Two BCS researchers are among this year's winners of the Ig Nobel Prize, the satiric award celebrating "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. BCS professor Edward "Ted" Gibson and graduate student Eric Martinez, along with former MIT visiting researcher Francis Mollica, now at the University of Edinburgh, were awarded the prize in the literature category for their work explaining what makes legal documents so challenging to comprehend.

As an undergraduate, Mitch Murdock was a rare science-humanities double major, specializing in both English and molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. Today, as a doctoral student in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, he sees obvious ways that his English education expanded his horizons as a neuroscientist. Murdock explores in his research the cellular basis of Alzheimer’s disease.

BCS PhD student Fernanda De La Torre uses complex algorithms to investigate philosophical questions about perception and reality. Although she still has several years left in her graduate studies, she’s already dreaming big. "I dream of opening up a school one day where I could bring this world of understanding of cognition and perception into places that would never have contact with this," she says.