The sounds of the timpani, marimba, xylophone, and snare and bass drums are sweet music to the ears of Meisha Bynoe, a native of the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines and a recent recipient of a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Gilliam Graduate Fellowship. Bynoe says that playing these instruments helped her achieve a perfect 5.0 grade point average at the Massachuse...
Darnell Diggs and his twin sister are the youngest of 15 children who grew up in the small Alabama town of Brundidge to parents who did not finish high school. Their parents did value education. "Our parents inspired us to work hard at school, and if you didn't, you got disciplined. That was encouragement enough," Diggs recalls. Thirty-four-year-old Darnell is now Dr. Diggs, a physicist working a...
The distance between Mexicali, just across the border from the U.S. in Baja California, Mexico, to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is approximately 3000 miles. For 24-year-old Luis León (pictured left), a third-year doctoral student in immunology at Harvard, the trip is one he never dreamed of making. For León, who was recently named one of the first recipients of a Gilliam Gradua...
It's a long trip from Bear River High School, in the small northern California town of Grass Valley, to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (N.C. A&T) in Greensboro, North Carolina. The distance is both geographical and cultural. But, for Geoffrey Bothun (pictured left), 29, a Bear River graduate, it has been a pleasant trip so far. As a postdoctoral fellow, Bothun establis...
Kétévi Assamagan has spent his whole professional life preparing to search for the unknown. From the time he received his doctorate in experimental nuclear and high-energy physics from the University of Virginia in 1995, Assamagan has dedicated his career to developing detectors and software to explore still-uncharted areas of particle physics. This exploration includes the search for dimensions ...
Jessica Maye, a linguist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, wants to know why babies are so much better at acquiring language than monkeys--or even human adults.
