Alumni Today Archives - �鶹��ý

Exonian wins Pulitzer Prize

Patrick Garrity — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 17:36:34 +0000

�鶹��ý extends hearty congratulations to Dake Kang ’11, who was part of a reporting team with The Associated Press honored this spring with a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting.

Kang covers Chinese politics, technology and society from Beijing for The AP.

The judges cited the team’s “astonishing global investigation into state-of-the-art tools of mass surveillance, created in Silicon Valley, advanced in China and spreading worldwide before returning to America for secret new uses by the U.S. Border Patrol.”

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On the front lines of artificial intelligence

Patrick Garrity — Thu, 14 May 2026 19:30:16 +0000

On the front lines of artificial intelligence

Christine Robson Weaver ’99 shares her experience and expertise with emerging technologies.

Christine Robson Weaver ’99 can’t remember a time when she wasn’t working in the field of artificial intelligence. While many of us associate AI’s arrival with the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022 and the other generative AI models that soon followed, Robson Weaver has spent her professional life developing smarter machines.

The last 14 years have been at Google, where today she is responsible for enabling developers and researchers across the company to create AI products using the highest-quality data. To Robson Weaver, AI is so much more than chatbots and Google Maps.

“AI is not any one thing, it is a tapestry of different surfaces,” she told a gathering of �鶹��ý students and adults this week in an informal discussion about the emerging technology. Robson Weaver is an �鶹��ý trustee who serves on five committees — including as chair of the AI Working Group. Given she has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT and a Ph.D from Cal-Berkeley in computer science, she’s a likely choice. But she doesn’t profess to know all the answers of how AI should and will be used in the Academy’s curriculum.

The problems that really worry me, I want to solve them faster and better and I want the people tackling them to have the very best tools available to solve them.

Christine Robson Weaver '99

“I think what you’re seeing at �鶹��ý is the same sort of varying responses to AI across the general population,” Robson Weaver said. “That dichotomy won’t deliver a coherent picture.

“But if I look globally, I think that the opportunties and the value of this is powerful, and �鶹��ý has a great tradition of innovation and early adoption in its history. I suspect �鶹��ý will manage to stay at the forefront of the pack when it comes to how it’s integrated.”

Where that won’t be, she hopes, is at the Harkness table.

“We are in a very privileged position, because Harkness in particular is very resilient. We can push learning in a very human-centric way.”

Robson Weaver calls the Harkness table “the best training I got in my whole life,” because it requires one to push themselves into uncomfortable places and take risks — “friction full” as she calls it — and that’s where the learning happens.

“If you’re just rushing to get something done, it doesn’t fill the same role as homework. Lessening the friction is skipping the learning phase.”

In general, Robson Weaver says she has little fondness for chatbot applications. “They have some value, but to me, that’s a sort of shallow, entertainment-based end of AI.” She urged her audience to not overexpose themselves to chatbots, especially in a conversational setting.

Robson Weaver ended the discussion with an anecdote from 2020 as the medical world struggled to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. She says Google stopped work to offer its data centers to work on epidemiology models. She remembers wishing AI was further along to find an antidote “so I could get out of my house sooner.”

Today, AI is being applied to a wide range of fields that have accelerated innovation, such as combatting climate change, fighting types of cancer and more. “And this isn’t a small speed up, but rather orders of magnitude, what would take thousands of years to a matter of minutes.

“The problems that really worry me, I want to solve them faster and better and I want the people tackling them to have the very best tools available to solve them.”

More to explore

Artificial Intelligence

How new technology is reshaping everything we do

Artful Intelligence

Instructor in English Tim Horvath on AI and the human act of making meaning

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Making history her story

Emma Ward — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:37:05 +0000

Decades ago, an aunt gifted Madelyn Postman ’90 a family tree detailing an ancestry she knew little about. Intrigued, she began digging into her family’s history, ultimately engaging a professional genealogist. That research evolved into a family memoir, Staring into the Sun: Stories from a Chinese American Family 18952015. Featuring her great-grandfather’s journey from a Chinese village to becoming a self-made millionaire in the U.S., her grandmother’s marriage to a renowned magician, and an intimate glimpse of her mother’s struggle with mental illness, the work deftly captures 20th-century American social and economic structures, immigration, and the building of new communities in California’s Bay Area.

Postman, a sustainability consultant, drew on interviews with family members, visits to China and newspaper archives to write this engrossing mélange of memoir and creative nonfiction that is both a sharp-eyed take on her family’s dynamics as well as a deeply moving tribute to her relatives.

We caught up with Postman in the run-up to the May publication of Staring into the Sun.

You covered some big themes in the book — immigration, identity, social and economic structures. Did those topics come through organically as you were telling your family story?

I think you can’t really extricate people from their surroundings and their context. I’m always struck by the world we’re born into, our cultural and our socioeconomic and geographic contexts. Part of the reason for writing this was to learn about history as well: I think if you see history through the eyes of an individual who lived through it, it gives you a much better grasp on what happened at that time. I also really like to show how quotidian life — culture, food, language, the way people dress — reflects bigger themes and ideas.

Part of your family story is a melding, through marriage, of two prominent Chinese American families. When did you realize that your family history was enmeshed in the history of California’s Bay Area?

I grew up knowing about my great-grandfather [entrepreneur and philanthropist] Joe Shoong and his [dry-goods store chain] National Dollar Stores. That was always part of my knowledge of the family background. It’s been interesting hearing from the other side of my family, my grandmother’s side, who married into that dynasty — I mean, they were well off, but nothing like the scale of the Shoongs. That’s what Henri’s chapter is all about.

I found the sections about your great- grandfather Henri and your great-grandmother Rose particularly compelling. How did you bring family members to such vivid life, some of whom you never met?

My cousin Michael remembers Henri really well, so he captured Henri’s personality for me. Rose died in the ’50s, but my great-aunt Celia, who just turned 100, told me about Rose, how feisty she was. I used Celia’s interview as well as photos of Rose. In those, she looks very unhappy and sort of stiff. That was probably the chapter I had the most fun with because Rose is a really unlikable character. I leaned into that and had fun with it, showing her conflicts.

Were there particular challenges that arose as you were researching the book?

It’s challenging writing about the people who are alive, not wanting to offend them. But you also don’t want to write about them in a flat way, only putting them in a good light. I’ve hurt some people by being too honest, but it didn’t create any lasting rifts. People have actually been very open with information — I don’t think there have been family secrets that people are trying to hide — but a couple of people wanted to be anonymous.

Why did you decide to only tell the stories of your Chinese American relatives in this collection?

Finding the voice for this project was tricky. At first, I wrote myself in the third person; after a manuscript assessment, I changed the chapters that I was in into memoir pieces — they became more emotionally powerful. With the narrative nonfiction chapters, I used Save the Cat! Writes a Novel and Story Genius, really helpful books in terms of plotting and structure. Bouncing between memoir and creative nonfiction, I got to the Staring into the Sun chapters, and realized, “This will stand on its own, as one story about half of my family.” For the other half, I’m working on a novel.

You published chapters of this book on The Spark, your podcast and Substack newsletter, where you also share interviews with other writers. How much has input from fellow writers motivated and shaped your work?

In all spheres of life, I really believe in community, and I’ve become quite active in the writing community. I was pretty isolated and working on my own until around 2022, and then I started to do some courses on writing a synopsis, writing about conflict and tension, all these different kinds of online courses. On one of the courses, somebody in the chat said, “There’s a podcast called The Shit No One Tells You �鶹��ý Writing,” and that’s been an amazing resource. I listened to every episode. They give so many tips on the publishing world and writing, and they do author interviews, which is a great way to learn about writing craft. You can get so much from a community of writers, and you give back to that as well, being a good literary citizen.

How has your background in branding and communications influenced your approach to writing?

They’re very different things in terms of writing — different zones, different headspaces. For narrative writing, I really have to have focused time, to get into a flow; I need bigger chunks of time, and it feels like I’m using completely different parts of my brain. It is more time intensive and energy intensive.

Did you learn anything new about yourself writing this book?

It was quite cathartic and therapeutic to write about the family, and about my mother’s death in particular. And I think my view of myself changed: I wouldn’t have called myself a writer going into this, and I definitely am a writer coming out of it.

Finally, what do you carry with you from your time at �鶹��ý?

Prep year I got an English award for a story about my brother … and there was another story that was about him and my grandparents. This is exactly the stuff I’m still interested in, and it goes back to �鶹��ý! Having that encouragement to write made a difference: I had Peter Greer and Rex McGuinn, both just incredible teachers. I think learning how to write is indispensable in all areas of life.

And something else from �鶹��ý which is really important is the Harkness system, learning to speak up and be in a conversation where you’re building on people’s points, learning that sometimes you need to interrupt them. I’m really aware of how a lot of women don’t speak and don’t interrupt, when sometimes people have to be interrupted because otherwise you can’t get a word in edgewise. That is also something I use every day.

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Millie Dunstan ’15: Sustainable fashion

Adam Loyd — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:33:48 +0000

This spring, fashion designer Millie Dunstan ’15 stood by the door to a storefront on Eldridge Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, eager to celebrate a pivotal moment for her growing fashion company: the opening of its first brick-and-mortar retail location.

Dunstan co-founded Mindblown, a New York City streetwear line that promotes individuality and environmentally conscious fashion practices, in 2019 with Ben Lucas Jones, an Australian musician and graphic designer who is now her husband. Like its co-founders, the label is edgy yet fun — modern streetwear set against a backdrop of alternative grunge, skate and punk.

Prior to the opening, they operated out of a studio in Brooklyn, but they wanted a place where the community could discover the Mindblown brand in real life. Now the store will be the creative hub: Jones will have space to airbrush his graphic designs, and Dunstan will deconstruct, sew and bring to life the one-of-kind “streetwear couture” garments that have come to define the brand.

Dunstan developed her signature upcycling methods as a fashion student at Parsons School of Design, but she graduated in 2019 with some major reservations about the field. “The fashion industry can be very unsustainable,” she says, “and unethical even in the way things are produced. It made me want to start my own company and create new systems to make fashion more sustainable.”

She has been doing just that with Mindblown, which uses either upcycled materials like damaged, thrifted or vintage garments, or deadstock fabric that is no longer needed for its original purpose. Neither method is perfect. Upcycling is time-intensive and usually produces one item at a time. Deadstock, which is what Mindblown uses for its hoodies and tees, is ideal for designing in larger quantities, but Dunstan says the process of finding U.S.-based sources and production facilities is tough to navigate.

Together, Dunstan and Jones found their way, producing two successful New York Fashion Week shows, in 2024 and 2025, and working tirelessly to cultivate a following within New York’s indie arts scene. Mindblown’s celebrity fans include the pop star Tyla, the rapper Lizzo and the British singer-songwriter Lola Young, who wore a custom outfit made of patchwork pieces of colorful vintage sports jerseys during an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Colorful corsets embellished with upcycled strips of plaid and lace. Pleated miniskirts proportioned from high-quality deadstock denim. Men’s pants patched together from salvaged work wear in a mix of colors and prints. Amid all of the subculture collaborations and Vivienne Westwood runway-punk vibes, it’s easy to miss that Dunstan is doing something more challenging than it seems: making sustainable fashion that is legitimately fashionable.

It’s a full-circle moment for Dunstan, who first explored fashion at �鶹��ý. Using a sewing machine under the guidance of Art Instructor Tara Lewis, she participated in Print to Fit, a special fashion-plus-3Dprinter challenge in which students created wearable garments from scratch. For another project, she created clothing out of candy wrappers.

“Looking back now, I realize that I was upcycling even back then,” Dunstan says. “I remember tumbling glass bottles to put them onto clothing and shoes. It was my very early experimentation.”

With the store officially open, Dunstan says she and Jones are preparing a Mindblown show for New York Fashion Week in September — this time with official sponsors and outside help. They’re also producing more of their signature pieces in quantity, starting with unisex pants made from deadstock denim.

“We developed what we consider the ‘perfect fit,’” Dunstan says. “We named them the Forever Denim Pant because they should last forever.”

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Roots of discovery

Emma Ward — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 19:26:17 +0000

Roots of

Discovery

Toby Kiers ’94 reveals the hidden fungal networks shaping ecosystems beneath our feet – and perhaps a powerful ally in the fight against climate change

Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers ’94 arrived at the forested base of Africa’s Mount Kenya in 2011 to collect soil samples — with her husband and two children, ages 1 and 3 at the time, beside her. “I wanted to have this career in science and be out in the field,” Kiers says. “I also had young children and a very supportive husband. I was determined to be with them.”

Toby Kiers ’94 in her lab at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, where she is University Research Chair and a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution.

Like trailblazer Jane Goodall — who raised her only son in the 1960s and ’70s while studying chimpanzees in the jungles of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania — Kiers chose to bring her full self into the wild as a scientist, a mother and a wife. She believes that taking her family on research trips has positively shaped the way she engages with the landscape.

“Sometimes my kids would taste the soil, and so I started tasting it too, to gauge things like the pH level and acidity,” Kiers says. “It’s not something that you can broadly recommend because local soils are very different. One time, in Chile, I tasted the soil and it was so spicy that I immediately thought I’d done something wrong. But as a scientist, you have to be open to that, to following childlike curiosity to success — or to failure — and learning from it.”

What Kiers didn’t know was just how far these leaps of faith would take her. Over the past decade she has traveled across deserts and into cloud forests. In 2025, she was named one of 22 MacArthur Fellows who received $800,000 no-strings-attached awards, popularly known as “genius grants.” They are given annually to creative and innovative individuals across a wide range of fields. The fellowship is a testament to the years Kiers has spent in the field and the lab, tracking the invisible lives of a vast, misunderstood community: fungi.

To many, fungi might register as a culinary delicacy or an infectious agent. A bowl of sauteed mushrooms, perhaps, or the ravenous organism that transforms people into berserker zombies in The Last of Us. But Kiers’ groundbreaking research into the true extent of fungal activity has brought to light how fungi silently sustain our world.

Finding the Fungi

For as long as Kiers can remember, the natural world has been a place of comfort and wonder. She grew up in Cornwall, Connecticut (population 1,567, as of the 2020 Census), where the great outdoors was her backyard.

“We had a tractor, we harvested our own wood, and my sister, Haven, and I were good at collecting morels, which is a wonderful type of edible mushroom,” Kiers says. Sometimes, when the sisters felt agitated or stressed, their mother would simply tell them to go and spend some time outside. Whether yanking weeds from the garden or mushroom hunting near the bases of apple trees that had grown in abandoned farmland, the sisters embraced the healing power of nature earlier than most.

“During our morel foraging adventures,” Haven Kiers ’92 remembers, “Toby and I kept coming back to this one swampy area in the woods that we started calling Candyland. We played there, let our imaginations run wild. And I think going to �鶹��ý was a natural progression for us both.”

The proximity of the woodlands surrounding �鶹��ý’s campus was comforting to Kiers. What surprised her was how much the inquisitive culture of the outdoors applied to the classroom experience as well.

“The thing that really struck me was the Harkness system,” Kiers says. “The idea of sitting down together and having the freedom to talk about ideas and debate them, as opposed to just being taught how to regurgitate them. It just made such a big difference, especially in sciences. I think these discussions are more common in the humanities, but to learn science around a table rather than being lectured was a game changer.”

Kiers soon took these conversations beyond the table. Most semesters since 1984, �鶹��ý has sent a handful of nature-curious students to The Mountain School, a 416-acre farm in the forested hills south of Montpelier, Vermont. The classroom on any given day might be a pen of chickens that need wrangling or a greenhouse rustling with spinach plants. The school, which Kiers attended in 1992, also organizes backpacking voyages into more rugged locales like the White Mountains. Spending so much quality time with spruce trees, seasonal crops and livestock was, as Kiers puts it, “the gateway” to biology.

One exam that Kiers remembers especially well from her Mountain School semester began with the entire class heading into the woods, where the teacher had placed a blackboard among the trees. “Our whole test was on plant communities, trees, succession and everything we saw around us,” Kiers says. “We had to write down our theories of ecological succession, right out there in the wilderness.” When Kiers returned from the mountains, she says, the path in front of her was clearer: “I felt certain that I wanted to be a field biologist.”

This sense of purpose led her to Bowdoin College in 1994 to earn a degree in plant sciences. But in her junior year, feeling confined to labs, Kiers took a leave of absence to start an internship on Barro Colorado, a small island in the middle of SPUN, Seth CarNill, tomáS mUNita the Panama Canal with rich red soil and a research station run by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. “Being on Barro Colorado with all these incredible scientists who were taking the time to bring me out and show me things was hugely impactful,” Kiers says. “We all saw ourselves in the chaos of this massive rainforest.”

While most of the scientists there were studying the trees, bats, primates and everything you could see. Kiers was considering what was happening beneath the ground. “I did this experiment, digging up samples of dirt from underneath old tropical trees, and using that dirt to inoculate seedlings of the same tree species and different ones,” Kiers recalls. “The idea was trying to figure out whether the same species of trees need the same kind of soil, and whether the trees can condition what’s happening below them.”

If trees flourish through a symbiotic relationship with something hidden in the ground, she asked, what is the other partner and what does it receive in return? Kiers’ answer: millions of fungal organisms, which form a series of networks and are the driving force behind a great underground economy. It was a landmark moment for her — an introduction to the fungal kingdom of millions of yeasts, mushrooms, lichens and mildew. Within this subterranean world, she found that a special class of microbes called mycorrhizal fungi perform a world-sustaining transaction: receiving carbon from plants and trees, and offering nutrients in return.

We’ve often associated fungi with disease, rot and decay, when it’s actually this massive kingdom.

A Hidden Marketplace

“When people see dirt or roots, they’ll think, Oh, that’s something I recognize,” Kiers says. “But if you dig up roots and stain them with blue dye, you’ll start to see these intricate and beautiful fungal structures that penetrate the roots. The first time I saw this, it was like having a blinder taken off.”

Kiers kept looking closer, even as her own environment took her to new locales like the University of California, Davis, where she earned her Ph.D. in 2005. When her soon-to-be husband, Cralan Kelder, moved to the Netherlands to pursue a career opportunity, Kiers went with him and became an assistant professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. By 2010, she was a university research chair focused on mycology, the study of fungi. With each experiment and field foray, the transactional nature of the world’s overlooked fungal structures became clearer.

“Fungi and plants have been beneficial partners going as far back as 450 million years ago, when the earliest plants were colonizing land,” Kiers explains. “Let’s say you’ve got a plant that’s photosynthesizing with carbon from the atmosphere. The plant transforms that carbon dioxide into a kind of sugary fat that it feeds to the fungi penetrating its roots. And in return, the fungi will keep foraging the ground for plant-sustaining nitrogen and phosphorus, which they’ll give back.”

Kiers wondered if she and her colleagues could devise a mechanism for monitoring the underground economy of fungi and plant roots, the way the S&P 500 tracks the performance of stocks. “We set up precise experiments in the lab where we would change the plants’ exposure to nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon and shade,” Kiers says. “At the same time, we changed the number of fungal ‘trade partners’ and competitors for the plants, to better understand how their respective resources are exchanged. And in the end we were able to track these resources across fungal networks, so that we could study them more predictively, as we do with our economic system.”

Understanding the futures and vulnerabilities of the vast hidden economy of fungi and plants has climatological implications. As Kiers’ colleague Michael Van Nuland, also an evolutionary biologist, says: “The trade relationship between plants and fungi means that carbon removed from the atmosphere by plants is being stored deeper underground, beyond plant biomass like roots. When we think about climate-change solutions, we often think of engineering technologies like tanks that can extract and store carbon. But the natural ecosystem has been doing this for a long time. Underground networks are a potential form of biological infrastructure.”

The substantial carbon-capture labor performed by fungal structures inspired Kiers to co-found the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) in 2021. When she’s not in the classroom or labs at the university, Kiers serves as SPUN’s executive director, with Van Nuland leading the data science. Their mission, to “map, protect and harness the mycorrhizal networks that regulate the Earth’s climate and ecosystems,” speaks to the importance of making the fungal economy more broadly visible.

“We recently did a study which demonstrated how plants and fungi are playing a massive role in the climate cycle,” Kiers says. “The plants allocate 13 billion tons of CO₂ to mycorrhizal fungi each year. That’s like about one-third of the annual emissions from fossil fuels. And the plants are feeding all that carbon dioxide to the fungal networks. That’s one of the things we’re now trying to understand: how the fungi are controlling the underground flow of carbon.”

Kiers studies samples imaged with confocal microscopy and fluorescent dye (pictured) to better understand the fungi’s mycelial network systems. Bright circles represent reproductive spores that store plant-derived carbon underground.

The underdog of life

Undaunted by the scale of these elemental questions, Kiers has pursued clues and answers far beyond the Amsterdam campus. Some harsh environments, like the Gobi Desert, might seem incapable of supporting fungi. But as Kiers found in the desert and in the mountains of Lesotho — where scientists often collect data or samples by horseback — deciphering the hidden lives of local fungi is a practice with many roots. “There are incredibly talented local scientists and communities that have been thinking about the workings of soil systems for decades, if not centuries,” Kiers says.

In October — as Kiers and her SPUN colleagues brainstormed ways to translate their collaborative research into blueprints for incorporating fungi into climate protection policies — the unexpected call from the MacArthur Foundation gave Kiers a longer runway and a major infusion of resources. “I sort of fell to the floor, on my knees, when they told me that I had been chosen for one of the grants,” Kiers remembers. “Because really, this is an award that honors all of these scientists around the world that care deeply about the underdog of life, which is fungi.”

Close friends and family were unsurprised by her MacArthur honor. “When it happened, I was like, but of course,” Haven Kiers recalls. Colleagues felt a sense of possibility for where research like Kiers’ could soon lead.

Van Nuland says: “Right now there are some broad biodiversity protection policies in place, but frameworks for how to incorporate fungi more specifically, alongside plants and animals, have been missing. What we now know about underground networks will make it possible to create those frameworks and to take bigger steps toward influencing policy; like building predictive maps of fungal biodiversity hot spots around the world, so we know which areas to work toward protecting in the first place.”

Why are fungi so important?

Mycorrhizal fungi are found in every soil system on Earth and have symbiotic relationships with the plants whose roots they live on and in. The fungi provide nutrients to the plants, from which they draw carbon dioxide and lock it into the soil, making it hard to release back into the atmosphere. This makes fungi major carbon repositories and an important tool for carbon sequestration.

Kiers and Van Nuland agree that a key ingredient in SPUN’s research and advocacy is decentralizing the scientific landscape by collaborating with field biologists across the world and honoring their localized insights and work. “This couldn’t be more important today, especially given recent federal funding cuts for science in the U.S.,” Kiers says. “You can work with researchers in communities to co-create datasets, which can inform a range of biodiversity protection policies that work for different communities and regions, instead of a top-down model.”

This collaborative spirit helped SPUN create the Underground Atlas, an evolving map of fungal patterns across the world’s underground ecosystems. Kiers was recognized for this work, and more, with the 2026 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. Goodall received the 1997 award, which the scientific community sometimes refers to as the Nobel Prize for the environment. Kiers holds the distinction of being the youngest woman to win it.

Inspired and supported by this recognition, Kiers remains deeply immersed in the ground work of tracking the fungal economy. Early this year, she was gearing up for a field-sampling trip to the high-altitude forests and grasslands of Bhutan. This time Kiers traveled alone because of the country’s complex travel permitting system. But she set off with the same curiosity and wonder that she cultivated in the Panama Canal and in the shadow of Mount Kenya with her children.

“We’ve often associated fungi with disease, rot and decay, when it’s actually this massive kingdom,” Kiers says. “And I think people are starting to realize that there are so many ways of interacting with fungi. Not just directly, like eating yeast-raised bread or taking penicillin for an infection, but more passively, whenever we walk among trees and wildflowers.

“It’s all around us, overhead and underfoot.”

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