Dr. Mark Brongersma and his team at Stanford University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering get excited about using tiny structures to manipulate light.


Image: ©Mark Brongersma
 

Dr. Mark Brongersma and his team at Stanford University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering get excited about using tiny structures to manipulate light.
 

This dynamic is all around us. It’s light interacting with molecules in the air to make the sky look blue and water droplets to make clouds look white.

But when you think tiny, Dr. Brongersma is working with particles 10,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. His research is helping make chips run faster, clothes cool bodies efficiently, and hydrogen fuel emerge from water.
 

In this interview, we explore how infinitely small-scale research has massive real-world impact. Dr. Brongersma reflects on his work to date, the benefit of working with industry, and how to attract brilliant minds to compelling research.
 

Silicon crystals

Mark Brongersma comes from a family of scientists and professors. Eager to follow in their footsteps, at the age of 6 he projected how long it would take him to become a professor and was upset when he realized it would take him 30 years.
 

Nineteen years later, he was earning a PhD at the AMOLF research Laboratory in Amsterdam and working with Albert Polman, a pioneer in the field of nanophotonics.
 

At the time there was substantial interest to see if electronic chips could be made faster by using light particles to transfer data, in addition to electrical currents.

Dr. Brongersma explained the research: “To see whether it would be possible to use light, we needed to develop some of the smallest light sources and ways to transport light on the chip.”
 

Researchers discovered that silicon, the main material computer chips are made of, can emit light when chopped into little silicon bits, or nanocrystals. Brongersma worked on demonstrating how the size and shape of the silicon crystals could be used to control the effectiveness and color of the light emission.

Later, he also found that light can be guided along metallic particle arrays and wires on the chip. Following these early findings, during his postdoc at the California Institute of Technology, which to this day has an ongoing collaboration with AMOLF, he studied how to make the tiniest wires that could transport light on a chip.

His amazing research solved an important piece of the puzzle of how to make super-fast energy-saving computer chips.
 

Soon after conducting that research, Dr. Brongersma became a professor at Stanford University, and achieved his childhood goal in less than 30 years.
 

Keeping science real

Dr. Brongersma loves technology and advocates strongly for the importance of applied research: “Often the best fundamental questions come from technological questions where you suddenly have to think in a completely different way.”
 

Through his work at Stanford, he has successfully translated his science into applied technologies by co-founding a startup, Rolith. The company, which was later acquired  by Metamaterials Technologies Inc., applies nanostructures to large areas, for example, in the windows of the flight deck to protect pilots from laser attacks.
 

This solved an important problem, as there are roughly 20 laser beam attacks in the US every night. The attackers, mainly children near airports, point lasers at pilots when planes are taking off or landing, and the nano-coated glass blocks the light of the laser pointer, but still allows the pilot to clearly see the outside world.

Reflecting his commitment to applied research, about 30 percent to 40 percent of his work at Stanford is funded by industry, and this has enabled ongoing innovation in his work.
 

“Government research funding has stayed more or less steady, and at the same time, companies have realized how we can use this knowledge of how to make and use nanostructures and optics to make better components,” he said. “That together has moved our research, a little bit more from fundamental research to more applied research.”
 

In an industry collaboration with Samsung, which has entered the race for self-driving cars, Dr. Brongersma works on LIDAR scanning laser beams.

With company ENEL Green Power, he’s implementing state-of-the-art solar cells that have nanostructures on top to increase their efficiency. The solar cells that he is working on in his lab are so thin, “about a hundredth the thickness of a human hair,” that they become flexible. This result in easy applications, for example, to the wings of an airplane or other automotive vehicles.
 

Finally, with augmented reality (AR) startup Magic Leap, he’s innovating  to improve AR glasses, which today are still bulky. By applying an invisible coating of nanostructures on the glasses that capture and redirect light, they can look like regular eyeglasses and become more user friendly, allowing the wearer to move and see virtual images blended in their true surroundings, without feeling nauseous.
 

These extensive experiences with applied technologies have shown Dr. Brongersma that collaboration with industry should be done thoughtfully.

For example, Stanford facilitates collaboration with industry through an affiliate program. For an annual fee of $150,000, a company can have active engagement with research programs and meet faculty and the brightest students.
 

This creates a win-win dynamic as money flows into research and infrastructure at the university, while students hear directly from industry leaders about the problems they are trying to solve and where they need support and new collaborations.
 

The Netherlands is one of the key players in the field of photonics and it has played a leading role in optics since the discoveries of Willebrord Snellius and Christiaan Huygens 400 years ago.
 

“The Netherlands is especially good at fundamental research,” Dr. Brongersma said, and he believes some university groups may consider working more closely with industry. “Get more companies involved to push to keep science real, because some people do brilliant things that are completely useless. So why not try to solve really hard problems that industry has?”
 

He stressed that universities should do work that companies think is too far out: “You need to have that 10- to 20-year horizon for research.”
 

Attracting the best of the best

Dr. Brongsmera is also committed to supporting and cultivating talented young researchers. Seven out of his eight last graduate students all went to Apple.

With tech giants just around Stanford’s corner, it can be difficult for universities to compete for talent. “Graduate students starting at Apple earn basically my salary,” he said, acknowledging that “with a faculty salary, it is extremely challenging to live in Silicon Valley.”
 

Nobody knows what Apple is working on, but rumor has it that Apple is also working on AR glasses. “There’s a competition, and Apple should be investing in the research and my group, but their way is to just buy up the talent.”
 

Yet, he is also excited for his students because they land jobs in a matter of weeks. “Part of that excitement is that the things that we are working on are really making an impact now,” he said.
 

Government could definitely play a role in attracting the best scientists, Dr. Brongersma thinks. When he was in high school, the US was investing heavily in science, making competitive offers to attract the best scientists from all over the world.
 

“That is, I think, the reason behind the strength of the US economy and it’s going to be the detriment of the US economy to stop bringing the best people here.”

He points out that China today is offering faculty incredible startup packages and resources, making it attractive for the best Chinese students to return to China.

“The costs of brilliant people leaving are hard to put or calculate on paper.” He stressed that governments should make it attractive to bring in more talent: “This is going to cost money, but the long-term benefit of bringing the best people in your country is worth any input,” and points to the incredible economic impact of Stanford in the Bay Area.
 

Companies that were formed by Stanford entrepreneurs generate trillions of dollars in revenue annually and have created millions of jobs since the 1930s. A study showed that if the companies that were founded by Stanford alumni formed an independent nation, it would be the 10th largest economy in the world.

How to make it attractive to bring in brilliant scientists? In addition to money it includes resources and a good quality of life: “That goes from good infrastructure, to transportation to great restaurants to alI the things that if you ask a young person, what do you value, about living in a certain city or place? If you can make deals, great things happen.”
 

Could the Netherlands make it attractive for him to return? One of the things that makes Stanford unique is the large size and international nature of its programs. He loves working with so many different people that bring diverse ideas.
 

“That would be harder to give up,” he said. With a competitive salary it could be interesting to return. Maybe in the role of a dean he could help universities or other organizations move into new directions. “I have many romantic thoughts of going back to Amsterdam and obviously great, amazing science is done in the Netherlands. So, I would not exclude the idea.”
 

Bio & CV

1969: Born in Geldrop, the Netherlands

1988-1994: Master’s in physics, Eindhoven University of Technology

1994-1998: PhD in material science, FOM AMOLF Amsterdam

1998-2001: Postdoctoral research fellow, California Institute of Technology: research in chip scale photonics and electronics

2001-present Professor Stanford University, Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Dr. Brongersma received the National Science Foundation Career Award, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the International Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences

 Dutch computational engineer Dr. Margot Gerritsen of Stanford University in California uses mathematics to solve a wide variety of complex problems and is recognized as one of the top teachers in her field.


Image: ©Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service

Dr. Margot Gerritsen uses mathematics to solve a wide variety of complex problems: identifying how to produce oil and gas in a more environmentally friendly way, studying coastal ocean flows, improving sail design for America’s Cup yachts, and designing search engines for digital archives.

She has even used math to model the wings of a pterosaur, a flying reptile in the dinosaur era, for the National Geographic documentary Sky Monsters.

Margot is a computational engineer and professor of energy resources engineering at Stanford University in California.

Aside from her scientific work, Margot is recognized as one of the top teachers in her field. She teaches courses in computational mathematics, energy and sustainability, and has received several awards for her excellence in teaching, such as the Tau Beta Pi award at Stanford.

She is also passionate about the role of women in STEM, and is co-founder and co-director of the global Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference and host of the WiDS podcasts, inspiring women all over the world to enter the field.
 

Biking to the sea

Dr. Gerritsen loved mathematics from an early age. In sixth grade, her teacher started every morning with a five-minute head-calculation competition, which she often won, and in high school she viewed math problems as fun, complex puzzles. Overtime, math became much more applied and exciting. “I always wanted to understand the world around me a little bit more,” Margot said. “I am intrigued by that. Math is a wonderful language that can be used to express ideas and deepen understanding.”

Born and raised in a small town near the coast in the Southwest of the Netherlands, she often biked to the sea as a little girl. She would stare mesmerized, wondering what would be beyond it.

Years later, when she had finished her masters in applied mathematics in Delft, Dr. Gerritsen won an international graduate scholarship. Eager to explore what was on the other side of the ocean, she chose to study at the University of Colorado at Denver. While in Colorado, she missed the ocean badly, and after one year she left to pursue her Ph.D. in scientific computing and computational mathematics at Stanford University, much closer to the water than landlocked Denver.
 

First female faculty member

She felt an enormous buzz at Stanford. The environment was competitive, entrepreneurial, and provided a wealth of opportunities. Anything seemed possible.

Stanford was also very intense, Margot said, especially since she was one of the very few women in her field. “People notice you and you are being scrutinized, and I always felt this pressure to perform,” she said. “It is a bit exhausting.” After she finished her Ph.D., she sought a less competitive environment and moved to New Zealand, where she worked for five years as a lecturer at the University of Auckland.

Yet, she began to miss the buzz of intensity that was pervasive at Stanford. Five years later, when she was offered a job as a professor in Stanford’s energy resources engineering, she did not hesitate and became the first woman faculty member in the department.
 

A virtual laboratory

But how is math used in such diverse areas as petroleum engineering, ocean modelling, pterosaur flight mechanics, and sails design?

Margot uses math to build computerized simulations to better understand or optimize complex physical or engineering processes. She begins by gaining an understanding of the physics of a process.

For example, when helping designing sails for America’s Cup yachts, she first talked to experts in the field, including sailors and sail designers, to understand the physics of the sails and sailflows.

Once she understands the physics, she develops a mathematical model from which she can build computer programs that simulate the process, “like a virtual laboratory,” she said.

For yachts, she simulated the air flow over sail shapes to help design better sails and in the case of petroleum engineering, she uses math to build simulations to identify how to produce oil and gas in a way that it has less impact on the environment.
 

Saving CO2 emissions

One of the fossil energy projects that Margot is working on today is finding out how to extract heavy oil from underground in a less environmentally harmful way. Heavy oil, Margot said, is sticky and hard to move unless it is heated.

There are several ways to heat heavy oil, but current approaches to burning fossil fuels create high levels of CO2 emissions. Dr. Gerritsen is trying to change the process, and in the approach she is studying, the oil is burned under the ground so that the CO2 is generated in the reservoir, and does not create surface-level CO2 emissions.

However, this process, called “in-situ combustion,” is harder to predict and control than the surface-level process. Through her work, Margot is able to simulate in-situ combustion, which offers better insight into how the oil in the reservoir will burn. With this data, she hopes to increase confidence so that companies are more inclined to use in-situ combustion rather than others that are more harmful to the environment.
 

100 percent clean energy law

Besides fossil energy production, Margot is an expert in renewable energy and has worked on many projects, such as tidal energy production and the assessment of large scale solar and wind energy projects.

How does she see the future? Will renewable energy be our largest source of energy in 30 years?

“It is quite complex,” Margot said.

Previous reports that addressed these questions, even those from the International Energy Agency, made predictions that turned out to be wrong. There were developments that could not be foreseen, such as major shifts in technology and population and economic growth.

“The thing is, we don’t really know. What I’m hoping is that oil and gas will be phased out. We already see big changes in some places,” Margot said. “In California, for example, we set a renewable portfolio standard that seemed very aggressive even 15 years ago. Our first ambitious goal, set in 2002, was to generate 20% of electricity using renewable sources. In 2015, this was adjusted to 50% by 2030, and we are already nearly there. Last year, California raised this to 100% by 2045.”

Margot said she believes this goal is feasible, but that there will always be niche applications for fossil fuels, such as emergency power, and uses outside of the transport sector.

A shift will depend on effective large scale clean energy storage, but she believes that this hurdle will be overcome. History has shown, she said, that when there is an enormous economic stress in the world because of energy, everybody starts investing in energy.

When she started teaching energy courses 20 years ago, everybody agreed it would take a long time for solar and wind to become cost competitive. Yet, today they have become cost competitive, because some countries, such as China, were economically growing exceedingly fast and needed energy.

China relied heavily on coal, but this had severe health consequences for the population and it became an absolute necessity for China to invest in renewable energy.

As a result, Dr. Gerritsen said, “Solar PV is incredibly cheap right now because markets have a lot of cheaper produces Chinese PV. These things have made a huge change and are incredibly hard to predict.”
 

Risk-taking culture

After working in the field of energy resources, coastal ocean simulation, and data science for almost 20 years, Margot is looking for some other areas to pursue, and a field that has piqued her interest is wildland fires. Wildland fire mitigation has become increasingly critical in California and the West (of the US).

Margot has many ideas for using simulations in this field, such as creating a better understanding of the fire-induced weather changes, smoke dispersion and smoke associated health risks. She feels that the Stanford research environment provides her the opportunity to pursue these new projects.

“The nice thing about being a professor in a place like Stanford is that that you can set your own research agenda and will most likely find colleagues and students to work with, so I’m very excited about this,” she said.

She appreciates the freedom she has as a professor at Stanford. For example, it took her only three months to start a new master’s in data science program at Stanford ICM. Starting a master’s program in the Netherlands would generally take much longer, Dr. Gerritsen said, as it needs to be discussed and approved at more levels and there are typically more bureaucratic obstacles.

“Here you can often just build what you want. It is a totally different thing,” she said.

She likes the risk-taking culture in the United States, especially in Silicon Valley, where if she has an idea, she can try it.

The Dutch are a bit more risk averse, she said.

“We (the Dutch) try not to upset too many people. We still have a really hard time picking winners and losers,” she said.

When she was in school in the Netherlands, there were no awards for the best students. It was a foreign concept. She understands the sentiment behind it, but at the same time, she believes, it is important to recognize and reward excellence, which is needed to drive innovation.
 

Dreams

“I’m an unbelievably fortunate person,” Margot said. Jobwise, Dr. Gerritsen’s dream was to be useful to people, and in her job she can be, by mentoring and teaching people and as the co-founder of Women in Data Science (WiDS), an annual conference with women experts in data science as speakers.

When she started in computational mathematics 35 years ago, it was a field comprised of roughly 15 percent women. “It is very frustrating to see that this percentage today has even gone down a bit,” Dr. Gerritsen said.

Many important decisions (e.g. in healthcare, industry, and politics) are made based on data analyses. Data science teams are influential, as they interpret data and make predictions based on this data. Most of the data science teams consist of men and are not diverse. Diverse teams are necessary because they ask different questions and have different perspectives, which can lead to different conclusions.

In addition, there are not enough qualified people in this field at the moment. To inspire more women to work in this field, she started the Women in Data Science Conference, which showcases excellent female experts in data science, the WiDS datathon and a WiDS podcast.

The podcast, in which leading women in data science from all over the world share their work and expertise, was necessary, as articles and interviews on AI up until five years ago were mostly all written or given by men.

Today, in its fifth year, the WiDS conference has gone global with online and satellite events, inspiring women worldwide to enter the field.

“Through the conference we reach over 120,000 people per year,” Dr. Gerritsen said. “A lot of them are women, and if you look for talks now in data science online, you probably will find a talk related to WiDS, which is great!”
 

Bio & CV

Born: Zeeland, Kloetinge, the Netherlands

1984-1990: Master’s degree in applied mathematics, TU Delft

1991-1996: PhD scientific computing, computational mathematics and mechanical engineering, Stanford University

1997-2001: Lecturer, Department of Engineering Science, University of Auckland

2001-present: Professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford

2010-2018: Director Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering, Stanford

2015-present: Senior Associate Dean for Educational Affairs, School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, Stanford

2015-present: Co-director of Women in Data Science and host of the WiDS podcasts

Dutch epidemiologist Albert Hofman, chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, is an expert who studies the causes of Alzheimer’s disease.


Image: ©Harvard Chan School of Public Health
 

Dutch epidemiologist Albert Hofman spends a lot of time studying the causes of diseases. One of the diseases he is particularly interested in is what he refers to as “the other pandemic” or Alzheimer’s disease.
 

An estimated 50 million people around the world have dementia, a number expected to triple by 2050. That’s a staggering increase, but Dr. Hofman, an expert in vascular and neurologic diseases and chair of the Department of Epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, remains optimistic.

That’s because new studies from the Netherlands and the United States show a declining risk of developing Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia.
 

Live a week, gain a weekend

In the 1800s, the global life expectancy at birth was about 35. In just two centuries, this number has more than doubled. In record countries such as Japan, the average life expectancy of women is today as high as 90. This rapid increase in how long we are expected to live is astonishing, Dr. Hofman said. “Every four years, we add one year to our life expectancy.  I summarized this for myself by saying, ‘You live a week and you gain a weekend.’”
 

Yet, an older population also means that the number of Alzheimer’s cases will increase. “After the age of 60, the risk of developing Alzheimer’s goes up,” Dr. Hofman said, and by the time we reach the age of 90, the chances are one in two of developing the disease.
 

The impact of Alzheimer’s disease is especially acute in countries like China and India, countries with a booming population that see a rapid increase in the proportion of elderly. Many of these countries are not prepared for the rise in the number of Alzheimer’s patients. “That’s why we call it the other pandemic,” he said.
 

15 million fewer cases

The reasons behind the increased likelihood for Alzheimer’s as we age remains a mystery. This is not solely a consequence of aging, Dr. Hofman believes, but an accumulation of risk factors.
 

In studying the causes for Alzheimer’s and dementia, Dr. Hofman gained crucial insights from large population-based cohort studies for age-related diseases, or studies that follow the same people over a period of time. He is the initiator of several large-population cohort studies like the Rotterdam Cohort study, which today includes 20,000 people and focuses on risk factors for cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s. In the data provided by the Rotterdam study, researchers saw a curious trend over the last three decades: a decline in the number of new patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Hofman followed up these findings by starting the Alzheimer’s Cohorts Consortium at Harvard in 2020, which combined the data of seven long-term cohort studies and involved 49,202 people from the US, Netherlands and other European countries. When researchers compared the data from these combined cases, they saw a decline in the number of new Alzheimer’s cases of between 10 percent and 15 percent per decade over the past 30 years.
 

They also discovered that the risk for men and women to develop Alzheimer’s is the same. “There are more women who have Alzheimer’s disease than men,” Dr. Hofman said, “but that is because women live longer.” In other words, while an aging population leads to more people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s overall, the risk of new cases is declining and if this declining trend continues, researchers estimate 15 million fewer cases in the US and Europe by 2040.

Population cohort studies are a valuable knowledge resource for epidemiology and medicine in general, but there are not that many in the world, Dr. Hofman said. It is easier in the Netherlands, and other European countries to follow people in a cohort study, he said, because the national governments maintain population registrations, including where people live.
 

Adopt a healthy lifestyle, now!

Scientists do not have a firm answer for the decline in new Alzheimer’s diagnoses. Dr. Hofman believes that non-genetic factors and in particular cardiovascular factors play a big role in Alzheimer’s disease. The vascular system, our circulatory system, is made up of blood vessels that carry oxygen-rich blood from the heart to other parts of the body. If the blood vessels are damaged, the lack of oxygen will cause the nerve cells to gradually die, leading to Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Hofman thinks a possible reason for the decline could be improved treatments of risk factors for heart disease and stroke since the 1970s and 1980s in Europe and the US, such as treating high blood pressure, lowering high cholesterol, no smoking and regular exercise. These preventive measures not only reduced the number of heart attacks and strokes, but also likely had a positive impact on the vascular system and brain health. The brain scans of patients who have been treated for blood pressure and cholesterol showed improvement over the years, Dr. Hofman said.
 

If the vascular risk factors play a major role in causing Alzheimer’s, adopting a healthier lifestyle can be a preventative measure that anyone can adopt.
 

Controversial drug

In teasing out the causes of Alzheimer’s, Dr. Hofman and his group are working on treatments that can lower or stabilize blood pressure, as large swings in blood pressure can increase the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
 

And whereas Hofman and his group are focusing on preventative measures, the FDA recently approved the Alzheimer’s drug Aducanumab, the first treatment to attack the progression of the disease. The FDA’s approval created much consternation within the scientific community because of the controversies around the medication’s effectiveness and cost. Hofman belongs to this group of skeptics. “Perhaps, the positive side is that it will stimulate other companies to go on this path and strive to go on,” but he hopes that the European Medicines Agency will hold off on its approval and instead ask for more studies and clinical trials of the drug to provide complete evidence of the drug’s effectiveness.
 

Dinner with billionaires

Epidemiology is “the quantitative part of medicine,” Dr. Hofman said. It is this formalized way of studying the causes of a disease that fascinates him and which is why he chose to specialize in this field at the department of epidemiology at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and Harvard in Boston in the late 1970s.

After his fellowship at Harvard, he returned to the Netherlands and later became chair of the biggest epidemiology department in the country. He maintained a connection to Harvard, and taught a summer course at the university for 25 years. In 2016, he returned to Harvard and became chair of the Department of Epidemiology. What makes Harvard and the Boston area appealing to him is the attitude toward science, or as he describes it, “the can-do mentality” and the “sense of urgency.” What’s more, Boston’s academic ecosystem is concentrated: “The Boston area has close to 20 percent of all postdoc positions in the whole of the US.”
 

When comparing the US research system to the Dutch research system, Dr. Hofman, thinks the educational infrastructure for PhD students in the US could serve as a model for Europe. “It is more developed in coursework, in the qualifying exams and in the in-person training,” he said. It is an educational infrastructure that provides students the opportunity to excel and to grow outliers.
 

The way the US funds science differs from the Netherlands. The US government, particularly the National Institutes of Health, funds and focuses on the important issues in medicine, but the role of private funds, benefactors, and foundations in the United States is “virtually absent” in the Netherlands.

“The dean and the president of Harvard advise me occasionally to go to the West Coast and to have dinner with a couple of billionaires, which is very nice. And very smart. I’ve never done a thing like that in Europe in the 30 years that I was chair there.”
 

He sees an opportunity for universities in the Netherlands to adopt this way of fundraising: “Most wealthy people are willing to support major causes in society.  Although we spend a lot of time here on fundraising I find it a very nice part of the American system.”
 

Bio & CV

1951: Born in Hardenberg, the Netherlands

1976: Medical school, University of Groningen

1982: Second research fellowship, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston

1983: PhD, Erasmus University of Rotterdam

1990-2015: Science director, The Netherlands Institute for Health Sciences

1988-2016: Professor and Chair, Department of Epidemiology, Erasmus Medical Center

2016- present: Stephen B. Kay Family Professor of Public Health and Clinical Epidemiology, Harvard

2016-present: Chair, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Nobel Prize laureate Guido Imbens, a Dutch-American professor of economics at Stanford University, talks about his work with colleagues to determine a way to measure the unmeasurable.


Image: ©Elena Zhukova
 

How can you measure the unmeasurable? That’s the question Guido Imbens and Joshua Angrist wanted to answer. And so they did, in a manner of speaking.
 

In 2021, the two college professors won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their pioneering research on new methods of using econometrics and statistics to simulate policy experiments that might be unethical or too expensive to test in real life. Or, as the New York Times explained it, “They have developed research tools that help economists use real-life situations to test big theories, like how additional education affects earnings.”
 

The duo won the prize jointly with David Card, who used natural experiments to analyze the labor market.
 

We recently spoke with the Dutch-American Guido Imbens, a professor of economics at Stanford University, about his thoughts on economics, winning the Nobel Prize, and how he sees the research environment in the United States.
 

The idea for the research first came to Imbens and Angrist in a laundromat in the 1990s, when they were both assistant professors at Harvard University.
 

1. What happened when you won the Nobel Prize?

When I received a call from Sweden in the middle of the night, my three children got up and started to make breakfast for the Stanford people who came over to help with the media that showed up at my door. We have chickens at home, and my kids made scrambled eggs and pancakes for the media crew. It was a very proud parenting moment.
 

It feels great that the sort of work that I had done was being recognized, and I am thrilled to share the prize with two very good friends: (economist) Josh Angrist had been the best man at our wedding, and David Card is also a very close friend, we’ve known each other since the early ‘90s. Our work wasn’t always viewed very positively, and there was lots of pushback early on. All of us have gone through this whole journey together.
 

2. Who inspired you to do research in econometrics and statistics?

My older brother had decided to study mathematics. I was kind of leaning toward mathematics as well, but I was looking for something different: math that could be applied and have an impact on society. One day my high school economics teacher gave me this little econometrics book by Nobel laureate Jan Tinbergen, one of the founders of econometrics. It appealed to me. Tinbergen was an inspirational figure. He was doing lots of government advising, as well as great academic work. He had founded an economics program at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam in the ‘60s that looked very exciting to me, and so I decided to enroll in the program.
 

3. How would you describe your research interests in econometrics?

I’m interested in the causal effects of policy changes. For example, what is the effect on earnings of getting more education? What is the effect of early childhood intervention programs? What is the effect of military service on the labor market? These are areas where we can’t run experiments, because it would be too expensive, or it wouldn’t be ethical, so we need to come up with clever ways of teasing out these effects and use data to draw conclusions. My research is all about trying to figure out cases where we can credibly find causal effects that are of importance to policymakers. We exploit idiosyncrasies in the system to get at credible causal effects. For example rules about when children have to enter school, or how priority for various services is determined, or arbitrary cutoffs for being held back in school.
 

4. What are some interesting experiments that illustrate your methods?

One of my research projects was to see what would happen if you gave everybody some guaranteed income. Clearly, here you could not do an experiment giving a large number of people universal basic income for a number of years, as the long-term implications of that would be incredibly expensive. But what we did was look at the lottery, which was essentially doing that experiment for us by giving randomly selected people large sums of money over a long period of time. In that way it resembles a universal basic income  We found out that most of the people who won the lottery just kept working, may be just a couple of hours less. Looking at it this way gives you a credible way of understanding what the effect is of having unearned income, without doing an experiment.  
 

Another example of my research was to look at the effect of military service. Together with my Dutch colleague Wilbert van der Klaauw, we looked at the effect on future earnings of the military service in the Netherlands. In the late ‘70s, the military didn’t need quite as many people in the draft as they were getting given the size of the birth cohorts, so they decided that one birth year cohort was going to be completely exempt; the men born in 1959 did not have to do military service. These were not smarter or dumber or different from those born a year before or after, but we found they have slightly higher earnings than those born a year before or a year after. Our estimates suggest that the effect of serving in military service on yearly earnings was roughly equivalent to the cost of losing a year of work experience.
 

5. Could you give an example of a challenge in working with your students that you had to overcome?

Working with students is one of the most enjoyable parts of my job. The transition from students just taking courses to actually doing research is always challenging, especially with coming up with new things and ideas. I talk to the students during that process, as it is very easy to get frustrated and lose hope. I’ve had the same feelings. When I was in graduate school, after my first year, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to continue doing research. I wasn’t sure I was going to be cut out for this and started applying to a job in banking in the US. They needed someone who had a master’s degree in economics and was fluent in Dutch and I thought I was perfect for that job. They didn’t even interview me! I figured that I’d stick with the PhD program. Research is challenging, and at times it is a very lonely thing. It’s great when it goes well, but it is never going to go well all the time.
 

6. How can people outside of academia learn from your research?

There are an enormous number of tech companies, especially in the Bay Area, doing experiments using data science these days. They are so close by that I can just ride my bike over there if I want to talk to people from these companies — Apple, Google, Facebook, and more — and a lot of the questions they are interested in are very similar to the questions outside of the tech world. I am currently doing work for Amazon and we developed a very novel way of designing experiments that is particularly relevant for these companies. I think it is incredibly stimulating and inspiring to talk to people at these tech companies and see how they think about these problems and what type of questions they’re working on. For example, they’re often not interested in what the effect of an intervention is  next month, but they want to know what the intervention will do two to three years from now. The econometric research I do can help answer that. But that does not just answer that question, it is also relevant for many problems in other areas. For example, I worked with Raj Chetty, professor of economics at Harvard, who’s very interested in the long-term impacts of childhood intervention programs, like the Head Start pre-K program in the US. We’ve done a lot of experiments where we look at the effects of test scores a one or two years later, but what we really want to find out is if programs like these help children 20 years or more later in life? It’s the the same problem that these tech companies were thinking about, and the solutions I developed work in both settings..
 

7. What is it that you like best in the US research system?

There are incredibly strong research places with researchers that are very inspiring and stimulating, like Harvard, MIT or Stanford. Having a group of really high-quality people to talk to continuously in the next office or in the hallway is very inspiring. In addition, the top universities here are very broad. They try to be good at everything. It is also less siloed than in the Netherlands, where if you would come into a program, such as economics or law, there are fewer opportunities to take courses in other areas. Here in the US students specialize later, and that has some disadvantages, but it does make it easier to connect with people from other departments.
 

For the work I do, it is really important to interact with computer scientists as well as with people in political science and in statistics. At Stanford, all these groups are nearby, so it is very easy to get in touch with them. My students take classes in computer science and statistics. Interdisciplinary research here is very well organized. When I was at Harvard, I had the statistics department next door, so I started talking to people there and  I  taught classes together with people from the statistics department. And the universities here are good at integrating people from other cultures, both first and second generation immigrants. When I look around here in my business school, there’s someone from Iran in the next office or someone from Belgium or someone from France. There are people from India. There are people from China. It’s very diverse, and that is partly because the school system in the US doesn’t specialize quite so early, so it is easier for non-native English speakers to do well.
 

8. Now that you’ve won the Nobel Prize, what is it still that you hope to achieve?

The prize is going to make all the things that I wanted to do before easier. I just love my research and working with students. I’ll probably shift a bit more to mentoring junior people and doing things for the profession and part of that is that I’ll be doing more in the Netherlands. I’ll be going to the Netherlands in July to give talks and I hope to contribute more to the tradition started by Jan Tinbergen helping the Dutch economic research move forward.
 

Bio & CV

1963: Born in Geldorp, the Netherlands

1982: Propadeutical Exam, econometrics, Erasmus University, Rotterdam

1983: Candidatum Exam, econometrics, Erasmus University, Rotterdam

1986: Master of Science, economics and econometrics (with distinction),  University of Hull, UK

1989: Master of Arts, economics, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

1990-1997: Assistant professor and associate professor, Harvard University

1997-2001: Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles

2002-2006: Professor, departments of Economics, and Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California at Berkeley

2006-2012: Professor of economics, Harvard University

2012-present: Professor of economics, Graduate School of Business and Department of Economics, Stanford University

Dutch scientist Bert de Jong, who leads Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Chemistry, Materials, and Climate Group, talks about the prospects of quantum technology for developing better car batteries, biochemical research, and optimizing distribution networks.

Image: ©Bert de Jong
 

In its latest issue, the renowned MIT Technology Review featured a Dutch research team’s quantum technology as No. 1 breakthrough technology in 2020. Indeed, quantum technology is no longer an abstract field of fundamental science, it says. Driven by significant progress over the last couple of years, combined with major supporters across the tech industry, some meaningful applications are emerging. While the Netherlands has a world-famous quantum research cluster, so has the United States. Both countries recently launched ambitious policies to bolster quantum research and step up international collaboration.
 

Dutch scientist Bert de Jong, who leads Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Computational Chemistry, Materials, and Climate Group, sat down with us to discuss the prospects of quantum technology for developing better car batteries, biochemical research, and optimizing distribution networks, while considering the influence of the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories and how they drive scientific discovery in his field of research.
 

“Someday we will run a desalination plant here in California completely with renewable energy,” says Bert de Jong. Though he works on molecular science, he always keeps a close watch on what his discoveries will ultimately help to achieve. “I work on exascale computing, machine learning, and quantum. Each of these fields can deliver meaningful breakthroughs.” With COVID-19 on everybody’s mind, people increasingly acknowledge the impact of high-performance computing for fields, such as genomic research and biochemical modeling. “It is secondary which technology pathway will lead to solutions. For me it is important to keep an open mind.”
 

This attitude reflects the way Berkeley Lab approaches its role in the academic community. “We sit between fundamental academic science and applied research teams within industry. I would say that we are de facto academia on steroids.” He enjoys the freedom at the lab that allows him to work on a broad range of issues, unconstrained by faculty commitments. “The UC Berkeley campus and the lab are connected in many ways, (UC Berkeley’s campus is just a 10-minute walk down the hill from the main Berkeley Lab campus), and we have many joint projects where we work extensively with the talented students on campus.”
 

The (near) future of quantum

Working with his quantum algorithms team, QAT4Chem, he looks into novel ways to develop chemistry simulations. For Bert, chemistry is one of the first frontiers for impactful quantum technologies. “You see early adoption in a number of industries, many of which are chemistry related, such as pharmaceutical, medical, oil and gas, and energy. “Today, my team works on simulating biochemical systems that can play a role in developing faster drug discovery pipelines and may revolutionize the way we deal with pandemics in the future,” he says. “But it is important for industry leaders to invest now. The first to develop a car battery with 500+ miles capacity will be way ahead of everybody else.”
 

Other applications he predicts will soon come from sectors where micro-second decision-making is important, such as financial trading or the electric grid. He expects quantum software to see dramatic changes to services even making real-time traffic recommendations for busses, delivery vans, or taxis, among many other innovations on the horizon.
 

Bert de Jong is also running a new five-year multi-laboratory and university program called AIDE-QC, focused on the development of an open-source software development environment. “Quantum is still a nascent field, and reliable hardware is another five to 10 years away, though early hardware is in use. We can currently do limited chemistry and optimization problems, but mainly we are learning how to perform quantum simulations using real hardware.”
 

Urgent need for talent

Looking ahead, he points out that there is a scarcity of talent in the field of quantum technology because undergraduate programs in quantum are just now being established and countries have responded differently to the need. “It will be interesting to see what kind of multidisciplinary graduate programs come out of faculties that are far away from the Bay Area. China produces more talent in this field than all other countries combined,” he says. “There is an urgency to invest in talent now. Academia competes with industry for talent in the quantum computing space. In Silicon Valley, corporations hire engineers straight from university and offer much higher salaries than a university can afford. They even hire from campuses before students get their degree.” For academia and for Berkeley Lab, this is a dilemma. They just can’t compete. “With quantum technology trending, Berkeley Lab is fortunate to be able to make somewhat competitive offers.”

To demonstrate how quantum technology is booming, Bert de Jong explains that investment in quantum is not driven by a clear pathway to financial return. “Venture capital is very generous, and they are not expecting profits as soon as they would in other sectors.” Put differently, investors and big tech are hedging their bets, investing in top talent and waiting for future profit. Why are they doing this? For him, this is straightforward, “Invest today, or you will be too late when quantum becomes viable for business.”
 

Transatlantic opportunities

Even though he has been in the US for more than 20 years, he still works closely with research groups in the Netherlands on specific projects. Given its excellent reputation in quantum science, the Netherlands could do a lot more with the National Laboratories and universities in the US.
 

Bert de Jong recommends establishing more programs facilitating educational and scientific exchange across the Atlantic. “Since inner-European exchange programs are so much easier to finance, it is often difficult to get European universities to connect to the US – and this is true for all fields, not just for quantum computing. We need to generate as much talent as we can as quickly as possible. Not only in multiple institutions, but around the world. Programs could be established to fund workshops and research exchange for postdocs, graduate, and undergraduate students. I would welcome having more Dutch students participating in my research.” In his view, European students could benefit from having a temporary assignment in the US. “I do admire the educational system in the Netherlands. It’s way more solid and students are much better trained than in a considerable number of universities in the US. But this is primarily the case for baseline undergraduate education. When it comes to breeding excellence beyond that, the US system is far more effective.”
 

There is a premium for going beyond the norm. This is what compelled him to come and work in the US in the first place. After he finished his PhD in Groningen, he started his postdoc in Washington State at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), working in heavy-element research driven by needs to clean up the Hanford nuclear site. He ended up staying at PNNL for 14 years, eventually leading the team that developed the widely used NWChem computational chemistry code. When Berkeley Lab offered the opportunity to further his research and work on a more diverse research portfolio, he moved to the Bay Area.

Would he consider going back to the Netherlands? “I enjoy coming back to visit family and teach summer school, which I did last year,” says Bert de Jong, but for now he likes having feet planted in both continents.
 

Bio & CV

Born: Assen, Drenthe, the Netherlands

1987-1990: Bachelor’s in chemical engineering, Technical College of Leeuwarden, the Netherlands

1990-1993: Master’s in chemistry, University of Groningen

1993-1998: Doctorate in theoretical chemistry, University of Groningen

1998-2000: Postdoctoral fellow, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

2000-2014: Chief Scientist, Lead of High-Performance Software Development Group, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

2014-present: Senior Scientist, Lead of Computational Chemistry, Materials, and Climate Group; Team Director AIDE-QC DOE ASCR Accelerated Research in Quantum Computing; Director of QAT4Chem DOE ASCR Quantum Algorithms Team

​

 How do institutions and laws work in different countries? They revolve around a set of ideas and at the same time provide a social space where people work and come together.


Image: ©Jan Sluijter

We spoke with Sarah-Jane Koulen, Assistant Professor of Peace, Justice, and Human Rights at Haverford College, about these concepts and the importance of looking beyond borders and appreciating different perspectives.

Koulen was born in the US, grew up in the Netherlands, and returned to the US to earn her Ph.D. at Princeton University. She serves as a board member to the newly established Dutch Network for Academics in the US (DNA-US).
 

1. Can you provide a brief overview of your research interests?

My research background is in international law and cultural anthropology, with a focus on international criminal law. The focus lies on the kinds of norms and values that underlie international legal agreements, what agreements are made, what types of conduct are considered international crimes, and how do we cooperate in the field of justice.

My dissertation was a close description of how international lawyers set up the International Criminal Court (ICC) and dived into questions around what it means to work at the ICC and belong to a group of mobile, highly-educated lawyers developing a new field of international legal practice.  

Currently, I am working on a project focusing on the intersections between asylum law and international criminal law and how states seek to regulate that. This is quite an interesting discussion in various countries, including the US and the Netherlands.

In the state I currently live, Pennsylvania, there is a large diaspora of Liberians who emigrated here during the Liberian Civil War in the early 1990s and have been here for 30 years. Recently, there have been several immigration fraud cases brought against Liberian American men accused of having lied about their past and possible involvement with armed conflict and war crimes in their application for asylum.

These trials are ongoing, and the questions I am interested in researching further are around who gets to be a US citizen and what the remedy is when asylum laws are violated. Will the men be deported? Can they serve their sentences in the US? What will happen to their families, as they have been building a life in the US for 30 years? And why are these cases being pursued now, 30 years later?
 

2. What sparked your interest in cultural anthropology and criminal law?

Traveling has been a big part of my life, as I was born here and grew up in the Netherlands, New York City and Trinidad & Tobago. I have always been interested in how things work in different countries. And for me, justice is something you feel. It involves questions of equity, access, and what the state provides. My interest lies with the lives people live in relation to the legal system, and the laws that are in place.
 

3. What could the Netherlands and US learn from each other in these related research fields?

The Netherlands and the US have strong similarities, but also strong differences. An interesting angle to foster a dialogue around is how social security works, and how people see the role of the state.

In the US, many believe in the idea of freedom and opportunity, which isn’t an exact match with how things are in the Netherlands. For me personally, it meant, at the time, that doing my research here in an interdisciplinary way is easier than in the Netherlands as it is easier to combine different academic disciplines.

Additionally, discussions on tempering the free market and thinking about access and equity are topics that would benefit from international collaboration. For me, the awareness that, as a country, you are not the only one dealing with an issue is important. Other countries deal with similar issues, and there is no one answer but different solutions exist. Looking beyond borders is essential.
 

4. What is a project you worked on that you are proud of?

In the past I organized a summer school for American university students to travel to The Hague and attend trials of the ICC. For them to learn that these are public hearings, and that you have access to that as a citizen of the world, was very rewarding.

Recently, I traveled with colleagues from different institutes to Rwanda. In cooperation with the University of Kigali, we discussed their views on international law and responses to justice after mass atrocity. It was very interesting to learn more about the current climate and Rwandan context and to improve understanding among each other.
 

5. How can innovation within education and research help support your work?

As a social scientist, it is not always clear what the concrete impact of my work is. For example, I am not creating a cure for cancer. Having said that, I think the interdisciplinary conversations in the field of anthropology have raised awareness in the global north about the importance of study our own processes.

Anthropologists have traditionally focused on understanding social practices ‘somewhere else’, but more contemporary research focuses on studying our own institutions.

The 2008 financial crisis is a good example of this. Anthropologists looked into the existing banking culture, and the attitudes towards risk and financial product development. See Karen Ho’s 2009 book, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street.
 

6. What can you take from the cultural anthropology field to other disciplines?

There is a saying within our field: anthropology seeks to make familiar things strange and the strange familiar. It is about covering and reflecting on the unspoken norms. It helps to shed light on aspects of your work.

For example, the other day I was teaching a biology class and we talked about human cells, and the use of these cells for scientific research. We discussed the ethical questions: What does it mean to use human cells? What is the culture in a lab that shapes how scientists engage with the social, ethical side of using human tissue samples?  What does informed consent look like, and is access to the benefits of scientific advancement (e.g, Covid vaccines) equitable? I believe these interdisciplinary conversation are extremely valuable.
 

7. How does your cross-cultural background affect your work?

For me it comes back to the idea of perspectives. When you grow up you become accustomed to things, but that is not the only way of doing things. It comes down to the value of each person’s experiences, and to be open to understanding that your perspective is not the sole perspective.

In the last 10 years, the quality of political debate and civic discourse has changed. There is greater polarization between political groups in both the US and the Netherlands. There are important challenges around access to information, the difference between a free exchange of ideas and hate speech and increasing partisanship rather than collaboration.
 

8. Last, but not least, what would be your advice to prospective students in your field?

Just try and give things a chance! Talk to as many people as you can. Ask questions. Submit that application and see what might happen.
 

Bio & CV

1985: Born in Manhattan, New York City

2007: Bachelor of Arts, Social Sciences, University College Roosevelt, Middelburg, the Netherlands

2009: Master of Laws, Human Rights, Conflict & Justice, School of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS School of Law, London, United Kingdom

2011: Master of Arts, International Development, Radboud University, Centre for International Development Issues (CIDIN), Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

2016: Master of Arts, Cultural Anthropology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

2018-2021: Commissioner, Dutch National UNESCO Commission (Appointed by the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science)

2023: Ph.D. Cultural Anthropology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA (expected defense January 2023)

Dutch cell biologist Dr. Titia de Lange of The Rockefeller University in New York City is one of the world’s leading experts on telomeres and is working to solve the puzzle of the role they play in the early stages of cancer.


Image: ©Titia de Lange
 

Dutch cell biologist Dr. Titia de Lange is one of the world’s leading experts on telomeres.
 

Her honors are many and include some of the most prestigious science awards, such as the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. The latter, the largest award in the sciences, (created by entrepreneurs including the founders of Google and Facebook) is given to scientists “who think big, take risks, and have made a significant impact on our lives.”
 

Born in the Netherlands, Dr. de Lange has been working in the United States for more than 30 years. She conducts groundbreaking research at The Rockefeller University in New York City, where she heads the Anderson Center for Cancer Research.
 

But what made a top Dutch scientist stay in the US? And what are telomeres?
 

Mysterious telomeres

Dr. de Lange learned of telomeres in the early 1980s when she was a biochemistry graduate student at the Netherlands Cancer Institute studying under Dr. Piet Borst, who later became the institute’s director.
 

There was little research on telomeres at the time, even though scientists assumed that telomeres were important protectors of the end of chromosomes, which carry genetic information. She became so fascinated that researching telomeres became her life’s work.
 

Human cells can detect and repair broken DNA in chromosomes, keeping chromosomes intact. The end of chromosomes resemble broken DNA, but cells do not start repairing them.
 

How do cells know that the end of chromosomes do not need to be repaired? Dr. de Lange decided to research the answer to this question, which she calls the “end-protection problem.”
 

Over the course of decades of research, she and her team discovered how telomeres hide the chromosome ends so they no longer look like DNA breaks. She also discovered that if telomeres do this job incorrectly and cells try to repair the end of chromosomes, they damage the chromosomes, potentially leading to cancer.

Dr. de Lange’s research has opened the door to understanding how telomeres work, and she continues to unravel what goes wrong when the protection of telomeres is lost, especially in the early stages of cancer.
 

Role models

When Dr. de Lange completed her doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Amsterdam at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in 1985, she went to the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) to work in the lab of Dr. Harold Varmus, who won a Nobel Prize in 1989 and later became the director of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.
 

“UCSF was the place to be for talented molecular biologists at that time,” Dr. de Lange said. “There were many small labs, and there was a vibrant atmosphere of frequent new findings.”
 

She initially planned to return to Amsterdam after completing her post-doctoral research at UCSF. However, she was inspired by the role of women in science at UCSF, which motivated her to stay in the United States.
 

“When I was a graduate student in the Netherlands, I knew there were very few women in the sciences, but it did not seem to be an important issue to me at that time,” Dr. de Lange said. “Only when I came to UCSF and saw women running their own labs and women being invited to be seminar speakers did I realize that women could have faculty positions and be successful, fun, and happy. This really impacted me. Young women need to see women in leadership positions.”

Dr. de Lange said she remains hopeful for the changing role of women in science in the Netherlands, where one in five professors is a woman. Changes in the workforce will occur as younger generations of women enter the sciences.
 

“It will take a whole generation to turn this around and get more women in leadership positions,” she said. She feels that these women will then serve as role models to other female scientists looking to take on leadership roles.
 

“Dutch science has a long way to go if they want to catch up with the US in terms of gender balance in science. That said, US institutions are not there yet either,” Dr. de Lange said. “Many institutions here are doing a lot of soul searching to figure out how they can support women in science better.”
 

A continuing quest

After researching telomeres for more than 30 years, Dr. de Lange shows no signs of slowing down. At 63, she remains passionate when she speaks about telomeres and is more inspired than ever to solve the puzzle of telomeres.
 

“We figured out what telomeres are and how they work, but don’t understand them fully,” she said. “There is still so much more to discover. I want to understand the exact structure of telomeres. What is the exact role of telomeres in early stages of cancer? Thirty years later, I still have the same question. How does it work?”
 

Bio & CV

1955: Born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands

1981: Master’s in biology, Highest Honors, University of Amsterdam 

1981-1985: PhD in biochemistry, Cum Laude, University of Amsterdam and the Netherlands Cancer Institute

1985-1990: Postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Harold Varmus, University of California San Francisco

1990-present: Director of the Anderson Center for Cancer Research, Leon Hess Professor, and head of Laboratory Cell Biology and Genetics, Rockefeller University

Dutch bio ethicist bridges the humanities and sciences
Dutch philosopher and ethicist Jeantine Lunshof, Ph.D. has spent her career connecting the humanities and sciences.


Image: ©Aram Boghosian for STAT
 

Today, Lunshof works at the Harvard Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and as a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. With a fascinating background that blends philosophy and medicine, she would gently challenge the label of “bioethicist.”
 

“It’s too specific,” she explained with a laugh.
 

To date, Lunshof has worked on many of our time’s pressing bioengineering ethical concerns, from CRISPR to Xenobots to organoids. At the Wyss Institute, surrounded by scientists and engineers, Lunshof will often be the only humanities person in the room.

This is a role she’s happy to be in – exploring the impact of scientific research and its translation into real-world applications. “The humanities and sciences are not really two separate worlds,” Lunshof elaborated. “On the outer ends, they are separate, but there is always a point of convergence where they meet, an essential common point of reference.”

This is a role she’s happy to be in – exploring the impact of scientific research and its translation into real-world applications. “The humanities and sciences are not really two separate worlds,” Lunshof elaborated. “On the outer ends, they are separate, but there is always a point of convergence where they meet, an essential common point of reference.”
 

Image: ©Dukker, G.J. – Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed (Ref. Beeldbank: 20097780-CC-by-SA3.0) The youth library branch in Haarlem Noord. In the 1960s, the 2nd floor was the location of the "forbidden book shelves," where the library shelves were divided into books appropriate for girls and books appropriate for boys.

Growing up, Lunshof’s interest in the intersection of the humanities and sciences became obvious by her choice in heroes: Russian ballet dancer Anna Pavlova and Polish-French physicist Marie Curie.
 

A voracious bookworm from an early age, Lunshof frequented her local library in Haarlem, where she found herself drawn to books about famous scientists. There was only one problem. In the 1960s, the library shelves were divided into books appropriate for girls and books appropriate for boys. The books about famous scientists, like Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, and Marie Curie, were on the shelves meant for boys. This did not deter her in the slightest.
 

“Every day after school, I went to the library and would watch for the librarian around the corner,” she recalled. “Then I would go to the bookcase and hope that nobody borrowed the book. If it was there, I would read the book quickly standing in front of the shelves for as long as I could and then come back the next day to continue or start another book I wasn’t allowed to borrow.”
 

Out of all the scientists Lunshof read about, she loved the book about Marie Curie the most, citing Curie as a hero and influence in her life, because she could relate to Curie’s motivation and drive to succeed in a man’s world.
 

Many years later, in 2013, her life had a full-circle moment when she was awarded a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship by the European Commission, allowing her to move to Boston and continue her work in George Church’s lab on the Personal Genome Project.
 

Philosophy and bioinspired engineering

What, why, and how? These are three basic philosophical questions that Lunshof has striven to answer scientifically over the course of her career. Since arriving in Boston, Lunshof has conducted research in philosophical ethics in genomic sciences and biological engineering. This is where she feels at home at the Wyss Institute.
 

“At the Wyss Institute, research covers much more than genomics and synthetic biology,” she said. Bioinspired engineering and the Wyss mission resonated with Lunshof and her own mission to bridge the humanities and sciences. She emphasized the differences between biotechnology and bioinspired engineering and their applications by giving the example of the exosuit project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
 

This suit, while originally intended for soldiers to walk longer distances, keep fatigue away, and minimize risk of injury when carrying heavy loads, is being used at the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston and elsewhere for the rehabilitation of paralysis patients.
 

“This is what appeals to me,” Lunshof explained. “Being inspired by nature is what bridges the sciences and humanities because what is in the middle of that are these ideas. What’s the concept for these applications? Where did you find the idea? That is the moment you’re talking about philosophy.”

At the Church lab and later at the Wyss Institute, Lunshof established the practice of Collaborative Ethics, where the ethicist works in the lab, side by side with scientists. This close working partnership between scientists and ethicist encourages familiarity and transparency and builds mutual trust. She facilitates further collaboration by hosting open office hours.
 

“I announce every Friday that I’ll be sitting in a common area. Sometimes no one comes, but sometimes I’m there for three hours talking to scientists about their projects.”
 

The Wyss Institute employs the Innovation Funnel as a model of technology translation. The funnel maps technology development from idea conception through commercialization. Lunshof employs Collaborative Ethics with the funnel in a dynamic way and at every stage. Her role, she says, shifts slightly with every stage.

During idea conception, her role is in conceptual analysis, which is philosophical work. During technology validation, her role is normative analysis: after conceptual analysis, one must ask if any ethical questions have surfaced. During technology optimization, her role is applied ethics: what is the ethical consideration when the technology will be applied? With commercialization, her role is minimal. “You need patent lawyers and regulatory scientists, not an ethicist.”
 

Lunshof used this model and applied it when working on Michael Levin’s Xenobots, the world’s first self-replicating living robots. Xenobots are biologically inspired, derived from frog embryo cells that are assembled in a pattern by artificial intelligence. When approaching this problem, the first thing you have to do is answer the philosophical question of what it is. After clarifying the concept, you can then move on to answering questions, such as “Is this something to which ethics will apply?”
 

“Conceptually, it’s certainly not a frog, but is it an animal? Is it an organism, according to our existing criteria?” In-depth conversations with the scientists all agreed that at least this is an entirely new life form, raising entirely new questions. Such joint explorations are eye opening for all.
 

She was also frank about where her role as ethicist ends. “The role of ethics is limited when it comes to translation in the real world.” Her unique role, she explained, is at the early stage of the concepts and their potential ethical relevance, and that’s why Collaborative Ethics works well with the Wyss Innovation Funnel. She also sees it as one realization of her efforts to bridge the humanities and sciences.
 

One thing Lunshof is adamant about is her role in the lab and during discussions with scientists. “I’m not the ethics committee,” she insisted. “I’m working with the scientists, not above or below them. I sit in the same meetings, get the same information. I just ask different questions.”
 

The future of transatlantic collaborations

Beyond her research and work at the Wyss Institute, Lunshof is deeply involved with many working groups, including the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness, the Vaccine Working Group that was created to support research, design, and development of vaccines against COVID-19; the Belfer Center’s Technology and Public Purpose Project; and the Boston Tech Hub Faculty Working Group. She is often the rare humanities person at the table.

“What do I know about virology or science policy?” Lunshof mused. By being at the table with people from Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and more, Lunshof is learning more about virology and immunology with real-world ethical applications. It also gives her ideas about potential future transatlantic collaboration.

In terms of technology development, Lunshof finds the working groups extremely valuable and would be happy to use her interdisciplinary experience to not only be the bridge between the humanities and science, but also between the United States and the Netherlands.

The openness of American academic culture and how people interact with each was a positive surprise for Lunshof earlier in her career, and that openness is something she’d like to see applied in facilitating future connections.

According to Lunshof, it’s easier to collaborate with people from other disciplines in America because everyone is just an email away. “It would make sense to have more frequent exchanges,” she said. “I think that is really important to give mostly younger people, but also mature scientists, the opportunity to work in the US. Or also American scientists, to go to the Netherlands, for example, to be part of a project or to build connections and open up perspectives and horizons.”
 

Bio & CV

1954: Born in the Netherlands

1977: Bachelor's in philosopy, minor in Tibetan language and cultural studies, Hamburg University, Germany

1981: Registered nurse, St. Elisabeth Hospital, Haarlem, the Netherlands

1988: Master's in philosophy and health law, University of Amsterdam

2008: PhD at VU University Amsterdam

2013-2015: Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship

2015 to present: Assistant Professor at UMCG Universitair Medisch Centrum Groningen

2018-2019: MIT Media Lab

2019 to present: Wyss Institute 

Dutch astronomer Dr. Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore has spent his career in the United States unraveling the secrets of the universe by measuring the movements of stars and galaxies.


Image: ©Roeland van der Marel
 

Roeland van der Marel takes measurements for a living, but everyday tools like tape measures, kitchen scales, and speedometers won’t suffice.
 

He needs more precise tools, such as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory, because he measures the movements of stars and galaxies. And as a tenured astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Dr. Van der Marel has such tools at his disposal.
 

In fact, the tools he uses measure precisely enough to detect from Earth the speed at which hair grows on a person standing on the moon.
 

“That may be an odd example, but it illustrates how challenging this work really is,” Dr. Van der Marel said. “We can achieve such accuracies only by building and using some of the most technologically advanced tools ever conceived.”
 

Coming to America

Born in the Netherlands, Dr. Van der Marel arrived in the United States in 1994 as a recipient of a prestigious NASA-funded Hubble Fellowship. He had earned his master’s degrees in mathematics and astronomy, as well as a doctorate in astronomy, at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
 

To fulfill the fellowship, he spent three years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where Albert Einstein worked for the last decades of his life, and became a frequent user of the Hubble Space Telescope for research projects to study black holes and the movement of stars within galaxies.
 

He then accepted a position at the Space Telescope Science Institute at the Johns Hopkins University Homewood Campus in Baltimore, where he is a tenured astronomer. The institute is a nonprofit research organization that operates the Hubble Space Telescope and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, which is scheduled to launch in 2021 for NASA.
 

Dr. Van der Marel is also an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, and has written hundreds of papers in scientific journals, books and other publications that have been cited thousands of times. He splits his time between continuing his research on galaxies and black holes using space- and ground-based telescopes, leading the science operations for the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, NASA’s next planned flagship observatory in space, and teaching the next generation of astronomers.
 

But what makes a top Dutch scientist stay in the US?
 

A collaborative field of study

Given its nature, astronomy is inherently international in part because of the cost of today’s state-of-the-art facilities, Dr. Van der Marel said.
 

In the earliest stages of astronomy, all people had to do was look up to the star-filled sky and take note of the celestial objects as they moved through the night. Then Dutchman Hans Lippershey applied for a patent for a refracting telescope in the early 17th century, sparking the imagination of Galileo Galilei. Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens would later improve the refracting telescope by inventing the Huygens eyepiece, which helped him discover the first of Saturn moons (Titan) and make the first sketch of the Orion Nebula.
 

Astronomy would never be the same.
 

“As time has passed, and you want to make progress in understanding the universe, astronomers have had to build bigger and bigger telescopes,” Dr. Van der Marel said. “Some of these are placed on remote mountain tops, while others are launched into space. The more technology advances, the larger the costs involved, and the more it becomes necessary for countries to collaborate. So astronomy is a very international endeavor, more so than many other sciences.”
 

It’s also highly specialized. The Netherlands has a strong international reputation in the field of astronomy, but also few universities with an astronomy department, he said. As a result, people who study astronomy in the Netherlands often leave and work elsewhere.
 

For example, Dr. Van der Marel’s doctoral thesis focused on black holes in the centers of galaxies, which required sharp observations, and some of the sharpest observations can be done through the Hubble Space Telescope.
 

Regardless of where Dr. Van der Marel works, he said he’s involved in many projects with groups of various sizes, from a dozen people to sometimes hundreds, spread out around the globe. Many include the European Space Agency, through which the Netherlands plays a significant role, which partners with NASA on various space telescopes.
 

“I’m sure I could be equally happy working elsewhere,” Dr. Van der Marel said. “But being where I am, I can use my training to advance humanity’s understanding of the universe and to help shape some of the most ambitious technological endeavors attempted by humanity. That’s all very satisfying.”
 

Measuring the motions of galaxies

Dr. Van der Marel said one of his specialties is understanding the motions of stars and galaxies with respect to each other. For example, he has spent the last decade measuring the movement of the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way’s nearest neighbor.
 

Even though Andromeda is 2.5 million light-years away, he’s been able to measure its movement by using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gaia observatory, which the Netherlands supports through its contributions to the European Space Agency.
 

“It’s actually very hard to measure how things move in the sky because objects in the universe are very far apart, so even if something has a very big velocity, it shifts very little in the sky,” said Dr. Van der Marel.
 

Still, his team has developed the tools to measure such movements and has determined that Andromeda is heading straight for the Milky Way on a collision course.
 

“We’ve done sophisticated calculations of how this will unfold. In about 4 billion years, the Milky Way will collide with the Andromeda Galaxy,” Dr. Van der Marel said. “Over a period of about another billion years, the galaxies will merge together to form an entirely new galaxy, thus completely transforming how the night sky may look to our descendants.”
 

An accessible field of study

“One difference between astronomy and other fields of science,” Dr. Van der Marel said, “is the degree at which non-scientists can relate to the topic in their everyday lives. Some scientists might find it difficult to talk about their work with people unfamiliar with the field because of the technical knowledge required, but that’s not the case with astronomy.”
 

Even though one of his main areas of expertise is black holes and the way space and time intertwine near them, Dr. Van der Marel said astronomy at its core asks the same questions today that people have been asking for millenia.
 

“Studying the universe is really studying the unknown, why we’re here, why we exist, whether life on Earth is unique, and the context of the world we live in,” said Dr. Van der Marel. “They’re all big-picture questions that are easy to relate to. Everyone can look up to the sky, see stars and the Milky Way, and ask the questions that I ask on a daily basis.”
 

Bio & CV

1967: Born in the Hague, the Netherlands

1990: Master’s degrees in math and astronomy, Leiden University, the Netherlands

1994: PhD in astronomy, Leiden University, the Netherlands

1994-1997: Hubble Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J.

1997-present: astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.