The Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Program presents its spring thesis show, The Good Person of Szechwan, directed by MFA directing student Addie Gorlin. It is a story about balancing moral goodness and monetary success. “The most obvious question that this play asks is: can someone be good and still succeed in a capitalist society? I'm asking this question with a particular lens on gender,” says Gorlin. She cast an all-female production to call out the façade of masculinity these women are forced into in order to be taken seriously. Performances run February 28 through March 10 at the Pell Chafee Performance Center. Learn more.

Using an army of small satellites, researchers, including Ph.D. student Sarah Cooley, have shown that water levels in small lakes across northern Canada and Alaska are far more variable during the summer than previously thought. The findings, published in Geophysical Research Letters, could have implications for how scientists calculate the natural greenhouse gas emissions from these northern lakes. “There’s been a lot of research on climate-driven changes in lake area, but it’s mainly focused on long-term changes,” said Sarah Cooley, a Ph.D. student at Brown University and the study’s lead author. “This is the first time that anyone has looked at fine-scale, short-term changes, and we found that there’s much more variability within a season than expected.” Read more. 

In a finding that will be useful in nanoscale engineering, Brown University researchers, including Engineering doctoral student Weilin Deng, have shown that miniscule differences in the roughness of surfaces can have important effects on how they stick together. In a series of papers, the latest of which is published in Scientific Reports, the researchers show that miniscule differences in the roughness of a surface can cause surprising changes in the way two surfaces adhere to each other. Certain levels of roughness, the studies show, can cause the surfaces to exert different amounts of force on each other depending upon whether they're being pushed together or pulled apart. Read more

Charlie Carroll, PhD student in History, recently won the Professional and Organizational Development Network (POD) Career Development Award.

POD is a professional organization comprised of educational developers, whose work helps universities function as effective teaching and learning communities. This grant is awarded by POD’s Special Interest Group on graduate student, professional student, and postdoctoral scholar development and provides funding for conference fees.