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You can see the crowd before you can read the signs. Engineers, physicians, scientists, students, and businesspeople mingle at this year’s science symposium, “Frontiers of Tissue Engineering,” cosponsored by Radcliffe and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “It was so popular, we had to shut down registration,” says Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard University, later that day as we talk in her office.

It has been six years since the Radcliffe Institute was established—six years of growth and evolution. I ask Faust to tell me a little about the early days of the science program at Radcliffe. “Right from the start,” she says, “I had many people say to me, ‘You should give up on having science at Radcliffe. The logistics are impossible. It’s just too difficult.’” She gives me a small grin. Leaning forward, she asks, “Did you see the crowd for the tissue-engineering symposium today?” I nod. Faust says, “It was clear to me from the outset that science needed to be an important commitment for the new institute and a key part of its interdisciplinary identity.”

When Faust was appointed dean in 2000, she assembled a committee of eminent scholars from across the country to advise her. One was Shirley M. Tilghman, president of Princeton University and a professor of molecular biology. Tilghman says, “One of Drew’s goals was to bring scholars and artists who were grappling with critically important questions of the day to Cambridge. Given the significant impact of science in our world, it seemed essential to have the voices of scientists in the Radcliffe milieu.”

(From left) James T. Costa RI ’05, Rachel S. Goldman RI ’06

The person who made the science program a reality is Barbara J. Grosz, Radcliffe’s dean of science and Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “From the beginning, we wanted Radcliffe to be a convening force, bringing scientists and nonscientists from a variety of fields and geographic areas together,” she says. “We wanted to foster collaboration among scientists of absolute excellence and tie them into the greater Harvard and Boston-area communities.” Using her own scientific expertise as a foundation, Grosz was able to recruit a diverse group of leading scientists. Over the past six years, the science program has grown to include a host of lectures, panel discussions, symposia, and seminars.

“Barbara has displayed a keen sense of management skill, leadership, and innovation,” says Thomas Sakmar, the Richard M. and Isabel P. Furlaud Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Rockefeller University and a member of the science advisory committee at Radcliffe. “In developing the program, she has been acutely aware of the Radcliffe mission and has allowed the program to expand so that it now plays a vital role in science education and outreach.” This is especially clear in interactions with the Harvard science community. Radcliffe brings in top scientists who often work closely with Harvard faculty members.

John Wakeley, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard, believes that “the interdisciplinary program at Radcliffe is a crucial part of science at Harvard, because it erodes the barriers to communication between scientists and the broader community.” Wakeley also points out that the Radcliffe Fellowship Program offers those on the Harvard science faculty the opportunity to take sabbaticals while staying in the area—often critical for laboratory scientists. Venkatesh Narayanamurti, the John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor and dean of engineering and applied sciences and a professor of physics, agrees, saying, “The Radcliffe fellows program has been invaluable in adding new colleagues to the broader science and engineering community at Harvard for extended periods of time. The fellowships also provide an important recruiting tool for Harvard faculty.”

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At the heart of Radcliffe’s science program are the fellows. Each year, fifty outstanding scholars and artists convene at Radcliffe, about a third of whom are scientists, engineers, or mathematicians. Their projects range from string theory to artificial intelligence to evolutionary biology. The number of applications to the program has tripled over the past six years, and more laboratory scientists are applying than ever before. “We were told it would be impossible for scientists to leave their labs, but we make it work,” says Judith Vichniac, director of the fellowship program. That may mean partnering fellows with research groups at Harvard or MIT, or supporting fellows who need to keep in contact with their research groups back home.

“The science fellows contribute enormously to the fellowship classes through their presentations,” Vichniac adds. “The way they help their nonscientist colleagues understand difficult scientific problems could be a model for how universities educate nonscientists.”

The current fellows offer a perfect example of making laboratory science work at Radcliffe. Cassandra L. Fraser RI ’07 is a professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia. Her research group synthesizes and characterizes biocompatible metal-containing polymers. Such polymers can self-assemble into films and other nanostructures, giving them exciting potential for use in drug-delivery systems or medical devices. In addition, a number of the metallo-biomaterials that Fraser has created have fluorescent properties. “They have a beautiful glow,” she says. “Some of them glow with varying intensity over time, or in response to oxygen levels.” Such compounds might be used in medical imaging at the cellular level, or even as tiny biosensors, detecting the level of oxygen in tumors or cardiovascular tissue, for example. Here at Radcliffe, Fraser plans to learn new characterization techniques, so she teamed up with two nearby laboratories, those of Edwin Thomas, the Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, and Daniel Nocera, the W. M. Keck Professor of Energy and a professor of chemistry at MIT. Fraser also plans to begin a more extensive investigation of the influence of metals on medicine and the environment. “I have a chronic interdisciplinary streak,” she says. “I expected a lot of the program, and that’s what I’m finding here.”

(From left) Cassandra L. Fraser RI ’07, Megan Núñez RI ’07, Salil Vadhan RI ’04

Megan Núñez RI ’07, the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Mount Holyoke College, is also a laboratory scientist. As a chemical biologist, Núez studies bacterial predators (bacteria that consume other bacteria) as well as the chemical mechanisms of DNA repair. At Radcliffe, Núñez is focusing on the base excision repair pathway, on which small modifications and mistakes in DNA are repaired and prevented from persisting and causing mutations, cancer, or cell death. “Though many of the molecular details of how enzymes in this pathway bind and excise lesions are well understood,” she says, “no one has yet answered the important question of how the enzymes find damaged bases in the first place.” Núñez has partnered with Harvard faculty member Greg Verdine, the Erving Professor of Chemistry. “I’m just thrilled to have her here,” says Verdine.

Fiona Doetsch RI ’03 was able to easily blend bench work into her time at Radcliffe by keeping her ties to Harvard as a fellow in the molecular and cellular biology department. Doetsch studies adult neurogenesis, the continual addition of new neurons to distinct regions of the adult mammalian brain. “It was very exciting to identify the stem cells that reside in specialized niches in the adult brain and to find that these germinal centers regenerate rapidly and completely following injury,” says Doetsch. At Radcliffe, she investigated the molecular control of adult neural stem cells and their progeny, work that she is continuing as an assistant professor of pathology and neurology at Columbia University Medical Center. “Radcliffe gave me the opportunity to bounce ideas off many great minds,” says Doetsch. “It was fantastic to interact with people from very different disciplines.”

Radcliffe also offers a welcome break for bench scientists who need time to write and to think. “I had been laboring over my book for some years before I came to Radcliffe,” says James T. Costa RI ’05, the H. F. and Katherine P. Robinson Professor of Biology at Western Carolina University and executive director of the University of North Carolina’s Highlands Biological Station. Costa studies social caterpillars and sawflies, spending countless hours observing them and designing experiments to explore communication, group foraging dynamics, and colony genetic structure. He finished his book The Other Insect Societies during his time at Radcliffe, and it was published by Harvard University Press in August of last year. Costa weaves together the scattered literature and his own observations about social insects other than the well-known quartet of bees, wasps, ants, and termites. He looks at the behavior and ecology of beetles, caterpillars, cockroaches, mantids, membracids, sawflies, and spiders—all insect societies that are, Costa believes, complex in certain ways and understudied. He hopes his research will provide a new framework for the study of social insects. “An interesting thing about my year at Radcliffe was that, to my surprise, I found myself spending most of my time not with fellow scientists but with artists, historians, philosophers, and novelists,” Costa says. “It was just immensely rewarding.”

The interdisciplinary nature of Radcliffe can pose a healthy challenge, however, especially for scholars in theoretical fields. Marie-France Vigneras RI ’07, a professor of mathematics at the Université de Paris 7, Denis Diderot, notes that she has been intellectually stretched at Radcliffe. Vigneras’s work falls into the branch of pure mathematics called number theory—the study of the properties of number systems, such as prime numbers or algebraic numbers. Specifically, she is interested in certain representations of groups in the Langlands program. Put forth by Robert Langlands in 1967, the Langlands program is a set of conjectures that relate number theory to both geometry and the mathematical representation of abstract groups. This is an active area of study in mathematics, and it has relevance for understanding the electro-magnetic duality in physics. “It is difficult to explain my work in pure mathematics to nonmathematicians,” says Vigneras. “But here at Radcliffe, I have had the opportunity to try to explain questions in mathematics and to relate the process of mathematics to processes in other fields.”

Lisa Randall RI ’03, a professor of physics at Harvard, is no stranger to explaining abstract concepts. Randall is a theoretical physicist who studies elementary particles and fundamental forces, with frequent forays into string theory and cosmology. One major focus of her work is the possibility of unseen spatial dimensions and the resulting ramifications, which doesn’t exactly sound like material for the lay reader. Randall thought otherwise. “I wanted to write an accessible book for people who want to understand what physicists pursuing the frontiers of knowledge are really doing,” she says. Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions (Ecco, 2005) was included on the New York Times list of 100 notable books of 2005. It is the result of three years of researching, writing, and editing, part of which Randall completed during her fellowship year at Radcliffe. “Radcliffe is a great resource,” she says. “I frequently encourage people from Harvard and beyond to apply.”

(From left) Marie-France Vigneras RI ’07, Abeer Alwan RI ’07

For some, the fellowship year offers a chance to set off in a different direction. Abeer Alwan RI ’07, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles, directs UCLA’s Speech Processing and Auditory Perception Laboratory. Her research group studies the mechanisms of human speech production and perception, and then applies the results to improving speech-processing systems and bioengineering devices related to speech and hearing. Alwan has been interested in understanding speech perception under noisy conditions. She conducted a number of experiments in which carefully synthesized speechlike noises, complex tones, and natural speech were played for research subjects in environments with varying levels and kinds of background noise. At Radcliffe, Alwan is developing procedures to predict perceptual confusions among various speech sounds, and also exploring a new area: women in science and engineering.

Together with Frank Dobbin RI ’07, a professor of sociology at Harvard, Alwan has assembled a group of fellows interested in examining the roles of women in science and engineering and the impediments to their greater participation. “We’ve had a lot of interest in this group,” she says. The group meets weekly to discuss recent reports and to formulate ideas about how to effect change. Alwan and Dobbin have also benefited from Radcliffe’s Research Partnerships program, which pairs Harvard undergraduates with fellows during the fellowship year. Since 1991, nearly 500 undergraduates have participated in the program, in fields including science, public policy, gender studies, the humanities, and the arts.

Alwan and Dobbin’s undergraduate partner, Eve Meyer, is a sophomore majoring in astronomy and astrophysics. “She’s truly excellent,” Alwan says. “We’re all benefiting from having her around.” Meyer attends the weekly group meetings, keeps abreast of current reports about women in science, and gathers data for discussion. “This partnership is the perfect counterpoint to all of my basic science and laboratory classes,” she says. “I like to keep my interests broad, and our group—which looks at the sociological implications of science and women in science—is ideal.” The group plans to write a summary report by the end of the year, with recommendations for science and engineering departments on how to improve the representation and support of women.

Groups as an intellectual catalyst for ideas and collaborations are a common theme at Radcliffe. The formal and informal interaction of ideas defines the Institute. In recognition of this, the fellows program actively seeks applications from scholars who are interested in working in a cluster on a common project. Over the years, cluster topics have included cosmology, linguistics, and randomness in computation.

The key requirement for a cluster is that members’ research will benefit significantly from the opportunity for intensive collaboration. That is precisely what happened in the 2002–2003 randomness and computation cluster, according to Salil Vadhan RI ’04, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard. “Some of the work that began during our year as a cluster has led to a line of research that has occupied me and my students ever since,” he says. That cluster explored ways in which computer programs can use carefully allowed randomness to improve efficiency in computation. “A good way to think about this is to compare it with polling,” says Vadhan. “Pollsters are able to take a small sample and then come up with an answer that is very close to the actual answer, provided that the sample is random and representative of the entire population.” One of the cluster’s goals was to improve the efficiency of a computational process used to verify a mathematical proof. Over the course of the year, the members were able to make that process exponentially faster. Although their work seems abstract, the interplay of randomness and computation has many applications in algorithms, cryptography, and e-commerce.

How did the environment at Radcliffe influence the work of the cluster? Vadhan says, “Radcliffe gives you the opportunity to be immersed in the full breadth of intellectual pursuits in a way that just does not happen in busy, everyday faculty life. I’m sure that this opening of the mind benefited my research and that of the entire cluster, not only during the fellowship year, but ever since.”

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In addition to its commitment to the intellectual life of the fellows, Radcliffe is committed to disseminating knowledge, to building intellectual bridges, and to advancing the presence of women in all areas of scholarly and artistic pursuit. One way to accomplish these goals is to convene scholars from across the globe to discuss meaningful interdisciplinary issues with one another and with the public. Each year, Radcliffe hosts a science symposium and science lecture series designed for the interested layperson. The symposia, which are developed with faculty from various science departments at Harvard, feature six to eight outside experts who have been brought together to share their views and research. This year’s symposium on tissue engineering saw an outpouring of thought from across the fields of science, medicine, engineering, business, and ethics. Topics in past years have included biodiversity, designing biology, digital privacy and security, and computational biology.

(From left) Maria T. Zuber RI ’03, Hans Hofmann

Several distinguished speakers are invited to Radcliffe each year for the science lecture series and, in some years, for associated panel discussions. Topics for the lecture series may spring from research clusters (randomness and computation) or be independent of the fellows program (aging and disease, symbiosis, the molecular basis of cancer). “We actively seek to bring new faces and new ideas to Radcliffe and Harvard, especially in fields where women have been historically underrepresented,” says Barbara Grosz. In 2005–2006, a lecture series on astronomy explored the origins, formation, and evolution of stars and planets. The associated panel discussion, “The Sky’s Not the Limit: Women in Astronomy,” brought together six renowned female astronomers (one by audiotape) to tell their stories. “This panel was just fabulous,” says Grosz. “Hearing these women describe their work and their career paths was amazing. The room was packed.” In fact, the panel was so popular that it sparked the idea for one this year, “Women Surgeons: Cutting New Paths.”

Radcliffe also acts as a convening force by hosting small groups of scholars for short, intense collaborative efforts, called Exploratory Seminars and Advanced Seminars. Lasting only a few days, Exploratory Seminars bring together eight to sixteen scholars, at least one of whom is a Harvard ladder faculty member. Exploratory Seminars aren’t expected to produce finished work; typically, they jump-start collaborations and initiate research. Advanced Seminars are similar in length and attendance, but are designed to contribute published work to the community.

Although these seminars last just a few days, they produce impressive results. In the spring of 2004, an Exploratory Seminar on the study of cichlid fishes was formed under the leadership of Hans Hofmann, then a Bauer Genome Fellow at Harvard and currently an assistant professor of cell and molecular biology at the University of Texas in Austin, and William Gelbart, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. “Cichlid fish genomic data are incredibly important for comparative genomics,” says Hofmann. “The cichlid is from a point on the phylogenetic tree that is undersampled in the current list of available genome sequences.” The goal of the seminar was therefore to form a Cichlid Genome Consortium that would work toward an approval for whole-genome sequencing of the cichlid. The group composed a white paper and submitted it to the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). In 2006, the proposal was approved for four cichlid species. “This is a tremendously important step, as it will turn our fish into a real model system,” says Hofmann. “Without the seminar at Radcliffe, the Cichlid Genome Consortium might never have seen the light of day.”

Drawing people together: that is what science at Radcliffe is about, from the fellows program to the symposia and lecture series, from Exploratory and Advanced Seminars to undergraduate partnerships. Scientists and artists, established stars and junior faculty members, graduate students and undergraduates come here for space to breathe, to explore, and to think. “We are an independent agent,” says Dean Faust. “Scientists can trust us to offer a neutral place to collaborate. We don’t have any scientific agenda of our own, no research program to pursue.” When I ask her about the future of science at Radcliffe, she says with a smile, “I feel really good about it. It’s only getting better every year.”

Jillian Lokere is a Boston-based freelance writer specializing in science and medicine.

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