Brown’s Astronaut

RESEARCH BRIEFS

SHORT TAKESFour teams of undergraduate and graduate students, working with faculty, were chosen as winners of the Brown- A new National Institutes of Health grant went to Hyundai Visionary Challenge for smart Brown medical school faculty testing a novel program that mobility projects, including aerial gives pharmacists more robotics and biometrics-based feedback. authority and resources to care for people addicted to opioids.

Brown’s Judaic Studies program was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize 50 print volumes of its high-quality scholarship previously published only in print, making it publicly accessible on multiple web platforms.

Literary Arts Professor Emeritus Forrest Gander won the Pulitzer Prize

in poetry for Be With, a volume inspired by his wife and fellow poet and Brown faculty member, C.D Wright, who died unexpectedly in 2016.

With a $1 million Carnegie Corporation grant, the Watson

Institute is launching a military fellows

program that will bring military officers to study and work with Brown scholars.

A study by Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology researchers, using a new method of radiocarbon dating, showed that textiles predated European contact and overturned the long-held belief that Vikings

introduced spinning and weaving to indigenous people.

As the landing site for its new 2020 Mars rover, NASA chose Jezero crater, a spot that Brown researchers have studied and championed for more than a decade.

Katie Wu’s interest in Japanese culture led her to earn a black belt in Aikido.

Thanks, Open Curriculum

COURTESY WU

A 2019 alum reflects on how Brown’s opportunities changed her.

Over the course of a month last spring, Katie Wu ’19 accepted an offer to Princeton’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering PhD program, won a Fulbright to do research in Japan, and earned her black belt in Aikido.

She gives much credit to Brown’s Open Curriculum— celebrating its 50th anniversary this year—for creating a culture where she felt comfortable and able to pursue her varied interests. “It’s an environment where people have to think for themselves: what do I want to learn and how do I want to learn it?”

For Wu, a first-generation college student, that meant challenging herself in advanced math and computer science courses outside of her engineering requirements, as well as taking accelerated Japanese language classes. Wu said she benefited greatly from the flexibility of her professors, including Rashid Zia ’01, now dean of the College, who let Wu take his computer programming class without having all the prerequisites.

“The philosophy that underpins Brown’s Open Curriculum emphasizes the intellectual and personal development of individual students,” Zia said. “This is why, as faculty, we provide personalized attention to help each and every student maximize opportunities for learning and growth.” As one of the 38 new Fulbright scholars from Brown, Wu is

working in a mechatronics lab in Kyoto, combining her passions for Japanese and engineering while also preparing herself for her PhD program. “I thought it would be a great opportunity to experience what life is like in a different country,” Wu said. “It’s also a chance for me to try out a focused, independent research project for close to a year, which is the kind of thing I would be doing in graduate school.” Wu is part of a group of Fulbright scholars that marked the third year running that Brown was the nation’s top Fulbright“It’s an environment where people have to think for themselves.” —Katie Wu ’19 producing university, including both undergraduates and graduate students. Christopher Carr, who oversees undergraduate fellowship programs at Brown, said the sustained year-to-year success of Brown students is a testament to their willingness, supported by the Open Curriculum, to step out of comfort zones academically and engage in teaching and research projects that forge deep connections across geographical, cultural, and linguistic borders. “Our winners rise to meet Fulbright’s mission of promoting education through cross-cultural exchange,” Carr said. —Eliza Cain ’20