Professor Junot Díaz will be honored as one of this year’s We Are Boston Award recipients for embracing “diversity and immigrant heritage,” writes Jennifer Usovicz for The Boston Globe. “Boston is beautiful precisely because of our immigrant communities,” says Díaz. “Our energy and sacrifice is the dynamo that drives the city forward.”
Boston Globe reporter Katherine Landergan writes that during MIT’s 2015 Commencement, U.S. CTO Megan Smith ’86, SM ’88 urged graduates to “be kind, be inclusive, be open.” President L. Rafael Reif asked graduates to have a “bold willingness to disrupt the status quo, to make the world a better place.”
MIT celebrated the induction of Robert Robinson Taylor, the Institute’s first African American graduate, into the U.S. Postal Service’s Black Heritage Stamp series. “Robert Robinson Taylor graduated MIT in 1892 and is believed to be the country’s first academically trained black architect,” reports Sara Feijo for The Cambridge Chronicle.
Boston Globe reporter Laura Krantz writes about an event held at MIT to honor Robert Robinson Taylor, MIT’s first African-American graduate who was honored earlier this year with a new postage stamp.
Karen Weintraub writes for The Boston Globe about Professor Temple Grandin’s talk at MIT about coping with stress. Grandin, who has autism, “said her anxiety has been transformed into hyper-vigilance. She’s aware of every little movement the airplane she’s riding on makes, but isn’t worried that the plane might crash,” Weintraub explains.
Boston Magazine reporter Olivia Rassow writes about how Robert Robinson Taylor, MIT’s first black alumnus, is being inducted into the U.S. Postal Service’s Black Heritage Stamp series. The stamp honoring Taylor “depicts a black-and-white photograph of Taylor taken when he was 22 years old and a student at MIT.”
The U.S. Postal Service has issued a stamp in honor of Robert Robinson Taylor, MIT’s first black alumnus, writes Krissah Thompson of The Washington Post. Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama and Taylor’s great-granddaughter, said that whenever she faces a daunting task she thinks of Taylor, “the son of a slave, who traveled all the way from Wilmington, North Carolina, to attend MIT.”
Shana Lebowitz writes for Forbes about a study co-authored by Dr. Sara Ellison that determined that gender-diverse teams are more productive than their single-gender counterparts: “[R]esearchers estimated that transitioning from a single-gender office to an office evenly split between men and women would translate to a whopping 41% revenue gain.”
CSAIL PhD students Elena Glassman, Neha Narula and Jean Yang write for Wired about their recent Reddit Ask Me Anything session and gender disparities in STEM. “By raising awareness and generating discussion, we hope to help women and other minorities feel more supported pursuing careers in STEM,” write Glassman, Narula and Yang.
Susan Adams writes for Forbes about research coauthored by Dr. Sara Ellison that indicates that single-sex teams are less productive than their co-ed counterparts. “The authors say their research shows that switching from a single-sex group to a co-ed team could increase revenues by a whopping 41%,” Adams writes.
Hannah Northey of Greenwire features the work of MIT alumnus Samuel Brinton, an energy fellow at Third Way and LGBT activist who is known for his bright red mohawk. "A lot of Hill staffers know me as the MIT or nuclear kid with a red mohawk," says Brinton. "It gets the conversation started."
Research by Dr. Sara Fisher Ellison indicates that co-ed teams are more productive, but have lower job satisfaction, writes Rachel Emma Silverman for The Wall Street Journal. “The researchers posit that shifting an all-female or all-male team to a coed one would increase revenues by 41%.”
Financial Times reporter John Authers writes about a new study, co-authored by MIT Professor Evan Apfelbaum, which found that diversity among stock market traders increased pricing accuracy. “It’s not about diversity boosting performance, it’s about homogeneity tanking it,” says Apfelbaum of the study.
Forbes reporter Susan Adams examines a new study co-authored by MIT Prof. Evan Apfelbaum that looks at how diversity impacts the performance of stock traders. The researchers compared groups of ethnically homogenous and diverse traders and found that “traders in the diverse group did a 58% better job at correctly pricing assets.”
Professor Craig Wilder received a Hurston/Wright 2014 award for his book “Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” writes DeNeen L. Brown for The Washington Post. According to the judges, Wilder’s book “brilliantly exposes the blood-soaked ties between slavery and high education and higher education in America.”