customs and traditions are probably ones we’re better-off without. Begrudging as he may be, the Tevye in “Fiddler” accepts the changes taking place all around him. He’s a schlemiel and a wise man because he knows love is more important than upholding traditions, even if it means enduring the ultimate shonda (shame) of having your daughter marry a goy.

The musical offers up hundreds of years of Jewish life in Eastern Europe as a prelude to life in the new promised land of America. Sholom Aleichem’s original stories, on the other hand, articulate the existential plight of a people living in permanent exile. Tevye is Job, transplanted to Sholom Aleichem’s fictional town, Boyberik. He wrestles with a God who is mercurial and unknowable, who demands love but doesn’t return it.

The bittersweet ending of “Fiddler” brings tears to the eyes but also the consolation of knowing Tevye is off to a better life in the United States. Sholom Aleichem sends a different message: We’re screwed.

At my friend’s wedding, my loogie-hocking gambit for breaking down the cultural divide worked. When the first wails of the klezmer sounded, everyone took to the dance floor for the hora, and I believed I, like a Jewish Marco Polo, had brought a bit of Yiddishkeit to the Japanese.

But I regret my shtik now. I didn’t do my heritage justice. As my ancestors would have said, “Via veyst a khazer fun lokshn?” What could a pig possibly know about noodles?

At Hebrew school, we learned about the Bible and modern-day Israel.

But we skipped over the Jews in Eastern Europe.

I’ve forgotten everything I learned at Hebrew school, but if I hadn’t, I would say I was done a terrible disservice.

Admissions Edition / Summer 2017 Brandeis 27

M I K E LOV ET T

The Mother of All Baby Calmers

By Laura Gardner, P’12

Nurse-turned-“Shark Tank” contestant Melissa Gersin ’05 figured out how to give fretful babies and fatigued parents desperately needed R&R — stat.

G

oogle “How do I stop my baby from screaming?” and you get more than 21 million results in a fraction of a second.

Few problems inspire more fear and panic than an infant on a crying jag. Experts say nonstop crying afflicts up to 25 percent of newborns, and the resulting parental stress and exhaustion can lead to depression, obesity and marital friction.

Parents aren’t the only ones who instinctively dread ear-splitting wails. The sound of bawling babies is so psychologically destabilizing that the U.S. military has piped recordings of it into detainees’ cells at Guantánamo Bay. This desperation undoubtedly accounts for a chunk of the $12,000 that parents spend, on average, on baby products during their infant’s first year, fueling a market estimated at more than $44 billion in the U.S., according to the website Statistic Brain.

“The sound of a baby crying is torture for new parents,” says maternity nurse Melissa Gersin ’05, a certified infant-crying specialist who has soothed thousands of crybabies while working at several Boston hospital nurseries.

Even a professional baby calmer like Gersin can get a little rattled. On one overnight shift six years ago at Tufts Medical Center, Gersin found herself using both hands and a foot to rock several bassinets and incubators while “shh-ing” at full volume.

“These were kids who needed constant motion and constant sound,” says Gersin.

That’s when “a lightning-bolt idea struck,” she says. “The typical soothing methods, like rocking a baby in your arms all night or taking a long car ride, are too exhausting. I began envisioning a tool for soothing babies. Something that could be stashed in a diaper bag and used anywhere babies go.” Maybe a portable vibrating mat — something that combined the constant motion babies love with soothing sounds that mimic what they used to hear in the womb.

Gersin asked fellow maternity nurses at Tufts what they thought about her idea. They were enthusiastic. But, she says, when she approached the hospital administration about developing it, “some guy in an office” turned her down.

She decided to build that mat herself.

Pleasant pandemonium “Brandeis honed my ability to think through complex problems critically, from different angles,” says Gersin, so she knew she could come up with a design.

As a newly minted nurse, she had taken a one-day course on baby doc Harvey Karp’s “Five S’s” method of settling infants.

She learned why infants sometimes cry with abandon for no good reason. “Babies miss being inside the womb,” close quarters that are always loud and always in motion, she says.

30 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

At 80-90 decibels, the noises heard in the womb are as loud as a vacuum cleaner. Between the mother’s physical movements and the soundscape of her voice, heartbeat, blood flow and other bodily functions, the womb is in a state of relentless ruckus. It’s paradoxical that parents spend countless hours and dollars trying to create calm and quiet for newborns.

Gersin began developing a prototype that could safely simulate the womb’s sounds and motions. A sociology major at Brandeis, she was, with Google’s help, a dogged researcher.

She taught herself to solder electric circuits and combine motors in tandem. For her first prototype, she soldered together a series of small vibrating Radio Shack motors and placed them inside a yoga mat. To protect the electronics from the inevitable leaks and spills of infancy, she stitched a waterproof cover, then placed a cozy cotton cover over that for baby to lie on.

For her next iteration, she pulled a computer chip and a battery pack from a vibrating pillow, and made a mat that could create multiple vibrations and had a 65-decibel white-noise component.

It was late 2012. Gersin needed a baby beta tester. Luckily, she knew a mother whose baby screamed until he turned purple every time he was strapped into his car seat — as if he were the one being tortured, not his freaked-out mom. Gersin placed her mat over the baby, and, for the first time, he grew calm in the car seat. Instantly.

“The mom wanted to drive to an ATM on the spot and pay me $100 cash for the mat,” recalls Gersin. “That’s when I knew it was something.”

Growth spurt After testing the mat successfully on several other babies, Gersin filed a provisional patent. An early licensing deal never got off the ground, costing her months in product-development time and teaching her the importance of cutting your losses when you hit a dead end.

She urgently needed money to continue safety testing and improving the mat’s sounds and vibrations. By selling her Cambridge condo (she moved into a tiny rental house in suburban Bedford) and combining the proceeds with a small inheritance, she scraped up $198,000 — enough to keep the startup afloat. Ultimately, she was able to put five levels of vibrations and two different heartbeats into a waterproof foam mat with a washable cover.

In April 2015, after four years of gestation, the Tranquilo (pronounced tran-KEY-loh) Mat was born. Its ability to transform a baby bender into baby bliss, as shown in commercials posted on YouTube, is so fast it’s funny, giving new meaning to the phrase “good vibrations.” The babies don’t just stop crying; they actually crack a smile before dozing off.

By early 2016, following more safety improvements, the mat was ready to go into production at a factory in China. Her com-

The next game changer occurred when the ABC reality TV show “Shark Tank” emailed Gersin.

“When you get that email, you call them,” she says. Her segment aired in February.

pany started preselling the mats, primarily through its website, and by the end of the year Gersin had 2,000 orders and $85,000 in sales.

Meanwhile, in June 2016, the startup accelerator MassChallenge selected Gersin as one of its top 128 applicants, giving her networking opportunities, office space, mentorship and practice pitching the Tranquilo Mat to big-name potential investors. The nonprofit ultimately awarded Gersin $50,000 in noequity, no-strings-attached funding, which she used to purchase inventory.

“Until MassChallenge, I was a nurse who had a business,” says Gersin. “The startup accelerator made me a business owner and businesswoman.”

The next game changer occurred last July when the ABC reality TV show “Shark Tank” emailed Gersin. The show bills itself as an opportunity for “people from all walks of life […] to chase the American dream, and potentially secure business deals that could make them millionaires.” Each episode features a panel of self-made industry “sharks” who grill budding entrepreneurs about their inventions, then decide whether to invest in them.

“When you get that email, you call them,” says Gersin.

A successful swim She says she “blew through” the show’s 10-step application proc­ess, in which she had to prove her sales numbers and provide a lot of other background information.

Gersin made the cut. Her segment, which was filmed last September, aired in February. In the episode, she stands confidently before the panel, hand on hip, wearing purple nursing scrubs, a purple stethoscope dangling from her neck. She tells them she’s seeking $100,000 for a 10 percent stake in the Tranquilo Mat. “We’re ready to save the sanity of parents around the globe,” she announces. “So, sharks, are you ready to invest in this incredible product?”

Questions and offers bombard her. She stays as calm as a baby after a good nap on the Tranquilo Mat. Finally, shark Robert Herjavec says, “You said you’d do $200,000 for 15 percent, and you’d take that deal in a second.”

“In a second,” Gersin confirms.

“That’s my offer.”

“Done,” says Gersin.

Though she is still working out investment details with Herjavec, the immediate impact of the broadcast was startling. Within 24 hours of the show’s airing, the company had sold 2,000 mats (at $85 to $99 each) — about the same number sold during the entire previous year.

A week following the broadcast, the Tranquilo Mat had presold another 2,000 mats. By March 1, the startup reached almost $500,000 in sales — the figure it had hoped to reach by the end of 2017.

“We have a ton of growth potential in the U.S. market alone,” Gersin says. Now a full-time businessperson (who also still picks up the occasional nursing shift), she knows her 80-hour workweeks won’t be ending anytime soon.

Her customers, on the other hand, should be well-rested.

“I can give parents a better night’s sleep,” she says. “And that is priceless.”

Admissions Edition / Summer 2017 Brandeis 31

the

BrandeisQuestionnaire Daniel Shapiro ’91

A

fter the high-wire responsibility of serving as the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro ’91 is finally taking it easy. Sort of.

Shapiro, who has become a wellknown public figure in his host country, decided to remain in Israel when his dip-

lomatic appointment ended on Jan. 20, the day President Donald Trump took his oath of office. Shapiro and his wife, educator Julie Fisher ’90, wanted their three daughters to be able to finish out the school year. The couple has now decided to stay in Ra’anana at least a few months beyond that. They say they’re grateful

P H O T O S C O U R T E S Y U . S . D E PA R T M E N T O F S TAT E

32 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

for the luxury of doing some writing, spending time with their girls and catching up on sleep while they weigh their next career moves.

But it’s been a busy kind of taking it easy. Fluent in Hebrew, conversant in Arabic, active on social media and booked solid with speaking engagements, Shapiro has joined the Institute for National Security Studies, a prominent think tank in Tel Aviv. He is a frequent source for American and Israeli journalists and scholars eager for an early take on the Trump-Netanyahu relationship and Middle East policy directions to come.

Having majored in Near Eastern and Judaic studies at Brandeis, Shapiro earned a master’s at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He worked in the Capitol Hill offices of U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Bill Nelson before becoming a Middle East policy adviser on the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama, then the freshman senator from Illinois (Shapiro’s home state). When Obama moved into the White House, Shapiro became senior director for the Middle East and North Africa at the National Security Council. In July 2011, he was sworn in by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the ambassador to Israel.

Shapiro has said that, even if Clinton had won the 2016 election, it was time for him to step away from the envoy post, despite how much he enjoyed it.

His six-year term was already the longest of any U.S. ambassador then in service around the world.

Shapiro greets Hillary Clinton as she arrives in Jerusalem in 2012.

What was your idea of perfect happiness when you were at Brandeis?

It was always about being with friends. It could be sitting on the rocks by Massell Pond, studying together, long lunches poring over the New York Times crossword, arguing about politics or sledding down the hill outside the library. It didn’t matter. These were friends for life. By the way, I’m married to my best friend from Brandeis.

Who was your favorite Brandeis professor?

Jehuda Reinharz, PhD’72. A scholar’s scholar, whose lectures and books ignited my passions for studying Israel and Zionism.

Where did you usually spend Saturday night?

Ice cream with friends at Cholmondeley’s, or taking the train into Boston for Chinese or Indian food.

Meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2011.

If you could be any other Brandeisian, who would it be?

Rabbi Albert Axelrad, Brandeis’ longtime Hillel director, who inspired generations of students with his wisdom, humanity and spirituality.

What is the most important value you learned at Brandeis?

Gratitude. Every day taught me how much I owed to family, friends, teachers, colleagues and even strangers.

What was the most important shortcut you learned in college?

Sleep in sweatpants so you can go directly to class without changing. (This doesn’t work so well in my recent line of work.)

What would your friends say is your greatest weakness?

Punctuality.

What is your blind spot?

I think my kids are perfect. (But, really, they are.)

What book do you read again and again?

The Torah.

What movie changed your life?

“Inside Out.” (You have to be a parent to get it.)

If you could go back to college, what would you do differently?

Play more basketball and read more fiction.

Which possession do you most like to look at?

A beautiful shofar we bought in Jerusalem.

Whom would you like to sing a duet with?

Beyoncé.

Which deadly sin is your middle name?

Procrastination (a form of sloth).

Which bad break was your biggest blessing?

Getting passed over to work in Barack Obama’s Senate office, but developing relationships that led me to work on his campaign, in the White House and as ambassador to Israel.

If you could climb into a time machine, whom would you like to hang out with?

Rosa Parks.

What would your friends say is your greatest strength?

A calm demeanor that helps me manage through crisis and turmoil.

On your deathbed, what will you be most grateful for?

The love of family and friends, and the opportunities I’ve had to serve my country and help others.

Which talent did Brandeis help you develop most?

Research and analysis: How to delve deeply into a subject, master the material, then challenge assumptions and draw my own conclusions.

What do you wish you had studied harder?

Art history. I took the intro class and loved it. I felt I understood art like never before. But I couldn’t squeeze in any more courses.

What three words of advice would you give to current Brandeis students?

Study. Play. Give. (Runner-up: Eat your veggies.)

Admissions Edition / Summer 2017 Brandeis 33

Arts&Culture

JA M E S S T E I N B E R G

Fake News: A Roundtable Reaction Journalists and public-affairs experts weigh in on the topic America loves/ hates/fears/spreads (depending on the sources you believe).

By Tom Kertscher

F

ake news is a real and present danger.

According to BuzzFeed, during the final three months of November’s U.S. presidential campaign, the most-read fake election-news stories on Facebook generated more shares, reactions and comments than the most-read election stories that came from The New York Times, ABC News and other major news outlets.

Far from being just an American concern, fake news, says The Guardian, is “an insidious trend that’s fast becoming a global problem,” distorting politics in nations around the world.

No less a publication than the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists cites fake news as a reason it’s moved the hands of its Doomsday Clock even closer to midnight.

34 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

Amid the gathering fog, we asked a collection of journalists and public-affairs experts with Brandeis ties what they thought about the assault on news, and what ordinary people can do to fight back.

IN A WAY, HISTORY IS REPEATING ITSELF Brooke Unger, who grew up in New York City in the 1960s, recalls his teachers “groovily proclaiming that perception is reality”: “Such a dethronement of fact is one of the things that make fake news possible. Over the decades, I’ve watched that belief spread to infect discourse on the right.”

In the 1970s, the Watergate scandal ignited a creeping bias against journalists who seem to have a liberal agenda. As a result, anti-journalism

rhetoric has ready-made support, says Florence Graves: “If it’s said enough, it creates a culture of distrust, and that culture of distrust has been at work over the past several decades.”

Julian Zelizer sees parallels between the partisanship of current outlets like Fox News and MSNBC, and the sensationalist 19th-century “yellow press”: “Yellow journalism was meant to capture your attention — like reading fiction. I don’t think it’s that different from the way this stuff is produced today.”

BUT SOCIAL MEDIA ARE FANNING THE FLAMES Thomas L. Friedman: “Whether it’s Twitter or Facebook, it’s just so easy now not only to generate something that looks like real news and is in fact fake, but also to get it out into the world and into the bloodstream of all kinds of people.”

Ben Terris: “It’s a natural outgrowth of social media — you spend a lot of time hearing from people who have the same ideas as you. Facebook and Twitter allow fake news to zip around the internet in ways it never could before.”

Alana Abramson: “There are so many new online sites; it’s easier for a site that’s not necessarily legitimate to disguise itself. You have less control over what you’re seeing. I don’t think people consciously want to read anything fake, but if their feed is populated with a site they don’t know, it’s OK because it’s in their feed.”

Terris: The presidential campaign “was the perfect laboratory for fake news to exist in. I’m not sure if the campaign created fake news or fake news created what happened.”

more willing to believe what comes from the ideological point of view we already lean toward.”

Terris: “The election definitely ramped up the level of both real and fake news. Kind of like drinking from a fire hose, and in that fire hose was more dirty water than normal.”

TRADITIONAL MEDIA’S CROSSROADS Unger: “Mainstream media are beginning to come to grips with the challenge of alerting readers and viewers to what’s fake without becoming partisan.”

Zelizer: “It’s not as if the democracy is going to be overturned in a year, but fake news is not good for the democracy. Our media are an important institution for checking political power, and they’re important for simply explaining what’s going on in politics.”

Terris: “I honestly don’t know what we can do to make people trust us more, because it’s clearly partially our fault if people can’t tell the difference between a well-reported story and something somebody made up out of thin air because it serves a purpose.”

Friedman: “It’s unhealthy for daily-beat reporters to tweet things that clearly lapse into opinion. I find that disturbing. If you’re covering the Trump beat at the White House, you shouldn’t be tweeting things that clearly show a negative attitude toward him.

That is then used by the White House — rightly so, it seems to me — to say, ‘Well, this reporter is obviously biased.’”

VOICES

Zelizer: “Clearly, the current administration is willing to put out stories that aren’t true and say things that really don’t have much basis in fact. It’s going to be hard for reporters, not just readers, to know exactly what is real and what isn’t, and when they’re being played. Given how quickly reporters put out their stories now, the immediacy with which they need to work, I think they are going to be a bit unsettled.”

Alana Abramson ’12, digital news associate for social media and politics at ABC News.

SO WHAT’S THE ANSWER?

Graves: “People read fake news because it resonates with them, it seems consistent with their beliefs. Most people aren’t fact checkers, and scholars have found that generally most of us are

Thomas L. Friedman ’75, H’88, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at The New York Times.

Florence Graves, award-winning journalist and founding director of Brandeis’ Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism.

Ben Terris ’08, political feature writer at The Washington Post.

Brooke Unger ’79, Americas editor at The Economist (who says that he is speaking here for himself, not his publication).

Julian Zelizer ’91, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, and a regular CNN commentator.

Friedman: “All we can do is continue to do what we do. But now we have to be much more vigilant, because it’s clear we have an administration that plays fast and loose with the facts, and cites fake news or propagates it if it serves its interests. I would urge everyone to get a digital subscription to The New York Times. I can assure you we don’t truck in fake news.”

Unger: “Truth-based publications should say something about the procedures they use — perhaps outline their fact-checking Admissions Edition / Summer 2017 Brandeis 35

Arts&Culture procedures or publish codes of conduct. You’re seeing the emergence of what you might call a pro-truth movement. Of course, fakers also claim to be pro-truth. Distinguishing real truthers from false ones will be important.”

Terris: “Support your local paper and The New York Times, The Washington Post and other national media. Spend money on good journalism because, really, the only defense against fake news is the abundance of real news.”

Zelizer: “The great thing about the internet and social media is that they will move away from something that’s not getting read. That’s the way to fight it.”

Unger: “As citizens, readers and viewers absolutely have a duty to seek out true information that might challenge their preconceptions. Education can play a role. Why shouldn’t school­

“”

Really, the only defense against fake news is the abundance of real news. children learn how to distinguish truth from lies and how to think critically about public issues?”

IN THE MEANTIME, BE VIGILANT Abramson: “If it’s a site you’re not necessarily familiar with, do your research before reading the article, and be cautious.”

Tom Kertscher is a PolitiFact Wisconsin reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

MIK E LOVETT

ArtBEAT Along with a steady stream of stand-up appearances, comedian Myq Kaplan ’00 has been busy making albums. In February, he released the comedy album “No Kidding,” which revolves around his reluctance to have children. Two months before that, Kaplan released “Many Mini Musics,” in which jokester Myq morphs into singer/songwriter Myq, performing 42 short pieces he’s composed, most under two minutes in length.

Yu-Hui Chang, PhD’01, associate professor of composition, received a $10,000 Arts and Letters Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for outstanding artistic achievement. The award also gives her $10,000 toward the recording of one work. Chang, who writes a wide range of music — her website notes her compositions are characterized by “diverse harmonic color, inventive timbre and ingenious effects” — has earned many prestigious commissions and fellowships over her career.

Mira Kessler ’16 received excellent reviews, including in The New York Times, for her performance in a Yiddish play revived off-Broadway. The new production of “God of Vengeance,” written in 1907 by Sholem Asch, was performed in Yiddish with English subtitles. In its review, the Times singled out Kessler, noting she inhabited her role “with marvelous grace.”

The newspaper also highlighted the play as one of its Critics’

36 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

Picks. (The play “Indecent,” which opened on Broadway in April, is about the real-life controversy ignited by a 1923 production of “God of Vengeance.”)

News worthy of a double take: Rabbi Zev Eleff, PhD’15, was a 2016 National Jewish Book Award finalist in two different categories, for two different books he wrote. “Modern Orthodox Judaism: A Documentary History” was recognized in the Modern Jewish Thought and Experience category. And “Who Rules the Synagogue: Religious Authority and the Formation of American Judaism” got a finalist nod in the American Jewish Studies category. The awards are presented by the Jewish Book Council. Eleff is chief academic officer at Hebrew Theological College, in Skokie, Illinois.

Susan S. Lanser, professor emerita of English; women’s, gender and sexuality studies; and comparative literature, was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2017 Perkins Prize awards, which recognizes the book making the most significant contribution to the study of narrative. Lanser earned her honor as co-editor of “Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions,” published by the Ohio State University Press.

They’ll be back. NBC is reprising the sitcom “Will & Grace,” featuring the original cast members, including Debra Messing ’90 as Grace. Ten episodes will run during the 2017-18 season.

The series’ first run lasted from 1998 to 2006. Each of the four lead cast members received at least one Emmy for their performances, and the show won the Emmy for Best Comedy in 2000.

Culturing Diversity EACH YEAR during the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts, students of all backgrounds and experiences produce one of Brandeis’ most anticipated events: Culture X, an electrifying evening of music, dance and spoken word celebrating campus diversity.

Here, the hip-hop dance group Kaos Kids follow their own advice to students — to “distress and express yourself” — in a high-octane performance titled “Kash or Kredit.”

M I K E L OV E T T

Arts&Culture

‘Trek,’ Even Unto Its Innermost Parts Celebrating five decades of boldly going where no one has gone before.

By Mark A. Altman ’88

I

t was 1987, but I still remember that day like it was yesterday.

Sitting behind my desk in the claustrophobic confines of The Justice’s office, in the bowels of the Usdan Student Center, I opened a press kit from Paramount Pictures. A new television series, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” a successor to the original “Star Trek” series, was being produced under the aegis of venerable Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

“The Next Generation,” however, would feature an entirely new cast and crew. No Kirk, no Spock, no Denebian slime devils. It wouldn’t

even air on a network — it would appear in syndication, on a patchwork array of channels.

None of this seemed particularly encouraging.

As a result, Paramount was doing everything it could to attract a modicum of interest, including suggesting that journalists come to Los Angeles to visit the set.

This sounded like a delightful idea. A week or so later, I arrived in Hollywood with my photographer (aka my roommate, Mitchell Rubinstein ’88) ready to beam down to Stage 8, where the episode “Too Short a Season” was being shot. I was given access to the entire cast and crew, including an imperious Patrick Stewart

COURTESY M A RK A . A LTM A N

38 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

(while Mitch feasted on lobster at the Paramount commissary with visual effects supervisor Rob Legato).

Nearly 30 years later, some of those first Star Trek interviews I did for The Justice — along with many, many more over the decades — serve as the nucleus for a massive two-volume tome I co-wrote, “The 50-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek,” published last year

by St. Martin’s Press to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the original series.

Although the first series went off the air in 1969, the 1970s were a great time to be a Star Trek fan, because a certain level of dedication was demanded. It was long before the birth of home video (the alphabet soup of VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and so on), which revolutionized the consumption of movies and TV on demand. Branded merchandise was rare. If you wanted a tribble, someone (in my case, my Aunt Gus) had to sew you one.

Star Trek’s capacity to flourish was a testament both to its genius and to the enthusiasm it inspired in fans, who — long before Twitter, Facebook or Instagram — shared their Trek love in selfpublished ’zines and at fan-run conventions.

At Brandeis in the ’80s, I studied under the brilliant, jocular American studies professor Thomas Doherty, who nurtured my love for film and television. He introduced me to the editor of Cinefantastique magazine, who hired me over the years to write about Star Trek. I wrote stories about Star Trek for The Justice. I interviewed James Doohan (who played Scotty) when he came to speak at Brandeis.

By 1995, the Los Angeles Times had dubbed me “the world’s foremost Trekspert.” Even after I started working in Hollywood myself, my passion for Trek was undimmed. The first feature film I wrote and produced was “Free Enterprise,” a 1999 romantic comedy starring William Shatner as himself. The plot: Two die-hard Trekkies learn their idol is more screwed up than they are. (You may remember it as the movie in which Eric McCormack, of “Will and Grace,” wears a Brandeis sweatshirt.)

Before “Free Enterprise” premiered, the director and I traveled to the Cannes Film Festival with Mr. Shatner — or Bill, as he preferred to be called. It was a wonderful week. In between attending screenings, we’d walk (or, often, stagger) along the Croisette as Bill admired the beach view, muttering in his legendary staccato fashion, “Topless … topless is good.”

For me, the true magic of Star Trek wasn’t so much its optimistic (some might say Pollyannaish) view of the future. Or its prescient glimpses of technology to come (although I did dig those sliding doors and the automat-like replicators). Or even the great writing and direction, or magnificent scores. For me, the magic was William Shatner as Kirk, a man who, I’ve often said, had the respect of his crew, the loyalty of his friends, and a green girl on every planet.

FIVE FUN FACTS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT STAR TREK 1. In “The God Thing,” an unproduced film script written by Gene Roddenberry, Captain Kirk fights Jesus on the bridge of the Enterprise.

2. Paramount planned then abandoned a movie-series spinoff starring Ricardo Montalbán’s legendary villain, Khan, called “Prison Planet.”

3. “Coma” actress Geneviève Bujold, originally cast as Captain Janeway in “Star Trek: Voyager,” quit several days into production. She was replaced by Kate Mulgrew (“Orange Is the New Black”).

4. A “Star Trek: Enterprise” episode being developed for William Shatner to return as Kirk was dropped when the star’s salary demands grew too pricey.

5. The script for a never-made film, “The Academy Years” — planned for release around the franchise’s 25th anniversary — followed the meeting of a young Kirk, Spock and McCoy at Starfleet Academy (years before J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Trek movie covered the same ground).

Kirk is a great leader because he’s decisive and smart, yet open to others’ opinions. He’s insatiably curious. He disregards rules when necessary. He is John F. Kennedy by way of Bill Clinton. Captain Picard, on the other hand, is a different leader for a different era — the 1990s, I mean, not the 24th century — a consensus builder, thoughtful and deliberate.

Today, cynicism and fatalism are our currency, and the best TV series, from “Breaking Bad” to “Game of Thrones,” plumb man’s dark side. But when Star Trek goes into the heart of darkness, it comes out extolling the human adventure, with a palpable sense of hope for the future. And every Star Trek crew is a family, united by love for and responsibility to one another.

In the end, characters that aspire and situations that inspire are very hard to write in a palatable (and not Pollyannaish) way for a wide audience. Star Trek, to its everlasting credit, is filled with both, which is why my voyage with the franchise is still going strong.

Mark A. Altman, a film and TV writer/producer, co-wrote “The 50-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek” (St. Martin’s Press, 2016). He is currently co-executive producer of the hit TNT series “The Librarians.”

Admissions Edition / Summer 2017 Brandeis 39

Inquiry

Avi Rodal

M I K E LOV ET T

Progress in the Fight Against ALS Brandeis research offers insight into motorneuron failure, which could help scientists find treatments for Lou Gehrig’s disease.

By Lawrence Goodman

A

pproximately 30,000 people in the United States suffer from the devastating neurodegenerative illness ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. As the disease progresses, patients’ muscles waste away, leading to an inability to speak, move and, eventually, breathe. Patients typically die within five years of symptom onset.

In 2016, assistant professor of biology Avi Rodal and her lab made a remarkable breakthrough when they enabled fruit flies paralyzed with ALS symptoms to crawl.

“We didn’t cure ALS in the flies,” says Rodal, “but we did make them significantly better.”

Normally, signals called growth factors travel from points throughout the human body to the spinal cord, where they promote the growth and survival of motor neurons. In patients with ALS, motor neurons eventually fail, leading to muscle decay.

Working with flies genetically modified to exhibit symptoms of ALS, Rodal and her colleagues were able to repair a vital signaling mechanism. As a result, dying motor neurons regained health, and once-paralyzed flies regained partial motion.

Rodal’s research focuses on vesicles, membranous “suitcases” within a cell that are

40 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

packed with growth-factor molecules. Some vesicles are manufactured in the limbs where nerve endings make contact with muscle tissue. They then travel along nerve fibers, or axons, to the spinal cord, where the nerve-cell nuclei are located. Because axons can stretch several feet in length, the vesicles rely on “motors” that propel them quickly toward the spine.

In people with ALS, something malfunctions so that the growth factors can’t effectively communicate with motor neurons, triggering cell death. The big mystery is what exactly is going wrong.

Researchers in Rodal’s lab found that the problem occurs at the start of the vesicle’s trip, in the nerve endings. In the ALS-model fruit flies, the growth factors were packaged into the wrong kind of vesicle, and vesicle movement was faster and ranged over larger distances than the movement in fruit flies without ALS. After Rodal modified the flies’ genes so the vesicles moved more like they do in healthy specimens, growth-factor function was restored, and the neurons recovered enough to allow the flies to crawl more efficiently.

“If we find a way to tweak the same trafficking machinery in patients as we modified in the fly,” Rodal says, “it might be a way to help return their neurons to a healthy state.”

A Visionary Solution to Dry-Eye Syndrome variations between the points of light as small as 50 microns, about half the width of a human hair.

This is where Wellenstein drew on his experience at the Large Hadron Collider.

When protons traveling at close to the speed of light are smashed together inside the collider, a set of new subatomic particles are released. Wellenstein and his colleagues developed software that monitors the detectors that trace the pathways taken by the new particles.

It turns out that the same software is able to analyze the patterns of light spots in the pictures taken by Sclervey’s cameras.

M I KE LOV ETT

Physicist Hermann Wellenstein spends a lot of time thinking about what happens when subatomic particles smash together at nearly the speed of light. A member of Brandeis’ high-energy physics group, Wellenstein and his colleagues conduct research at the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, Switzerland.

But when Wellenstein’s late wife, Monika ’85, was suffering from lupus, the physicist turned his gaze toward a very concrete problem. As a side effect of the autoimmune disorder, Monika developed dry-eye syndrome. Wellenstein began to look for ways to make treating the condition less uncomfortable for her and other patients.

Dry-eye syndrome can damage the eye’s surface, creating ridges, bumps, rough patches and gaps. To treat it, Monika needed scleral lenses, similar to contact lenses but large enough to cover most of the sclera, the white outer region of the eyeball. The lenses form a seal with the sclera, creating a chamber that can hold saline solution or other fluids. The liquid bathes and lubricates the eye surface, providing relief from burning, itching and blurred vision.

But a scleral lens must form a perfect seal to prevent the liquid from escaping. And the eye is not a perfect sphere.

Wellenstein watched his wife undergo the discomfort — and sometimes pain — of repeated fittings, as the ophthalmologist searched for the right lens shape. It took days to get the fit right. As her disease progressed, Monika needed to be refitted for lenses several times.

“I was always asking the doctors if there was something I could do to help,” says Wellenstein.

Although he was not able to develop a solution in time to help his wife, Wellenstein is now putting the finishing touches on Sclervey, a system to survey the sclera so patients with dry-eye syndrome and other corneal diseases can be fitted for lenses more efficiently. Two undergraduates — Forrest Webler ’14 and Dave Matthews ’18 — played major roles in developing Sclervey.

“It was just incredible to work on something that has real-world applications and can change people’s lives,” says Matthews.

The Sclervey prototype is a concave dish, which is placed about four inches from the patient’s eye. The dish is divided into segments shaped like pizza slices, each containing a panel of roughly two dozen LED lights. When the lights go on — they are dimmer than a cell-phone screen so they won’t damage the eye — cameras positioned around the dish photograph the eye, capturing the location of the light spots projected onto the sclera.

Changes in the sclera’s contours alter the light spots’ positions.

To interpret the data, Wellenstein and his students needed software that could map the photos generated by Sclervey into a 3-D image of the sclera. The software would have to detect

Dave Matthews ’18 makes adjustments to a Sclervey test model.

Indeed, the device detected differences as small as 15 microns.

Next, it created a 3-D image of the sclera that, in theory, an ophthalmologist can use to create a scleral lens. Instead of resorting to trial and error, doctors should be able to create a perfect fit the first time out.

The next big step? Wellenstein and his lab hope to find a partner, possibly a nonprofit, to begin clinical testing on humans.

— Lawrence Goodman

To watch a video of how the Sclervey works, go to bit.ly/2p2EStr. Admissions Edition / Summer 2017 Brandeis 41

Inquiry

M I K E LOV ET T

Finding Inner Balance, on Earth and in the Air The Graybiel Spatial Orientation Lab studies how humans navigate (and keep their lunch down) in a topsy-turvy environment.

By Lawrence Goodman

ROCK ’N’ ROLL: The MART takes a subject for a disorienting spin.

I

magine you’re a fighter pilot being chased by a heat-seeking missile.

Going 1,500 mph, you undertake evasive maneuvers, climbing and nose-diving, performing barrel rolls and loops, sharply banking left and right.

Without the proper training — even with it — you’d probably feel nauseated. You’d grow disoriented, unable to tell whether you were headed up, down, left or right. You wouldn’t know how to right your jet or steer it back on course.

To find out what this experience might be like — and not die — you could take a ride on the Multi-Axes Rotation and Tilt Device (MART) on campus. A massive motorized chair, the MART rotates along the same axes as an airplane, though more slowly. For researchers at the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Ori-

42 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

entation Laboratory, the chair stands in for the experience of being inside a cockpit.

“How do you know what’s up and down?

How do you know when you’re moving? How do you know what direction you’re moving in? That’s what we’re studying,” says associate professor of psychology Paul DiZio, PhD’87, who co-directs the Graybiel Lab with James Lackner, the Meshulam and Judith Riklis Professor of Physiology.

The U.S. Air Force funds MART research to understand how pilots respond to shifts in direction and gravity. NASA uses MART research to study what astronauts experience during spaceflight. MART findings could even one day be used to develop treatments for vestibular diseases, disorders of the inner ear that affect balance.

Test subjects are strapped into the MART with a five-point harness, then are blindfolded and fitted with soundproof headphones.

There’s a joystick on the right arm, an emergency-stop button on the left. The chair can lean from side to side, tilt back and forth, and twist, moving 360 degrees (though most experiments require it to move no more than 60 degrees) in any of these directions.

The chair can also move in two directions at once. If you’re sitting in it when this happens, you feel as if you are wobbling. Using the joystick, you try to find the point where the chair is once again balanced, as if you’re an egg searching for the spot where you won’t tip over.

“Even the people who get motion sick want to come back, because it’s so fun,” DiZio says.

About a decade ago, DiZio and Lackner had the idea of bolting the MART to the floor of a stripped-down DC-9 airplane, strapping in a passenger, and taking off. The plane would fly along a parabolic path, rising to 35,000 feet before arcing down and free-falling for 10,000 feet. Along the way, the chair periodically rotated to a new position. Every test subject went through 40 parabolas before the plane landed. Although participants were trained extensively beforehand, at least half still lost their lunch.

During the ride, the passengers were given a pencil-sized measuring device. As they rotated, they were asked to identify the direction an object placed on top of the stick would fall and then point the stick in that direction. They were also asked to align the device parallel to the midline of their body. This determined whether, despite the twisting and turning, they still knew which way was up and out from their body.

Not surprisingly, a lot of passengers got their responses very wrong. But it was when they got them wrong that was most revealing.

The chair rotates along three axes — pitch, roll and yaw. Roll tilts you leftward or rightward. Pitch throws you forward or backward.

Yaw goes around the vertical axis that runs from your head to your feet (think of gyro meat turning on a rotisserie). When passengers on the DC-9 MART experienced changes in roll or pitch, they became substantially disoriented. Yet changes in yaw barely registered.

This finding helped confirm a radical new theory of how humans determine spatial orientation: Our bodies have an instinctual sense of pitch and roll, but we determine yaw indirectly, calculating it from the ratio of pitch to roll.

In other words, if you were a two-dimensional cutout moving around on a piece of graph paper, you would be able to accurately ascertain how far you traveled vertically or horizontally, but not along a diagonal. To know the diagonal, you would have to compute it from the other two measurements.

Though we experience ourselves moving through space in three dimensions, we are actually attuned to only two of them.

Our experience of rotating around the yaw axis is a mathematical calculation our brains instinctively make so that we feel at home in three dimensions.

“This raises deep questions about perception and the human mind,” says DiZio. “When do we know we’re having a true perception of the real world, and when is it an illusion?”

He adds, “It’s the story of psychology. We overestimate how much we know and how rational we really are.”

Brandeis Makes Strides in Reducing Carbon Footprint In November, President Ron Liebowitz emailed the campus community with news that had everyone seeing green: For the first time since 2007, when Brandeis signed the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (now known as the Climate Leadership Commitments), the university has reduced the size of its carbon footprint.

During fiscal year 2016, the university used 10 percent less energy than it did in fiscal year 2015, reducing its carbon footprint by approximately 8 percent. “Though it will take more than one year to fully confirm our pace of progress,” the president wrote, “we

are confident we have taken an important first step.”

Brandeis achieved its carbon reductions by implementing practices outlined in its new Energy Conservation and Management Policy, developed by the 2015-16 President’s Task Force on Campus Sustainability and endorsed by the Student Union. The task force also revised the university’s Climate Action Plan, which outlines strategies for making further reductions in Brandeis’ carbon footprint.

The university’s short-term goals: Using fiscal year 2015 as the baseline, reduce emissions by 10 percent by fiscal year 2018 and 15 percent by fiscal year

2020. These reductions will not only be good for the environment but will also translate into significant financial savings.

In other sustainability news, the university has launched Commute Green, an online ride-sharing and alternative transportation website. The program, which aims to take single-occupant vehicles off the road, helps members of the Brandeis community share frequent commuting or one-time rides; find routes to campus via multiple modes of transport, including ride-sharing and biking; view maps of on-campus bike racks, public bike pumps and bike-repair stations; and earn rewards for commuting green.

Admissions Edition / Summer 2017 Brandeis 43

TurningPoints Booting Away the Fear

By Caroline Leavitt ’74

44 Brandeis Admissions Edition / Summer 2017

J U L I A D U D L E Y- K R A M E R

B

ullied as a kid, mocked for being smart, I grew up shy, not wanting to attract attention, happiest on my own. I loved becoming a novelist, writing at home, occasionally doing a bookstore reading, where maybe two people showed up, one wanting a warm place to sleep, the other guzzling the free wine.

But five years ago, my new publisher, Algonquin, told me my ninth novel was already in its sixth printing before publication. To help promote it, I had to tour 40 cities and speak to large audiences.

I was terrified. How was I going to do this and not pass out?

“What you need is a talisman,” a friend told me. “A way to fake it until you make it.”

I liked the idea, but I wasn’t sure what to adopt as my talisman. Maybe it should just be words, a mantra I could repeat over and over, something like I can do this. But every time I said the mantra, I heard a stronger voice telling me, No, you can’t.

I rifled through eBay, trying to find something that someone confidant and spirited would wear, something that would make others look at me and think, Well, now, that’s a kick-ass woman who has something to say. Let’s all pay special attention to her.

And then I saw them. Ten-dollar, bright-red short cowboy boots. I never wore anything but sneakers, and I never wore any color that wasn’t black. Still, I bid on them, and two hours later they were mine.

When they arrived, they looked ridiculous, as bright as tomatoes, as pointed as exclamation marks. What was I thinking?

But when I put them on, for a moment I felt different. More powerful. More free and easy.

The first time I had to speak, in front of 150 librarians, I wore the boots. I was so nervous beforehand. My editor later told me she noticed my trembling and thought, “Oh my, this isn’t going to work.” But when I walked to the podium, someone called out, “Rad boots!” and I felt myself grow feisty. In those boots, I wasn’t a terrified author who felt on the brink of failure. I was a woman who kept a tiger cub for a pet, who line-danced until 3 a.m., and I began, confidently, to talk.

Have an “aha” moment I clung to those boots my whole tour, you’d like to share in taking on the persona of the woman who Turning Points? Please might wear them. I boldly told really persend a query letter to sonal stories, and the audiences clapped. gardner@brandeis.edu.

I went out for dinner with people, and

the boots eroded my shyness. To my astonishment, the crowds grew right along with my confidence. A month later, to celebrate, I bought two more pairs of boots, one in purple and one in turquoise.

The boots began to have a fan club. They were celebrities!

People showed up for my events wearing their own cowboy boots, wanting our boots to be photographed together.

One day, I saw a pair of embroidered Old Gringo cowboy boots.

They were $600. The old me would have sighed and let it go. But the new me called up the manufacturer and offered to write ad copy in exchange for the boots. A week later, I was wearing them.

I was convinced my boots made me a lucky person. I wore them through a blizzard in Chicago, through a tornado in the Deep South and on a day an ice storm shut down the city of Boston. I stayed calm, able to handle anything.

To my amazement, I became a New York Times best-selling author and sold my next novel. I knew that I had done this, not my boots. When I began to realize the boots weren’t that comfortable, I stopped wearing them. I still had crowds at events. I still had laughter and applause. I had practiced being confident for so long, I’d actually become the person I set out to be.

Here’s a secret. Sometimes, when I pass my closet and see my boots in all their glory, I feel them whispering to me, reminding me: Imagine what could happen, who you could be. And then be it.

Caroline Leavitt is the author of “Pictures of You” and “Is This Tomorrow.” Her most recent book, “Cruel Beautiful World” (Algonquin, 2016), was an Indie Next pick, and a Best Book of the Year according to Blogcritics and the Pulpwood Queens.

She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com.

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