Massachusetts Institute of Technology chemical engineer Arup K. Chakraborty remembers well the day that he learned about some of the challenges facing immunologists. “I found it a fascinating area of science and got completely enamored with it and have been so for the last decade,” he says. He uses his engineering background to apply theoretical and computational approaches to understanding how lymphocytes function (which he describes in "Seeing in Numbers"). Bringing together the engineering, physical and life science disciplines “can lead to new mechanistic insights that otherwise would not have been possible,” he says. He’s won an array of awards for his work, including the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, and the E.O. Lawrence Memorial Award for Life Sciences.
Milton Diamond began studying sexuality back in the 1960s, when it was still completely taboo. “In those days, nobody studied sex—whatever they studied was called ‘reproduction,’” he says. While people have become ...