Brown University

Nilo Cruz is an Cuban-American playwright and pedagogue. With his award of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play, Anna in the Tropics, he... became the first Latino so honored. Cruz was born to Tina and Nilo Cruz, Sr. in Matanzas, Cuba. The family immigrated to the "Little Havana" in Miami, Florida in 1970 on a Freedom Flight, and eventually naturalised to the United States. His interest in theater began with acting and directing in the early 1980s. He studied theater first at Miami-Dade Community College, later moving to New York City, where Cruz studied under fellow Cuban María Irene Fornés. Fornes recommended Cruz to Paula Vogel who was teaching at Brown University where he would later receive his M.F.A. in 1994. In 2001, he served as the playwright-in-residence for the New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, where he wrote Anna in the Tropics, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer and the Steinberg Award for Best New Play. A year later it received its Broadway premiere with Jimmy Smitts in the lead role.
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Gareth Cook is an American journalist and editor. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for “explaining, with clarity and humanity, the... complex scientific and ethical dimensions of stem cell research.” Cook is currently a Sunday columnist at the Boston Globe, and is also the editor of Mind Matters, Scientific American's neuroscience blog. Cook graduated from Brown University in 1991 with degrees in Mathematical Physics and International Relations. He was an assistant editor at Foreign Policy, a scholarly journal based in Washington, DC. He then worked as a reporter at U.S. News & World Report, and then as an editor at the Washington Monthly. He was the news editor of the Boston Phoenix, an alternative weekly based in Boston, from 1996-1999. In 1999, he started at the Boston Globe, and worked for seven years as the paper’s science reporter, covering a variety of topics, including biology, physics, paleontology, archeology, the role of women in science and scientific fraud. He helped invent the Boston Globe's Ideas section, and then served as its editor from 2007 to 2011. He is now a Sunday columnist.
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Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and short story writer. Eugenides is most known for his first two novels, The... Virgin Suicides and Middlesex . His novel The Marriage Plot was published in October, 2011. Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, of Greek and Irish descent. He attended Grosse Pointe's private University Liggett School. He took his undergraduate degree at Brown University, graduating in 1983. He later earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from Stanford University. In 1986 he received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship for his story "Here Comes Winston, Full of the Holy Spirit." His 1993 novel, The Virgin Suicides, gained mainstream interest with the 1999 film adaptation directed by Sofia Coppola. The novel was reissued in 2009. Eugenides is reluctant to disclose details about his private life, except through Michigan-area book signings in which he details the influence of Detroit and his high-school experiences on his writings. He has said that he has "a perverse love" of his birthplace.
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John Wilder Tukey ForMemRS was an American statistician best known for development of the FFT algorithm and box plot. Tukey was born in New Bedford,... Massachusetts in 1915, and obtained a B.A. in 1936 and M.Sc. in 1937, in chemistry, from Brown University, before moving to Princeton University where he received a Ph.D. in mathematics. During World War II, Tukey worked at the Fire Control Research Office and collaborated with Samuel Wilks and William Cochran. After the war, he returned to Princeton, dividing his time between the university and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Among many contributions to civil society, Tukey served on a committee of the American Statistical Association that produced a report challenging the conclusions of the Kinsey Report, Statistical Problems of the Kinsey Report on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1982 "For his contributions to the spectral analysis of random processes and the fast Fourier transform algorithm." Tukey retired in 1985. He died in New Brunswick, New Jersey on July 26, 2000. His statistical interests were many and varied.
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Leon N Cooper is an American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate, who with John Bardeen and John Robert Schrieffer, developed the BCS theory of... superconductivity. He is also the namesake of the Cooper pair and co-developer of the BCM theory of synaptic plasticity. Cooper graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1947 and received a B.A. in 1951, M.A. in 1953, and Ph.D. in 1954 from Columbia University. He spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study and taught at the University of Illinois and Ohio State University before coming to Brown University in 1958. He is the Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Professor of Science at Brown, and Director of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems. He has carried out research at various institutions including the Institute for Advanced Study, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. The character Sheldon Cooper, featured in the CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory, is named after Leon Cooper.
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Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University and the recipient of the 1993 Pulitzer... Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution. His book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 won a 1970 Bancroft Prize. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. Gordon Wood was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and grew up in Worcester and Waltham. He graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University in 1955. and has served as a trustee there. After serving in the U.S. Air Force in Japan, during which time he earned an A.M. at Harvard University, he entered the Ph.D. program in history at Harvard, where he studied under Bernard Bailyn. Wood received his Ph.D. in 1964. He has taught at Harvard, the College of William and Mary, the University of Michigan, Brown, Pitt Professor at Cambridge University, and in 1982–83 and lectured for One Day University.
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Paula Vogel is an American playwright and university professor. She received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, How I Learned to Drive.... Vogel was born in Washington, D.C. to Donald Stephen Vogel, an advertising executive, and Phyllis Rita Bremerman, a secretary for United States Postal Service Training and Development Center. She is a graduate of The Catholic University of America and Cornell University . Vogel also attended Bryn Mawr College from 1969 to 1970 and 1971 to 1972. A productive playwright since the late 1970s, Vogel first came to national prominence with her AIDS-related seriocomedy The Baltimore Waltz, which won the Obie award for Best Play in 1992. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning play How I Learned to Drive , which examines the impact and echoes of child sexual abuse and incest. Other notable plays include Desdemona, A Play About A Handkerchief ; The Oldest Profession ; And Baby Makes Seven ; Hot 'N Throbbing ; and The Mineola Twins .
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Lars Onsager was a Norwegian-born American physical chemist and theoretical physicist, winner of the 1968 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He held the... Gibbs Professorship of Theoretical Chemistry at Yale University. Lars Onsager was born in Kristiania , Norway. His father was a lawyer. After completing secondary school in Oslo, he attended the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim, graduating as a chemical engineer in 1925. In 1925 he arrived at a correction to the Debye-Hückel theory of electrolytic solutions, to specify Brownian movement of ions in solution, and during 1926 published it. He traveled to Zürich, where Peter Debye was teaching, and confronted Debye, telling him his theory was wrong. He impressed Debye so much that he was invited to become Debye's assistant at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule , where he remained until 1928. Eventually in 1928 he went to the United States of America to take a faculty position at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
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