Category Archives: In Short

Extras: How Do You Define Yourself?

How do you define yourself?

That was the simple—and surprisingly complex—question at the heart of the 2015 Diversity Symposium.

Keynote speaker and advocate Thomas Smith viewed the issue as a matter of triumph through adversity, while University of Massachusetts faculty member Dr. Kerrita Mayfield saw it as a problem of integrity.

In their student addresses, which began a day of workshops, Maranie Harris-Kuiper ’15, Verdi Degbey ’16, Anthony Leung ’15, and Cameron Stanley ’16 strove to answer the question through the multifaceted lenses of race, culture, sexual orientation, and religion.
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Getting Results: Extras

WNF14-7455Emily Grussing ’15 was in AP Calculus when she learned the news: a scientific paper she researched and co-authored had just been accepted for publication.

“It was the greatest thing. I didn’t expect to get published,” Ms. Grussing said. “It wasn’t something I even believed was possible.”

Ms. Grussing had spent the summer interning at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine where she was charged with researching links between chemicals and cancers. To do so, Ms. Grussing learned coding basics, dove into online research, and analyzed and constructed scientific networks.

“I loved being in the environment of the lab,” Ms. Grussing said, adding, “I never had to do such self-learning in my life before.”

The resulting paper, which Ms. Grussing helped write, was accepted by the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, where it was presented on January 8. The paper will also be published on PubMed Central, an archive of scientific publications.

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