People
Without apology
A network of inter-communicating actors, if you want to be technical about it. Some of them are related to me by blood. The rest got adopted somewhere between Cambridge and now.
Family
The academic star. Chancellor's Professor of Africana Studies at Brown, Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives, and Director of the Systemic Racism and Resilience Project at the John Nicholas Brown Center — having run the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America from 2013 to 2024. Author of Black Noise, The Hip Hop Wars and, most recently, Metaracism (2024), and a popular-culture maven of long standing. Wikipedia.
Founding President (1999–2009) of the Goldman Sachs Foundation and the second Black woman ever to be a Goldman Sachs Managing Director. Later Senior Managing Director at TIAA-CREF and Head of the TIAA-CREF Institute. Also, per Crain's New York Business, rather well connected.
Tried to become "the future of night life" with his startup Nite-Fly, and found that nightlife providers are a scary bunch — most such businesses fail within a year, so they are not exactly forward-looking. He then went into high-tech recruiting, supplying companies with what they actually need: smart employees. In the process he became a rather good web developer.
Chosen family
Now back at Maryland as the John S. Toll Professor of Physics and Clark Leadership Chair in Science, having directed the Brown Theoretical Physics Center and held the Ford Foundation Professorship here from 2017 to 2022. He sat on President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and was named a National Medal of Science winner in December 2012. Jim was a big brother — and a legend — for close to a generation of students who came through MIT in the '70s and early '80s. He is also an amateur Einstein historian focused on Einstein's stance on human rights, and has serious ideas about diversity in STEM. His Adinkras are why part of this site exists.
Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT, Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School, and — as of July 2026 — an MIT Institute Professor, the Institute's highest faculty honour. He also received the National Medal of Science in January 2025. We were antipodal undergrads — Emery a Harvard brat, me an MIT gnerd — and graduate students together. We also vied for lifer status; Emery won that one. His public area is anesthesiology, as this delightful NY Times profile shows. What many do not realize is that Emery's main passion knocks directly on the door of one of the biggest Big Questions there is: what is consciousness? His experimental work relates mental state to measurable electrical phenomena in the brain — of rats, so there is no need to buy tin foil hats yet.
Now Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford, and a Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Faculty Scholar — by way of UCSD, after we successfully lured him out of the corn at UIUC. A true academic star: not only scary smart but scary driven and scary savvy. His area is information theory applied to biological — mostly electrical — signals. His work on epidermal electronics caused something of a rage in non-invasive bioelectrical sensing. Whether he wins a Nobel or builds a business empire, only time will tell. I am delightedly proud, and somewhat in awe.
One of those planet-hunting astrophysicists, plucked from Caltech as a three-years-in assistant professor into a tenured full professorship at Harvard. Harvard is also supporting his push to build an astrophysics institute aimed at developing a pipeline of under-represented astrophysicists. And yes, he has a Wikipedia page too, at his tender young age.
Students
PhD 2026, Brown. On the Classical and Quantum Information Flow Between Interacting Particles. His thesis results feed directly into everything I am working on now.
Founder of BCT Partners and winner of The Apprentice, season 4. He was absolutely spectacular as an undergraduate in our department — I remember him most for never letting us see him sweat, even when I made up an exam just for him (though I gave it to the whole class). Preternaturally graceful under pressure, always. He went on to an even more spectacular career: Rhodes Scholar, MBA and PhD from MIT. I found it puzzling how much hand wringing was done over which of the two final candidates to hire. There really was no other choice. Perhaps they manufactured a bit of theater.
Twenty-five years of doctoral and master's advisees, with theses. The formal roster is also in the CV.
Collaborators
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