CM Summer 2025

CM Commonwealth School Magazine Summer 2025

Scientific Sparks

WHY I MADE IT: KINETIC MOBILE

BY ALEC LAZORISAK ’25

T

hroughout my time at Commonwealth, I have been interested in making art out of street trash. I collect random objects and street signs, and I started turning them into art sophomore year. I came up with these designs by staring at the object until I had an idea, usually with no deliberate outside inspiration needed. This project, kinetic mobile, however, was unlike the others I had done; it was made with street trash but involved a sculptural element. I wanted to use a bike wheel I found at one of the Green Line stops, but I did not know where to start. So, I looked for inspiration at the MIT Museum. I love Cory’s Yellow Chair by Arthur Ganson, which contains mechanics, but I’m not sure how I got to kinetic mobile from that.

When I started this project, I wanted it to mean something. Most of my pieces do not mean anything, and I wanted this to be different. But, ultimately, the more I tried to make it mean anything, the more I got lost. So, I focused on the process over the finished product.

It started with an in-class project in Sculpture/Ceramics where we made “plaster paintings.”

We made negatives in clay, then turned them into positives made from plaster. At that point I was still deciding what to do with the bike wheel and ended up making imprints in the clay, which became 3D plaster “stars.” (Later in the year, I finished the plaster and the frame with iron-toned oil to give it a more natural look.)

I delayed the actual building of the project for a while because I did not know how to start.

Kinetic mobile was as far as I got. I made a couple sketches, but they were a poor representation and did not give me any information. At one point I considered a theme: maybe children’s toys?

But it didn’t grab me. So, I laid everything out in front of me and built the sculpture one piece at a time.

I knew I wanted to use the chains to hold the shape. I spent multiple weeks soaking them in salt baths to try to rust them in place. This did not work, but I noticed that when I left them to dry, the rust seeped into the paper towels, leaving a print. (I took a break from the kinetic mobile project to create rust prints, where I spread out the chain along a piece of paper and sprayed it with vinegar to create an imprint.) Ultimately, I decided to use resin to hold the chains’ shape. After I figured that out, I started with the next piece that grabbed my eye: the pedal. I hung that, then added the next biggest piece—a string of rear derailleurs—to balance it out. After that, it was a game of hanging different pieces, balancing the rest and so on, until it felt right.

Overall, this reflects the kinetic sculptures I have always admired while adding an element of “street trash” tied to my own artistic preferences. t

1

T

he other day at recess, one of my colleagues, Melissa Glenn Haber ’87, asked our students to raise their hands if their grandparents were born in another country. A veritable forest of hands shot up. Most of our community, it turns out, have meaningful ties to other places. For personal as well as political reasons then, many of us are scared and appalled by the antiimmigration rhetoric bellowing out of Washington, the policies that follow, and the poison seeping through social media. Commonwealth is diverse along many dimensions, and we have always viewed our differences as a powerful source o learning and growth.

What are we doing in the face of what feels like an assault on our core values?

We’re doing some of what we’ve always done, with more force and intention: teaching students about the complexities of American history; engaging with the theme of immigration in our summer reading; empowering students to find thei voices and use them to better our world.

Another inspiring way is through Dive In. Dive In, for those of you unfamiliar, is our program for motivated, curious middle-school students who might not have had opportunities to access schools like Commonwealth. As you’ll read in these pages, Dive In has grown in scope and impact since we started the program in 2019 with five students. This summe , we will welcome thirty-seven students, some of whom will go on to enroll at Commonwealth. Several of our Dive In students are immigrants, too, and their stories help remind us of the big, complicated world within and beyond our walls.

The joyful engagement with that big world is manifest in our profiles o alumni/ae who work in the field of translation. Their craft allows them to cross an blur borders, searching for near equivalencies as we reach across differences. I coul almost taste their delight in words and was awed by the nuance of their craft.

There is much else that awaits you in this issue. For one, I am delighted you’ll get to spend some time with our physics and astronomy teacher Chris Spalding, himself an immigrant. As you read, you will not hear the distinct vowels of his Northern Irish accent (where “vowel” might be pronounced “vuhl”). You will, however, get a sense of the sheer exuberance and rigor he brings to teaching— infused with wonder about the way the planets move above us and the world functions around us.

That I get to talk to Chris regularly, that all of us are in each other’s close orbit as we move through our hallways, is one of the central parts of the Commonwealth experience. We live on top of each other, students and adults alike. We are close enough to peel back the layers of the more overt identifiers we all display t the next layers of who we are. This closeness allows us to plumb each other’s differences and expand each other s worlds. Diversity and connection are bedrock values for Commonwealth and will remain so.

Jennifer Borman ’81 Head of School

2 CM Summer 2025

CM

Commonwealth School Alumni/ae Magazine Issue 28 Summer 2025 Editor-in-Chief Jessica Tomer Editor Catherine Brewster Contributing Writers Jennifer Borman ’81 Catherine Brewster Becca Gillis Claire Jeantheau Alec Lazorisak ’25 Jessica Tomer Lillien Waller Contributing Art and Design Alan A. Photography Andre Bogard Diego Colmenares derin korman Ciaran Murphy Peter Nguyen Henry Poynter Tony Rinaldo Photography Printing Hannaford and Dumas

CM is published twice a year by Commonwealth School, 151 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02116, and distributed without charge to alumni/ae, current and former parents, and other members of the Commonwealth community. Opinions expressed in CM are those of the authors and subjects, and do not necessarily represent the views of the School or its faculty and students.

We welcome feedback: communications@commschool.org.

Letters and notes may be edited for style, length, clarity, and grammar.

Printed on recycled paper. Please recycle.

@commonwealthalumniae commonwealthschool commonwealthschool commonwealthschool

CM

CONTENTS

Commonwealth School Magazine Summer 2025

Why I Made It: kinetic mobile

1

7

Alec Lazorisak ’25 experiments with street trash to create an eye-catching sculpture

A Letter from the Head of School

2

Connecting across borders

News of Commonwealth

4

16

A graduation of firsts upgrades to the Ceramics studio, successes on stage, Earth Day assembly, ten years of COMMUN, and more

Conversations with the Head

12

Jennifer Borman ’81 sits down with Dive In Commonwealth leaders to reflec on the growth and trajectory of our program for middle-school students

What Can You Do with a Biology Major?

16

Four biology majors, four differen paths

A Partner in Health

20

Albert Whitaker ’73 links health services with community ones

Careers in Translation Alumni/ae linguists, translators, and interpreters revel in the nuances and complexities of language

Criss-Crossing Science, from Planets to Prehistory

12

22

26

28

Commonwealth science teacher Chris Spalding thinks outside the box—and outside the confine of scientifi disciplines

The Sputnik Explosion into American Politics

28

In his recent research paper, Brian Li ’26 dissects the politics of the launch of Sputnik I

Throwbacks

30

Cooking at Hancock then and now

Alumni/ae Connections

32

Alumni/ae experts grapple with AI at the Merrill Series panel, and a spate of reunions bring old friends together in Boston

20 Questions with Duncan Eddy ’09

26 On the cover: CJ Carpenter ’27 collecting data for Chemistry 1, with teacher Eva Earnest just o camera lighting the test strip. Meet Ms. Earnest and other Commonwealth scientists with academic roots in biology on page 16.

36

Get to know the Executive Director of the Stanford Center for AI Safety 3

N E W S of Co m m o nwe a l t h

2 1

3

4

5

6

7

Scholastic Art and Writing Awards 2025

M

ore than 100,000 students in grades seven through twelve submit upwards of 330,000 pieces to the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards each year. This year, fif een Commonwealth students across all four grades took home a total of twenty-one awards. From striking portrait photography to dizzying architectural images to vivid comic-book storytelling, these works have certainly earned their accolades.

ART AWARDS

WRITING AWARDS

Gold Key Aadi Krishnan ’26, “There’s hope but not for us” (1)

Silver Key Aritra Ghosh ’25, “A Jolly Adventure” Angelina Yu ’27, “Pop pop, Pop pop”

n

n

n

Silver Key Iris Eckelman ’27, “Untitled” (2) Katie Heim Binas ’25, “Through a Playground Lens” (6) Ada Knox ’28, “Black and White Raku Series 5” Ada Knox ’28, “Ceramic Pot” Sarah Rahman ’27, “Journey of Letters” Caro Taylor ’27, “The Little Match Girl” (7) n

n

n

n

n

n

Honorable Mention Alice Botvinik ’28, “Sandcastle” (4) Iris Eckelman ’27, “Dancing on the Dock” (9) Ramya Ramanathan ’27, “Sublimation and the Unseen” (5) Amanda Trogolo ’26, “Reflection ” (3) Amanda Trogolo ’26, “Rue Saint-Melaine” (8) n

n

n

Honorable Mention Aditya Anand ’26, “PriyƒÅvihƒÅra, Louis meets Peter and Boy” Katie Heim Binas ’25, “If You’re Going to Leave—an Abecedarian” Katie Heim Binas ’25, “The Part of This You Find Strange” Chloe Li ’27, “STOP. THIS IS ALL TOO MUCH.” Happy Liang ’26, “A Curse for Time” Happy Liang ’26, “(future) reference” Sarah Rahman ’27, “The Ghost of Edgehill” n

n

n

8

n

n

n

n

n

n

4 CM Summer 2025

9

Diplomats in the Making

Spinning Up Ceramics Studio Updates

N

ext time you stop by 151 Comm. Ave., make your way to the fift floo and check out the upgraded Ceramics studio. Thanks to a generous donation from Catherine Merrill (Charles Merrill’s oldest child and an accomplished ceramicist), Commonwealth students are throwing on eight new wheels, wedging on heavy-duty steel tables, and storing their masterpieces on custom-built adjustable wooden shelves. When the bell rings, clean-up is a breeze thanks to the deep double sink, complete with commercial sprayer. Look for more on this transformative gift and the artistry it is making possible in the next issue of CM.

C

ommonwealth had an impressive showing at Model United Nations conferences this spring, with seven students receiving recognition in their committees across two major conferences at Concord Academy (CAMUN) and MIT (MITMUNC).

Best Delegate Aditya Anand ’26 (CAMUN) Natan Shapiro ’27 (CAMUN, MITMUNC) Outstanding Delegate Aditya Anand ’26 (MITMUNC) Alyssa Beach ’26 (MITMUNC) Gideon Borisy ’28 (CAMUN) Happy Liang ’26 (MITMUNC) Will Washko ’25 (CAMUN) Honorable Mention Brian Li ’26 (CAMUN) Verbal Commendation Happy Liang ’26 (CAMUN)

Mermaids Across the Pond

M

useo del Prado. The Colosseum. La Alhambra. The Circus Maximus.

Over spring break, our Spanish and Latin students steeped themselves in culture, language, and history on trips to Spain and Italy. What a treat, too, to welcome our Spanish host students to Commonwealth in April to get to know our school, tour the Boston sites, and reconnect with some familiar faces.

5

N E W S of Co m m o nwe a l t h

APPA Leads Lunar New Year Event

O

n the last day of midyear exams, the students of APPA (Asian Pacific Peoples Affinity Group) treated ou community to a morning celebrating the Lunar New Year and ushering in the Year of the Snake. With cookie decorating, games of Go and table tennis, calligraphy, tea sampling, tasty treats, and more, the festivities were a hit amongst students and faculty alike.

An Interdisciplinary Earth Day Assembly

T

his year’s Earth Day Assembly challenged students to consider some of the most complex and nuanced questions they will tackle in their lifetimes: Who or what is responsible for climate change? What can be done about it? What can I do about it?

Commonwealth’s Environmental Club, led by Anya Ratanchandani ’25 and Lillian Walsh ’25, organized the event with an eye toward helping all students connect with environmentalism, whether or not they think of themselves as “science kids.” The assembly featured ten different student- and teache -led workshops, or “booths” (in true science-fair lingo), ranging from information sessions on topics like water filtration systems to tips on how to shop sustainably to open discussion on thorny climate-related issues. Questions surrounding climate change may have elusive answers, but our community left the Earth Day Assembly prepared and invigorated to keep asking them.

Winter and Spring Sports Highlights

O

ur athletes saw action-packed winter and spring sports seasons this year, whether they were battling in playo games or organizing informal matches for some after-school fun.

Our basketball teams came out in full force this winter as we celebrated the first post-pandemic playoff qualification fo the Girls’ Varsity team as well as the first post-pandemic win for the Boys’ JV team.

Following a successful inaugural season last spring, our volleyball offerings expanded from a Girls’ Varsity team to include Girls’ and Boys’ JV teams.

Led by Kevin Wang ’26, students organized an informal tennis group for players of all experience levels to get together and play around Boston.

Finally, five Commonwealth athletes were selected for All-League Teams: Ben Hines ’26, Jasmine Liu ’27, and Bonnie Wang ’25 for basketball; Eli Denenberg ’25 for Ultimate Frisbee; and Juliana Li ’26 for volleyball.

6 CM Summer 2025

The Government Inspectors Arrive

O

n February 28 and March 1, audiences flocked to th Multicultural Arts Center in Cambridge for two sold-out performances of The Government Inspectors, a contemporary take on Gogol’s classic satire, adapted and directed by Susan Thompson with Assistant Director Maggie Elsen. Two government inspectors visit a corrupt little town: mayhem and miscommunication ensue. Featuring thirty-nine student actors, musicians, and techies—as well as active collaborators in the adaptation process—The Government Inspectors captivated audiences with a wonderfully frenetic tale of greed, deception, and bribery. Top it all off with clow ish yet glamorous costumery, and we’ve got a winter play for the books.

Students Shine in Two Stage Competitions

W

inter at Commonwealth sees a delightful amount of poetry as students enrapture us with their performances during our annual Poetry Out Loud and Shakespeare competitions. This year, Mirabel Han ’26 took first place in Poetry Out Loud with her performance of “Ode for the American Dead in Asia.” After an impressive qualifying performance at the state semifinals, Mirabel was selected as one of only fifte finalists and went on to perform at the state finals at the Old South Meeting House in Bosto A whopping fifteen Commonwealth thespians participated in this year s Shakespeare Competition, delivering scenes from the uproarious to the tragic. Alissa Lopes ’25 won fifth place; Zora Flint-Somerville ’27, fourth place; Millie Amster ’28, third place; Chloe Li ’27, second place; and Ben Hines ’26, first place with his comical, swaggering portraya of Petruchio from The Taming of the Shrew. Ben represented Commonwealth at the English-Speaking Union’s state competition, where his acting chops landed him first plac in Massachusetts and qualified him for the national competition at Lincoln Center in Ne York City, held in April.

7

Graduation 2025

T

he Class of 2025 came to Commonwealth behind masks and surrounded by upheaval and uncertainty—but instead of withdrawing, they reached out. As Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81 noted in her graduation remarks, this class “created community, not as a slogan, but as a practice” by founding affinity group leading Diversity Day presentations, organizing drives for those in need, steering environmental stewardship efforts, and more. They have maintained that indomitable spiri throughout their time with us, up to the very last moment. We have always told seniors to wear what they want to graduation, with a nudge toward “something they’d be happy to see in photos in fifty years.” The Class of 2025 took this advice to heart, coordinatin amongst themselves to procure what they truly wanted: caps and gowns, which most chose to wear, a first for our school. It was a morning of firsts, as we filled our , significantl larger graduation venue, The Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Tremont Street, with family, friends, and classmates to celebrate these thirty-seven remarkable new alumni/ae.

8 CM Summer 2025

Class of 2025 Matriculations Boston College Boston University Brandeis University Claremont McKenna College Colby College Columbia University Duke University Harvard University Johns Hopkins University Massachusetts Institute of Technology The New England Conservatory of Music North Bennet Street School Northeastern University Northwestern University Swarthmore College Syracuse University Tufts University University of California San Diego University of Edinburgh University of Michigan University of Rochester University of Toronto University of Wisconsin–Madison Washington University in St. Louis Wesleyan University Yale University

LEFT PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81, Rimas Youssef ’25; Milana Živanović ’25; Aritra Ghosh ’25; Hanna Gialil ’25, Sienna Shapoval ’24; Duane Schmidt GP’25, Mary Schmidt GP’25, Oliver Grant ’25, Sarah Grant P’25; Lillian Walsh ’25, Charlie Zhong ’25; Mellanie Rodriguez ’25 THIS PAGE, LEFT TO RIGHT, TOP TO BOTTOM: David Bau Jr., Catherine Bau, Cody Bau ’25, Heidi Yeh P’25, David Bau P’25; Ella Sherry ’25; Alissa Lopes ’25, Andrew Carter ’25, Katia Nigro ’25, Sarah McPeek ’25; Jennifer Borman ’81, former faculty Polly Chatfield; Peyson Bilimoria ’25; Will Washko ’25

9

Debate, Diplomacy, and Discovery at

COMMUN X

10 CM Summer 2025

T

he year is 1815. The disastrous reign of Napoleon Bonaparte has come to an end, and Europe stands at a crossroads. You find yourself in ienna, joining monarchs, diplomats, and revolutionaries in a quest to redraw borders, restore stability, and determine the balance of power for the coming century. And you are King George III—well, you are a thirteen-year-old acting as him.

Students clamored for this and similar opportunities at COMMUN X in April 2025, the most recent conference in a ten-year streak. For the uninitiated, COMMUN is a daylong Model United Nations conference for middle-school students, organized and led by Commonwealth students. Part foreign-affair lesson, part communication-skills boot camp, part role-playing game, COMMUN challenges participating “delegates” to find diplomati solutions to a variety of problems. Delegates are asked “not only to understand history and current events but to grapple with leadership, responsibility, and compromise,” Junior Secretary-General Aadi Krishnan ’26 told them in his opening remarks. “We hope you learn today to speak with clarity, to listen with empathy, and to collaborate across differences while imagining what a better world might look like, and how we might build it.”

Delegates tackle this work in one of two types of committee: General assemblies are the “classic Model UN experience,” where delegates represent specific countries and fac real-world issues. Crisis committees, as the name suggests, respond to more acute scenarios unfolding in real time, often via Commonwealth student Crisis Chairs jumping into the room to share updates (sometimes even in costume, as Roman senators, Russian generals, or, in one special instance, a beaver…). Crisis committees can take place in the past, the present, or even a fantasy world. But whether delegates step into the Japanese parliament of today, rewrite history in ancient Athens, or try to negotiate intergalactic peace in a far-flung future, they us and hone the same diplomatic skills (and raise their placards in earnest).

Self-confidence, public speaking, collabor tion, research: all are bolstered by Model UN, says Peter Dowd ’25, who burnished those abilities as a delegate and helped impart them to others as one of COMMUN’s leaders. He joined the Secretariat this year “to pay it forward and teach others how to foster that growth and create a comfortable environment for middle schoolers to practice thinking on the fly and o the-cuff speaking,” he says. “I observed som of the best speakers I ever have seen tackling the most in-depth topics at COMMUN.” Peter hopes younger Commonwealth students “step up to share their passion” by joining the

Secretariat and shaping “how educational and meaningful this conference is.”

It’s hard to overstate what the Secretariat does to run the show—and always has, since students, including Allison Stillerman ’16, founded COMMUN in 2015. (If you were part of that storied history, we want to hear from you! Email communications@commschool.org to let us know what those early years of COMMUN were like.) Ever since, participants—middle schoolers and their adult chaperones alike— have consistently praised the sophistication and novelty of the committees, as well as the overall professionalism of the event.

Every school year, the Secretariat spend months organizing the conference with light logistical oversight from Commonwealth faculty and sta⁄. This year, senior Sarah McPeek ’25 stepped into the role of Secretary General, overseeing it all. “Hooked on Model UN” since middle school, Sarah enjoys “behind-the-scenes matters” and problem solving. “This year, I was really excited to see how engaged all the delegates were in their committees. It was also wonderful to see how maturely the delegates held themselves, and how they interacted collaboratively with their peers,” she says. She and her fellow Secretariat members recruited their peers to run the various committees, always quick to remind them that experience is not required.

Though many sta⁄ers have been involved in Model UN in various capacities, COMMUN is, above all, “a teaching conference,” they say, pairing more experienced chairs with newcomers and particularly welcoming of new delegates. “Paradoxically, it was the fact that I was a novice, that I was just a fresh beginner, that allowed me to get into [COMMUN] as much as I possibly could,” says Aditya Anand ’26, who this year served as the Crisis Head for The Siege of Delhi committee, which tasked delegates with determining the “fate of the subcontinent” in the “brutal struggle between British colonial forces and rebel sepoys.”

After serving on the Crisis Sta⁄ for the Second Greco-Persian War committee during COMMUN VIII as a ninth grader, Aditya knew he wanted to lead a committee. “At the time, I was studying Indian history, and I thought [the Siege of Delhi] was a pretty interesting event, because it has a lot of complex meanings, a lot of complex themes of race and colonization, that a lot of middle schoolers definitely should learn about.” Aditya wants to open the conference up to more students, including other high schoolers, so they can explore even “more complex issues” with more “creative freedom,” he says.

Of course, with COMMUN consistently at capacity in our cozy little brownstone building, scaling up would be a challenge worthy of a diplomatic council.

Natan Shapiro ’27, who chaired a COMMUN X committee this year and is a decorated participant of other Model UN conferences, nevertheless quips, “Frankly, I think Model UN as an institution isn’t that important.” What is important? “The doubly educational nature of COMMUN” as a teaching conference, and “valuable skills like collaboration, critical thinking, and argumentative writing. We get good practice managing middle schoolers and dealing with unexpected events. My love for Model UN...is what drew me to it.”

Natan joined his classmate Ellery Española Mase ’27 in running the historical crisis committee “The Russian Provisional Government of 1917,” which dropped delegates into a country reeling from the February Revolution and the end of the country’s tsarist regime. Both Natan and Ellery wanted to do a deep dive into the era. And research they did, preparing a background guide (used by participants to prepare for the conference) that introduced delegates to the major players leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution, from Lenin and Prince Lvov to Soviet Republic thought leader Viktor Chernov. “Doing research for the topic was quite challenging because of its obscurity, but I think the e⁄ort paid o⁄,” Natan says. (Do yourself a favor and read this and the other meticulously researched background guides at commonwealthmun.com.) As Ellery and Natan noted, “this committee is filled with such polarizing beliefs and ideals, we hope that delegates walk away with increased appreciation for di⁄erent opinions and a better understanding of compromise. In today’s fraught political climate, these skills are invaluable.”

Getting to students early is also key, posits Ellery. “[COMMUN] prompts middle schoolers to engage with the world in a more careful and attentive way that stays with them more significantly than it might for high schoolers.” Herself a COMMUN alumna, Ellery wanted to give

[students] the same opportunity to learn about something that [she] had.” Natan adds: “The best part is definitely seeing how the delegates react to crisis updates, engage in debate, and embody their roles.”

Sarin Chaimattayompol ’25 agrees. “The delegates always bring such high energy, creativity, and curiosity to the conference,” she says. They even surprised and impressed her by gamely jumping into an impromptu mock-trial scenario she threw at them. “Model UN always reminds me how quickly students can grow when they’re given space to experiment and think for themselves.” Sarin was inspired to develop her committee, Indo-Japanese Population Crisis, after reading Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape in Audrey Budding’s history elective, The World Since 1945. “The book introduced us to global data, including life expectancy and income trends. From there, I started exploring demographic data from other countries and came across Japan’s declining fertility rates and its emerging partnerships with countries like India and Vietnam to bring more immigrant labor.” She wanted delegates to see economic and demographic policies in the context of the social and political resistance they often face.

“Protest movements were a key inspiration for my crisis scenarios because I think they’re especially relevant today. I think we’ll see a lot of civic engagement in the next four years, and I hope delegates can realize how protests can both challenge and inform policy making.”

Seniors Andrew Carter ’25 and Brooks Sjostrom ’25 capped three years of COMMUN by chairing the North African Terrorism Conflict committee this year. Said the longtime friends and collaborators: “We both observed an incredible amount of great research and careful consideration of the nuances of solving issues of terrorism. Delegates delved deep into the e⁄ect of colonialism on global independence and stability and worked carefully to balance internal, North African e⁄orts with international collaboration...that ensured a lasting solution that respected state borders and sovereignty.”

To recognize delegates’ work leading up to and during the conference, committee chairs award Best Delegate, Best Position Paper, and more during the closing ceremony. The winners excitedly scurry up to collect their certificates as their happy, hyper (and just a little overtired) schoolmates cheer them on. As this year’s crop of delegates prepared to depart, Aadi once more entreated them: “I hope you leave with new ideas, new passions, and a renewed sense of what you’re capable of when you speak and collaborate on issues that a⁄ect you. The world needs young leaders, and although I’m still only a junior in high school, from what we’ve seen today, the future is in good hands.” t 11

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE HEAD

Dive In Commonwealth

Rui Shu, Director, and Paul Brunick ’02, Assistant Director 12 CM Summer 2025

What does the typical summer day at Dive In look like for students?

For you as administrators?

Paul Brunick: Our first class is at 9:00 a.m., but students tend to arrive starting at 8:00 a.m. because they like to have social time with each other. The kids are super curious and engaged. They’ve always done the reading, and they often come in with a lot of questions. They’re very willing to express their skepticism about things we’ve read.

The core academic classes are in the morning—that’s English and math, plus dedicated writing classes and some test prep. After lunch, we have a rotation of arts, sports, and elective classes in different humanities or STEM-related topics. Then we cap off our week with a Friday field trip.

Jennifer Borman: The building feels joyful.

If I go down [to the Cafegymnatorium] at lunchtime, there’s a bunch of kids playing chess, maybe they’re telling jokes or laughing.

If I walk by a classroom, I see the same high levels of engagement. These kids are full of life, full of energy, full of giggles. There’s a lot of enthusiasm. It’s delightful. I sometimes think to myself, you know, how lucky am I that I get to hear their laughter every day?

Rui Shu: From an administrative standpoint, we have faculty meetings once every two weeks, and we meet with individual students to go over their grades and comments, or with their parents. My work also depends on what we need: I cover study halls, or I might monitor lunch or recess. I chaperone a few trips. I take attendance…

O

nce summer starts, Commonwealth’s stately old building sits sleepy and quiet—until just after the Fourth of July. Then stairwells once again rumble with feet running to class and giggles echo up from the Cafegymnatorium during lunch. Dive In Commonwealth is now in session.

Founded in 2019 for driven, bright students from low-income back-

grounds, Dive In is not your typical “summer school.” Rather, students commit to up to twenty-seven months of rigorous classes and enrichment activities through six-week-long summer sessions and Saturdays throughout the academic years leading up to high school.

In particular, Dive In is designed to help bridge the opportunity gap for students and families interested in independent schools like Commonwealth, burnishing their academic skills and assisting with the application process. With ingenuity, institutional support, and old-fashioned pounding the pavement, Dive In has grown from five students its first s

-

mer to thirty-seven students this year, a new record.

Here, Dive In Director and Commonwealth Mandarin teacher Rui Shu, Assistant Director Paul Brunick ’02, and Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81 reflect on the program s thoughtful growth and their hopes for its future.

JB: Rui is being modest! Yes, you do all those nuts-and-bolts things, but you also meaningfully look at what we’re providing students, and then, holistically, make program shifts to do an even better job.

Rui also does a fair amount of sitting in on classes, and as a result of that sort of care and attention, makes sure our pedagogy and our classes truly meet the needs of middle-school students, both in terms of who we’re hiring and in terms of the insights we glean and then mirror back.

PB: Rui gives lots of great, concrete, actionable feedback on classes, which I really appreciate. She’s allowed our teachers to have creative and intellectual freedom while also building a more comprehensive throughline for the whole program. She’s a teachers’ teacher.

13

Besides that joyful atmosphere, what drew you to Dive In? RS: I started with Dive In by teaching a Mandarin course for two weeks. I had a lot of fun teaching middle schoolers; they’re much younger than my Commonwealth students, but they’re equally enthusiastic. When I teach Mandarin to Commonwealth students, they obviously make really rewarding progress, but I think Dive In makes an even bigger impact on the students’ life trajectory. I was really impressed by their engagement and their commitment to furthering their education. So that’s been really, really meaningful.

PB: I was working in art journalism, and at the same time, I was volunteering as a mentor with young people, so teaching was just a way for me to combine those two domains. I still get to stay engaged with the world of arts and letters and share my intellectual interests, but then also be part of a community. I find it a particularly rewarding crossover.

JB: I would say my whole career has been about wanting young people to become empowered and grow into their potential, and I’ve always had a connection to doing that work with students who haven’t had those opportunities fall into their lap. For me, Dive In is an important way that Commonwealth does that work—not the only way, but an important way—and it was certainly a draw in my coming here [in 2021].

The Dive In kids are just fantastic young people, curious and ambitious in all the ways Commonwealth students are curious and ambitious; in many cases, they just don’t have access to the kinds of opportunities that many of our Commonwealth students have had all their lives. Commonwealth is a more educational and more impactful school if we are serving all different kinds of students, and the Dive In students who have joined our

community have added so much to the range of perspectives and identities in the building.

We are lucky when they choose to come here.

So far, twelve students have matriculated at Commonwealth from Dive In. What does that journey look like—to Commonwealth or other schools? How do we support students through the admissions process and after they enroll here?

RS: Well, it starts the summer before eighth grade, as we have SSAT [Secondary School Admission Test] preparation, so that’s a huge part of it. Students can take the SSAT twice for free. And then during the Dive In Saturday sessions in the fall, we do mock admissions interviews with students and parents who want to apply not only to Commonwealth but to other private schools. We’ll help with filling out and navigating all the application platforms online, too. After students are admitted to schools, we reach out again to prepare them, like if they need any help in terms of picking a school or negotiating a financial aid package or things like that We also meet with Carrie Healy [Commonwealth’s Director of Admissions and Financial Aid] and the admissions team. They have great knowledge about the schools around this area, so they can recommend other schools if families are interested. That way, if students apply to Commonwealth and they don’t get in or they’re waitlisted, they have other options, just in case, and we communicate that with parents. And, obviously, the parents have the final say abou where they want their children to apply.

JB: In terms of supporting students once they arrive here, I think our Dive In students often encounter many of the same challenges as their peers: How do I manage all this homework? How do I tackle a project or a

test that seems too hard for me? The majority of ninth graders—and I don’t just mean Dive In students—at one point or other feel out of their depth here. These are all kids who have generally done exceptionally well in school, wherever their school was, and, almost inevitably, they will hit a class or a task or a situation here where they’re like, “Oh, this is really hard.”

And that can be scary in all kinds of ways.

In addition to all the ways we would support any student who feels like they’re struggling or out of their depth, Dive In students have a bit of a running start because they know the building. They know some familiar faces—not just Rui and Paul, but Mr. Letarte, Mr. Samblas, and Ms. Sundberg [Commonwealth math, English, and biology teachers, respectively]. They know each other; our goal is to always enroll a cohort of students from Dive In, so they have some friends built into that support system. But I do think the scariness of adjusting to the demands of high school and feeling like maybe you’re not fully up to it are a little more acute if you’re coming to an environment that’s more privileged. It can feel like a steeper hill for some students, even though everybody’s climbing that same hill. We adults in the building are all pretty attuned to that and asking ourselves, How do we help kids who are coming into a school where not everybody shares their background?

What can we do to provide extra support?

RS: Our admissions team does a great job pairing students with advisors for all incoming students, but because they know Dive In kids a bit better, it’s even more intentional.

We’re also tweaking the Dive In curriculum—for example, having rising ninth graders take biology and writing, instead of more generic courses, to get them ready for Biology 1 and English 9 at Commonwealth.

The classes are taught by Ms. Sundberg and [Commonwealth English teacher] Ms. Tyson, who are likely to teach those students when they’re here, so they will already know the Dive In students when they arrive.

This summer, Mr. Williams [Commonwealth’s Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] will be teaching a humanities course and serving as a class advisor for one of the cohorts. He will also lead a few field trips to get to know kids from a different perspective as well. He was part of the admissions events for them this year, so he’s already met a lot of the parents, too.

JB: We also have Dive In alums come back and serve as teaching assistants to current Dive In students, and that creates, I think, a really nice sense of mentorship and support.

The original Dive In cohort in 2019

14 CM Summer 2025

Dive In has grown from five to thirty-seven students since its founding in 2019. What has driven that growth, and how have you managed it?

JB: One way we’ve grown was by adding a sixth-grade cohort a few years ago; that’s been a lot more work, but it was the right way to go, because it became clear that starting with seventh graders wasn’t giving us and them enough time to get ready for the rigor of a school like Commonwealth. Though we will certainly still admit seventh graders when it makes sense.

We’ve also grown our budget. One of my big jobs with Dive In is finding the funds t support the plans and programs we want to offe . Every year, it’s an increased commitment from Commonwealth to make sure we’re doing this good work, and we have the resources to do this good work, including supporting students through financial aid and other grant for all four years if they enroll here.

It hasn’t been an accident that Dive In keeps growing. It’s been deeply intentional work—a program development cycle of trying new strategies, assessing what works, and making further adjustments so we can grow in steady, careful ways and make sure we are offering a great experience. Every yea , in terms of size and money and outreach and curriculum and instruction, we’ve been trying to be better and more impactful.

PB: We rely a lot on sending schools and organizations [such as St. Peter School, Mother Caroline Academy, and many METCO schools] to generate referrals, and, over the years, those relationships have been sustained and continue to pay dividends. And as we build new ones and expand our network, we’ve gotten more and more viable applicants every year. We were originally looking to enroll twelve students per cohort this summer, but we had so many kids we didn’t want to cut loose that we ended up expanding to fifteen. e always want to fin ways to extend the impact of the program while holding on to its close-knit, family-like feel, so we’re going to try to perfect the size we’re at before we expand in other directions.

We decided to go school to school, neighborhood by neighborhood. Rui started sending handwritten notes to principals, guidance counselors, and family liaisons at various schools, and I did a little tour on my bicycle, dropping off packets of translated flyers wit goodie bags to really try to break through the noise of people’s inboxes and get their attention. We got a lot of great referrals that way.

Speaking of family ties, at least three Commonwealth alumnae aunties have referred their nieces to Dive In! How else has Commonwealth’s alumni/ae network supported the program?

RS: Like it takes a village to raise a kid, it takes a village to support these students as well. We work with Alisha Elliott ’01 [Commonwealth’s Director of Advancement] to email alums, or they hear about opportunities through the Commonwealth newsletter and they reach out to us. We had great experience last summer working with the alumni/ae who either taught a class or chaperoned field trips Ellie Laabs ’17, Jordan Dowd ’17, Ayla Denenberg ’23, and Alec Bode Mathur ’20]. They already know Commonwealth, they know the building, they know our culture, they know our goal. So it’s really nice to have them support Dive In. JB: Alumni/ae, parents, and friends also gave generously to help launch Dive In six years ago. The program continues to inspire and rely on such generosity, and we are deeply grateful for those commitments.

What are your hopes and plans for the future of Dive In? PB: To create a more comprehensive curricular throughline for the whole program and make sure all of our classes are working

towards the same goals and are coordinated with each other—that’s our focus this year.

And, with our bigger enrollment, we also want to make sure we still provide individualized guidance to each student. That’s meant hiring more classroom teachers so Rui and I can dedicate more time to family engagement and homework help in study halls.

RS: We also want to further diversify our applicant pool for Dive In. We’re always trying to find new ways to attract more student from different backgrounds. And we’re tryin to diversify our teaching pool as well, to have more teachers of color to better reflect th students, who are mostly students of color. We tried some new things this year, like directly emailing all English and humanities teachers in Boston public and charter schools inviting them to apply for our open summer positions.

PB: Commonwealth’s admissions office ha always been apt at spotting young talent that have overperformed their circumstances—like being able to read test scores against educational background in a holistic way.

But I think it’s great that Commonwealth has taken this huge next step of extending those enrichment opportunities more widely. Dive In is designed to help level the playing field, so these students can grow to their full potential before they even start high school and aren’t stuck making up for lost time relative to their peers. Like what Jennifer was saying about Commonwealth’s commitment to these students—I think it’s really meaningful.

JB: Well, one of my hopes is that every year Commonwealth enrolls a good number of Dive In participants, that they feel like they have a real presence here at every grade level, and that they feel well served by being here and are able to make the most of what we offer for thei own hopes and dreams. That’s my big aspiration, and we’re certainly on our way. t

RS: A lot of that relationship building is also with our current students and their families.

Many of them refer their friends and family—we have a lot of cousins! And I think that, because those students have good experiences here, their middle-school teachers and school administrations may want to recommend more students to us. That’s also very important.

PB: We’re always looking for ways to connect.

Dive In students and TAs in 2024

15

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH A

BIOLOGY MAJOR?

16 CM Summer 2025

BY LILLIEN WALLER

Biology, that science of living organisms, is squishier than others in more ways than one. The options available to biology experts are vast and varied—from funding lifesaving medical research through the NIH to organizing for a living wage for graduate student employees to teaching young people to embrace the sciences and designing experiments that test therapeutic antibodies against autoimmune disease—as these four members of the Commonwealth community prove.

ROWAN HENEGHAN ’19

Research Associate, Generate:Biomedicines

“I

f you try to understand what is happening that makes a human able to function, you can get down to the level of organs,” says Rowan Heneghan ’19, pondering the earliest questions that led her toward cell and molecular biology. “But what makes the organs work? You can get down to the level of cells, but what makes the cells work? As a kid I was really interested in how far you could take it. How do you get to the base level of the molecular pathways and circuits that power us to move through the world? At a certain point, you’re just talking about chemical interactions between a variety of molecules. And that’s what makes a human being.”

A recent graduate of Northeastern University, Rowan is a research associate at Generate:Biomedicines, a medical therapeutics company that uses machine learning to produce monoclonal antibody therapeutics more efficiently than traditional methods. Her work focuses autoimmune and allergic diseases. She explains: Think of the body as a vast network in which a signal has gone haywire. The goal in treating the disease would be to identify the signal—a key molecule within this network—and create a particular kind of protein, an antibody, that will bind to it, block its path, and make it inert. Rowan’s job is to design experiments that test the functionality of the antibodies. Do they block the intended pathways? Her data becomes part of the broader decision-making process that determines which therapies the team might want to move forward toward clinical trials.

It’s work that has intensified her interest in immunology, so much s that she plans to eventually pursue graduate study. “I have really grown

to appreciate the field of autoimmune disease and how many open que tions there still are,” she says.

“People receive diagnoses based on the few things we do know. And maybe there’s a drug that helps by shutting down a huge portion of the immune system. But we don’t actually understand all of the mechanisms involved in why particular people get the immune diseases they do, like lupus or chronic fatigue syndrome. For a long time we’ve said, ‘Well, you’re going to be exhausted and achy, and that’s just your lot in life.’

I’m really interested in studying the pathophysiology of how these diseases manifest and why.”

This sounds a lot like Rowan following her own advice to “date around” in one’s field. Academia, industry, and medical science can b varied ways of looking at similar questions, she explains, and young folks interested in science owe it to themselves and their careers to see what each path offers and find the best fit. She approached her early pass for science with a lot of certainty, she says, arriving at Commonwealth “knowing” that she wanted to be a laboratory researcher, a role she loves but also understands to be the first of many possibilities Rowan’s science education at Commonwealth did put her ahead of the game academically, however. Among her many (often geneticsfocused) science classes, she recalls taking an elective in gene expression and regulation with former Commonwealth teacher Samantha Burke in which the class read seminal scientific papers from the last century The course prepared her not only to dissect research findings but also t identify the scientific methodology such papers have in common During this time, Rowan also learned the value of keeping one’s mind open to other disciplines and the greater world. “Some of my favorite classes that I took at Commonwealth had nothing to do with science, but they continued to foster this love of learning in me,” she says. “Mr. Conolly’s Russian literature class or Ms. Haber’s Bible history class were so fantastic and interesting. It’s important not to become one of those people who is so focused on science and math that you block out everything else. You really need to appreciate every sector of education to be a well-rounded person. Keep your mind open to things beyond biology.”

JON LORSCH ’86

Director, National Institute of General Medical Sciences

S

ince 2013, Jon Lorsch ’86 has served as Director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), one of the twenty-seven institutes and centers of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that fund and produce research across diseases, body systems, and medical areas from diabetes and cancer to the effects of the environment o human health to understanding the human genome. The NIH is a vast federal agency working in the background of American life, largely unnoticed but vitally important to how we live and how the country meets unexpected challenges—the COVID-19 pandemic, for example—that only medical science can address.

Within this system, Jon explains, the NIGMS, which “lays the foundation for 17

advances in disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention,” is key to understanding the fundamental principles of how life works. Jon’s background in RNA research, leadership acumen, and lifelong passion for science come together in his work as director and senior investigator of the institute’s Laboratory on the Mechanism and Regulation of Protein Synthesis. And it all began with a cow heart.

One of Jon’s earliest memories, and the root of his love of science, dates back to the age of four. He recalls sitting in a classroom with other children. Whether it was preschool or kindergarten he doesn’t remember, but the moment a teacher walked in and showed the class a cow heart, he was rapt. “I was just transfixed by this thing with all these fla and tubes coming out of it,” he says. “At that moment I decided I wanted to be a scientist.”

Jon’s passion for science continued through his time at Commonwealth, where he took courses in chemistry and biology with Richard Robinson, Jane Farber, and others. After graduating, he went on to major in chemistry with a minor in biology at Swarthmore. It was there that Jon began what he describes as a circuitous path toward the biology of RNA, ribonucleic acid—a molecule that carries genetic information and the focal point of his life’s research. Biochemist and textbook author Judith Voet got him “hooked” on enzymes and how they work, which led him to graduate work at Harvard with acclaimed enzymologist Jeremy Knowles. After three months of working in Knowles’ lab, Jon was dispatched to work with biologist Jack Szostak at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“I didn’t think of that on my own,” Jon chuckles. “He sent me there, and that’s where I started to work on RNA, because that’s what Jack Szostak was working on. From there, I became part of the RNA world, as it’s called. And I combined my love of enzymes with this newfound love of RNA because I started to work on catalytic RNAs—that is, RNAs that are themselves enzymes.”

After fourteen years teaching in the Department of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Jon has established himself as a leader in the field of RNA biology. Hi own research focuses on how mRNA gets translated into a protein: “We study how protein synthesis works inside of a cell, and proteins are made from an mRNA template. That’s the code that says what the protein is going to be composed of. It’s then translated from that mRNA by a machine called a ribosome, which is itself made, in part, of RNA.” As director of the NIGMS, Jon’s role is to oversee the institute’s mandate to fund medical research in all fifty states. He explains that th foundation for advances in every aspect of the medical sciences comes from the kind of basic research that the NIGMS supports. The mRNA vaccines developed during the COVID-19 pandemic are obvious recent examples. Scientists didn’t create those vaccines out of thin air, he emphasizes. They were the result of more than a hundred years of accumulated knowledge, which also made it possible to develop them so quickly.

“That’s why we fund the research,” he says, “so that it’s there when we need it, and we can keep making progress in medicine. How does a cell work? How do the components of a cell fit together to make that cel operate? By understanding that, we can then understand when something breaks, that is, you get a disease. Why does disease—the breaking of a system—take place? Then by understanding that, hopefully we can figur out how to fix it, how to make a therapy for the disease or a vaccine t prevent it.”

18 CM Summer 2025

EVA EARNEST

Science Teacher, Commonwealth School

E

va Earnest teaches most students who come through Commonwealth. Ninth-grade biology, which she teaches along with Emma Sundberg, introduces her to each new generation of students while introducing them to the wonders of the natural world. She is well known to students and families—or so they think.

For example, many students know that, prior to joining the Commonwealth science faculty three years ago, and after graduating from Boston University with a degree in biochemistry and molecular biology, Eva became an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT), and she maintains her certification to this day. She is open about the fact that she has wanted t teach since she was a child, and at Commonwealth she has come to love the work deeply. She is definitely known for her infectious laugh What may not be entirely obvious, however, is her passion for the same interdisciplinary problem solving she encourages in students, as well as her experience-based perspective on why science education is important. Science, she suggests, is not just a collection of disciplines that lead to STEM careers; it is functional knowledge. And you may not even realize you need it until you do.

“Teaching biology, chemistry, or science in general—and working in a health-care field where you see individuals who have gone through th education system and are now being hit with a lot of information about their own health and conditions—really does remind me how important it is for everyone to learn about science in school,” Eva says. It’s a perspective forged by both her background in biology and her having seen people in the midst of medical crisis with no clear understanding of what is happening to them.

Science education is also an education in how to approach and solve problems. Eva learned this first-hand as an EM . “You get a call, you show up, and someone is having a problem. It’s your job to use the information you have, as well as your education, to ask the right types of questions,” she explains, “to try your best to figure out what s going on.

And if you can’t figure out what s going on, you at least have to figur out what’s going to make this situation better in the short term. Do that under a time crunch as an EMT where you are in an emergency, and it is really important that you have effective and fast problem-solving skills.

We all tackle problems in our day-to-day lives; Eva insists that the same problem-solving abilities come up in science classes at every turn.

“You are given a distinct set of information and must try to figure ou what is and isn’t important. How can I use what I have to either solve the problem or find out what I need through follow-up questions?

Is that what attracted her to biochemistry and molecular biology?

Not quite. Or not entirely. When Eva chose her major in college, she wasn’t thinking about what she would do with the rest of her life, only what she would devote her attention to for the next four years. Biology, in particular, was how she wanted to spend her time because of its real-world relatability, something she believes is true for many students at Commonwealth, too. “Biology is so applicable to who you are,” Eva says. “We work hard to make our biology classes relatable. We give the students lots of labs. We give them lots of problems that involve things they could see in the world. And so, with biology, the goal is ‘How can we explain how the living things around us act?’”

Even as Eva loves biology in particular and science in general, she still thinks that students should think expan-

sively about their lives while they are in high school and not devote 100 percent of their time to one thing—even biology. She pushes them to keep an open mind, she says. “Remember that every moment of your life, when you’re attacking new problems, you are adding another piece to who you’re going to be. And that piece could be the integral one.”

RUTH HANNA ’13

Labor Organizer and Graduate Student, MIT

T

he number of unionized graduate student employees (GSE) grew by a whopping 133 percent between 2012 and January 2024. That’s more than 150,000, or thirty-eight percent of all current GSEs, according to The National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. It’s not surprising that organized labor is gaining in popularity in higher education. Graduate student workers are cheap and easy labor for universities, which often offer low wages and few to no benefits. et their contributions are invaluable, as they work on the front lines of research, sometimes in potentially hazardous working conditions, if they’re in the field or in labs Since 2024, Ruth Hanna ’13 has been Vice President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Graduate Student Union. She is also a master’s student in biology. These two positions may seem unrelated, but ultimately, they represent facets of Ruth’s interest in and dedication to human health. In spring 2022, MIT graduate students voted overwhelmingly to form a graduate student union. Having joined other student organizers in the effort, Ruth then worked with the newly forme union toward a contract with the university. Faced with an impending GSU strike in September 2023, the university agreed to a contract that included formal nondiscrimination procedures and a compensation package of successive annual wage raises, dental premium coverage matching that of other employees, a seventy-percent transportation subsidy, and three months of back pay.

It was an incredible triumph, one that confirmed for Ruth—who, prior to graduate school, ha been working as a lab tech in Boston—that how scientists and science workers are treated matters as much as the science itself. “I’ve always been really supportive of unions. And the other thing that made me interested was that, when I got to grad school, I was coming from this lab tech job and, in a lot of ways, doing similar work,” Ruth explains. “But in grad school, the pay is lower. People often don’t have a lot of benefits, and in academia in general, there are a lot of issues around harassmen and discrimination. Without organized labor, it’s hard to push back against those kinds of injustices when they happen. So I was very interested in this organizing and started getting more involved.”

Like many people who eventually major in biology, Ruth discovered her love of science early.

Once she arrived at Commonwealth, she took a broad range of science courses. But it was one Project Week in particular that stayed with her—so much so that it helped inform her choice of a major later on in college. “I shadowed a primary care doctor,” she recalls. “That definitely mad me more interested in learning about human health, and how biology relates to human health more broadly, so that made me more interested in health care. When I went to college, I ended up pursuing a double major, studying both biology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

I was really interested in understanding human health from the scientific angle through biolog but also looking at it by way of the societal angle.”

Ruth’s research focus is microbiology and pathogens, specifically Listeria monocytogenes, a foodborne pathogen that causes serious illness and even death. She was drawn to it because of her interest in genetics and infectious diseases. “It’s an interesting field because you get to loo at the interplay between the pathogen and the host and see that two-sided relationship. How does the host biology respond and adapt to this infection? What is the immune response? What are the ways that the host is going to try to kill the pathogen? Then how is the pathogen going to respond to try to evade detection or block the host response? That’s what intrigues me: being able to look at this complex system that has a lot of relevance to human health.”

Ruth says she plans to continue full time with MIT GSU as staff organize . She has discovered more of what matters to her in life and in work, and she has found a way for those things to live in concert. “I’m definitely going to bring a scientific lens to organizing and, likewise, an organ ing lens to science.” t Lillien Waller is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her essays focus primarily on the intersection of art and personal history. In 2023, she was awarded an Arts Writers Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts to profile interdisciplinary artists of color in her hometown, Detroit

Rowan Heneghan ’19

Jon Lorsch ’86

Eva Earnest

19

A Partner in

HEALTH

BY CLAIRE JEANTHEAU

O

nly one truck per day passed through the rural community of Juan de Mena in Paraguay, where Albert Whitaker ’73 served as a volunteer in the Peace Corps. If a local resident needed intensive care—often, it was a farmer injured in a machete accident—they would have to go first to what Albert calls “makeshift doctors and nurses.” From there, quality treatment was never guaranteed.

“In order to get to a hospital, first of all, you had to have transportation. Then when you got there, you had to have finances in order to pay,” he recalls. “The access to care always frightened me.”

Informed by both cross-cultural experiences and his roots in Boston, Albert, now the Director of Community Impact at the American Heart Association, set out to understand what it really means to provide care—not just at the moment of an emergency but in every sphere of a person’s life. “To see that those that are under-resourced receive adequate and proper healthcare,” he says, “has been my charge since.”

SYSTEMIC CHANGE

A

sk Albert what’s new at the American Heart Association, and you’ll hear about cardiac health initiatives that have drawn large-scale public visibility, like Damar Hamlin’s #3forHeart Challenge, a public education campaign developed with the Buffalo Bills safety who suffered a heart attack on the football field in 2023 The challenge is helping advance a long-term goal for the organization: to train at least one person in every American household in CPR by 2030.

When Albert talks, though, his thoughts spill over into projects in a dozen areas of public health: Drafting model vape discipline policies for schools that use counseling to identify the root causes of student drug use. Teaming up with food pantries to install more refrigeration and shelving, increasing the space available for fresh produce.

Developing partnerships so that patients with blood-pressure problems can instantly be referred to clinics that will assist them with next steps. And all of this as he completes a ministry doctorate after work hours, focusing on the 20 CM Summer 2025

intersection of religious faith and health. (“Those that are marginalized and don’t have that wherewithal to get quality care—how is their faith impacting that?” he wonders.

“I’m still formulating all of this in my head.”)

Albert’s overarching goal for these varied initiatives is “building a clinical-community linkage,” and New England is a complex place for this work. The region covers not only East Coast hubs like Boston and Providence but also sparsely populated towns in Maine where (much like Albert’s host community in Paraguay) residents don’t have immediate access to a doctor. He must account, too, for the gaps he sees in the health system that extend beyond any one locality.

“Say someone’s living with hypertension, and the advice from the practitioner is ‘eat healthier, get physical activity,’” Albert explains. “If you live in an area that’s lacking in green spaces or affordable, healthy foods, then what s the alternative? In most cases, we see that people…go to a McDonald’s or a Burger King, and eat from there, which is really going to have [a negative] impact on their health in the long run.”

Effective interventions, Albert insists, need to happen on two levels: “We’re working with the community in one place, where we’re providing education and ensuring that [community members] get the care, but also working with the health provider to look at not only the actual disease but the social determinants that caused that disease.”

MULTIDIMENSIONAL UNDERSTANDING

A

lbert’s childhood in Boston’s South End—which he fondly remembers as a “multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic, multigenerational” neighborhood—lent itself well to a career based in advocacy and communication. “There were people from various cultures—Lebanese, Chinese. We grew up together; we never had that separation,” he says. Free recreation at the Boys’ Club (now Boys & Girls Club) helped unify children across backgrounds, along with summer classes and trips to Camp Hale in New Hampshire. (Albert currently sits on the camp’s board and returns to assist with building projects.)

At Commonwealth, Albert drew from the knowledge of distinguished assembly guests (bluesman John Lee Hooker and author Alice Walker both made appearances) and Spanish teacher Aida Álvarez (who went on to lead the federal Small Business Administration). He progressed from practicing Spanish on class outings to Harvard Square restaurants to using it in Mexico during a summer with the Experiment in Intentional Living program. During his Peace Corps term after high school, Albert would also pick up Paraguay’s most common local language, Gurani, by joining card games in the local pensione (boarding house).

He returned to his neighborhood to work for the United South End Settlements, organizing guest speakers and classes on topics like Arabic, Hebrew, and art for minimal fees. His language skills helped net him an administrative position for the American Diabetes Association; the final interview was co ducted entirely in Spanish. And to advance his growing professional interests in epidemiology and community outreach, he earned two master’s degrees in public health and urban ministry. Albert pauses for a moment as he recounts it all. “I did a lot!” he chuckles.

An affinity for other languages and cultures remains a key part of Alber s life—after all, it’s one of the most important tools he has for connecting people in Community Initiatives. “In Maine, Portland has a large Somali population, and there are Portuguese and French and Arabic speakers,” he says. “We’re training those that actually speak those languages to provide hands-on CPR demonstrations. We’re doing it in multiple languages now so that we can work with other communities.”

FOOT SOLDIERS AND HEALTH VICTORIES

W

“Say someone’s living with hypertension, and the advice from the practitioner is ‘eat healthier, get physical activity.’ If you live in an area that’s lacking in green spaces or affordable, healthy foods, then what’s the alternative?"

hat would Albert’s hypothetical interaction—the health practitioner giving advice to a patient with hypertension—look like if a framework was in place for holistic care?

“I think it’s really important that providers, whether it’s a physician’s assistant or a nurse practitioner, are able to ask questions that are going to prompt a response so that they can get a better idea of where that individual is and then make those referrals,” Albert says. “The ideal response would be ‘Hey, guess what? We can send you down the hall to the SNAP recruiter,’” who would help identify affordable, healthy grocery options To know how to draw upon those resources, Albert says, practitioners need to listen to those he dubs the “foot soldiers” in each community: “the people who are really passionate about it, who have some kind of personal experience.”

Examples who inspire Albert include the late Yvonne Heredia, a woman who survived cardiac arrest while living out of her car with two children, then went on to earn a doctorate and join the Board of Directors of the Rhode Island American Heart Association chapter. (When she passed away, the chapter established a Lifetime Achievement Award in her name for other champions of health awareness, particularly those working with vulnerable populations.)

In Albert’s own fights over the past yea , one of the wins he’s most proud of is training clinical staff to take more accurate blood pressure readings, as well as expanding the use of those tests not only at community health centers but at local churches. He envisions a time when health services are fully integrated with day-to-day life, what he terms “one-stop care.” It would be a future where it’s commonplace to borrow a blood pressure monitor with your library books or to visit a mobile clinic in your neighborhood park for seasonal vaccines and wellness screenings.

“I’m still learning about all of the opportunities that are available and what we can offer to the community,” he says. “That, to me, is success—when I’m seeing people empowered to take control of their health, but also having organizations that are working in tandem with clinics to provide necessary care.” t Claire Jeantheau served as Commonwealth’s Communications Coordinator before becoming the Marketing Manager for the American Exchange Project.

21

တစ်နည်းပြောရရင်တော့

言い Με άλλα λόγια 換え வேறு வார்த்தைகளில் ると

Ба ибораи дигар

Si kale haddii loo dhigo

‫ںیم ظافلا ےرسود‬

Başka bir deyişle

22 CM Summer 2025

Nói cách khác

Dengan Kata Lain

in aliis verbis

ໃນຄໍາ

ສັບຕ່າ

‫במילים אחרות‬

I etah atu ku i pu

i w z a m a ye Ngaman

� � � � � � ٔ �� � ����� � �

Nan lò t mo nyob rau hauv lwm yam lus

inna ada words

ka mantsoe a mang

In Other Words

Autrement dit

En otras palabras

கூறுவதானால்

ງໆອື່ນ

и г у р д с думи

ໆ

다시 말해서

换 句 话 说

Sa Iban Mit anderen Worten

Друг слов

ʻo ia hoʻi

മറ്റൊരു വാക്കിൽ

‫ترابع هب‬ ‫رگید‬ met andere woorden

s a r t ou as m E lavr pa

ng Salita

гими вами

Careers in Translation

BY CLAIRE JEANTHEAU

I

t’s all greek to me. like trying to read hieroglyphs. lost in translation.

In English, a full range of idioms exists, paradoxically, to express a struggle to communicate. There may always be a gap, however slight, between people who use two differen sets of words—even in the same language. The linguists, interpreters, and translators you’ll meet here have all experienced that, whether during international negotiations or observing reactions to a local dialect. But they’ll also attest to how working between languages and their variations has helped them form friendships, embrace literature, and gain a new appreciation for other parts of the world. For all of them, it’s an affini that can be traced back to their studies at Commonwealth.

The text to the left, beyond literal translations of "In Other Words," represents the languages known to be spoken by current Commonwealth students, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Burmese, Dutch, Filipino, French, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Mandarin, Portuguese,

The Polyglot: Selim Earls ’80

Russian, Spanish, Tamil, Telugu, Turkish, and Urdu.

I

t started with French and Spanish at Commonwealth (along with Latin, “sort of against [his] will”). Then came a bachelor’s degree in Mandarin and side studies in Russian and German. Before he knew it, Selim Earls was flexin his knowledge of Greek while working in Athens—plus learning Turkish to get to know his new neighbors.

Is it enough? “When I retire, I will maybe undertake one fina adventure” in language, he muses. Sign languages, which the linguistic community is now studying with more inclusive attitudes, fascinate him: “Many people [once] considered them simplistic or primitive and not fully fledge languages. That’s not the case anymore.” Should he add one to his list?

23

“I’m motivated by language as a means to be able to travel to different places, to communicate with people with different experie es and backgrounds, and to learn about different parts of the world and ways of living in it from direct experience,” Selim says, delivering what could be the manifesto for his career as an interpreter and translator. His current and longest-standing role, held for nearly three decades, has been interpreting for the European Union in Brussels, Belgium, where he lives with his family.

It can be a challenge to establish the kind of connection he speaks of when he’s working in tense situations. “The names of things— places, people, concepts—sometimes can be politically charged,” Selim says. “If I just translate word-for-word without putting it into the context of the listener, it can lead to a distortion.” Case in point: While Selim was interpreting at a one-on-one meeting of the Greek and Turkish ministers of education, the Turkish minister led with a thought about how they had Thessaloniki and the Aegean Sea in common. To his counterpart, that could’ve sounded, if rendered literally, like a threat to national sovereignty.

“The Turkish minister was trying to be very friendly and warm,” Selim explains, but “if you say those things, that [the territories] are shared between the two countries, that’s a big no-no,” given Greece and Turkey’s history of animosity. “I couched the message of the Turkish minister in a way that made it clear that the intention was ‘we are here meeting in a common place, a place of shared history.’”

On the whole, though, a current of understanding runs through his experiences with fellow language lovers. As a University of Pennsylvania undergraduate, he greeted international students arriving at the airport while working as a college secretary, connecting with them in their first languages. He lights up when he reminisces about kickstar ing relationships through “informal translations in groups of friends.”

And Selim hopes to pass on this love to another generation over the next few years through teaching: “Sharing their experience of learning languages, helping them with idioms or common everyday expressions—that’s the sort of thing that a kid wants to learn.”

Cool Under Pressure: Daniela Ascoli ’84

A

fter Sergio Mattarella was elected as President of Italy in 2015, one of his first visits to a fellow head of state was to Queen Elizabeth II. There in the crowd in England was Italian citizen and Commonwealth exchange student Daniela Ascoli, feeling “very proud” to be selected to translate his remarks in real time.

It wasn’t Daniela’s first visit to Buckingham Palace; she’d been invited back after providing her services as a simultaneous interpreter to Prince Philip.“I always have to study a lot because no job is like another,” Daniela says, and she has the monthly calendar to prove it: “One day I work for a political meeting. The following week, I work for a medical conference and then trade unions. Sometimes I work for the BBC when something has happened that’s time sensitive—they call you, and you have to rush there.”

Her role is one that she has trained extensively for since she was a young adult. Daniela opted to spend a high-school semester abroad at Commonwealth practicing her English in preparation for entering a demanding interpretation training program. “It was a very nice

24 CM Summer 2025

experience,” she says, contrasting her daily immersion in downtown Boston—“it’s a very European-like city, so I felt more at home”— with escapades in the woods at Hancock. Italian was offered at Commonwealth then, and Daniela helped out in class, demonstrating a native speaker’s pronunciation.

Daniela’s interpretation clients over the years have included the British and Italian governments, the Council of Europe, and the World Bank of Washington. People often assume, wrongly, that she enters these spaces alone. In many situations, she relies on an interpretation booth partner to check her work and relieve her on breaks (and vice versa). “The maximum you can work on your own is forty-five minutes. After that, the quality starts going down, and yo don’t want that,” she says. Those unfamiliar with the field “don t understand how strenuous and tiring, both mentally and physically, interpreting is.”

Help from her partners is paramount, but, according to Daniela, it’s also internal character—not just translation ability—that helps you keep your head while interpreting live. “You need to be able to work under pressure, because you’re constantly under pressure. You cannot lose your concentration for half a second,” she says. “It’s all a matter of character, really. You need to be somebody who’s not nervous. You need to keep your cool.”

Generational Shifts: Aaron Dinkin ’98

C

ooperstown, New York, is home to the Baseball Hall of Fame, a significant tourism industry, and one of many instances of a distinctive regional dialect: the Northern Cities Shift.

Aaron Dinkin, a linguistics professor at San Diego State University, is most interested in this last detail.

In the Northern Cities Shift, the sounds of vowels swap places and shift around the mouth. Words like “cat” and “black” are pronounced with a vowel like the “eah” in “yeah”; meanwhile, the sounds of “cot” and “block” mirror those of “cat” and “black” in other dialects. (Fans of TV series The Bear, which takes place in Chicago, can spot the shift when characters Richie and Fak are speaking.) In upstate New York locales like Cooperstown, the shift is receding in the younger generation—“it’s very common among Baby Boomers, but since then, it’s sort of been on the downswing,” Aaron says—and he wants to discover why.

To do that, he conducts interviews to document both what people say (measuring acoustic features of vowel pronunciation in select words, for example) and what they think about how they say it. So far, Aaron’s learned, as older residents’ receptivity to the tourism industry increases, their use of the shift decreases. On the other hand, “for younger people, the difference mainly seems to be between careful and casual styles of speaking,” he observes. In the 1990s, many speakers with the Northern Cities Shift didn’t think they had an accent. Now more conscious that their speech might come across as “sounding uneducated or like bad English or nonstandard,” they often alter their patterns—a posture that, Aaron says, can be influenced by a pervasive “classist” notion that “some ways of using language are incorrect or bad.”

Aaron’s interest in language variation emerged at Commonwealth almost by chance. After dropping in on Claire Hoult’s “History of

the English Language” class during a day visit, he thought, “‘That was amazing. Any school that offer this class is somewhere I want to go to.’” (He took the course, which spanned the Middle Ages to the Boston accent of today, in his sophomore year.) His research as a University of Pennsylvania graduate student began with a similar serendipity: his advisor’s studies of the Northern Cities Shift had just been published in the Atlas of North American English, and the drive from Philadelphia to upstate New York was a doable weekend trip.

His sociolinguistic research motto? “‘Find someone who doesn’t seem to be doing anything and say hi.’’ Aaron’s firs day in Cooperstown conveniently coincided with the library book sale—“That is catnip for me. I would go there under any circumstances”—and the volunteers there drew on their networks in town to put him in touch with potential interviewees. “If you show up and you’re sincerely interested in listening to them and learning from them about their lives and about their communities,” Aaron reflects “people are often just willing to talk to you.”

Games Across Culture: Wren Steinbergh ’09

I

n the 2009 Commonwealth yearbook, the senior class selected Wren Steinbergh as “Biggest Japanophile.” It was a fittin sendoff When not taking Japanese language classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Wren relished studying the nation’s history in class with Commonwealth history teacher Barb Grant—especially through The Pillow Book, a piquant record of the tenth-century imperial court written by a lady-in-waiting.

More than fiftee years and a degree from Japan’s Kansai College of Business and Languages later, Wren has, without a doubt, fulfille her senior superlative. Building a career as a Japanese-to-English translator, she’s found a niche in mobile and anime tie-in games, adapting the cutscenes, credits, and captions that move stories along.

There’s an ongoing balancing act in Wren’s industry between localization and translation—the extent to which content should hew to its original form or be adapted for an outsider audience. Some choices come down to individual words: “Do you want to call it a ‘rice ball’ or an ‘onigiri’?” Others touch on deeper cultural nuances.

“Tone of speech is a big one,” Wren says. “There are a lot of things in Japanese, like levels of formality, that are conveyed via grammar that you have to think about when you’re trying to convey a character’s particular voice in English.”

For Wren, context is king. Her firs translation jobs dealt with educational products: building kits and textbook manuals about robotics, coding, and science experiments (including, memorably, a “Learn Programming with Megaman” collaboration with famed game company Capcom). Then, she would call on friends in programming to help explain words she was unfamiliar with. Now, she’s challenged when developers send her isolated sentences—which, in Japanese, are often subjectless—to translate without a storyline. (Fan-made wikisites often come to the rescue.)

Wren has adopted Nintendo as a model, praising their strong commitment to translation quality for an audience that may not be “keyed into the original Japanese.” “You want to try to remember: what is it

about the literal thing that you are trying to preserve? Is there an ambiguity in the original language that you need to keep in your version?”

Wren asks. She knows from experience that her games may be some players’ first brief introduction to an entirely new culture.

Life in Transition: Ellen Elias-Bursać ’70

A

few miles from 151 Commonwealth Avenue, translator Ellen Elias-Bursać remembers, the Museum of Science once unfurled a large banner on its roof that declared to pedestrians along the Charles River: “It’s alive!”

Inverted, this exclamation guides her practice: “Is it alive?” “You can make a sketchy little immediate translation of almost anything,” Ellen says. “But it’s not there yet.

That’s just a start. Then you have to live with it for a while.”

Ellen has lived with translating for a while—almost fift years, in fact—with numerous travels and course changes. While her Commonwealth French classes were “enough that I could get into a cab and give directions to somebody in Paris,” her true love was Russian with Natasha Grigg. As Ellen cackled over stories in her textbook A Russian Course, starring “hooligans” who loitered on trolleybuses, Natasha was “really open[ing] my eyes to the excitement of language stuff, she says. A few years later, she was o to the University of Zagreb in Croatia for an M.A., along with a job as a community translator. Ellen would render whatever people approached her with—promotional materials for a television series, reports for the Institute of Meteorological Research—from Croatian to English.

In 1998, following the horror of the Yugoslav Wars, Ellen found herself in the translation unit of The Hague’s war crimes tribunal, supervising the production of documents for use as evidence. The work required absolute precision, and the team grappled with how to maintain accuracy between languages with very differen grammatical structures.

“One of the things that came up at the tribunal all the time,” Ellen remembers, “is that in Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, when there’s an action, you always tie in the body part that’s involved with it—you say ‘he hit him with his fist or ‘with his foot.’ And if you think about how we say that in English, we say ‘he punched him’ or ‘kicked him.’”

Upon returning to the United States, Ellen took up literary translation, where, unlike with several of her previous assignments, one-to-one literalisms are not the end goal—there’s room for ambiguity. “I sometimes feel bogged down by writers who have to tell you everything and flo dead horses all the time,” she says, preferring to leave room for the reader’s interpretation. Her recent projects include producing English versions of two novels by Croatian author Damir Karakaš: Celebration (a history of human failure and the endurance of nature in an unsettled Croatian region) and Blue Moon (the comic tale of an Elvis wannabe).

The line from A Russian Course to contemporary Central European fictio has been a winding one, and that’s fin with Ellen. “Translation takes you in many differen directions,” she says. “It’s always teaching you things that you didn’t have an opportunity to learn before.” t Claire Jeantheau served as Commonwealth’s Communications Coordinator before becoming the Marketing Manager for the American Exchange Project.

25

S I L LU

TI TRA

ONS

BY C

IARA

UR NM

PHY

TEX

TB

YC

AT H

ERI

NE

BRE

WS

TER

Criss-Crossing Science from Planets to Prehistory 26 CM Summer 2025

Sit down with English teacher Catherine Brewster as she gets to know her colleague, the astrophysicist, dinosaur enthusiast, and “introverted rocker” behind Commonwealth’s Physics and Astronomy classes, Chris Spalding.

F

or anyone who sees “screen time” as a menace to intellectual growth and a satisfying life, the case of the young Chris Spalding is perplexing. His path to teaching physics at Commonwealth began with the nature documentaries, especially about space and dinosaurs, that he loved as a child: “the deeper you look, the more fascinating it gets.” Growing up just outside Belfast, Northern Ireland, he wasn’t above video games, either; their soundtracks introduced him to heavy metal, paving the way to wild acclaim for his talent-show work on guitar, drums, and bass at Hancock. But he indisputably got his homework done, too, counting among his bandmates his Ph.D. advisor at the California Institute of Technology. His years at CalTech followed an undergraduate degree in astrophysics at the University of Cambridge.

A self-described “polite, quiet, introverted rocker,” Chris chose the Cambridge college, Fitzwilliam, that was the most remote from the pubs.

He envisioned a research career in astrophysics, and indeed went on to publish papers in collaboration with people like his wife, Sarah Millholland, who now studies exoplanets at MIT (and gave an assembly talk at Commonwealth two years ago, introducing a spellbound audience to categories like “hot Jupiters”). One of Chris and Sarah’s joint publications explores the circumstances under which, in some planetary systems, “the inner planets impulsively acquire misalignments that scale with the stellar obliquity.”

Chris’ own doctoral research focused on the rotations of stars. Our sun rotates in the same direction in which the planets orbit, which makes sense since the whole system presumably collapsed from the same cloud—stars in some other planetary systems, though, rotate “backwards,” or in ways Chris sometimes called “upside down and inside out” in talks. He used computer simulations to examine what might explain the differences Across his years of doctoral and postdoctoral research, at Yale, Princeton, and MIT, “I tried my hardest to stay broad,” Chris says. He gently rejects Ernest Rutherford’s haughty proclamation that “all science is either physics or stamp collecting.” He would have loved to study biology, he says, if only he’d “figure out sooner how to write essays about it”; at CalTech, he collaborated with an “archetypal geologist with a giant beard” to build a model of a mass extinction event caused by ocean acidification looking at the physics of how animals form shells.

He also began to notice that while many of his peers seemed happiest when they could “sit in the basement and code,” he loved giving talks at conferences: “I realized that I’d sat in my basement and coded just so I could give the talk—that was the fun part.” (He also recalls a “talk about giving talks” whose message resonated: “Your slides are the backup singers; you are the rock star.”) At the same time, he found himself discouraged by the forces pushing him toward narrower and narrower focus: “once you’re six papers deep into a topic and there’s a competing team with another model and there’s not really the data to test them.”

At Princeton, he began to think seriously about high-school teaching.

The answer to “How can I see what that’s like?” was to teach math to incarcerated people, a choice whose causes and effect he explains very carefully. “I went in there for me, but I stayed because I really liked it. I had never thought about these kinds of issues, about people society has forgotten.” The most advanced material he taught was Algebra I—his students “had never had the chance to have that education. They didn’t have anything to lose. They were just trying to show the world that they mattered. And even though I was just teaching them how to factor polynomials, it forced me to say to myself: How can I think about this in a way I’ve never thought about it before?”

Even if the eleventh and twelfth graders learning physics from Chris at Commonwealth couldn’t be farther, in their preparation and opportunities, from the incarcerated people he taught in New Jersey, two principles have nevertheless stuck with him. The firs is that “the only time you truly understand something is when you have to teach it.” He started his new astronomy elective this year with a unit on historical figures confronting some regrets about his own high-school performance in history—“the only D I got”—and realizing for the firs time that figure like Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Aristarchus lived hundreds of years apart.

The second principle underlies the conception and design of the astronomy course: he looks for ways to resist patterns whereby, as he puts it, “the rich get richer.” For instance, Commonwealth students who can tackle calculus-based Physics 1 Advanced as juniors can go on to Physics 2. In his algebra-based physics courses, on the other hand, Chris noticed “students who love science as much as I did but have not gotten the math to be able to jump into astrophysics, who I thought weren’t really being seen by the STEM curriculum.” He built the astronomy elective partly for them, with Algebra 2/Precalculus and Chemistry 1 the only prerequisites. For him, that meant using last summer’s Hughes/Wharton grant (funds for faculty enrichment, named after two of their champions at Commonwealth: John Hughes and Bill Wharton) to figur out how he could set assignments that tested students’ understanding without the kind of math he would include in physics problems.

“Flexing that muscle,” he recalls, was a lot of fun.

Astronomy, Chris makes clear, won’t be the only elective he develops at Commonwealth. Earth science and a second-year course in classical mechanics are among his ideas, along with “a dinosaur course. I really, really love evolutionary biology.” For this year’s Earth Day Assembly, organized by the Environmental Club, he offere a workshop on the physics of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Since I include a few weeks’ worth of readings on climate science and policy in my twelfth-grade course, Reasons for Writing, I signed up. In ten minutes, Chris fille in a gap in my understanding of the history as well as the science: he cited the work not of John Tyndall or Svante Arrhenius, the big names I associated with “carbonic acid” and climate change, but of Eunice Newton Foote, who demonstrated the greenhouse effec experimentally in 1856, three years before Tyndall. “I like to show that women do things,” Chris acknowledges dryly. With luck, all kinds of students will do things in his classes for years to come. t Catherine Brewster has taught English at Commonwealth since 2000.

27

The Sputnik Explosion into American Politics

BY BRIAN LI ’26

Through our history curriculum, Commonwealth students learn how to be historians rather than passive absorbers of facts. Core to this discovery process is an annual research paper that hones students’ analytical and writing skills and challenges them to dig deep into a variety of sources on any topic of interest, like this recent example from Brian Li ’26 unpacking the political manipulation of the launch of Sputnik I.

O

n the evening of Friday, October 4, 1957, at a reception at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., science reporter Walter Sullivan suddenly got an urgent phone call. Rumors of the Soviets being close to launching their satellite had been spreading, but nobody knew the validity of the rumor—until two words began to echo through the crowd: “It’s up.”

The news spread quickly: the Soviet Union had taken the world by surprise in launching Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, 180-pound instrument orbiting 600 miles above the Earth. A cursory glance into the politics at that time will reveal that the launch of Sputnik is often portrayed as a wake-up call for Americans and the “seed” that would bloom into the Apollo project, often citing national security concerns as the motivator. However, the public attitude towards Sputnik was largely indifferent. Few Americans immediately perceived the satellit as a threat, and most were even supportive of mankind’s technological advancement. There were, of course, concerns around Sputnik, mainly that it allowed the Soviets to appear to be ahead in the arms race. Even though this was the voice of the minority, Eisenhower’s opponents were able to use this to turn Sputnik into a symbol of national vulnerability and Soviet power. What had begun as a quest to explore the unknown quickly became a pivotal moment in redefining the Cold ar, and American politicians used fear to turn the space program from a modest, underfunded scientific endeavor to a high-stakes race to the moon 28 CM Summer 2025

Both the Soviets and the U.S. engaged in displays of force and power with their space program during the Cold War and used it as a way to demonstrate their rocket technology. Given that space rocketry used the same technology as Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), the country that launched the heaviest satellites could easily portray itself as having the best missiles and rockets, thus claiming a technological lead. The fact that the Soviets had been able to send a satellite to space, leaving the U.S. still struggling on the ground, suggested that the Soviets had beaten the U.S. in the role of the greatest technological power. However, strangely few seemed to believe that the Soviet launch of Sputnik posed any sort of threat whatsoever. As seen in a Public Opinion Index, Sputnik’s launch was known to ninety-five percent o Americans, yet forty percent “dismissed it without serious thought as to what it might mean for them and their country.” In fact, eighty percent thought that the U.S. was “at least even,” and few took it to be a blow to American pride.

The overly dramatic and heroic description of the Russians’ firs venture into space does not convey any fears about national security or space weapons—rather, it and the larger public saw the new technology as “a symbol of progress” for mankind. Further surveys done by the U.S. government found that “sixty percent said that we, not the Russians, would make the next great ‘scientific’ (actually technological) advance.

Yet, the fervor and motivation that resulted in the U.S. being able to beat the Soviets to the moon does not at all match the perception of the public, and rather than fearing the satellite, they welcomed it as an achievement of technology.

A view into the Eisenhower administration’s concerns and political efforts opens a window to the reasons why the American public initially did not view the satellite as a threat: namely that Eisenhower understood the satellites’ potential to cause great concern and attempted to minimize it for the purposes of protecting his self-image. Indeed, overall concerns that Eisenhower held towards Sputnik were ones of partisan politics within the nation, not of real defense. As historian Julian Zelizer claims, Eisenhower regarded the potential shortcomings of U.S. technologies in space as a political problem rather than an issue of national security. Eisenhower clearly understood the potential implications of the satellite, and private meetings revealed that the administration was quite concerned over the national and international perception of the administration. Fearing that the victory of Sputnik only signaled to other nations that the Soviets could “legitimately claim leadership in a major technological field,” Whit House officials privately expressed concerns that “Soviet claims of sci -

tifi and technological superiority over the West had won greatly widened acceptance” and that “public opinion in friendly countries shows decided concern.” They had evidence of the potential harm in letting the public hold the perspective of U.S. inferiority, citing that Mexican newspapers had “expressed immediate diminished interest in USIS scientifi features, and frankly said that they were looking to Soviet sources for such material” instead. Eisenhower understood, and had been warned, that “the deliberate effor in the next Congress to destroy popular confidenc in the President and the Administration” was the real threat. Indeed, the White House expressed the concern that despite the satellite being a superficia achievement, it might still be perceived as a major success, with the “newly independent people” the “audience most vulnerable to the attractions of the Soviet system…most impressed and dazzled by the Sputnik” and only “[s]ophisticated opinion…far less likely to be impressed by the drama of the satellite or its being a ‘first.’ Eisenhower, seeing this reaction, defended his and the Republicans’ reputation by minimizing the military and security aspects of Sputnik and continually portraying the space race as strictly for scientifi purposes.

Based on public perception, this campaign initially worked, or at least reinforced the beliefs that the public originally had. Eisenhower, in a series of press conferences, repeatedly demonstrated a congratulatory tone toward the Soviets and a hope for scientifi accomplishments in space for the future—the very same tone that is heard in public opinion later on.

When reporters showed concern over the connection between Sputnik and the ICBMs, Eisenhower responded, “Let’s take…the Earth satellite, as opposed to the missile, because they are related only in the physical sense and in our case not at all.” Eisenhower strongly emphasized, throughout the conference, that this endeavor was strictly scientifi and had no implication for the military, further emphasizing that “every scientist that I have talked to since this occurred…has spoken in the most congratulatory terms about the capabilities of Russian scientists in putting [Sputnik] in the air. They expressed themselves as pleased rather than chagrined.”

This “amazed” and congratulatory reaction to Sputnik is precisely what the Public Opinion Index and newspapers at the time seemed to feel, and it would seem that Eisenhower’s effort to minimize public concern over Sputnik had succeeded.

However, Eisenhower’s pre-Sputnik policies also allowed room for attacks by his opponents. The space program before Sputnik, under the Eisenhower administration, was far more undeveloped, particularly compared to what it would become in later years. Eisenhower had initially wanted to keep military development of ICBMs and launching a satellite into space as separate endeavors, as the initial plan proposed by the National Security Council was to use such satellites to “emphasize the peaceful purposes of the endeavor, and…contribute to establishing the principle of ‘freedom of space’ in international law.” Given the nature of the Cold War, this proposal for a peaceful and, as a result, primarily scientifi satellite, took a backseat to rocket and space activities pertaining to national security, namely the development of ballistic missiles. Indeed, the rocket that was initially chosen to launch the firs American satellite Explorer 1, the Naval Research Laboratory’s project Vanguard rocket, was chosen over the other proposals largely because the rocket would not take away from ballistic missiles resources and development, as it used a differen rocket base from them. Furthermore, the rocket’s larger payload capacity was cited as a benefi for this program, as it would have greater ability to perform scientifi research. Despite the separation, spacefligh was no small feat—and it was becoming clear that the project would take tremendous effor and money to go forward.

The slow start to the program meant that Democrats, as Eisenhower’s cabinet had warned, were able to take advantage of Eisenhower’s failure and fin continuous ways to amplify public concern, playing on the fears around American pride, diminishing U.S. power, and the “missile gap.”

Regardless of their validity, these were all legitimate and easily believable claims that were used to pin Soviet success on the Eisenhower administration. A private letter between Democratic strategist George Reedy and Lyndon B. Johnson reveals intentions surrounding the use of the success of the Soviet satellite to their advantage, saying that “the issue is one which, if properly handled, would blast the Republicans out of the water, unify the Democratic party, and elect you President…. You should plan to plunge heavily into this one.” Despite Eisenhower’s attempts to reassure the public that the U.S. was in the technological lead, the effort to amplify the issue by Johnson and the Democrats appeared to have succeeded. By encouraging the view that the “Soviets have beaten the U.S. at our own game—daring, scientifi advances in the atomic age,” Johnson was able to frame Sputnik as a disaster on Eisenhower’s part.

Based on the “superiority” of Soviet rockets, in being able to launch Sputnik, the idea of a missile gap between the Soviets and the U.S. began to take shape, and the Democrats portrayed it as a large enough gap to emphasize its power. As General Bernard A. Schriever described, “[The missiles’] enormous potency as a weapon comes from the fact that it travels through space, high above the earth, at speeds up to 15,000 miles per hour,” emphasizing it as a deadly weapon that could destroy American cities and kill millions. As portrayed by his opponents, falling behind the Soviets in missile technology was a catastrophic failure of the Eisenhower administration, and Democrats used it to easily and effectivel attack Eisenhower’s “lackluster” foreign policy. Johnson even went as far as to, at a committee hearing on November 25, describe the Sputnik crisis as “comparable to Pearl Harbor.” While the launch of Explorer 1, the firs American satellite, somewhat eased the political pressure on Eisenhower, the attack on the Republicans and the Eisenhower administration was put into place—further successes from the Soviets would only serve as more fuel.

It is this fuel that Kennedy would use in his election campaign and presidency to rally his support. Kennedy, using the framework provided

by Johnson and the other Democrats, played on the idea of a missile gap between the U.S. and the Soviets. He repeatedly claimed that the U.S. lagged far behind the Soviets in rocket technology, emphasizing that “our own offensiv and defensive missile capabilities will lag so far behind those of the Soviets as to place U.S. in a position of great peril,” that the “missile striking power of the Soviet Union increases” while “our retaliatory power lags.” His “alarmist statements,” reflectin his political motivations, “assailed the record of Eisenhower,” with the U.S.’s “continental defense falling behind that of the Soviets” and warning that under the current U.S. policies, “the Russian striking power... will have several times as many intermediate-range missiles to devastate our own country.” Kennedy also played on fears surrounding the “new frontier” in space, linking control over space to world domination, proclaiming during his 1960 presidential campaign, “If the Soviets controlled space, they can control the earth, as in past centuries the nation that controlled the seas has dominated the continents,” drawing an analogy to how British naval superiority and American aerial superiority allowed them to achieve global dominance. t Keep reading at commschool.org/sputnik.

29

T H ROW B ACKS

RECIPE FOR SUCCESS: HANCOCK COOKING ACROSS THE YEARS “Planning one’s meal for Hancock is an endeavor worthy of a Homeric epic,” Will Washko ’25 pronounced at this year’s Art Show Opening and Senior Speeches. Indeed, cooking for 200 people is a feat under any circumstances—and when you’ve got diners with diffe ent dietary restrictions and a kitchen staffed with fir -time chefs, careful planning becomes all the more important. For decades, Hancock head cooks and their faculty supervisors have put their heads together to generate meal ideas, scale up ingredients, and plan food options that ensure every member of our community is sated.

What did you cook up at Hancock?

30 CM Summer 2025

TOFU SOFRITO TACOS (FOR 200) Extra-fir tofu Spanish onion, chopped Green bell pepper, chopped Roma tomatoes, chopped Minced garlic Tomato paste Apple cider vinegar Cumin, ground Garlic powder Oregano, dried Kosher salt Ground black pepper Corn tortillas Assorted toppings

25 lbs 6 12 12 0.75 cup 1.5 cups 0.5 cup 0.5 cup 6 tbs/to taste 0.5 cup 6 tbs/to taste 1 tbs/to taste 4 90-packs in quantity

1. Drain tofu, pat dry, and crumble it. Lightly season with salt, pepper, and garlic powder.

2. Wash and dry(ish) vegetables, and then chop them—show your crew what size you would like them to be.

3. Blend minced garlic, chopped vegetables, tomato paste, vinegar, cumin, garlic powder, oregano, salt, and ground black pepper in a pan.

4. Sauté over medium-high heat to warm and to blend fla ors.

Add crumbled tofu, stirring to coat. Taste and adjust seasoning if necessary.

5. Pretty close to serving time, warm tortillas. Once warmed, stack in hotel pans, covering with dish towels.

6. Serve with all the fixins iceberg lettuce, cheese, pico de gallo, guacamole, sour cream, hot sauce, cilantro.

31

1

2

A LU M N I /A E co n n e c t i o n s

AI HYPE VS. REALITY: NAVIGATING SAFETY, ETHICS, AND DATA PROTECTION

3 4

Our 2025 Merrill Series panel brought together alumni/ae experts for a dynamic discussion on AI’s opportunities and risks. Thanks to all who attended, asked thoughtful questions, and continued the conversation throughout the reception. Events like these embody the Merrill Series’ spirit—bringing our community together to explore complex ideas with curiosity and depth.

1. Duncan Eddy ’09 (turn to page 36 to learn more about him and his work), Tahmid Rahman ’13, Rebecca Wright ’84 2. Ruth Hanna ’13 (meet her on page 19) 3. Stephen Senturia P’82, ’87 4. Victor Na ’23; Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Clinton Williams 5. Moderator and faculty member Catherine Brewster 6. Isaac Slavitt ’04 7. Nikiforos Karamanis, Cecily Morrison ’98 7 8. Lauren R. Moo ’84 9. Head of School Jennifer Borman ’81, Taylor McAdam n

n

n

n

n

6

n

n

n

n

5

9

32 CM Winter 2025

8

1

CLASSES OF 2010 AND 2011 JOINT REUNION 2

4

5

3

After their ten-year celebrations were put on hold, the Classes of 2010 and 2011 were keen to reconnect for fif een! Thanks to all who joined us and to the alums who spearheaded this special combined event.

1. Sarah Sofi ’10 2. Armani White ’10 3. Gabe Murchison ’10, Assistant Head of School Rebecca Jackman 4. Russell Weiss-Irwin ’10 5. Sandra Melo ’10 6. Zachary Goldhammer ’10, Sylvia Hickman ’10, Emily Murphy ’10, Elizabeth Kendrick ’10, Jackson Elliott ’10 7. Caleb Weinreb ’11 (and his little one!)

8. Laura Pedrosa ’10, Sophie Elias ’10, Hannah Kaplan-Hartlaub ’11 9. Peter Hall ’10

9

7 6

8

33

1

3

2

4

6

5

CLASSES OF 2020 AND 2015 FIVE- AND TEN-YEAR REUNIONS

8

The Classes of 2015 and 2020 gathered at The Irving at The Lenox to celebrate major milestones and reconnect with classmates and faculty. The afternoon was filled with laugh er and stories, catching up on life’s adventures since graduation. A special thanks to the alumni/ae who led outreach effo ts and helped make this reunion possible.

6. Rohan Abichandani ’20 1. Lee Friedman ’15, Maria Ronchi ’15 7. Aunnesha Bhowmick ’20 2 Former faculty Sasha W. Eskelund ’92 and Sophia Meas with Alok Shetty ’20 and Abi 8. Former faculty Chris Barsi Tenenbaum ’20 9. Jocelyn Olum ’20 3. Former Headmaster Bill Wharton 10. Nick Gabrieli ’20 4. Travis Chaplin ’20 5. Wilder Perkins ’20, Aunnesha Bhowmick ’20, Collin Gray ’20, Izziy Dowd ’20, Travis Chaplin ’20, former faculty Alex Lew n

n

7

n

n

n

n

n

n

9

10

34 CM Summer 2025

1 2

3

4

8

5 6

CLASS OF 1974 50TH REUNION Fifty years flies y, doesn’t it? It was as if no time had passed when the Commonwealth Class of 1974 reunited, revisiting their favorite spots around the building and welcoming many members of their class via Zoom. A special evening, truly. Thank you all for coming and reminiscing with us!

1. Carol L. Rosenberg ’74 2. Sarah Burrows ’74 3. Alumni/ae and former faculty joining via Zoom 4. Sage Givens ’74 5. Marc Sadowsky ’74 6. Chris Boutourline ’74, Tom Bledsoe ’74 7. Adam Hertz ’74 8. Tom Loeser ’74 9. Former faculty Rusty Crump

7

9

35

20 questions with...

A

Duncan Eddy ’09

fter studying mechanical engineering at Rice, Duncan headed to Stanford for a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering—and did “the traditional Stanford thing” of dropping out to join a startup, Capella Space, where he helped launch multiple commercial satellites. He’s been bouncing back and forth between Stanford and other engaging gigs ever since, like leading Amazon’s space operations group. Today, he’s the Executive Director of the Stanford Center for AI Safety. (And he finishe his Ph.D.!)

1. What three words best describe Commonwealth?

Curious, caring, and vivacious.

2. What is your favorite Commonwealth memory? I distinctly remember taking Special Relativity with Farhad Riahi in the winter and freezing my hands o in 1A—but he was just up at the blackboard, teaching away and absolutely loving it.

3. What was your favorite Commonwealth class? Again, Special Relativity. And Mr. Sherry’s Geometry class my firs year, just because it made math fun again.

4. What’s your #1 piece of advice for Commonwealth students? Keep being curious, keep applying what you’ve learned at Commonwealth, and keep learning. Education is something that will never fail you, will never let you down, and can never be taken away.

5. What myth(s) would you like to dispel around your work? There’s a lot of fear about space debris and space safety— of Kessler Syndrome and space becoming a junkyard. But that is something that the industry actually takes incredibly seriously, and there’s been fantastic cooperation over the last few years to address the challenges of preventing debris creation as well as working towards removing historic sources of debris.

6. When and how did you fi st become interested in aerospace engineering? A combination of reading a little too much science fictio and wanting to get out of Dodge. It was the classic experience of a kid growing up just yearning for what’s behind the horizon. I figured if there’s something I can do today so that someone can someday stand on the bridge of the Enterprise [from Star Trek], I might as well work towards building it.

7. What is your favorite aspect of your career? The moments along the way that I never expected, like late nights at Capella trying to hit deadlines building the spacecraft or trying to fi it on orbit. There were lots of moments where we were writing software in thirty or forty minutes, testing it, and uploading it to the spacecraft hoping it would work—it was real-time engineering at its best.

8. What is the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Don’t do anything you don’t want to do. That can be taken in a lot of wrong ways, but the way I generally take it is “fin what you love, then live life the way that you want to live it.”

9. Coffe or tea? Yes. 10. Whom do you most admire? My thesis advisor, Mykel Kochenderfer, who is perhaps the nicest human being that has ever 36 CM Summer 2025

existed. He has four kids and somehow manages to make time for all of his students, teaches wonderful classes, mentors a bunch of differen people, and is a fantastic researcher. It’s a little rude how nice he is!

11. Which word or phrase do you most overuse? Delightful.

12. How do you defin success? Working on hard problems with good people.

13. What book do you wish you had read sooner? Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman.

14. If you could have dinner with one person—alive or dead—who would it be? Farhad Riahi, just to show him where I have come from the classroom and talk physics with him.

15. What is your favorite paradox? The Twin Paradox.

16. What do you bring to a potluck? Vegetarian white lasagna, with ricotta, spinach, Monterey Jack cheese, and garlic.

17. What was your go-to Boston eatery? It was Kashmir on Newbury Street, but it sadly died in the pandemic.

18. What is the theme song of your life? “Family,” by Catey Shaw.

19. What is the best gift you have ever received? My parents got me an iMac—one of the blue bubbles when they firs came out. They turned it into a scavenger hunt on Christmas Day, stringing up lights all around the house for me to follow and somehow swapped it into my room. And I spent so many hours on it.

20. What is your motto? Stay hungry. Stay curious. Be good.

Don’t Rush.

Plan.

THE HANCOCK SOCIETY Planned Giving at Commonwealth

The Hancock Society recognizes those whose commitment to Commonwealth will endure in perpetuity by including Commonwealth in their estate or retirement plans.

WHERE TO START? There are many ways to include Commonwealth in your plans. You may be able to name the school as a designated beneficia y of your retirement, bank, or investment account or donor-advised fund (DAF) with just a few clicks.

Your attorney can assist you with including a bequest to Commonwealth in your will. Thinking about annuities or other financial mechanisms?

e are equipped to accept all

manner of planned-giving vehicles.

Whether you have plans in mind or are considering The Hancock Society for the fi st time, we want to connect with you.

Interested in making Commonwealth part of your legacy?

Contact Alisha Elliott ’01, Director of Advancement: aelliott@commschool.org or 617-266-7525 ext. 293 Visit commschool.org/legacy to confirm your plans today.

NonProfit Org. U.S. Postage Paid N. Reading, MA

151 Commonwealth Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02116

Permit #211

commschool.org

Notice something new about this year’s graduates? Learn more about this remarkable class and their legacy on page 8. Don’t be strangers, Class of 2025! Top row, left to right: Yiray Wang, Ryan Xia, Eli Denenberg, Brooks Sjostrom, Peter Dowd, Henry Booth, Charlie Zhong, Felix Métral, Cody Bau, Zach Walton, Oliver Grant, Aritra Ghosh; middle row, left to right: Katie Heim Binas, Andrew Carter, Katia Nigro, Alissa Lopes, Lillian Walsh, Fisher Roman, Hanna Gialil, Alec Lazorisak, Bonnie Wang, Peyson Bilimoria, Will Washko, Govind Velamoor, Dylan Sherry, Prosper Anoke-Samuel, Henry Furman; bottom row, left to right: Milana Živanović, Ella Sherry, Anya Ratanchandani, Sarah McPeek, Rimas Youssef, Sarin Chaimattayompol, Ayala Salmon-Malcolm, Mellanie Rodriguez, Jay Park, Bianca Mints