Brandeis Magazine

“I certainly very much felt I was a woman throughout my career. That is, I never felt like one of the guys.”

— Mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck, MA’66, PhD’68, H’08, the first
woman to win an Abel Prize, in The New York Times (March 19).

“As a physicist, you hope that the phenomenon of life is not just about the specific chemistry and DNA and molecules that make living things on planet Earth — that it’s broader. What is that broader thing? I don’t know. But maybe this is lifting a little bit of the veil off that mystery.”

— Physics professor Jané Kondev, on understanding the decoding
strategy of cells, in Quanta Magazine (March 13).

“They don’t have a boss. They don’t have a pope. They don’t have a prince. They don’t have an employer who’s telling them these are the rules.”

— Amelia LeClair, Women’s Studies Research Center scholar,
on 19th-century female composers’ penchant for taking
creative risks, on WBUR’s The ARTery website (March 29).

“I refer to myself as an old person. One of my reasons for doing it is in solidarity with other old people.”

— Margaret Gullette, Women’s Studies Research Center scholar, on changes in
life-stage nomenclature, in The Boston Globe (March 7).

“‘A Night at the Garden’ plays like a message from a time capsule sent forward by a distant epoch, at once a rediscovery of erased history and a past-is-prologue warning to the present.”

— Thomas Doherty, American studies professor, on an Oscar-nominated
short documentary about a 1939 pro-Nazi rally in Madison
Square Garden, in Tablet magazine (Feb. 21).

“While you can always find examples of individual Jewish or black voters throwing their hands up in frustration and leaving the Democratic Party in favor of the Republican Party, the plural of ‘anecdote’ (as I regularly tell my students) is not ‘data.’ There’s no empirical evidence suggesting that Jewish voters are switching parties en masse.”

— Matthew Boxer, assistant research professor at the Cohen
Center for Modern Jewish Studies, on Jewish voters and the Democratic
Party, on The Washington Post’s PostEverything website (March 22).

“It’s tempting, for example, to see how impressive and accomplished and happy someone seems to be on social media, and to compare that to your own less-than-perfect existence. But remember: All the ‘perfect things’ you see on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Snapchat may not be so perfect in reality, and it’s a waste of your own time and energy to use social media as a mirror for judging your own personal status and sense of accomplishment.”

— Andy Molinsky, professor of international management and
organizational behavior, advising college seniors not to stress out
about post-graduation life, in Forbes (Jan. 24).

“Your heart will pump fluids. Your intestines will pump fluids. Now, if we want to pump oil through a pipe, we have to have a pump at one end and create pressure to drive it. Why can’t we have tubing that consumes energy from the fluid that flows through it, much as our heart consumes the energy from the blood that flows through it, and then contract?”

— Physics professor Seth Fraden, on designing
nature-inspired technology, on “PBS NewsHour” (Feb. 6).