In 2011, associate mathematics professor John Baldwin posted on his homepage what he held to be 18 of the more “interesting” questions in his area of study, which is geometry and topology. They included: “Suppose Y is an irreducible 3-manifold which doesn’t admit a taut foliation. Is Y an L-space?” “Are there contact structures with support genus greater than one?” And, “Does contact -1 surgery on a Legendrian knot in a closed 3-manifold preserve tightness?” Some of the questions, such as the last mentioned, have been settled. (The answer, in brief, is “yes.”) Most, however, remain open, according to Baldwin earlier this year.

Baldwin says an overhaul of the list is forthcoming, with his launch of a wiki funded by the National Science Foundation called Open Problems in Floer Homology (a reference to a framework employed in topology studies). The site will contain background explanations and progress updates.

Over the past few months, senior editor Thomas Cooper interviewed faculty members in a variety of disciplines, asking what open questions and issues stir their imaginations.

Welkin Johnson

Professor of biology

Recently taught: “Metamorphosis: Evolution and Genetics of Change”
Recently published: “An Intact Retroviral Gene Conserved in Spiny-Rayed Fishes for over 100 Million Years” (with J. Henzy, R. Gifford, and C. Kenaley), in Molecular Biology and Evolution (2017)
Years on faculty: Six

“A lot of people think of viruses as pests. But I have a suspicion that viruses—particularly retroviruses such as HIV—have had a vastly underestimated impact on the evolution of organisms, including humans. I don’t know whether that suspicion can be resolved, but it is a question that I hope in the next few years to know a lot more about.

A virus, unlike a living organism, exists only as an infection of a host cell. If there’s no host, no cells to infect, the virus goes extinct. Retroviruses are distinctive in that their genetic material is RNA, but when they infect a host cell, they transcribe their RNA into DNA and then insert it irrevocably into the host cell chromosome, so that the viral genome becomes a gene in the host cell, albeit a gene that codes for the virus. Depending on the type of host cell infected, the viral sequence may become embedded in the host’s germ line, and passed on as DNA to offspring, still as a virus-encoding gene.

If you examine genomes, you can find sequences related to HIV and other retroviruses that are tens of millions of years old. Retroviral sequences are present in the DNA of most vertebrates; there are, in fact, more of these viral sequences than there are actual genes. This is true of all vertebrates, even humans.

That tells us that retroviruses are a source of genetic novelty. Can they be a major part of the explanation for how evolution works? Well, evolution at a pace of one mutation at a time—the standard model for how sequences evolve—can take literally hundreds of millions of years. There is evidence, however, that the viral sequences in our genomes are structured almost like modules that can be cut and pasted. This may explain how gene networks have evolved more rapidly than the standard model would predict.

A recipient of the Nobel Prize in Medicine once said that if viruses never existed, life would be the same. I disagree. I think viruses directed—and continue to direct—the paths along which we evolve.”

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Ellen Winner

Professor of psychology

Recently taught: “Psychology of Art”
Recently published: “Distinguishing between Abstract Art by Artists vs. Children and Animals: Comparison between Human and Machine Perception” (with J. Nissel and L. Shamir), in ACM Transactions on Applied Perception (2016)
Years on faculty: Thirty-nine

“Are there habits of mind that people learn when they study the arts? And do they spill over into other areas?

Many claims have been made about how arts education improves test scores. In 2000, my colleague Lois Hetland and I published a set of meta-analyses of nearly 50 years of studies on this question. We found that the more arts courses students took, the better their academic performance. But this was a correlational finding, telling us nothing about causality. Perhaps students who take arts courses are already academically strong. When we looked at the experimental studies that allow causal inference (random assignment to an education with vs. without art), we found zero evidence that studying the arts transfers to improved test scores. And why should we expect such an implausible finding? What do the arts have to do with verbal and mathematical reasoning?

Arts advocates feared that our findings would be used to cut the arts curriculum out of schools. This propelled us to examine what the arts really do teach, if not verbal and math skills. In a qualitative study of visual arts education at two Boston-area high schools, we uncovered clear evidence of the teaching of broad habits of mind—such as close observation, reflection and evaluation, exploration and experimentation, and persistence.

We need to develop measures to determine whether the habits that are taught are actually learned. And if they are, do they get applied outside the art studio? Does a student who has learned to observe in art become a better observer in biology? Is a student who has learned to persist in art more likely to persist on a math problem?

We don’t know the answers to these kinds of questions. Perhaps these habits are learned well in the art studio but do not get applied elsewhere. Or perhaps they do. This is what we seek to discover.”

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Devin Pendas

Associate professor of history

Recently taught: “World War II” and “Intellectual History of Capitalism”
Recently published: “Against War: Pacifism as Collaboration and as Resistance,” chapter in The Cambridge History of the Second World War (M. Geyer, A. Tooze, eds.), Cambridge University Press (2015)
Years on faculty: Fourteen

“I research the history of legal responses to mass violence. Law is a boundlessly fascinating topic. It is conceptualized around life within a stable political community, one in which the state somehow regulates human behavior. It’s an attempt to crystallize and institutionalize moral insights, to create social order and peace and justice.

But we all know what the road to hell is paved with. When crimes are committed by states—by tens of thousands of perpetrators, against hundreds of thousands of victims—the principles of individual responsibility, of intentionality, of proportionate punishment, so central to law in ordinary times, begin to break down.

My first book, on the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial, examined the nature of German criminal law and the challenges to it in dealing with the Holocaust. My next big project will be a global history of pacifism and humanitarianism in the modern era. To get a comprehensive picture of how humans have tried to stop and/or fix the problems of mass violence, you have to look not just at law, but also beyond law. The question to ask is, Why can’t we do something that works? What is it about the human condition that makes this problem so intractable?

I feel that scholars have an obligation to ask hard questions that have high moral stakes. I can’t think of too many questions more necessary than figuring out what to do about the way we needlessly kill one another.”

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Sam Ransbotham

Associate professor of information systems

Recently taught: “Analytics and Business Intelligence” and “Data Analytics 4”
Recently published: “Ubiquitous IT and Digital Vulnerabilities” (with Fichman et al.), in Information Systems Research, 2016
Years on faculty: Nine

“At the same time that a person first picked up a rock to break open a seashell, another person was picking up a rock and banging someone over the head with it. Fast-forward to today. How do we as a society get the most good out of technology while minimizing the bad?

One tradeoff that interests me is between security and productivity. What if you had an information system so secure that every time you typed a character you had to go through a retinal scan, password, and fingerprinting? Security would overwhelm the system’s value. What if you had no security? The system would be immediately attacked and destroyed. Maximizing the balance for productivity requires making difficult decisions.

Many computer users think, Why don’t smart people just solve the security problem? Isn’t there a technical solution? We are newborns with technology, only 50 or so years into chips. Yet we are building a giant societal infrastructure on top of systems that seem like drafts.

In 1986, IBM computer architect Fred Brooks wrote a seminal paper titled ‘No Silver Bullet,’ which has become axiomatic in the information systems field. There are no magical solutions to the challenges new technologies pose. There isn’t even a single magical question. It’s a matter of figuring out what the tradeoffs are and deciding what is acceptable—a value management business problem more than a technical one, and a problem that, with relentless technological progress, won’t go away.”

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Kristin Heyer

Professor of theology

Recently taught: “Immigration and Ethics” and “Christian Ethics and Migration”
Recently published: “‘An Echo in Their Hearts’: The Church in Our Modern World,” in New Theology Review (2016)
Years on faculty: Two

“In the world of theological ethics, there are enduring questions that take a different shape today in light of newly urgent realities. Even a decade ago, for example, there was very little discussion in the field of the treatment of migrants as a moral issue. I investigate what the Christian tradition’s central commitments—to human dignity, family life, global solidarity, its idea of social or structural sin—may contribute to migration policy today.

What are our duties to one another within, and beyond, borders? In the West, the conversation about migration often focuses on illegal crossings, rarely stepping back to examine Westerners’ complicity as consumers, or their nations’ interventions in underdeveloped countries, or the contribution of multinational corporations to foreign destabilization. There’s a case to be made for porous borders.

I’m currently pivoting in my research because I think the human rights arguments—both moral and civic—and the intellectual contributions of the Christian tradition, while necessary for progress, remain insufficient. Recent findings in moral psychology indicate that much of the entrenched resistance to justice or hospitality is not rational. If, as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues, reason is at best riding the ‘elephant’ of our emotions, then considering the roles played by imagination, culture, or other factors beyond our control is necessary. The task of the ethicist, therefore, is not only to address legal restrictions, but also to probe the underlying fears and identity questions that impact people’s attitudes toward immigrants, in an attempt to form consciences for global citizenship.

If we’re living isolated lives, we’re never going to break down ‘internalized’ borders, those subconscious biases that reinforce notions of ‘us’ vs. ‘them.’ And if we want a robust vision of the common good, then we need to be honest about power imbalances. In ethics, it’s important to consider insights from the social sciences and economics, even when normative and religious questions are on the table.

I want to understand what justice requires in a pluralistic, globalized society, but even more, what compassionate reason requires.”

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Paul Davidovits

Professor of chemistry

Recently taught: “General Chemistry” and “Physical Chemistry”
Recently published: “Effect of Oxidant Concentration, Exposure Time, and Seed Particles on Secondary Organic Aerosol Chemical Composition and Yield” (with J. Brogan, P. Chhabra, et al.), in Atmospheric Chemistry Physics (2015)
Years on faculty: Forty-three

“I study atmospheric aerosols, specifically, tiny airborne particles produced by combustion—of wood, coal, diesel—or by nature, such as mineral dust from the Sahara. My challenge is to better understand their effects on climate, and to incorporate those roles in long-range modeling. Fifteen years ago, aerosols weren’t even a factor in such designs.

The bigger aerosols settle quickly—you can see the results on the exterior of our building, the Merkert Chemistry Center, where the darkened east wall intercepts the diesel clouds from Beacon Street. Smaller particles move swiftly and tend to aggregate; they have a fairly long life in the atmosphere, typically two weeks, time enough to travel from Mexico City, say, to the North Pole.

Most aerosols reflect light back into space, thereby cooling the earth’s atmosphere. However, the aerosols that contain black carbon absorb light. Clouds sweep up aerosols from burning coal in India, for example, and the sun heats them. Wherever the particles land—in the Himalayas, say, or even the Alps—they become little ovens absorbing sunlight and, in mountainous regions, spurring glacier melt. They also melt icebergs. That’s the aerosol effect, a complex combination of cooling the atmosphere globally and heating it locally.

Add to that the fact that aerosols are key to forming clouds. For water to condense in the atmosphere, there must be a particle around which it can do so. Otherwise, because of surface tension, the water re-evaporates. Every cloud droplet has an aerosol in its center. And clouds have their own effect on climate—cooling by day, warming by night.

Lastly, what are the full effects of switching to aerosol-free nuclear, wind, or solar energy? There are suggestions that clearing out smog, thereby allowing more sunlight to penetrate the lower atmosphere, actually heats urban environments. The models are uncertain.

Recently at Boston College we’ve been collaborating with MIT and Aerodyne Research to study the formation of cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere, a process not well understood. Sometimes such clouds are present, while at other times under apparently similar conditions they are not. We expect our studies will explain the mechanism of their formation and lead to a fuller understanding of their climate effects.”

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Régine Michelle Jean-Charles

Associate professor of French

Recently taught: “Haiti Chérie: Haitian Literature and Culture” and “Black Feminisms 101”
Recently published: “Naming, Claiming and Framing Marie Vieux-Chauvet: A Haitian Woman of Letters,” in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (2017)
Years on faculty: Ten

“The political role of literature is an old concept. In French, it’s called engagement. There were writers in 20th-century Africa—Sembène Ousmane of Senegal, Ahmadou Kourouma of Ivory Coast, and Cameroon’s Mongo Beti—who felt literature had to have a role beyond art. Enough with the poems about trees and flowers! Write a poem about the struggle against oppression. In the context of francophone African and Caribbean literature, which I primarily study, this is a big topic. In the late-20th and 21st centuries, writers such as Henri Lopès of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Alain Mabanckou, who was born in the Republic of Congo, pushed back. Why, just because we’re African, do we have to write about social justice? What if we want to write about the flowers?

Gender justice is the theme that animates most of my research, writing, and teaching. How do we create a world in which women are safe? How do we create a world in which women are considered equal and treated equally? How do we make people care?

We know that in this country one in five women will be raped in her lifetime. It’s a terrible statistic. Yet so often the word rape is misrepresented. I once heard a student say, ‘That test raped me.’ The word is used symbolically, or it’s normalized, or it’s denied altogether.

Why ask literature to explore terrible, sad issues rooted in reality? Why not leave it to the social sciences? The answer lies in the relationship between reality and representation. It can be easier to read truth once-removed than to hear it from a survivor’s mouth. Literature creates a space in which to see the world.

My students read The Color Purple as the fiction it is. But I also ask them to hold onto that one-in-five statistic, and imagine a different world.”

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Sheila Blair

Norma Jean Calderwood University Professor of Islamic and Asian Art

Recently taught: “Islamic Architecture” and “Masterpieces of Islamic Art”
Recently published: Text and Image in Medieval Persian Art, Edinburgh University Press (2014)
Years on faculty: Eighteen

“I was a graduate student in my second year, and I wrote a paper on a Mongol manuscript that was turned into a book. And I thought, whooh, this is a field; if a second-year graduate student can produce material for a book already, this is exciting.

I’m most interested in calligraphy, the art of writing—on books, on buildings, on objects—in Iran, which became the meeting point between China and the West during the Mongol empire in the 13th and 14th centuries. Writing is probably the most important feature of Islamic art. The Quran was revealed in Arabic, and virtually all cultures that adopted Islam adopted Arabic script. I’m interested in how they used that script both to write in other languages and to visually convey religious, political, and personal messages, when not everybody could read.

My focus is also on how a work of art was made—the materials, the process—and what that physical making tells us about the culture, about the people who crafted it (men and women) and the people who used it (why did they desire it?). Art that gets preserved is often reinterpreted, imbued with new meaning, and I want to track a work’s value at different times.

I’m currently tracing the history of an enormous 14th-century Mongol Quran. The 30-volume manuscript, each page measuring over three feet high, was created in Iran, seized by the Ottomans in the early 16th century, and taken to Istanbul. The Ottomans considered the manuscript a talisman and carried portions of it on their European campaigns, before their defeat at Vienna in 1529. Parts reside today in Leipzig, Dresden, and Istanbul. Basically none of it remains in Iran.

The biggest change in my research over time owes to a narrowing of access. It’s become very hard to study Islamic architecture. I can’t go back to Syria, for example, and talk to the people who are there and who see their edifices in a doubtless different way than I would. Even North Africa’s getting tricky. I work a lot now in museums, in America and Europe. When I was a student, we just put on our backpacks and went.”

Read more by Thomas Cooper