Recent Graduates Make Tracks in Science

“In science, the most interesting stuff is happening at the interfaces between disciplines. There’s a blurring of traditional divisions. Think about nanotechnology, for example—a combination of chemistry, materials science and physics. Right now at Apple, I get to work at the intersection of business, engineering and design.”

Aaron Raphel ’96
Global Supply Manager,
iPod Worldwide Operations,
Apple Computer, Inc.

“Apple is a company that cares a lot about the form and function of our products,” Aaron says. “On the form side, we spend a lot of time thinking about the ‘engineering’ of color, gloss, texture, material and shape. On the function side, we have to control the mechanical, electrical, thermal and chemical properties of our products so that they work well for our customers. Engineers and designers develop all of the detailed specifications. I’m a member of the operations team, which is responsible for the tactical execution of the product.”

Aaron’s group—iPod global supply management—works with the design team to identify best-in-class suppliers, predominantly in Asia, who manufacture all of the plastic and metal enclosure parts of the product. The pieces of Aaron’s puzzle include meeting iPod’s quality, volume and cost needs.

Aaron enjoys working on the execution side of engineering: the “glue” between design and manufacturing.

“I’ve always been fascinated by how things worked,” Aaron says, tracking his interest in engineering. He loved science and math through his 13 years at Milton and still remembers certain honors physics demonstrations, chemistry labs and “honors bio” projects. After Milton he thought chemical engineering would be his focus, but he found he was more interested in physical, mechanical areas. “MIT exposed me to a lot of things I didn’t even know about. During freshman year, I took an introductory materials science course that highlighted current engineering challenges. We learned about fuel cells, three-dimensional printing, biological implants and metallic superalloys. I was hooked.”

After college, Aaron joined Surface Logix, a biotechnology start-up company developing some novel approaches to drug development and testing. The company continues to grow, with its first drug recently passing Phase I clinical trials. Aaron used this entrepreneurial experience as a springboard to learn more about business—specifically, operations—in MIT’s Leaders for Manufacturing (LFM) program. This program between MIT’s School of Engineering and Sloan School of Management, covers everything from product design to supply chain management to operations strategy and global manufacturing. The experience turned Aaron to the confluence of engineering (manufacturing) and business, and ultimately to Apple, where he is excited to work today.

“My rule,” Aaron says, “is that I’ll keep doing something I enjoy until I stop learning, and then I’ll start looking for the next exciting opportunity.”

“In college, once I took Introduction to Mechatronics, I knew that I had found the specialization that would stick: it taught mechanical engineering students how to work with electrical circuitry and software—to build robots and mechanical systems.”

Daniel Jacobs ’01
Master’s candidate, mechanical engineering, Stanford University

Today, Daniel spends most of his time at Stanford’s Robotic Locomotion laboratory, or the LOCOLab as it is locally known.

An accomplished jazz musician at Milton, and an athlete who played basketball and ran track, Daniel is intrigued by the work of this lab, which, he says, “is to develop the mechanical and electrical systems necessary to test theories of locomotion.” Daniel is a master’s candidate in the design division of Stanford’s department of mechanical engineering.

“The robots we are working on are bio-mimetic: They mimic animals—how animals move, and specifically, in the current project, how to create and control a quadrupedal gallop.

“While small robots have successfully been designed to move at high speeds in terms of body lengths per second,” Daniel says, “we are working on a large-scale machine designed to gallop at around six meters per second (12 miles per hour). The different scale presents numerous challenges, such as power delivery, energy efficiency and shock absorption. We want to design and build a machine with the capability to traverse difficult terrain, to deal with positive or negative obstacles such as divots or bumps, just as animals in this type of environment would—like horses and mountain goats—easily and quickly.”

Daniel’s main thrust this year is to develop his own research, and he is interested in foot design as it relates to locomotion. “Right now, the machine we are working on is around 180 pounds, 5–6 feet long and when it contacts the ground experiences between 8g and 9g of acceleration. Unfortunately, in the early design stages, the feet were neglected. Until this point, the focus had been more on getting the legs coordinated, and controlling the thrusting system that powers the liftoff. Now, there’s a need to work on stabilization, getting some control. The current foot design is a simple aluminum hemisphere, covered in a piece of bike tire for extra traction. However, in both humans and animals the foot plays an essential part in reducing the shock from ground contact. When you jump and then land, your tendons dampen the shock and help you stabilize. But this robot is rigid aluminum. Not only does the large shock prematurely wear on the body of the machine, the large shocks can also saturate the sensors causing an error between the calculated and actual position of the vehicle in flight, which can cause instability of the system. For us, instability means a heavy and expensive machine hits the ground at high speed. By designing a bio-mimetic foot that can function more closely to the actual foot of quadrupeds, I hope to increase the stability of the machine and extend the lifetime of the components.”

Thinking about these challenges helps him understand the problems in the field and the opportunities for his doctoral thesis. Daniel prepared for what he knew would be a career in some aspect of math and science by purposefully shaping the broadest high-school experience possible. Not only did he love the time-consuming interests of jazz and athletics, he doubled up on languages, and took AP math. He figured that taking the three major sciences would position him adequately to be accepted at a good engineering school, his goal; but in view of the specialization that was inevitable later on, he wanted breadth. He used the same rubric at Stanford, being careful to take general preparatory courses, while he looked carefully around the departments, learning what professors were working on what problems and projects. Ultimately, his introductory course in mechatronics hit the right nerve, and he’s been happy every since.

“One reason mechatronics is great,” Daniel says, “is that it is very broad and interdisciplinary. It demands that you bring several threads together: mechanical design, hardware design and circuitry, and software in the creation of something amazing.”

“Conservation biology develops the methodologies to protect natural systems while considering the role that humans play in the natural world. Many conservation biologists are driven by the belief that decisions about the natural world should be based on the best scientific information. They study the ecological, economic, and social aspects or of a natural system to inform managers and policy makers about its inner workings.”

Laurie Richmond ’98
Master’s candidate, conservation biology,
University of Minnesota
Fellow, MacArthur Program,
Interdisciplinary Center for Global Change

The notion of focusing her science on environmental justice and community-based science began during a semester in Ecuador. It crystallized after college graduation while Laurie was working at the environmental office of a Native American tribe in northern New Mexico: Taos Pueblo. Laurie was the water-quality specialist there and helped organize the water-quality monitoring program. There she learned how cultural, economic and political concerns play an important role in environmental monitoring and management.

“Working at Taos opened my eyes to new directions you could go in science,” Laurie says. “At Milton and Middlebury, I developed a set of environmental ‘ideals’ about how conservation should work. When I began working with local communities, some of these worldviews were shattered. I observed that environmental issues are just one part of people’s livelihood and concern. I also began to learn how environmental science can help people and communities protect their natural resources and consequently their health. Certain communities did not always have access to the funds and technical expertise to examine and remediate important environmental concerns. I am interested in defining scientific study so it provides technical information and is directed at communities that normally do not have access to those resources—specifically, in creating scientific partnerships with native American and Alaska native communities.”

As a first-year student in the conservation biology Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota, Laurie is in the fisheries and wildlife track. Minnesota attracted her because she is able to work closely with a professor who has extensive experience working with tribes in northern Minnesota on fisheries issues.

“I am interested in fish population dynamics and the science behind the management of sustainable fisheries—how environmental change affects fish populations that are economically and culturally valuable. I would like to form partnerships with Alaska Native communities to explore how climate variability affects populations of the Pacific halibut. I would like to combine scientific inquiry into how halibut have responded to climate change in the past (through an analysis of the fish’s calcium parts, called otoliths) with indigenous knowledge about changes both in the fishery and climate over time. The shape and direction of my research should respond to what communities could use in their decision making.”

Laurie’s graduate work is funded through a fellowship with the University of Minnesota’s Interdisciplinary Center for Global Change (ICGC). An interdisciplinary and cross-cultural group of faculty and graduate students, they study global change, especially in the developing world—including issues such as peace, conflict, security, social and environmental change, justice, human rights, development and international cooperation. Laurie brings a scientist’s approach to the discussion that includes students of economics, political science, history, gender studies, law and public policy. “The differences in how we approach and speak about the same problems are fascinating,” Laurie says. “This type of education that fosters interdisciplinary communication is very important. We are experiencing problems that span disciplines and require communication among disciplines, and individuals who can ‘speak the language’ of several different fields.

“My traditional education at Milton and then at Middlebury gave me a strong base to support a career in the general direction of science, Laurie says. “However, the decision to do more community-based science and to think about the role of environmental science in the developing world stemmed from my experiences outside the classroom.”

“Molecular biology was the first area of science that I could see myself doing, the first time I could imagine work I could do that would make a real-world difference. I’m in molecular biology because of the disease and human welfare aspect of it.”

Molly Perkins ’00
Fellow, Oxford-NIH Graduate Partnership
in Biomedical Science

After a year working at Cold Spring Harbor, Molly Perkins is a molecular biologist in the Oxford-NIH Graduate Partnership in Biomedical Science. She is working at Oxford for two years and will follow that with two years at NIH in Bethesda, Maryland.

“I study HIV and its interaction with another virus, GB virus C,” Molly explains. “GBV-C (also called hepatitis G virus) is related to hepatitis C but doesn’t seem to cause any disease. People who are infected with HIV-1 and GBV-C at the same time tend to do better than people who only have HIV. Individuals who have both viruses tend to have lower HIV viral loads and higher helper T cell counts, and they tend to have longer survival than people who have HIV but not GBV-C. Scientists are trying to figure out what causes this effect.”

With other scientists, Molly is investigating the nature of the interaction between the two viruses. Little is known about this virus. It has the same causal agents as HIV and roughly 2 percent of Americans have it right now. Mechanisti-cally, what is happening between the two viruses? Do they infect the same cell? That would affect the disease pathway. Inflam-mation has an effect on disease. Does this virus affect inflammation? Does GBV-C affect the immune response?

“These questions might lead eventually to a drug that could mimic the action of GBV-C,” Molly says, “and doctors are also considering a trial where they would deliberately infect HIV patients with GBV-C to try to induce this beneficial effect.”

Entering high school, Molly “loved math and hated science.” Physics turned her around. In fact, she claims that she owes passing her first-year advanced chemistry course at Harvard to taking Physics II at Milton with Tom Sando. “He was militant about teaching thermodynamics; he felt that was the province and responsibility of physics teachers. That came to bear on my life exactly one year later in chemistry.

“Then,” Molly says, “the molecular focus of biology hooked me. I like molecular biology because it’s so complicated. Milton was more focused on molecular biology than the AP course is, or than other high-school programs are, and that’s what the focus of biology at Harvard was for me. I was extremely well prepared for Harvard biology, where they start with genetics, and I was comfortable with that. I know that the labs Diane Gilbert-Diamond (Milton science department) is doing in molecular biology are the ones I was doing at Harvard, researching my thesis.

During her freshman year in college, Molly began thinking she would go into applied math, or history and politics. Then, during the spring semester, she took genetics and never stopped taking biology. “I finished my molecular biology courses early, because of the good preparation at Milton, and therefore could take graduate courses in immunology while I was still an undergrad, and then go right on to Cold Spring Harbor.”

From Cold Spring Harbor Molly sought out a place in the Oxford-NIH program because “my interest,” she says, “is disease driven, human welfare driven; this is the aspect of science that is thrilling to me.”

Cathleen Everett

 

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