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Tuesday november 26, 2013 vol. cxxxvii no. 111

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Four graduate students win Jacobus

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By Elliott Eglash

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staff writer

Announcement The Daily Princetonian will not be publishing for the rest of this week in observance of Thanksgiving break. We will resume publication Monday, Dec. 2.

In Opinion Claire Nuchtern discusses teacher residency programs, and Marni Morse argues that women should take the inititative to speak up in class PAGE 4

Today on Campus 12 p.m.: “The Effect of Receiving versus Being Denied a Wanted Abortion on Women’s Health and Wellbeing.” Wallace Hall.

The Archives

Nov. 26, 1979 Students for Conscientious Choice, a 36-member antiabortion group, launched a weeklong petition drive against the funding of abortions from university health fees.

On the Blog The Class of 2014 has voted not to have a mustachioed monocle on its beer jacket.

got a tip?

MERRILL FABRY :: PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

The Princeton Entrepreneurship Club held open hack classes in Lewis Library for aspiring entrepreneurs and hackers.

U N I V E R S I T Y A F FA I R S

U. unlikely to be legally liable for meningitis vaccine

By Warren Crandall senior writer

Princeton’s plan to make a meningitis vaccine — called Bexsero — available to students in the near future likely has few legal ramifications for the University, despite the fact that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not yet approved the drug for use in the United States.

Since March, eight cases of meningococcal disease linked to the University have been reported. Following the

seventh case, the University decided in coordination with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA to import the Bexsero vaccine and offer it to students and certain community members.

In order to receive the vaccine, students will have to sign an informed consent form that will likely go to great lengths to eliminate any legal risk the University might face should something go wrong during the implementation of the vaccination program, Associate Di-

rector of the Program in Law and Public Affairs and former professor of Health Law and Policy Leslie Gerwin said. This legal consent form has not yet been released to the public.

University General Counsel Peter McDonough was out of the office when contacted by The Daily Princetonian. University Spokesperson Martin Mbugua declined to comment Monday, noting that the consent form has not yet been approved or issued and that questions See BEXSERO page 2

Four graduate students were named winners of the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, Princeton’s top honor for graduate students, the University announced Friday.

The students, James Pickett GS, Emily Vasiliauskas GS, Sonika Johri GS and Cristina Domnisoru GS, will receive funding for their final year of graduate study. The fellowship is awarded to those whose work has exhibited the highest scholarly excellence.

Pickett, a Ph.D. candidate in the history department, has studied Islamic scholars of central Eurasia from the 18th and 19th centuries. His research bridges Persian, Islamic and Russian history.

“The goal is to write a transregional history that’s not really the history of any one particular quality,” Pickett said. “This is an area of history that hasn’t really been studied at all.”

He added that people in other, better-studied areas of history “are refining very small questions and developing a very sophisticated understanding of history. But central Asia is in many ways a blank slate.”

“A lot of the things we take for granted about modern nation states and modern societies simply didn’t work the same way back then,” Pickett said. As an example, he cited the fact that scholars educated in the city of Bukhara would travel throughout the surrounding regions to perform research and various jobs. “Even though we think of India, Afghanistan and Russia as very different places, they had a common high cultural skill set,” he said. “That doesn’t really have much parallel. It offers lessons for global history.”

Vasiliauskas, a Ph.D. candidate in the English department, is researching the concept of a literary afterlife in early 17th-century England.

“The word ‘afterlife’ was first used in English in 1598 to mean a posthumous literary legacy, rather than anything about a theological afterlife,” she said.

See FELLOWSHIP page 3

BEYOND THE BUBBLE

DREAM Team efforts help halt deportation

By Hannah Schoen staff writer

Princeton’s DREAM Team, a student immigration advocacy group, said it helped prevent the deportation of German Perez, a native of El Salvador, by successfully lobbying N.J. Senator Robert Menendez, whose office got involved with the case.

Perez, a Trenton-area construction worker, was going to be deported by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

He has been a granted a sixmonth period in which he can petition for asylum.

As ICE began procedures to deport Perez earlier this month, DREAM Team members advocated to prevent his deportation

on grounds that he is needed to care for his children in the United States and that he would be in danger of violence if he returned to his home country.

Menendez’s office got involved in the case after the DREAM Team reached out, according to Juan Pachon, Menendez’s Deputy Communications Director.

“Perez’s case was obviously a

horrible one, [where] something needed to happen,” Pachon said.

Pachon explained that their office got involved once the DREAM Team had drawn their attention to the case.

“Our office stepped in and contacted ICE to make sure that they would send [Perez] back to New Jersey, and not only that, but that he would still be able to apply for

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News & Notes Reported gunman keeps Yale campus on lockdown

reports of a gunman on campus brought Yale University under a daylong shelter-in-place lockdown order Monday.

The campus-wide lockdown lasted approximately six hours, from 10:50 a.m. until 4:40 p.m., according to the university’s emergency management website. The initial report of a gunman near Old Campus, where Yale freshmen are housed, was confirmed in a text alert to the Yale community around 11 a.m., The Yale Daily News reported.

The lockdown concluded with no persons in custody as law enforcement began to assume the initial call had been “an innocent mistake,” New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman said at a press conference.

There were no reports of a gun fired or of any injuries on campus. Classes were not in session Monday, and many students had left campus for Yale’s weeklong Thanksgiving break.

See NOTES page 3

STUDENT LIFE

ACADEMICS

Reunions jobs publicized

Speakers talk ‘Disrupt’ at first TEDxPrincetonU

By Corinne Lowe staff writer

Students who wish to be employed by the Office of the Alumni Association during Reunions may now complete an online survey to be considered for employment, according to an email sent by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students to non-senior students last week. By actively circulating the survey and offering a more comprehensive student employment site, the Alumni Association is increasing its efforts to consolidate hiring for Reunions crews and publicize Reunions employment opportunities for students.

By creating a “more robust” website that advertises all of the different employment opportunities available to students during Reunions and by sending out an email to the student body detailing the process and deadline for applications, the Alumni Association hopes to make these jobs available to the entire student body, Mibs Southerland Mara, the associate director for Reunions, explained.

In past years, Reunions job opportunities were not formally advertised or centralized. Students learned about jobs through word of mouth or from individual websites, such as the Dining Services site.

Mara stated that one of her motivations in increasing advertising efforts was that in past years, multiple students called the Alumni Office in the spring hoping to work Reunions, not knowing that crew positions had long since been filled.

“The employment site and survey has been available for several years, but last year we heard some feedback that it would be helpful to, you See CREWS page 3

By Elizabeth Paul staff writer

The changing landscape of education in the digital age was a prominent topic of discussion at TEDx PrincetonU, an event that featured 12 short talks on the topic of “Disrupt” last Saturday. Several speakers focused on the disruption of our current education and university systems, including University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 and Jeremy Johnson, who was formerly of the Class of 2007 but did not graduate.

Eisgruber argued that “lec-

tures on stages” will never fully be replaced by video lectures because the ability for professors to motivate students personally, engage them through interpersonal contact and individualize curriculum is paramount to education.

Eisgruber asked the audience to recall an educator who had transformed their thinking.

“Could that teacher and their impact on your life be replaced by a video transmission? I’m certain the answer to that question is no,” Eisgruber said.

See TED page 3

asylum when he was let go,” Pachon said.

Perez was being held in Louisiana.

Perez first spoke with DREAM Team members on Nov. 9 during one of the DREAM Team’s regular visits to a local detention center.

They had learned that Perez was at the detention center from Wind See UNDOCUMENTED page 3

GRACE JEON :: STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

U. President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 spoke on disruptions in the higher education system.

STUDENT LIFE

‘splash,’ ‘Saheli’ win $1,000 each at Princeton Pitch

By Anna Windemuth staff writer

The two $1,000 first prizes for Princeton Pitch went to the creators of “splash,” a free application that allows users to share media based on location, and the developers of “Saheli,” a catering service that aims to help Indian women escape the sex trade.

Students dressed in business attire crowded into Dodds Auditorium for the annual competition hosted by the

Entrepreneurship Club, which gives participants 60 seconds to pitch their startup ideas, in for-profit or social entrepreneurship tracks, to a panel of judges for cash prizes. These included $400 and $250 for second and third place, respectively, as well as $250 for an audience choice award.

“We pretty much doubled in everything this year. We have double the number of participants, we have double the amount of prizes,” Entrepreneurship Club co-director of com-

petitions Shompa Choudhury ’15 said in her introductory speech. Increased support from the program’s sponsors made possible the expansion of prizes. “splash” creators Adam Suczewski ’15, Derrick Dominic ’15 and Darshan Desai ’16 gave a live demonstration of their product, originally developed as coursework for COS 333: Advanced Program Techniques, by filming their live pitch and asking audience members to open www.splashed.me See PITCH page 2

The Daily Princetonian

page 2

Vaccine likely to require consent form BEXSERO Continued from page 1

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about the legal aspects of the form would be best answered by a legal expert.

The consent form will first need to be approved by the CDC’s Institutional Review Board.

Although the University administration is encouraging students to get the vaccine, Gerwin said the University is unlikely to assume any sort of responsibility in the event of problems with the vaccine.

“The University is not liable … because you will sign an informed consent form. And that informed consent will probably be very long and detailed,” Gerwin said.

The one point of possible legal contention could come with regards to whether or not the University has given students enough data to actually be informed when consenting to receiving the vaccine. University administrators have given little information regarding the contexts of specific cases of meningitis that have bro-

ken out on campus, Gerwin said, adding that this withholding could potentially be raised as an issue in court.

Email alerts sent to the student body have included information regarding the diagnosed students’ gender, when they developed symptoms and began to receive treatment, and some basic information on the location of the institutions where they were receiving treatment.

“The only legal challenge you would have is whether you had sufficient information to be informed,” Gerwin said.

Gerwin noted, however, that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which protects the privacy of patient medical records, grants the University much leeway when it comes to withholding details of the outbreak in order to protect the privacy of the affected students. The University, Gerwin said, has to walk a fine line in determining the marginal benefit of providing more information to students interested in possibly receiving the vaccine.

Although the FDA has not yet approved the vaccine for general use in the United States, Gerwin noted that as far as legal issues go, the company behind the vaccine, Novartis, has followed established FDA protocol in its attempt to make Bexsero available to the University.

Specifically, the FDA has worked with the CDC to approve Bexsero as a “treatment investigational new drug,” which, according to the FDA’s website, is a drug or vaccine “showing promise in clinical testing for serious or immediately lifethreatening conditions.”

Gerwin also pointed to the European Union’s approval of the vaccine as promising evidence of the drug’s safety. She noted that even Britain’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which recommended against adding Bexsero to its routine vaccination program this past July, did so not because the drug was unsafe in any way, but rather because it was not deemed cost-effective in the context of the country’s government-payer health system.

Tuesday november 26, 2013

‘TECH GIANTS’

LU LU :: STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Chenyu Zheng ’12 displayed her art project, Tech Giants, at Frist Campus Center yesterday. Tech Giants is a site for aspiring entrepreneurs that displays Zheng’s series of acrylic portraits of well-known tech entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship competition gave participants 60 seconds to pitch ideas PITCH

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on their smartphones. After the video was “splashed,” anyone in the room could access it from the website without having to download any application.

“This is designed so the sender or the receiver has no extra step involved when broadcasting their content,” Suczewski explained. “The world doesn’t need another social network.”

Any data is deleted after 24 hours, a feature that allows the startup to operate with “much less [storage space] than a company like Google or Facebook is going to have to deal with,” Dominic said. “It’s also going to help ease users’ consternations with privacy policies,” he added.

The app is free on iTunes. It can “splash” users as far as 16

miles away and has an optional encryption feature. Although the group is currently more focused on growth than on monetization, the app could potentially generate revenue through targeted advertising, Desai said.

On the social entrepreneurship track, Aashna Mehra ’15, Prerna Ramachandra ’14 and Rachita Jain ’14 were motivated by the New Delhi rape case that made international headlines in 2012 to help break the cycle of sexual violence persisting in regions of India such as Bharatpur, where the caste system promulgates professional prostitution, according to Mehra.

Ramachandra is a former staff writer for The Daily Princetonian.

“They have no way to support themselves. They’re not educated, they have no marketable skills and they can’t find jobs,” Ramachandra said of current

victims.

Saheli, which is Hindi for “friend,” strives to generate salaries for these women by tapping into the market of young professionals who move to New Delhi and crave home-cooked meals. The group is discussing the venture, which originated through Ramachandra’s project for COS 448: Innovating Across the Boundaries of Business and Technology with Apne Aap, an Indian grassroots organization that empowers women to fight sex trafficking.

Second prize in for-profit enterprise went to Adcomm Mobile, an advertising-supported service designed for emerging markets that offers free text messages and minutes. It was entered by Ebhodaghe Osime ’16 and Columbia student Jimmy Toussaint. Third prize went to LifeArk, a digital watch entered by Zachary Ming

that monitors the vital signs of aging people. Ming, a visiting graduate student at the University, designed the watch to be used in China, where there is a large aging population that lacks health care.

In the social enterprise category, second prize went to Celeste, a social commerce platform and fashion brand that connects Western shoppers to textile artisans in remote countries, created

by Marina Kaneko ’15, Jenna Rodrigues ’14 and Megan Partridge ’14. Third prize went to PiCreate, which is partnering with Coursera to bring the benefits of online education to developing countries by marketing a computer at less than $100. PiCreate was launched by Bode Abunbarin ’16, Kasturi Shah ’16 and Mark Pavlyukovskyy ’13.

On a lighter note, Haven on Earth, a for-profit enterprise

aimed at selling Hoagie Haven sandwiches to drunk college students on Prospect Avenue, won the audience choice award.

“My idea has a very low startup cost and a very high profit ceiling, especially when you consider the fact that many students can’t tell the difference between a $5 bill and a $50 bill [in their drunken state],” co-creator Tyler Servais ’15 said in his pitch. Servais created the idea with friend Ryan Albert ’14, but pitched it alone.

“Because it’s only 60 seconds and it’s an informal pitch, since you’re not actually putting together a business plan, it’s very open to anyone who wants to do it,” competitions officer of the Entrepreneurship Club Sreya Basuroy ’16 said. “Sometimes it’s those very wacky ideas that really hit the mark.”

“Just do it,” judge and LivNow

CEO Jeff Mitchell ’81 said. “It’s a good experience from any perspective to have to try to boil down your idea to 60 seconds and present it to people in a persuasive way.”

A total of 45 teams participated in Princeton Pitch.

Bryan Gartner and John Monagle ’12 from Insight Venture Partners, Jalak Jobanputra from Techstars and Will Peng ’10 from Raptor Ventures judged the forprofit entrepreneurship track, while Mitchell, James Smits ’12 from TigerLabs, Douglas Rubin ’81 from Men’s Divisions International and Jon Wonnell ’81 from AIG judged the social entrepreneurship track.

The event was sponsored by the Keller Center, Reach Out, the USG, ODUS, Insight Venture Partners, the Princeton Social Entrepreneurship Initiative and the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club.

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Tuesday november 26, 2013

page 3

Student advocates recruited help of Sen. Menendez Vasiliauskas GS studies UNDOCUMENTED idea of ‘literary afterlife’ Continued from page 1

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of the Spirit, another immigrant advocacy organization, according to DREAM Team member Logan Coleman ’15.

“It struck me just how sad he was and concerned about his family. Not even really as concerned as he should’ve been about returning to El Salvador but concerned about what would happen to his five children that are here, and his wife who has the newborn without having any sort of income,” Coleman said.

DREAM Team members discovered that Perez’s case was unique among the deportation cases they usually see, according to Coleman.

Perez falls into what ICE considers its lowest priority category of potential deportees. According to ICE documentation, ICE first prioritizes immigrants who threaten national security or pub-

lic safety, then immigrants who have recently entered the country illegally and finally aliens who are subject to a final order to depart but do not leave, of which Perez is one. “[We’ve been] giving it more attention than we’ve given some of the other cases just because it seemed like there were so many things pointing his direction that we’d be able to get him out for,” Coleman explained. She mentioned Perez’s “incredible fear of going back” and his “having five kids, one of which [is] a newborn.”

Of these five children, three are U.S. citizens, according to an email the DREAM Team sent to the student body. “German’s family [will] suffer immensely should he be deported,” the DREAM Team email said.

The DREAM Team email added that Perez’s “own life will be at risk in El Salvador,” explaining that his sister was recently shot and his nephew was killed. El Salvador was ranked by the Geneva Decla-

ration as the nation with the most violent deaths per capita in 2009.

Coleman explained that Perez’s deportation moved along extremely quickly despite the features of his case. News that Perez was being moved to Louisiana in preparation for his deportation spurred the DREAM Team into action on Nov. 17, she added.

“We weren’t expecting his movement to Louisiana or his deportation to happen that quickly.

ICE tends to be really slow and bureaucratic about these things,” Coleman said.

The DREAM Team coordinated efforts on Perez’s behalf quickly.

This included circulating a petition, organizing phonebanks to call ICE’s New Jersey and Washington offices and holding a rally in Frist Campus Center on the evening of Nov. 18. It worked with similar organizations from other college campuses.

“It was something that was really sudden. In a matter of a few hours, we decided that we wanted

to do something,” DREAM Team member Christina Chica ’15 said. “I was really proud of all of the people who pulled together last minute.”

Perez was given release by ICE on Nov. 21, according to an email sent out by the DREAM Team.

This was just one day before Perez was scheduled to be deported on Nov. 22.

Perez was scheduled to fly back to New Jersey from Louisiana on Monday, according to Coleman.

He will soon be reunited with his family. “We do a lot of things that we like to think are directly impacting people, but this was one of the first times that we could see most immediately the link that our actions had on somebody else’s life,” Chica said.

While the DREAM Team has previously participated in petitions circulated online, Perez’s case was the first it took on from start to finish, Coleman noted. He added that the DREAM Team will continue to work on these types of cases.

Eisgruber, entrepreneurs talk ‘disruption’ in education TED

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Johnson, a cofounder of 2U, which partners with universities to offer online educational programs, agreed with Eisgruber. He argued that the perception that “open education online is going to make universities go obsolete” is false. After tracing the evolution of the university through technological innovations, including the development of the Gutenberg press and the “moving picture machine,” Johnson argued that universities “have evolved, but have strong staying power.”

“This isn’t just a tectonic shift in higher education. It may be the last one. We’re actually entering the golden age of academia,” Johnson stated, referring to universities’ ability to harness the Internet to

expand and improve their impact.

As cofounder of CommonBond, a platform that helps university students seek loans, David Klein also realized the need for transformation of the education sector.

Klein discussed “disruption in the sense of disruption of you” and recounted a transformative period which allowed him to “become a disruptor” of the broken student loan system.

Deborah Chang ’10, founder of The Conversation Coach, a service that guides people through high-stakes conversations, discussed what she called educators’ failure to address the problem of “failing successfully.” Drawing parallels between her experience as a rock-climber and the challenges of navigating rapidly changing modern industries, Harrison encouraged the

audience to “take the leap,” leaving their comfortable life plans in the name of solving big problems, such as bridging the gap between entrepreneurs and educators.

Several academics discussed disruption in their respective disciplines.

Jane Harrison, former lecturer in the School of Architecture, spoke of “designing disruption and disrupting design.” Rather than designing better structures for the privileged, Harrison said she founded the “ATOPIA Project” to use architectural thinking to engage with the most serious environmental and social questions of our time. She then proceeded to describe several of her recent projects, including the construction of a Kenyan school which also serves to capture and store rainwater for the community and the transformation of ex-

New website centralizes crews hiring CREWS

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know, send an email to all underclassmen to make them aware of the employment site and survey and that there’s a deadline,” Mara explained.

The website advertises staffing positions for the Dining Services, golf cart, ice delivery, major Reunions, graduate alumni, Office of the Alumni Association, Old Guard and Public Safety crews. By filling out the Student Employment Survey, students can indicate the jobs in which they are interested, as well as provide information about their past work and Reunions experiences. The site also directs students to external applications for Public Safety, Dining Services and certain student agencies, which have their own application processes.

Sue Pierson, the coordinator of Dining Services’ Reunions crews, emphasized the importance of hiring students for these crews.

“The alums really like to interact with the students — that’s

why we hire student workers,” Pierson said. “That’s what Reunions are all about — alumni coming back and connecting with Princeton today.” Traditionally, Dining Services has advertised its employment opportunities on its website each spring and hires students on a first-come, first-served basis.

For major Reunions crews, however, the hiring process has relied more on word of mouth.

Last year, 234 students were hired to work in 13 major Reunions tents, according to the email sent by ODUS. Reunions managers, who are members of the alumni class for each tent, hire student crew managers, who then oversee the staffing of their fellow crew members.

Matt Farris ’14, who served as a crew manager during Reunions 2013, explained that he was first hired as part of the Class of 1981 30th Reunions crew his freshman year after another person dropped out at the last minute. A friend and varsity hockey teammate who was a crew manager at the time offered Farris the position.

The following year, Farris was

promoted to crew manager after the Reunions manager for the Class of 1982 contacted him personally based on a referral from his crew manager the year before.

“There wasn’t really an application process,” Farris said before clarifying, “I know there have been other kids who have done Reunions jobs and who have gotten manager positions through sending in a resume through kind of a more professional process.”

Farris said that it’s common for the hiring of crew managers to happen through “more of an informal interview process” in which students can earn promotions by impressing the Reunions manager or Reunions chair.

Students wishing to be considered for a Reunions crew must fill out the Reunions 2014 Student Employment Survey and application by Dec. 9. Dining Services applications will be available sometime in the spring.

Staff writer Jean-Carlos Arenas contributed reporting.

News & Notes NOTES

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The lockdown was initiated after an unidentified male placed a 911 call that lasted between five and 30 seconds on Monday morning from a pay phone near Yale’s campus. The caller said that his roommate had a long gun and was on his way to shoot up the Yale campus, The New Haven Independent reported.

Four different SWAT teams were activated. University, state and local police responded, along with the border patrol and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Police conducted a roomto-room search of the campus starting at 1:45 p.m., when a text alert was sent to the Yale community informing them of the action. Police identified themselves by slipping a Yale ID under the door, a later phone alert told community members.

U. donates $100K to Princeton Public Library the university has made a donation of $100,000 to the stewardship fund of the town’s public library. The head of the library announced the donation on Thursday, Planet Princeton reported.

The stewardship fund provides an endowment that is available to serve the needs of the library, including upgrades and improvements. The Univer-

sity has donated to the library many times since beginning its relationship in 1909. Notably, the University donated $300,000 to fund the library’s construction of a new building in 2000.

Princeton Public Library membership is free to all town residents, as well as any nonresident students, faculty and staff of the University.

CORRECTION Due to a reporting error, the Nov. 25 article “Victory pyre warms freezing students” misstated the title of Bob Gregory. He is the former University Fire Marshal and current town Director of Emergency Management.

The ‘Prince’ regrets the error.

cess shipping containers into wind turbine power units.

On the other hand, Renee Hlozek, a postdoctoral fellow in astrophysics, looked to the history of cosmology to recount how data has changed our view of the universe, which furthermore “changes the perception of ourselves.”

“It is with great privilege that I am able to not only think about the universe, but use data to ask and answer questions,” Hlozek said. “I wait with intrepid excitement for the next cosmological disruption.”

The TEDx event, held in Theatre Intime, was organized by codirectors Jason Yu ’16 and Christopher Huie ’16 of the Princeton Social Enterprise Initiative, under the guidance of the TED Conference program. At the event, PSEI announced it plans to make the talks an annual event.

FELLOWSHIP Continued from page 1

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Her work, she said, charts “how what we now think of as a religious concept started out as secular and became religious over time.” She added that her work also deals with the more familiar concept of authors seeking literary immortality through their work.

Vasiliauskas explained that her work is part of an intellectual movement to shift literary studies from the politicallyminded interpretation that sprang up in the 1980s toward a more mystical, apolitical focus, which was a more prominent approach in the 1960s and 1970s.

“Right now, as a field, we’re still talking to ourselves.” cristina domnisoru gs neuroscientist “Now, people are realizing that different cultural artifacts … have a temporal force in their own culture that can be much more unfamiliar and weird and even politically significant than just the activities of kings and queens are,” she said.

Johri, a Ph.D. candidate in electrical engineering, studies two aspects of solid state physics: disordered systems and strongly interacting systems.

She said that although it can be very easy to study electron flow through highly ordered crystals, this is not the case with nature.

“In nature, nothing is ever perfect. In real material, atoms

will not be exactly in their places. There will be a lot of disorder,” she said. “This leads to all kinds of effects, especially in quantum mechanics.”

She also studies strongly interacting systems, in which large numbers of electrons interact with each other. “Everything depends on everything else,” she explained. “That’s a very hard problem. How do you solve that? You can’t do that with pen and paper.”

Johri said she hopes her work will help lead to the development of a quantum computer.

Her work in topological quantum computing is potentially more stable than the approaches of other researchers, she said.

“You need a big, big amount of disorder … to destroy this qubit [quantum bit]. It’s very robust,” Johri said.

Domnisoru, a doctoral student in the Program in Neuroscience, studies circuit mechanisms within the entorhinal cortex, an area of the brain associated with memory. “In humans, there’s always been a recognized link between space and memory,” she said.

“Right now, as a field, we’re still talking to ourselves,” she said. “We’re trying to understand how neurons communicate with each other.” She said that her research will most likely help further our theoretical knowledge of how the brain works and that potential applications for her research are still uncertain.

Domnisoru also said that she has a more humanistic interest in neuroscience. “What we’re all trying to do is to understand ourselves,” she said. “Trying to do neuroscience, trying to figure out how the brain works is kind of like practical philosophy. People have wondered, for a long time, how their own minds work. That’s the ultimate goal.”

Pickett, Vasiliauskas, Johri and Domnisoru all plan on pursuing careers in academia.

Tuesday november 26, 2013

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Quotable

Inside

Trivia

‘Snoop Dogg announced he’s suing a woman for trying to extort money from him. If convicted, the woman could go to jail for embizzle-ment.’

Men’s water polo team chucks canary-colored spheres and wears tiny little hats to boot.

SPORTS PAGE 14

What former Tiger forward played on the basketball team that beat UCLA in the the 1997 NCAA Tournament and also went to Tito’s grammar school? t former Tiger forward played on the basketball team that beat

Conan O’Brien, late nite television funnyman

ANSWER IN TOMORROW’S PRINCE