By the 1970s, genes were cloned and isolated and the sequences of the nucleotides revealed the proteins that they made, which could then be expressed and produced in bacteria. […] A common question was “What does one learn from all this reductionism without the organism?”

“Imagine you knew nothing about baking, but someone gave you a million different muffins. Could you figure out how to bake a muffin? That's the problem of machine learning,” says Chris Maddison, Member in the School of Mathematics. At IAS, he is developing methods for machine learning and exploring foundational questions about how learning from data is possible.

How could a leaderless grassroots movement, involving often quite small groups of protesters, monopolize the national news, capture the attention of the wider world, and destabilize a government that had swept to power by a landslide victory in 2017? As Jacques Rancière has suggested, it is as difficult to understand why some people mobilize when confronted with situations they regard as unacceptable, as it is to understand why others in similar or even worse circumstances do not. 

“My research offers scholars, activists, and community organizers a new way to see race—as a rhetorical practice with historical roots that extend back well beyond the periods of Enlightenment science and American slavery to which it is often attached,” says Cord J. Whitaker, Member in the School of Historical Studies, who is examining the history and development of race and racism in medieval English literature.

It's not so easy being a role model. One of the things you learn when you’re going through life and so forth is that you need role models, but you don’t need perfect role models. You need role models who fall down and pick themselves up. You need role models who show how even though you can’t do everything, you can do some things. You need role models to keep you going.