Panhia Lee

Meeting of the minds leads to brain science technology venture

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After researchers spent years developing an artificial intelligence technology to monitor lab animal behavior, a team of recently graduated entrepreneurs is investigating its commercial potential.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – Brown undergraduates Adrienne Tran and Max Song didn’t just take Thomas Serre’s machine vision course in Fall 2015 – they ultimately took an innovation from his lab to consider its potential for commercialization.

The technology, which Serre’s lab has developed with Brown colleague Kevin Bath over the last several years, automates the observation of research animals. Normally students and other research assistants must painstakingly review hours of video footage to determine when and for how long a mouse sleeps, wakes, feeds, drinks, grooms another mouse, nurses its pups and so on. Those factors are key to understanding the potential effects of an experimental intervention on the mouse’s behavior.

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Brown launches new program for engineering and science executives

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Brown University is now accepting applications for a new Executive Master in Science and Technology Leadership (EMSTL) program, which is designed to prepare engineering, science, and technology professionals to be successful in industry.

The 16-month program of study is “for highly accomplished professionals with five to 15 years of experience in technical fields who are ready to broaden their impact and achieve greater success as business and organizational leaders,” according to the university.

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Summer Internships with a Twist

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The tech startup culture born in the ’90s has given rise to all kinds of entrepreneurial offshoots, including what rising senior Callie Clayton 17 TX refers to as “citizen science.” As one of this summer’s 10 Maraham STEAM Fellows, Clayton is interning at an innovation hub in Brooklyn: Genspace, one of 30 community bio-labs that have sprung up across the country.

Open to science teachers, businesspeople, journalists and other amateur scientists, Genspace offers affordable access to a lab where people can conduct individual research. Clayton has already met a visiting designer exploring how sound waves affect the growth of Kombucha (fermented tea) and an industrial designer working on biogenetically generated materials for use in home goods, such as lampshades.

“What I’m really interested in is how little government regulation there is around citizen science,” says Clayton. “That allows for a lot of innovation.”

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Finding their Royce

For 20 years, Brown’s Royce fellows have set out on carefully planned independent research projects across the world – but the discoveries that greet them aren’t always what they expect. 

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – When Caitie Whelan trekked to India in the summer of 2006, her goals had been clearly articulated in her successful Royce Fellowship application: she wanted to work with the Merasi, a community of marginalized lower-caste musicians in rural India who live in extreme poverty, to create an archive of their 38-generation-old folk music.

But as she traveled the hot, dusty roads of the Thar Desert, stopping in dung huts to talk to the Merasi people about their musical ambitions over cups of hot tea, she came to realize that preserving their music was only part of their hopes. What the Merasi desired above all, she recalls, was not an archive of their history but a provision for their future: education for their children, many of whom had never attended school.

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