Goleta, California
Physics Teacher
Amir Abo-Shaeer created the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy as a school within a school. With a bit of physics, engineering and mathematics, the program motivates students with hands-on building projects and robot-building. The program has changed the culture of the school to one in which students embrace science and math, and even revere DPEA participants—half of whom are female, well above the national average in advanced science courses in high schools across the country.
In his words: “We fully embedded the robotics competition into our curriculum. This has also been exciting to me because contrary to what you hear on the news, you know ‘students don’t want to do science, students don’t want to do engineering.’ We’ve had a line out the door of people wanting to get in the program.”
Mashpee, Massachusetts
Indigenous Language Preservationist
Wampanoag, the language native to Algonquian Native Americans, has not been spoken in 150 years and exists only in written records. But, Jessie Little Doe Bird is working to reinvigorate the language with the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. Baird, fluent in Wampanoag, worked with another scholar to produce a Wampanoag-English dictionary and has adapted her work into educational programs and materials for children and adults.
In her words: “I would like to take the documents that are written by my ancestors in Wampanoag and write histories in English and write from the basis of what my people left as a written record and I would like to offer that to the wider world.”
Corvallis, Oregon
Marine Biologist
With advanced acoustic engineering techniques, Benoit-Bird has been studying the “structure and behavior” of food chains in the ocean from zooplankton to dolphins. The precise data that she has been able to record offers new insights into the complexities of the ecosystem that exists miles under the surface of the ocean.
In her words: “We’re trying to unravel the food web in the ocean…To be able to see these animals beneath the surface, we needed to develop lots of new techniques and new tools and modify existing ones so we could get greater range and look at things deeper and that has meant developing new types of sonar and new platforms to put it on. I’m fortunate enough to come from a family where people believe in doing it yourself. And my dad is a mechanic who can fix just about anything so I learned a lot of useful skills that it turns out are critical for an oceanographer.”
Newport, Rhode Island
Stone Carver
Nicholas Benson is known for his precise and architectural hand letter carving, which can be seen on buildings across the country, including the National Gallery of Art and the National World War II Memorial. He’s a third-generation stone carver and is a devoted teacher to young artisans. He created an original font for use in the new Dr. Martin Luther King National Memorial.
In his words: “I think of myself as lucky because I was born into a very, very rich legacy of stone carving in this very old tradition…I’m currently working on the national Martin Luther King, Jr memorial in Washington, D.C. When it comes to being satisfied reviewing your work, especially on a large memorial like the Martin Luther King memorial, obviously the evidence of the product—these inscriptions that everyone will be reading and everyone will be viewing—it’s very, very satisfying. Receiving the MacArthur Fellowship is one of the greatest affirmations that one can receive.”
Melbourne, Australia
Biomedical Animator
With a series of animations that creates 2-D and 3-D renderings of tumor growth, DNA replication and the malaria life cycle, Drew Berry has created a new way to make science enthralling and enlightening to scientists as well as students.
In his words: “What my work is able to do is translate science into a visual story that people are able to watch and intuitively understand. We are exploiting the amazing digital technologies that are coming out now…to get away from the abstract, clinical way biology is taught in text books.”
Stanford, California
Population Geneticist
Carlos Bustamante studies DNA sequence data to study how humans, plants and animals have evolved. He has retraced history to figure out when Asian dogs were first domesticated and delineated patterns of population migration and genetic composition across continents.
In his words: “What we hope to accomplish is developing rigorous approaches for testing hypotheses about the ancient past. The other major goal of our work is to breakdown traditional concepts and notions of race.”
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Type Designer
As the principal of Carter & Cone Type, Inc., Matthew Carter creates typefaces. He has designed more that 60 typeface families and more than 250 individual fonts. His recent work has dealt with creating readable fonts for computer and low-resolution screens.
In his words: “There aren’t a great many people around the world who do what I do…like any industrial designer, what I produce has to work. There is a sort of struggle within the straitjacket of conforming to the conventions of the alphabet and yet not letting yourself get too depressed by these constraints and learning to express some small part of yourself within them.”
New York, New York
Theater Director
David Cromer is a freelance theater director in New York City, working to bringing the classic American plays of the 20th century back to the stage.
In his words: “I think the American plays of the 20th century were a really, really important part of world playwriting. They were about the modern anxiety of living in what became in that century in our mind the center of the world. There’s a lot to be considered about the experience of being an American.”
Pasadena, California
Biophysicist
John Dabiri studies evolutionary biology, biomechanics and theoretical fluid dynamics to figure out how some of the simplest organisms move. Through his study of jellyfish, he has revealed how size and speed impact on the formation of optimal vortex rings. He has also invented a method that enables divers to visualize the fluid dynamics of jellyfish propulsion, providing new insights into vortex behavior.
In his own words: “In my work, we study both the successes and the failures of biological systems and then we try to take that knowledge and use it to improve engineering systems like underwater vehicles, cardiac diagnosis of heart failure and more recently wind energy. I’ve always been interested in engineering systems, to understand how in nature or in man-made structures how things work and jellyfish seemed like an interesting challenge because on the surface they seem very simple. When you start to dig deeper you find that there’s a lot of interesting complexity in these animals.”
Chicago, Illinois
Anthropologist
Since 1994, Shannon Lee Dawdy has worked in New Orleans to study its evolution from a French colony to the city that exists today. She recently embarked on the largest archaeological excavation undertaken in the French Quarter, concentrating on the site of the former Rising Sun Hotel and St. Antoine’s Garden behind St. Louis Cathedral. She has also been a committed advocate for historical preservation and served as the special liaison between FEMA and the Louisiana State Historic Preservation Office after Hurricane Katrina.
In her words: “I’m interested in the ecology and the economy of the colonial period, but up through the present, looking at informal economies and how people make do and how ‘making do’ is very successful as opposed to large, impersonal systems…Part of what interests me is that in our current age where our concerns are about sustainability, for example the BP oil spill, and ecology, I really think that we can look to the past for inspiration. The past is full of the paths not taken and ways of doing things that we might look at again.”
Cambridge, Massachusetts
American Historian
Since launching an independent study into the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, which culminated in the publication of
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Heming: An American Controversy, Annette Gordon-Reed has continued to examine interracial relations in colonial America. In 2008, she published
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family to follow the progression of racial assimilation and societal integration of the family.
In her words: “I was concerned about the way the words of former enslaved people were treated in the historiography, the way historians looked at their words when they were talking about whites in the story when they were talking about whites, about the people that were enslaving them, that was negative. There was a tendency, I thought, to subject them to extra scrutiny…it was a bigger topic to me. It wasn’t just a man and a woman and did they have an affair. It was how do you view the words of enslaved people.”
Davis, California
Fiction Writer
Yiyun Li moved from China to the U.S. in 1996, seeking a graduate degree in immunology at the University of Iowa. But, she ended up in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and focused on fiction writing. She published a story collection in 2005,
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and her first novel,
The Vagrants, in 2009. She has established herself as a writer who can offer insight into other cultures with her work.
In her words: “I write about China with the idea that it’s not that I’m going to show my readers how China is an exotic or different place, but I’m just going to show this is China and these are the Chinese people, they think like Americans and they feel the same way.”
Ithaca, New York
Optical Physicist
Michal Lipson is an associate professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. She is one of the leading researchers in designing optical and opto-electronic devices, which will have significant implications for the development of optical computing mechanisms.
In her words: “I’m working now on ways to manipulate light, control the flow of light in ways that nobody thought would be possible today. An example of this work is bending light around objects to make them invisible using the force of light to control the motion of little objects. It turns out that light has a force that can be very strong and just by pointing it in the right direction, you can basically change the geometry of certain objects.”
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Quantum Astrophysicist
As a professor at MIT’s Department of Physics, Nergis Mavalvala has been making significant in-roads into the areas of optics, condensed matter and quantum mechanics. Since developing a laser for detecting gravitational waves as a graduate student, she has worked to enhance our ability to detect and measure gravitational radiation.
In her words: “Studying gravitational waves is important for a couple of reasons. One, they’ve never been directly observed. From objects in the sky we have indirect evidence that they exist. The more important reason is that it’s a way of doing astronomy, of observing our universe, with a completely different method than light.”
New York, New York
Jazz Pianist and Composer
Jason Moran melds jazz standards with his own compositions to create a signature style that is helping to define modern jazz. He blends classical, blues and jazz techniques with hip-hop and funk influences.
In his words: “As a jazz musician, most of what we learn is from other musicians, especially older musicians where we really respect what they’ve done given the time period. I can’t imagine being Thelonious Monk with Charlie Parker in the 1950s making such powerful music in a society that doesn’t even really deem you relevant.”
La Jolla, California
Sign Language Linguist
Various sign languages that are used around the globe are relatively young languages, but linguist Carol Padden and colleagues have demonstrated that even young languages can develop complex grammatical structures, challenging long-held beliefs about the progression of language. Padden’s research focuses on the unique structure and evolution of sign language, as well as the social context of signed languages. She is a professor in the Department of Communication at University of California, San Diego.
In her words: “To watch people create, put together the beginning, the very beginnings of language from whatever they have, from gestures, from pointing…it’s something we do, because we want to communicate.”
Los Angeles, California
Installation Artist
Jorge Pardo’s work combines a bit of painting, sculpture and architecture to reinvent the way museums and museum-goers think of installation art. He uses familiar objects, like lamps or a sailboat, as transformative materials with several artistic interpretations and works in both small and gigantic scales.
In his words: “I think there’s something really interesting that happens when you come across something that’s not necessarily framed for you to be looking at. I’m really trying to understand how something that I make disseminates perceptually in the world.”
Providence, Rhode Island
Violist, Violinist and Music Educator
Sebastian Ruth is the founder and artistic director of Community MusicWorks, a non-profit in Providence with a house ensemble that offers frequent performances to support free music lessons. In a unique move, Ruth and the rest of his quartet live in the inner-city community they work in, which coincides with their vision of the music learning space to have an active role in the community the same way a library or church does.
In his words: “Community MusicWorks is a relationship between professional musicians and students and families in an urban community in Providence. Right now we are starting into our 14th season…I’m also working on more opportunities to think about these ideas of musicianship and community and transformational, educational opportunities.”
Berkeley, California
Economist
As an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Emmanuel Saez is working to advance our understanding of the link between income and tax policy. He has developed methods for measuring changes in income patterns through time to determine how taxation affects savings and income. With his research, for example, he has shown that the net economic benefits of earned income tax credits more than offset floors on hourly wages.
In his words: “My special area of interest is public economics that is the role that the government can play in shaping inequality...We as economists are interested in the consequences of policy when people start responding to incentives, taxes, etc. So that’s why knowing how people react to a specific program or respond to a specific set of incentives is critical to the evaluation of potential public policy programs”
Baltimore, Maryland
Author, Screenwriter and Producer
David Simon is the man behind
Homicide: Life on the Streets,
The Wire and most recently
Treme. He has created a body of work that focuses on complicated narratives involving inner-city characters and complex social issues.
In his words: “I’m a storyteller. I began as a journalist, as a newspaperman, here in Baltimore and then when newspapers began to go bad in the mid-90s, I had an opportunity to learn the craft of television drama because one of my books was being made into a television show…If you look at these pieces carefully, I think,
The Wire,
The Corner,
Generation Kill,
Treme, you’re looking at ruminations on the end of empire.”
Berkeley, California
Computer Security Specialist
Dawn Song uses theoretical methods to study how software, hardware and networks interact to make computer systems vulnerable to attack. She studies underlying patterns of computer system performance that exist across ranges of security susceptibility. She’s an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley.
In her words: “One of the areas that I plan to go further is in protecting users’ privacy. Users have a lot of sensitive data and it’s now being collected on the Internet, for example when a user uses online social networks and clouds based service. There is a big question how we can protect users privacy and provide the users with the services that they would like to have.”
St. Paul, Minnesota
Entomologist
Honey bees pollinate a third of the American food supply, but they have been disappearing recently thanks to pesticides, diseases and parasitic mites. Marla Spivak, a professor at the University of Minnesota, has been working to develop practical applications to protect the honey bee population. She focuses on behaviors influenced by genetics that transfer disease resistance to entire colonies.
In her words: “The research on hygienic behavior of honey bees is really important because we are breeding bees that can defend themselves against diseases and parasites. This is giving bees a way to get back on their own six feet.”
Atlanta, Georgia
Sculptor
Elizabeth Turk uses marble to craft works of art that manage to be delicate and seemingly weightless from heavy material. She challenges the physical boundaries of the material she works with, as well as putting a modern spin on the classical medium of sculpture. "Unlike most artists, Elizabeth's works are a holistic embodiment of quantitative thinking, science, history, creativity,” one of her longtime collectors, private equity professional Glenn Kaufman, tells The Daily Beast. “It leads to art that will stand up to the great artists over time."
In her words: “The work that’s become the most well-known is stone sculpture. The stone is really about what’s not there. What has been removed is a tremendous amount of material so that only a delicate lattice remains. You take a huge block of stone, maybe 600 to 1,000 pounds and you’re going to remove so much material that it will weigh 50 or 70 pounds, how can that structure hold itself? That’s the physicality of my work, that’s the difficult part, and that’s the intriguing part.”
