Name: Christina Chang/Alice Easton/Kyle Edwards/Sam Dorison/Emily Rutherford

Age: 21/24/21/23/21

Major: Chemistry/EEB/Woodrow Wilson/Woodrow Wilson/History

Hometown: Austin, TX/Chicago, IL/Pasadena, CA/Longmeadow, MA/San Diego, CA

Upperclass Eating Club/Res College/Affiliation: Butler/Independent/Terrace/Tower/2D-Coop and Rocky RCA

Who’s your favorite Princetonian, living or dead, real or fictional?

SD: Sam Seaborn.

KE: Tough call between Bruce Wayne and Chad Edwards ‘79.

ER: My mom, primarily because she is awesome, but secondarily because together she and I manage to defy every ‘legacy’ stereotype.

What’s the best meal you’ve had at Princeton?

CC: Penne integrale at Teresa Caffe followed by mascarpone-flavored ice cream at Bent Spoon.

AE: I often had cravings for Frist sushi when I was in Delhi. Sushi in a box is such a good idea.

KE: Post-finals chicken souvlaki at Hoagie Haven, which is awkwardly about a fifth the size of anything else they serve.

In one sentence, what is it you actually do all day?

SD: Eat breakfast, go to work, eat second breakfast, do some work, eat lunch, work, eat second lunch, work, go to the gym, eat dinner, watch TV with my roommate, eat second dinner, all while being addicted to gmail. It’s amazing how much you can fit in one sentence when it’s a run-on.

AE: Listen to a book on tape on the Green Line, help healthcare companies think about how to improve their performance, eat dinner with my parents and Skype people in other cities.

KE: I’m either a) in class, b) studying, c) procrastinating on a and b at Terrace meals, or d) singing with the Tigressions.

What is your greatest guilty pleasure?

CC: I’m addicted to eating muffins. If I ever see a muffin type I’ve not yet tasted, it’s my rule that I have to try it.

SD: Obscure competitive TV shows (Top Shot on the History Channel)

ER: Buying samosas from the U-Store at midnight.

What kind of research are you pursuing with the Marshall?

SD: The intersection of international security and human rights: How can countries work together to uphold human rights while protecting their citizens in the 21s century?

AE: The optimal design of intestinal worm treatment and control programs in India.

ER: I’m doing an MPhil in Modern British and European History at Oxford. I’ll be extending my current research on the intellectual history of male homosexual identity in late 19th and early 20th century Britain and America.

What is your biggest fear?

CC: Falling out love when it really matters.

SD: Being boring.

ER: Not finishing my thesis.

What’s your drink?

CC: To me, there’s nothing like freshly-squeezed orange juice with lots of pulp.

AE: Something fruity and preferably endemic to my current location. In Delhi that meant a fresh lime soda, and I’m hoping in London it’ll be a Pimm’s Cup.

KE: Coffee, especially Small World’s Organic Love. At least 4 cups a day.

What makes you laugh?

CC: The Quipfire! improv troupe, the TV show Friends, and my boyfriend’s sense of humor.

KE: Peter Zakin + Aarian Marshall.

ER: My friends’ non sequiturs and dorky jokes.

What makes you cry?

SD: The Red Sox in September.

AE: When friendly animals die in movies.

KE: Ginger haters.

When’s bedtime?

CC: 10 pm. I know that sounds early for a college student…but so does my 6 am rise time!

KE: Somewhere between 2 and 3 am generally.

ER: Around 1 am.

What’s been playing on repeat recently?

CC: Final Fantasy soundtracks, and Spanish-langugage songs, especially Julieta Venegas.

KE: Stevie Nicks’ backstage recording of Wild Heart. (Thanks, Patrick Carroll!)

ER: Handel’s Messiah. For a half-Jewish atheist, I really, really like Christmas.

Where do you do you best thinking?

SD: In my bed.

AE: On trains and buses.

KE: It used to the be basement of Fine until The Flood. This year my carrel has been a productive place, but anywhere within three minutes of coffee is acceptable.

What hangs over your bed?

SD: A South African flag from my summer in Cape Town.

AE: Every time I start thinking about decorating, it’s time to move.

KE: A couple of Klimts and a dreamcatcher. There is also a mouse/other small animal that lives in the wall next to my head and regularly wakes me up when my alarm fails.

How did you celebrate your last birthday?

CC: To celebrate my 21st, I invited 21 friends to a dinner party. We grilled outdoors, made strawberry shortcake for dessert, and watched Catch Me If You Can.

SD: Turkey and cake with my extended family. My birthday was on Thanksgiving.

KE: I turned 21 on the first day of midterms this year, so we waited to celebrate until Princetoween at Thai Village – quintessentially Princeton.

Quick! Top three things on your Princeton bucket list – go!

CC: Camp out with friends overnight on Poe Field, eat a meal at each Eating Club, and build a snowman – no, a snow squirrel!

SD: Since I’m an alum: 2012 reunions, 2013 reunions, 2014 reunions.

KE: Prospect 10 (or 11 now?), convince my friends to actually show up to an arch sing, find the way to the top of Holder.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

CC: “That is the case.”

KE: “Are you serious?” “That is wild!” “Word”

ER: My friends have been mocking me recently for responding to the inquiry of “How are you?” with Carrying on.”

Who is your mortal enemy?

CC: Lord Voldemort

AE: Whoever most recently disturbed my sleep.

KE: The Glass Ceiling.

What’s the most dangerous thing you’ve done in the past year?

AE: Taken a bus from Delhi to Leh. The scenery was beautiful, but we could see trucks that had fallen off the roads that snaked up and down the mountains, and the bus was full of crazy people.

KE: Jaywalking to Terrace.

ER: Deliberately overstaying my UK visa and then gambling on UK Border Control’s generosity to let me back into the country from France. It worked!

In 25 years, you will be…

CC: Hopefully, I’ll be conducting solar energy research at a university or National Laboratory and doing public engagement activities in order to inspire the next generation of scientists! Outside of lab, I’ll still play piano, run, travel around the globe, and maybe have a family.

AE: In a better position to answer this question.

KE: Probably still in debt.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned at Princeton?

CC: It’s a tie. 1) In Algorithms class, we learned probabilistic reasoning behind the Birthday Paradox. In a room of only 23 people, there’s a 50% chance that two or more of them have the same birthday. (2) In Organic Chemistry, we learned the reason why bleaches remove stains. They don’t necessarily remove the colored molecules from your clothes! Instead, they just chemically alter the colored molecules, so that instead of absorbing visible light, they absorb ultraviolet light – which our eyes can’t see!

SD: That a class called ‘Theory of Games’ will be much harder than you’d expect from the title.

KE: Professor Lee Silver told our class that after mentioning the genetic similarities between monkeys and humans, a student came to office hours and asked him to serve as her thesis advisor, for which she wanted to carry/give birth to a monkey-human hybrid.

What makes someone a Princetonian?

AE: Many of us have an almost fanatic sense of loyalty to each other.

SD: An excessive supply of orange and black clothing.

KE: Unabashed enthusiasm for something/anything – from electrical engineering to education policy to start ups to mountain topping and beyond.

At the most recent meeting of the Faculty of Princeton University, members voted unanimously to grant “The Trustees of Princeton University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same.”

Translation?

Basically, professors are no longer allowed to give up all rights to their work when publishing, as some academic journals now require – especially in fields like English, history, and chemical engineering. Professors usually publish without expecting compensation, but journals still charge readers around $30 per article, as anyone who’s tried to do research off campus knows. The change would let the university make their work freely available.

While professors can request waivers to the policy if a publication refuses to budge, the faculty hopes that the policy will give them extra leverage to push to retain their rights. Professor Andrew Appel, a member of the committee studying open access, said the Provost is also planning to create a public repository for their work to make it more accessible.

So, why do you care?

It’s a win for the “information wants to be free” camp, but even if you’re not an open access advocate, you can still get excited about never again needing to pay for a Pequod version of any article by a Princeton faculty member.

Appel has the full report here.

Name: Emma Yates
Age: 22
Major: Chemistry
Hometown: Coconut Creek, Florida
Eating club/residential college/affiliation: Charter/Forbes

What was your initial reaction when you found out you won the scholarship?
Immediately, it was realizing that I’d won the Churchill based on the fact that the director of the Churchill Foundation had just asked me to withdraw from the Gates. After that, it was, SCORE!

What’s the first thing you do when you wake up?
Obtain some sort of caffeinated beverage.

What’s the best meal you’ve eaten at Princeton?
I actually eat the same special order soy, whole wheat pizza at Charter every day for dinner. My friends laugh, but honestly, it’s delicious! Thanks Tom and Ramon!

When was the last time you pulled an all-nighter and why?
Honestly, I’ve never been able to figure out how people actually do that. I can’t function as a productive person if I don’t sleep at all, but with finals, papers, and fellowship interviews all clustered within a few day stretch, I averaged around 3 hours a night for a week or two. Before that it was graduate school applications: I had 5 due on the same day.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
So _________, “I mean…”

What magazines do you read?
Allure and Lucky.

What is the background on your computer?
Believe it or not it’s St. John’s College, Cambridge! My research advisor there is the Master of St. John’s.

When is bedtime?
Unless something goes horribly wrong around 1:00 or 1:30 am.

What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned at Princeton?
Please forgive my answering with two; they’re very different.

One is the degree to which the hydrophobic effect, which explains how a protein with an astronomical number of possible conformations can find its native fold based on the burial of hydrophobic residues so as to maximize the entropy of the surrounding water molecules, explains almost all of biology (Professor Hecht).

The other is that reasonable people can reasonably disagree (Professor George). It’s a simple concept, but I’ve been encouraged by how much intellectual diversity actually exists on Princeton’s campus, and I’ve so enjoyed taking part in healthy debate through the Student Bioethics Forum, the Anscombe Society, and Princeton Pro-Life.

In one sentence, what is it that you actually do all day?
I walk around excited about the fact that I am so blessed to get the chance to get my hands dirty and actually do real science that may one day improve people’s lives.

What is your greatest guilty pleasure?
Cappuccinos.

What is your motto?
Soli Deo gloria (Glory to God alone).

What’s the most dangerous thing you’ve done in the past year?
Hmmm….either falling on the ice sustaining a concussion and a cervical spine injury last February…. or there was that protein bar I took into Marquand!

What’s the last student performance you saw?
Classical Music Hour.

At age 6, what was your dream job?
I came up with this hypothesis about how to target AIDS around then, and I wanted to be a “medical researcher” in order to explore it. I’m not even kidding.

What do you hate most about Princeton?
I hate that there are so many things that I want to do that time simply won’t allow.

What are your plans for the Churchill Scholarship?
I will be studying the molecular basis of Alzheimer’s disease in Professor Chris Dobson’s lab and collaborating with Dr. Tuomas Knowles. Amyloid-beta is a neurological protein that has been implicated in pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers first thought that extracellular tangles of aggregated units of this protein were responsible for the neurological degeneration of Alzheimer’s disease. Now, researchers think that it’s actually intermediate forms on the aggregation pathway from soluble, monomeric amyloid-beta proteins to larger amyloid fibrils that are the toxic species. I’ll be looking at the structures of amyloid-beta oligomers and how it may be possible to direct these oligomers toward nontoxic forms with small molecules or other proteins.

What’s the next not-class-assigned book on your reading list?
Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis.

When was the last time you were in a car?
My boyfriend came up to visit me last weekend and we went out to dinner and then to Wegmans in his car.

Who, or what, is your mortal enemy?
Fear.

What makes you laugh?
When I realize I can’t speel.

What makes someone a Princetonian?
A willingness and desire to give their everything to impact one small part of their world.

Princeton researchers are chargin' up their lazer (sic). Photo credit: Frank Wojciechowski

That’s right. Take that, Austin Powers.

Princeton’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering has developed a new laser that can detect and identify trace chemicals in the air, which is 1000 times more sensitive than the laser technology being used today.

With funding from the Office of Naval Research, Princeton’s engineers expect that this laser could eventually produce a remote, bomb-scanning military device small enough to be mounted on a tank. As professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Richard Miles told TG Daily:

“In general, when you want to determine if there are contaminants in the air you need to collect a sample of that air and test it…but with remote sensing you don’t need to do that. If there’s a bomb buried on the road ahead of you, you’d like to detect it by sampling the surrounding air, much like bomb-sniffing dogs can do, except from far away.”

Oh, it can also detect pollution. Technology that both the army and the peace-loving environmentalists can agree on? Science, you amaze me.

Read more about our super awesome lasers here.

Scientists have long known that exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells, and some believe that’s the reason working out tends to have an antidepressant effect. A study by Princeton scientists has found that cells that are created from running don’t respond to stress in the same way regular ol’ lazy-people cells do, according to an article in the New York Times.

These “exercise-created” cells express fewer stress genes than regular cells do in stressful situations. If you’re a rat.

The researchers experimented with two groups of rats, only one of which was allowed to run. Then the rats were made to swim in cold water (which the Times tells us helpfully, “they don’t like to do”) and their brain cells were monitored.

The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm.

Other studies have shown that this effect is consistent with not only physical stress, but also emotional stress. In one experiment, rats were injected with an oxidative chemical that artificially raised their stress levels and then placed in an unfamiliar area. Rats that had exercised were “relatively nonchalant” and explored the area. Rats that did not exercise hid in dark corners. So.

“It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they’re more equipped to handle stress in other forms,” says Michael Hopkins, a graduate student affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory at Dartmouth, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion. “It’s pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors.”

OK, and here is the part where I actually motivate you to start going to the gym. Working out will help your brain cells not die.

Anxiety in rodents and people has been linked with excessive oxidative stress, which can lead to cell death, including in the brain. Moderate exercise, though, appears to dampen the effects of oxidative stress.