News

The Beauty of Many Hats

By Tara TeslowFebruary 22nd, 2024in HOS Blog

What an exciting week here at BUA! Last Friday, the Jazz Band and Swamp Cats entertained students, faculty, staff, parents, and even grandparents for our Valentine’s Cabaret. The dance floor was quite a scene. Yesterday, both the boys and girls varsity basketball teams won their league championships in close games in front of a lively home crowd. In the girls game, senior Anais Kim reached a rare milestone – scoring 1,000 points – which is even more impressive given that she did so in just three years (COVID canceled her 9th-grade season). Tonight, we will celebrate the Lunar New Year in that same gym. Students from the East Asian Students Association, along with dozens of parents, have organized food, music, and games to share this important cultural moment with the whole BUA family. All are welcome, and we hope to see many of you there. I’m struck by how many of... More

Leadership is Learned

By Tara TeslowFebruary 22nd, 2024in HOS Blog

On Tuesday, Boston University’s interim President, Ken Freeman, spoke at our all-school meeting. President Freeman has a distinguished history of service to BU, including eight years as the Dean of BU’s Questrom School of Business. That service followed a nearly forty-year career in industry, including senior executive positions at Corning, Quest Diagnostics, and private-equity firm KKR. In 2013, Harvard Business Review named him one of the 100 best performing CEOs in the world. He knows some things about leadership – his topic that morning. He offered a lively overview of what we know about successful leadership, peppering his talk with anecdotes and grounding it in decades of scholarship about what works and what doesn’t. He invited students to think about their own preferred leadership styles and challenged them to begin developing their own leadership philosophies. He touted the centrality of EQ. Most notably, he assured our students that leadership is... More

Our Diversity is Our Strength

By Tara TeslowFebruary 22nd, 2024in HOS Blog

Students from the Geography Club and from Student Council’s PR Committee posted a world map at the foot of the staircase by the main entrance earlier this week. Attached to the map is a basket of pushpins and a request for students to add a pin to any locations connected to their heritage. Just a few days later, the map has now come alive with hundreds of multicolored pins. Yesterday afternoon, I joined some students gathered around the map analyzing the data – noticing the significant coverage of Europe, East Asia, South Asia, and parts of North America; tight clusters in East Africa, Central America, and the Middle East; and scattered points throughout the map. The story it tells is a beautiful one of a local school composed of and enriched by cultures from around the world. We are proud that BUA is a place where families and students across cultures... More

Research Highlight: Finn McMillan ’24

By emmeyerFebruary 14th, 2024in BUA News and Stories, Homepage News

For his senior thesis, BUA senior Finn McMillan ‘24 is working in partnership with Boston University’s Daniel Segrè Lab to investigate the optimization of plant growth for the sustainable and affordable production of consumer biofuels.  Finn was first introduced to the Segrè lab when he toured it as part of the STEM Seminar in his junior year. Intrigued by the team’s work, which focuses on bioinformatics and metabolic networks in living systems, Finn reached out to Professor Ilija Dukovski, a researcher in the Segrè lab, and arranged to spend his summer conducting research in the lab. Finn’s – and the Segrè Lab’s – work focuses on a small piece of a much larger, multi-institutional project called the Microbial Community Analysis & Functional Evaluation in Soils project, or m-CAFEs, “a collaborative, coordinated and integrated mission-driven proposal that interrogates the function of the soil and rhizosphere microbiome, which has immense implications for carbon... More

Tagged: , , , ,

Owen Bergstein, Resident Puzzle Master

By emmeyerFebruary 12th, 2024in BUA News and Stories, Homepage News

For BUA sophomore Owen Bergstein ‘26, crossword puzzles are a way of life. Always an avid puzzler – like many BUAers – Owen does the New York Times crossword every day and estimates that he’s solved close to 1,000 puzzles since starting at BUA. But about two years ago, Owen took the leap from solver to creator and began to teach himself how to design his own puzzles. Tapping into a network of online and in-person crossword constructors, Owen found mentorship and guidance, and began to refine his puzzle-building technique.  Reflecting on his process, Owen said: “ I started out constructing pencil-on-paper, but soon learned that there is helpful software that the pros use. Every crossword is either themed or themeless. For themed puzzles, you build a theme, generally based around what's called a ‘revealer,’ an answer in the grid that explains the gimmick going on in other answers. Then you... More

Tagged: , ,

Our Alums

By Christos J KolovosJanuary 30th, 2024

I’m just back from a trip to San Francisco visiting BUA alums with Mr. Stone. Over two days, we caught up with several dozen BUA graduates ranging from the class of 1997 to 2018. The trip confirmed a few things for me, aside from the fact that I am perhaps getting too old to function well after a red-eye flight. One is that our alums are doing remarkable and purposeful things with their careers, with a focus on technology given the location: launching a medical-technology company as part of the current Y Combinator startup accelerator cohort; pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence in education; investing in next-generation cancer therapeutics; developing LiDAR systems for use in self-driving cars. They spoke not just of their passion, but also of the ways in which their work will impact society for the better. It gave me a lot of hope for the future. Another is... More

BUA Transit Club Lobbies MA State Senator Sal DiDomenico

On Tuesday, January 23, members of the BUA Transit Club were accompanied by chaperones Mr. Seth and Ms. Kelly on an exciting visit to the State House to enjoy a tour of the Senate and House chambers, as well as take part in an engaging and helpful discussion with State Senator and Assistant Majority Leader Sal DiDomenico about local public transportation concerns. Senator DiDomenico, representing the cities of Cambridge, Charlestown, Chelsea, and Everett, overheard numerous concerns and suggestions regarding the MBTA’s budget, reliability, and future plans. The senator was extremely impressed about how knowledgeable Transit Club members were, and encouraged all students to reach out to local representatives engaged in pushing transit infrastructure legislation; he hopes to include some of BUA students’ suggestions in his upcoming transit legislation.

Tagged: , , ,

What Do You Do For Fun?

By Christos J KolovosJanuary 23rd, 2024in HOS Blog

As I was walking the halls recently, I passed a classroom during a free period where about a dozen students were looking up at a crossword puzzle projected on the screen. I popped in – I love crosswords too much to just walk by – and quickly discovered that I was in a new world. The students were working on a cryptic crossword puzzle, where each of the clues is a puzzle to solve – puzzles within puzzles. The whole room erupted when somebody got an answer; I didn’t contribute much, but it was fun to try it with them. After school that same day, I came across four kids playing chess on two boards side by side, with another handful of students and a teacher watching from the periphery. They explained that they were playing something called Bughouse Chess, a two-on-two version of the game where pieces taken by... More

Dora Mou ’27 Wins New York Times Essay Contest

Ninth-grader Dora Mou '27's essay, "My Two Primal Urges," was selected as one of 15 winners of the New York Times' 2nd annual Teen Tiny Memoirs contest. Teen Tiny Memoirs are 100-word narratives by teenagers about meaningful moments in their lives. Read Dora's winning essay here. Congratulations, Dora, on your fantastic essay and this incredible accomplishment!

Tagged: , ,

Research Highlight: Robbie Mulroy ’24

BUA senior Robbie Mulroy's thesis project has the potential to impact the future of cancer research. For his senior thesis, Robbie '24 is investigating the role of the CREB binding protein (CBP) in cancer under the guidance of BU Biology Professor Dr. Trevor Siggers as well as BUA Biology Teacher Dr. Colleen Krivacek, who by remarkable coincidence happens to have expertise in this area. CBP is a cofactor that binds to transcription factors, which in turn bind to DNA to regulate when genes are expressed. The CREB binding protein regulates around 10,000 different genes; Robbie has been studying where and when CBP’s five binding regions bind to various transcription factors.  Inspired by his BU biology courses, Robbie was motivated to better understand the inner workings of the human body on a genetic level, and to investigate CBP’s effect on the immune system and the relationship between CBP and tumor development. In the spring... More

Tagged: , , , , ,