This year, one Endicott professor took a different kind of summer break. One that involved closed-door diplomatic talks, meetings with government officials, and hard-hitting interviews with the press.

Princeton SPIA’s Jacob Shapiro and a transatlantic research team receive a three-year grant to dig deeper

For Kayla Yewon Park, A24 (BFA), a 3D animator and recent graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, waiting for a computer to catch up with her imagination used to be an exercise in patience. “Rendering just a 10-second segment of a 10-minute animation used to take anywhere from 24­ to 72 hours depending on the scene’s complexity,” she said.

Tallying public opinion as a war rages around you would seem next to impossible. But that’s exactly what pollster Khalil Shikaki, senior fellow at Brandeis’ Crown Center for Middle East Studies, is doing: surveying Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank during the Israel-Hamas war. Shikaki has dedicated his life to documenting Palestinian public opinion and sharing his objective empirical data with communities, policymakers, and academics. His most recent survey, the 91st opinion poll he’s conducted in Gaza and the West Bank, was arguably the most personal one of all. Illustration by Davide Bonazzi

Wentworth undergraduates participate in research at every stage and level. "Engineering is a lot of fun for me," Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering John Voccio says before taking a sip from his large cup of Dunkin' cold brew. "I like to ask questions and then try to design experiments to solve those questions just like the old-school scientists." With a career spanning 35 years, primarily focusing on superconductivity and electromagnetics, Voccio's most recent research benefits from the work of some of the greatest scientists and inventors that came before him–including Michael Faraday and Benjamin Franklin. "I'm sure they were having fun, too," he says.

When Noely Irineu Silva ’27, a student from Brazil, began selecting courses for her first semester at Wellesley, she focused on political science and sociology—fields she considered open-ended and creative. “Nothing involving math, please,” she remembers thinking, cringing as she charted her schedule. But a personalized invitation from two professors to join ECON 251: Wellesley Initiative for Scholars of Economics (WISE) offered an intriguing plot twist. Irineu Silva admits she enrolled in WISE to cross a graduation requirement off her to-do list. Yet as a result of having taken the course, she’s now set on majoring in economics and pursuing a career involving economics research...

In his first year teaching at Endicott, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice Ethan Boldt created a course to examine the U.S. court system in a highly unconventional way. The syllabus for CJ 205: American Court System requires students to subscribe to Netflix for the semester and binge-watch all 13 episodes of The Staircase. (Popcorn is recommended, but not required.) The documentary and Boldt’s course both follow the Michael Peterson case, which tested the limits of the North Carolina court system and became a twisted national obsession...

Semahagn Abebe hasn’t been able to set foot in Ethiopia since 2007 when he was forced to seek political asylum. For nearly two decades, the Associate Professor of International Studies has tirelessly advocated for Ethiopian human rights from abroad while giving undergraduates the opportunity to gain real perspectives on international law, advocacy, and African politics...

In Colombia, approximately 60 percent of gold extraction originates from an informal sector known as artisanal and small-scale gold mining. Among them are “las chatarreras,” women who arrive early in the morning at the mines to scavenge and collect rocks or tailings discarded by male miners. Through a project launched in 2020, MIT D-Lab is working with these women to help them build a labor movement focused on reducing gender-based violence and environmental degradation...

For the last 15 years, when she could have been sleeping, practicing self-care, running marathons, or deep-cleaning her kitchen, Sara Johnson Allen was instead working on her first novel, Down Here We Come Up. “It was a difficult process. I easily went through 100 drafts. Even after my agent sent it out, the book was turned down by at least 30 editors. I cut and rewrote hundreds of pages and submitted it again,” said Allen from her writing desk. “I want to be honest about life, especially with my students..."

At U.S. colleges and universities, men are twice as likely as women to major in economics. But a team of three Wellesley economists has concluded that among students admitted to Wellesley, those who ultimately enrolled at the College were 94% more likely to receive an economics degree than those who chose to study elsewhere. The National Bureau of Economic Research recently released the team’s findings in a working paper: “Women’s Colleges and Economics Major Choice: Evidence from Wellesley College Applicants.” “At the College we often say that Wellesley encourages women to go into fields that they might not have had access to if they had gone to another school,” said Kristin Butcher, Marshall I. Goldman Professor of Economics and one of the paper’s co-authors. “[We] set out to see if that was really true.”

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many hospitals ran out of beds and ventilators, the fingertip pulse oximeter — a $20 neighborhood drugstore purchase — became a primary arbiter of whether a patient was “sick enough” to gain admission to an emergency room. This spring, surrounded by antique telescope models in a classroom tucked inside the MIT Museum, 10 students bent over a square-shaped seminar table. They were building basic pulse oximeters from low-cost do-it-yourself (DIY) kits...

Last spring, Associate Professor of History Elizabeth Matelski made national news when she uncovered a disturbing truth hidden in plain sight on the College’s scenic Mingo Beach. She discovered that the beach was named for Robin Mingo, an enslaved man who lived in Beverly in the 1700s...

Annabelle Estera, Assistant Professor of Education at Endicott College, is increasingly conscious of the fact that the original model for a higher education institution was designed exclusively for white, Christian, land-owning men. “That was the profile of a person both shaping and enrolling in America’s first college,” she says. As a Filipina person, an Asian American, and a woman of color, Estera would have been excluded from that original educational system twice over...

As a young child, historian Maya Jasanoff followed her parents on trips to historic sites around the world. In India, where her mother is from originally, she spotted street signs referencing Shakespeare and imperial British figures and became lastingly curious about how cultures, power, and people cross borders, and the stamp of the British empire on it all. It’s these questions that will form the basis for her conversation with Somali-British novelist Nadifa Mohamed on Tuesday...

Shaye J.D. Cohen works in an office with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four walls. Volumes in English, Hebrew, and Aramaic are piled on every available and makeshift surface. Most of the texts are bound in leather, with pages as translucent as onion skins. The speckled pattern of the wool sweater Cohen wears is so similar to the stacks that he appears in near-camouflage at his desk. Cohen, the Nathan Littauer Professor of Hebrew Literature and Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern...

“As a historian, I always tell my students that one of our greatest responsibilities is to correct the myths of the past because without accurate knowledge of history, the present is chaotic and the future is unclear,” said Elizabeth Matelski, Associate Professor of History. And when it comes to Endicott’s past, arguably the greatest myth is that of Robin Mingo, namesake of Mingo Beach, one of the College’s three picturesque shorelines. A lesser-known, troubling truth is waiting some