Photo by Janice Checchio

Today’s world is full of challenges. Addressing these challenges requires bold action from wise, creative, forward-thinking people.

The College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences is proud to play a role in preparing our students to become the world-changing leaders and citizens who will step up to tackle our planet’s most serious problems. Our students’ engagement with rigorous academics, world-class faculty, and a wide range of experiential learning opportunities provides them with the skills and experience they need to make a difference in the world.

Here are some of the ways CAS and GRS are preparing today’s students to become tomorrow’s leaders and citizens:

Undergraduate Education: Broadening Our Curriculum

A broad range of majors—75 at last count—gives students the freedom both to learn broadly and to focus specifically. With 2,500+ undergraduate courses, students have the flexibility to explore a wide variety of disciplines.

This year, we added two new undergraduate majors and one new minor:

  • BA in Linguistics & African Languages: A joint major that combines the study of the formal structures of human language with the study of one or more African languages.
  • BA in Physics & Computer Science: A joint major that integrates the study of physics and computer science, an integration that is growing in importance as topics such as quantum computing and machine learning become the focus of major industrial developments.
  • Undergraduate Minor in Public Policy Analysis: A foundation of knowledge, skills, and analytical tools that provide in-depth perspective on public policy issues within government settings.

We have also added new classes, all of which satisfy BU Hub credits, that reflect the ever-expanding interests of our students and the changes in the world around us, including:

  • Applied Mathematics for Personal Finance
  • Black Power in the Classroom: The History of Black Studies
  • Cybersecurity and U.S. National Security
  • Gender, Sexuality, and Buddhism
  • Immigrant Women in Literature: Found in Translation?
  • Mapping Dangerous Online Speech
  • Public Opinion in American Politics
  • Religion and Hip Hop (read more about this popular class in this BU Today article)
  • Shark Biology and Conservation
  • U.S. Environmental Policy

Undergrads Leading the Way

In addition to excelling in the classroom, CAS undergraduates showed a remarkable range of leadership in a wide variety of areas. Here are a few of the ways they made a difference on campus, in their communities, and in the world:

  • Zak Schneider (CAS’22, Pardee’22), who considers himself as being “solidly left on economic and social issues,” volunteered for a one-week immersion in the Summer Honors Program at the right-leaning think tank American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. He then shared what he learned—including insights about respecting different political views—in an article for BU Today.
  • Six BU students—including Lily Kelly (CAS’22), Christopher Dew (CAS’22), Deep Patel (CAS’22), and Avi Nguyen (CAS’22)—tackled topics such as climate change, racism, and social and economic inequities during summer internships at Boston City Hall.
  • Several student volunteers—including undergraduate Lauren Mister (CAS’21, Pardee’21)—worked with Assistant Professor of Sociology Heba Gowayed to help prepare refugees to pass the US citizenship exam as part of BU’s Citizenship Hub.

Developing Tomorrow’s Leaders Working at the Forefront of Knowledge

Students in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (GRS) can earn advanced degrees through 40 professional MA, MS, and MFA programs and 30 PhD programs in the natural sciences, mathematical & computational sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

GRS faculty are highly respected leaders in their disciplines. Our alumni are known for their innovation and creativity in a wide array of subject areas. And our graduate students are a dynamic, diverse, bright group of scholars who are poised to reach stunning heights in academics, research, and professional spheres.

During the past year, GRS has continued its intense focus on developing tomorrow’s leaders working at the forefront of knowledge, supporting opportunities for collaboration between professors and students, and providing a wide range of postgraduate opportunities in the vibrant, academically focused city of Boston and beyond. The following are just a few examples from this past year:

  • Kayli Rideout (PhD candidate, American & New England Studies) interned at the Massachusetts Historical Society in summer 2021, helping curate a forthcoming digital project called “The Case for Ending Slavery.” The project outlines how slavery ended in Massachusetts and the ways in which the legacy of slavery plays out in the state’s contemporary society and culture.
  • PhD candidate Shrey Grover and Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences Robert Reinhart added to the body of knowledge about how to treat obsessions and compulsions. Their study showed that applying to a person’s scalp very weak electrical currents attuned to their brain wave pattern can significantly reduce obsessive-compulsive behaviors. The study, “High-Frequency Neuromodulation Improves Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior,” appeared in Nature Medicine.
  • PhD candidate Olivia Britton was selected as a Rappaport Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, through which she interned at the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement (MOIA). Olivia assisted with logistics for Immigrants Lead Boston, a program for Boston immigrants who wish to take more civic ownership and become leaders in the community.
  • PhD candidate Casey Monroe was awarded a Joan and Stanford Alexander Award from the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. This award supports dissertation research in the history of photography and will support his project, “William Henry Jackson and the Construction of a Global Frontier.”
  • Eleven PhD students in seven different disciplines earned highly competitive National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships.

Faculty Excellence

Each year, CAS recruits several leading researchers and scholars to join our faculty. With these new additions to campus, the Arts & Sciences community is strengthening its commitment to its students, faculty, and staff—as new faculty play a vital role in advancing our contributions to the greater world. For the 2021/22 academic year, we welcomed 27 new researchers, lecturers, instructors, and visiting professors in a range of departments and programs, all dedicated to supporting our students and their academic and professional interests and pursuits.

And CAS faculty and researchers are true leaders in their fields, as the following accomplishments show:

  • Writing Program Master Lecturer William Giraldi (GRS’03) received a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. This award is given each year to artists, scholars, and scientists who “have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.” Read more about his work.
  • Three CAS researchers received Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) awards from the National Science Foundation: Zeynep Demiragli, assistant professor of physics; Emily Whiting, associate professor of computer science; and Mark Bun, associate professor of computer science.
  • Stefan Hofmann, professor of psychological and brain sciences and director of BU’s Psychotherapy and Emotion Research Laboratory, is one of three BU professors elected as American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow. He is recognized for his work advancing cognitive behavioral therapy as an effective treatment for anxiety.
  • Assistant Professor of History of Art & Architecture Anne Feng received a Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Program in China Studies Early Career Fellowship for 2021/22. Her project is titled “Aqueous Visions: Water, Meditation, and Mural Painting in Medieval China.”
  • Theodora Goss, a master lecturer in the CAS Writing Program, received a Fulbright Teaching Award for the spring semester of the 2021/22 academic year in Hungary.
  • Professor of Spanish, Latin American Studies, and Comparative Literature Alicia Borinsky received the Enrique Anderson Imbert Award for her lifelong career as a scholar and creative writer from the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE).
  • Four CAS faculty received 2021/22 fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute: Alisa Bokulich, professor of philosophy of science; Margaret Litvin, associate professor of Arabic and comparative literature; Petrus Liu, associate professor of Chinese and comparative literature and of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; and Merav Opher, professor of astronomy.
  • Associate Professor of Political Science Katherine Levine Einstein has been named a Clarence Stone Scholar by the Urban and Local Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. This award recognizes up to two young scholars who are making a significant contribution to the study of urban politics.
  • Assistant Professor of Computer Science Alina Ene, who also serves as institute junior faculty fellow at BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering, is one of two BU professors who received a 2021 Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards for early-career scientists.