Personal Mention

Tiziana Di Matteo, professor of physics and a member of the McWilliams Center for Cosmology at Carnegie Mellon, has been awarded a grant from the Astrophysics Theory Program at NASA to make predictions about colliding supermassive black holes and test Einstein’s theory of gravity with observations of a space-based gravitational wave detector. The grant will allow Di Matteo to study the growth of massive black holes across cosmic history by carrying out simulations of galaxies and black hole formation across the full history of the universe. “At the center of each galaxy, there is a powerful black hole that’s millions or billions of times more massive than the sun,” Di Matteo said. “These galaxies move toward each other, and sometimes they collide with each other. Observing the gravitational waves produced during these super-collisions is what will help us understand whether Einstein was right in these extreme environments.” Learn more.

English Professor Jane McCafferty has authored a “sleepcast” for the evidence-based meditation app Headspace. Titled "River City," the podcast aims to put listeners to sleep by guiding them through a relaxing visualization of Pittsburgh, complete with myriad bridges and houses nestled into hills. McCafferty read the piece live during Headspace’s recent “Happy Healthy America” tour stop in Pittsburgh. “I love podcasts,” said McCafferty, who also has had her own personal experiences with insomnia. “I was told the piece had to have strong images and nothing plotted — that it had to be plot-less. I read the story to a crowd and was told people fell asleep, including Pittsburgh Steeler JuJu Smith-Schuster, despite it being pretty cold in the Headspace tent. It’s a strange assignment — 'write something that will put people to sleep' — but I had fun." McCafferty is the author of four books: “Director of the World and other stories,” which won the Drue Heinz prize; “One Heart,” a novel; “Thank You For the Music,” a second book of stories; and “First You Try Everything,” another novel. She teaches a variety of fiction and non-fiction courses. Listen to “River City.” 

Robert F. Murphy, the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology and head of the Computational Biology Department, has been elevated to fellow status in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest technical professional organization. Fellow status is a distinction reserved for select members who have demonstrated extraordinary accomplishments in an IEEE field of interest. The IEEE cited Murphy “for contributions to machine learning algorithms for biological images.” Murphy’s career has centered on combining fluorescence-based cell measurements with quantitative and computational methods. In the mid-1990s, his group pioneered the use of machine learning to analyze microscope images of subcellular structures. His group’s work over the past 20 years led to the development of the first systems for automatically recognizing all major organelle patterns in 2D and 3D images of cells and tissues, and for building generative models of subcellular organization directly from images. Find out more.