Imagine gazing up at the night sky and knowing that somewhere arcing across it is a satellite that you helped build. As of summer 2018, that’s a pleasure that some 80 former and current Brown students got to experience, along with the knowledge that they are advancing science.

The idea for the spacecraft, a four-inch cube called EQUiSat, was born in 2011, when a handful of students in an aerospace engineering class decided to try to design and launch a satellite. With a budget of less than $5,000, the team got right to it, building and testing the parts and systems themselves.

Seven years later, in May 2018, thanks to the work of successive generations of undergraduates, EQUiSat was included on a NASA resupply mission to the International Space Station, lifting off in a commercial rocket while dozens of the students watched on Wallops Island, Virginia. Then, in July, astronauts successfully launched it into space, where it joined the select group of other, decidedly non-DIY satellites orbiting the earth.

The tiny craft came equipped with a mission. It was outfitted with four industrial LEDs powered by lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries, which have never been flown in space. NASA will use the batteries’ performance data to determine their viability for future space suits and rovers. The agency has also mandated testing of the satellite’s ability to survive a trip into orbit and to function properly some 250 miles above the earth.

EQUiSat’s other mission was to show people that space is accessible—not just to those in the space industry, but to all. It emitted a signal that both complex ground stations, including the special antenna installed on the cupola of Brown’s Ladd Observatory, and amateur radio users have been picking up. The LEDs were set to flash as brightly as the North Star at regular intervals, encouraging people to look skyward and, the team hopes, post sightings on Facebook and Twitter. These features, coupled with the cube’s low final cost of $3,776 and open source system (available on the team’s website, along with K–12 curricula for budding space amateurs), are proof positive, according to the student designers, that space technology is within reach.

Brown Space Engineering, as the team is called, has been entirely student-run from the start, says Lauren Haller ’18, who machined the chassis. “Although we had advisers and reached out to a few experts [including Rick Fleeter, an adjunct associate professor of engineering at Brown], we mostly learned from each other.” Different teams within BSE had to engineer the complex chemical coating for the delicate solar panels, for example, and design the computer code to run the systems.

“Each generation of leadership has channeled their excitement toward a different part of the project,” says Hannah Varner ’14, a member of the team that successfully applied to NASA for a spot on a rocket in 2014. “With a fair bit of luck, we have accomplished something that none of us ever believed was possible.”

A number of last-minute challenges made for lots of long hours for team members as the launch approached. But in the end, said Hunter Ray ’18, the team’s project manager in the months before launch and an engineering concentrator like many of his colleagues, the team pulled together and delivered. “It was hard to say, ‘Hey, I know you have three finals coming up and a paper due tomorrow, but we need you to come in and work on this,’” Ray said. “But it really pushed us. I think as a team we came out stronger.”

Growing up in Armenia, Lilit Grigoryan ’18 thought she wanted to be a doctor like her mom. But working in Professor Laurent Brossay’s lab at Brown was a revelation.

There she discovered not only her love of scientific research, but also a community of “helpful, smart, collaborative people.” These include the grad students who trained her, as well as Brossay himself.

After a year and a half of doing experiments in Brossay’s lab, Grigoryan thought she had reached a dead end. She had been looking at a category of lymphocytes—the white blood cells that are part of the immune system—called cytotoxic T cells. These are responsible for the removal of the human body’s own cells that have been infected by viruses or taken over by cancer. She was trying to identify the function of a lipid marker found on them, but was unsuccessful. “I was disappointed,” she said, yet gamely decided to write a thesis about it anyway.

Then, as she was reviewing data from the year before, something jumped out at her. She realized she was looking at a new marker, one that was present solely on white blood cells that were producing the highly inflammatory interferon gamma, which plays a role in combating viruses. Dubbed CD27, the marker could be used to identify this subset of T cells in an individual battling a viral infection, eventually leading to novel immune interventions. That quickly became the topic of her thesis, for which she received both the Clapp Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis and the Elizabeth Leduc [’48 PhD] Prize in Cell Biology, named for the distinguished scholar and former dean of biology at Brown.

Grigoryan said that, as a mentor, Brossay, who is chair of molecular microbiology and immunology, was deeply involved with her work. “He taught me every cell shape I needed to know and helped me design new experiments.” And he included her as second author on a paper his lab recently published. It stunned her that at Brown she “met these world-class professors who treated us as their equals.” For his part, Brossay counts Grigoryan among the most accomplished of the thousands of undergrads he has taught over the past 18 years.

Fascinated by the “crosstalk” of the immune system with other parts of the body, Grigoryan is pursuing a PhD in immunology at Stanford and is on her way to becoming, if Brossay’s prediction comes true, “a highly visible scientist.”

When you think of probiotics—foods containing the microorganisms that help our bodies function properly—kimchi might not come immediately to mind. But, along with yogurt and kombucha, the traditional Korean side dish of fermented cabbage is an increasingly popular probiotic choice. Because it’s usually made with fish sauce, though, vegans haven’t been able to tap into health benefits it may offer.

So it was significant when a recent study that attracted considerable attention, published in the peer-reviewed journal Food Microbiology, showed that, though they start out with different microbial communities, vegan kimchi ends up with almost the identical type of bacteria after fermentation as the traditional kind. The results were seen as exciting, yet even more surprising to some was that the lead author, Michelle Zabat ’18, was a senior at Brown when the study came out.

Food has always been so central to the life and identity of this Filipina-American that she created a food studies track within her health and human biology concentration. “I was very interested in the intersections between culture, health, science, and society. Food presented a way of exploring the overlaps between all of these things,” she said.

Zabat credits her mentor, Assistant Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology Peter Belenky, with validating her interests. “When it came time to start thinking about my senior thesis project,” she said, “he suggested I merge my passion for food science with the human microbiome work his lab traditionally focuses on”—that is, the impacts of microbial community dynamics on human health. Working with grad students Damien Cabral and Jenna Wurster and research assistant William Sano, Zabat obtained vegan and nonvegan bacterial samples from a local fermenter and used high-throughput DNA sequencing to identify the bacteria.

According to Belenky, Zabat’s taste in research is as good as her timing. “Microbial communities, fermentation, and veganism—these are areas people are very interested in right now,” he said. “Michelle hit all of those notes.”

And her interests were no mere flash in the pan: thanks to a U.S. Fulbright Student Research Award, Zabat traveled to the Philippines after graduation to continue studying traditional Filipino fermented foods.

In fall 2015, when Brown/RISD student Nellie Robinson ’17 asked computer science lecturer Barbara Meier ’83, ’87 ScM if she could design a class that would produce an animated film, Meier said yes, as long as she had at least 10 people on the project.

Over the next year, Robinson developed the art, storyboard, and script and gathered the collaborators. The class, Advanced Animation Production, kicked off in fall 2016. Eight months and 10,000 computer hours later, Toymaker, a seven-minute animated short, was complete. And in 2018, the film won the music award in the student competition at Athens Animfest and was accepted into five more festivals, including the Los Angeles International Children’s Film Festival.

“It was a student-driven process,” said Robinson. “We were responsible for setting our own schedule and leading our own critiques, with Barb to guide us with practical advice. Everything we made was from scratch, from story and concept all the way through production. This gave us a sense of ownership that was crucial for staying invested in our work.”

“The format of Barb’s course allowed each of us to focus on certain areas of the pipeline that interested us the most, while collaborating with each other and providing feedback, all in the format of a small animation studio,” said Kenji Endo ’18, who helped lead on modeling and set dressing. In 2017, Endo completed another research project with Meier, developing new curricular materials and tutorials for Meier’s course Intro to 3D Computer Animation.

According to Meier, a well-designed course structure alone was not enough to guarantee the success of Toymaker. “These students had a vision for their piece and created a tight community that made the process rewarding enough to continue even when some of the work was tedious,” she said. “The heartwarming story of the film stands by itself, but for me it will always be interwoven with the story of friends working toward a common goal.”

When Adam Blumenthal, Brown’s virtual reality artist-in-residence, launched into an immersive virtual reality (VR) project focused on the Gaspee Affair, it wasn’t long before a team of undergraduates volunteered to pitch in. A year later, he and 14 students formed a group independent study project titled Virtual Reality for Education.

When completed, the project will be used to teach middle and high school students about the 1772 incident in which Rhode Island colonists boarded and burned the HMS Gaspee, a British Royal Navy schooner helmed by a captain with a reputation for confiscating cargo and harassing merchants and fishermen. The incident was significant in the run-up to the Declaration of Independence.

To create such a product is no small undertaking, according to Blumenthal, but the project’s “14 creative minds”—concentrators in more than a dozen disciplines, from computer engineering to visual art—“were great collaborators.”

Students had to think hard about how to structure the project so it was manageable to produce and also met the educational requirements. “We were really focused in the beginning on how you could put this into a curriculum,” said Zev Izenberg ’20, a computer science and visual art concentrator. “By the end, we realized how difficult it was to create anything at all in VR. …The hard stuff is getting it there in the first place.”

Creating the project involved historical research, script writing, reenactments of historical scenes, animation, 3D modeling, coding, and learning how to use new and emerging VR programs. The team shot the scenes using a 360-degree Google Jump camera rig that the company loaned to Blumenthal, a designated “trusted tester” of Google VR technology.

The production also involved Tilt Brush, a Google VR painting program, and a technique called photogrammetry, which figures out the geometry or shape of things in the environment. Students wove all these elements throughout the storytelling process, adding voiceover narration and using spatial audio to guide a student through the experience.

The sense of being immersed in an environment where history is being made makes VR an effective tool for overcoming disengagement among students, said Blumenthal. Hannah Seckendorf ’20, a cognitive science concentrator, agreed, saying that VR is often referred to as an empathy machine. “Students [can sometimes feel] that the material they’re studying isn’t relevant, or that it has no importance in daily life. In VR, it is relevant to you, because it’s your environment.”

Katerina Ramos Jordan arrived at Brown on an October evening in 2017, not long after Hurricane Maria had devastated a swath of the Caribbean—including Puerto Rico, her home. Brown welcomed her and other displaced University of Puerto Rico students.

Over the course of the academic year, Ramos found a “passionate and collaborative community,” and wanted to stay for the summer and continue her work. “I knew Brown was the perfect place that would allow me to conduct my research in a unique and interdisciplinary way,” she said. So she applied to a summer research program run by the Leadership Alliance, a Brown-based consortium of 36 premier research and teaching institutions that supports underrepresented and underserved students who want to explore advanced graduate study.

Ramos, who studies literature from the Puerto Rican diaspora, worked with Leticia Alvarado, an assistant professor of ethnic studies and American studies at Brown. “We connected immediately,” she said of her mentor. “She motivated me constantly to analyze in depth and to express my ideas clearly. Exchanging ideas with her was a continually enriching process.”

Many more students like her will be able to enjoy the same support. The Mellon Foundation recently gave $1.25 million to the consortium to underwrite summer undergraduate research in the humanities and social sciences for underrepresented students. That funding will support students at the 10 host universities—Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, New York University, University of Chicago, University of Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, and Johns Hopkins University—that are part of the Leadership Alliance Mellon Initiative.