With individual motivation to work for social justice, senior orators Michelle Bailhe and Lucas Johnson didn’t sit idly by at Brown. In their four years they worked in Rhode Island prisons and schools to learn how to effect change. That experience, as well as their lives on campus, will inform their 2015 senior orations titled “I Don’t Know” and “School Spirit.”
During its 247th Commencement Sunday afternoon, May 24, 2015, Brown University conferred honorary doctorates on Robert A. Corrigan, president emeritus of San Francisco State University; Louise Lamphere, distinguished professor emerita of anthropology at the University of New Mexico; David E. McKinney, civic leader and former IBM executive; Tracee Ellis Ross, actress and performance artist; Susan Solomon, atmospheric chemist; and Kathryn D. Sullivan, astronaut and geoscientist.
An apparently advantageous mechanism of conifer pollination has nevertheless been disappearing over millions of years, a new study finds. The mechanism works well, but because it depends on three traits related only loosely, the vagaries of evolution have led to its demise in many species. It its wake, however, a diversity of new traits and functions has emerged.
The waters of Baja California Sur are both ecosystems and fisheries where human needs meet nature. In a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers assessed the capacity to achieve sustainability by applying a framework that accounts for both ecological and human dimensions of environmental stewardship.
In Neuron, Brown University neuroscientists show how cells in the brain’s cortex can either stifle or enhance sensory information incoming from the thalamus, thereby allowing it to focus on just some of the many sensory inputs it might choose to consider.
Researchers based at Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital show in a new study that a drug already approved to fight tapeworms in people, effectively treated MRSA superbugs in lab cultures and in infected nematode worms. The scientists are pursuing further testing with hope that the findings will lead to new treatments for deadly MRSA infections.
Researchers at Brown University have developed an advanced technique for cell culturing that uses sheets of wrinkled graphene to mimic the complex 3-D environment inside the body.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer, head of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), will deliver a lecture titled “Breaking the Wall of the Hidden Universe: What the Discovery of the Higgs Boson Tells Us about Physics, Mankind and the Universe” on April 20, 2015, at 4 p.m. in Barus and Holley Building, Room 166, on the Brown University campus.
In an op-ed published Tuesday, April 14, 2015, in the Providence Journal, Brown University President Christina Paxson shows how the Jewelry District can be the cornerstone of a bright future for Rhode Island — “a vibrant ecosystem of academics, commerce, and innovation.”
