FEBRUARY 23, 2024 / VIEW IN YOUR BROWSER

Portraits of children living with rare diseases remind medical students, faculty, staff and visitors to look at patients beyond their diagnoses.

Advancing a commitment to accessible robotics education, the Ph.D. student is researching how to simultaneously control multiple drones and teaching others how to build and operate them.

The scholar and former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund delivered the University’s 2024 Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture with reflections on U.S. history and a present-day call to action.

By teaching single mothers how to knit and creating avenues for sales, the student-led nonprofit is opening doors to new income streams for Rhode Islanders, one handknit hat a time.

With an award from the Barr Foundation, Brown researchers will develop a pilot program to strengthen training for recent Brown MAT graduates teaching in Providence, Central Falls and Pawtucket.

Scientific American

As scientists aim to develop more intelligent robots, they’re hitting a roadblock. Large language models like ChatGPT-3 have what robots lack: access to knowledge about practically everything humans have ever written. In turn, robots have what the models lack: physical bodies that can interact with their surroundings, connecting words to reality. “The way things are now, the language understanding is amazing, and the robots suck,” says Stefanie Tellex, half-jokingly. As a roboticist at Brown who works on robots’ grasp of language, she says “the robots have to get better to keep up.”

USA TODAY

No perfect parenting method exists. But decades ago, educators thought differently – so much so that they acquired babies from local orphanages for home economics students to “parent.” So-called “practice babies” lived among students at dozens of universities between the 1920s and 1960s. Brown Professor of Anthropology Jessaca Leinaweaver discusses the phenomenon, which was seen as a solution to the misconception that women who sought a college education would struggle to become competent mothers. 

Boston Globe

Teacher resignations in Providence have more than doubled in the past five years, jumping from 81 in the 2019-20 school year to 172 in the current year, according to a new report released by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University. The resignations – which are separate from retirements – have steadily increased in each of those years, a period that overlaps with both the COVID-19 pandemic and a state takeover of the school system. The report largely attributes turnover to the pandemic, noting that districts across the country are finding it difficult to fill jobs. 

As part of an Anthropology Day celebration in mid-February, staff from Brown’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology led visitors in a learning activity with objects from the museum’s collection. Curatorial assistant Jessica Nelson presented traditional Ghanaian Kente and Adinkra cloths, as well as Adinkra stamps used to make the latter, putting them into dialogue with the museum’s current Manning Hall Gallery exhibition, “A Verry Drunk Hunters Dream: Modernist Expression in Africa.” Nelson also answered questions about the museum and the field of anthropology.  “Anthropology Day is a wonderful opportunity for us to draw attention to the museum here on campus,” Nelson said. “It’s not every day that we get to bring objects in and do a bigger event with the community.” Photo by Nick Dentamaro.