GUIDO IMBENS MA’89, PHD’91, LHD’22 HON. is an economics professor at Stanford University. He was awarded Brown’s Horace Mann Medal in 2017 for his contributions to the economics field, shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, and received an honorary degree from Brown in 2022.

“Coming to Brown University opened up a whole new world for me. It was the first time I came to the United States, and the friendliness of the [economics] department and the University community made me feel very welcome. It was not just the rigor of the academic program that prepared me well for my subsequent work, it was also the humanity of the department. I vividly remember getting invited by one of the profes- sors for a family Thanksgiving dinner. As a faculty, we now often invite graduate students to our house to make them feel welcome and seen.”

Caltech wave fellowship

Sultan Daniels ’23 participated in a WAVE Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with a postdoctoral researcher to conduct information theory research in the electrical engineering department. His project involved developing the proof for a scheme that achieves the fastest theoretical rate at which data could be reliably transmitted by a Gaussian network channel. “The biggest thing that this research project gave me was the chance to put faces to the names in the field. I enjoyed speaking with the other students interested in information theory to brainstorm together or hear about their aspirations. I also enjoyed talking with the professor and the postdoc, as they were always able to point me to interesting papers or other insights,” Sultan said. He is applying to PhD programs with the goal of continuing to pursue research in information theory.

Kareen Coulombe, associate professor of engineering, and team members Bum-Rak Choi, associate professor of medicine (research), and Ulrike Mende, MD, professor of medicine, received a BBII award in 2020 for research to make therapeutic drugs safer for the heart. With an additional round of BBII funding in 2022, the team continued to develop an in vitro cardiac tissue model platform for drug discovery and cardiotoxicology testing. The team is further expanding the model to be able to test for cardiac side effects of oncology drugs as well as to identify drugs that can be used to mitigate or treat these side effects. 

In most chronic diseases, including heart failure, kidney failure, and pulmonary fibrosis, the extracellular matrix becomes abnormal, leading to inflammation, fibrosis, and hypoxia, or reduced oxygen supply. In 2019, with the support of BBII funds, Jeffrey Morgan, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, developed a process for producing uniform injectable particles that potentially could be used to treat damaged tissue in various organs. The company XM Therapeutics was formed to further develop the treatment and bring it to clinical trials. XM Therapeutics is initially focusing on two of the most serious disorders, heart failure and pulmonary fibrosis, for which the clinical need and market size are enormous and continue to grow.

Cancer researchers know that individual tumor cells can reveal important information about how an individual’s cancer develops and spreads and how it might be best treated. Yet conventional methods of tumor analysis rely on the extraction of nucleic acids from bulk tissue samples and result in low-resolution genetic readouts. The poor quality of these results can even lead to misdiagnosis.

Cel Welch, a PhD candidate in the lab of engineering professor Anubhav Tripathi, has developed a way to isolate high-quality, intact single cells from biopsied cancer tissue within minutes. The individual cells can be used for single-cell RNA sequencing, which is especially useful in detecting rare mutations.

The process uses electric field fluctuations rather than enzymes to separate cells from one another. The biopsied tissue is placed in a liquid-filled receptacle between two parallel plate electrodes. Electric field fluctuations applied to the liquid create opposing forces, which cause the tissue cells to move first in one direction and then in the opposite direction until they separate from one another.

The new electric field method is superior to standard isolation methods in terms of labor, cost, and efficiency and was described in June 2022 in Scientific Reports. Welch has been named to Forbes’s 2023 30 Under 30 list in science.