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Last year, a group of Case Western Reserve University students made headlines with Hole Patch, their innovative approach to fixing potholes using a bag filled with a secret recipe of non-Newtonian fluid. As a co-founder of the award-winning startup, junior Mayank Saksena played a major role in the c...

For Mary Grimm, writing is all about creativity. An associate professor of English, she teaches courses that demand imagination: fiction writing, urban fantasy, graphic novel, science fiction, and contemporary American literature. But her favorite to teach is the aptly named creative writing course,...

Thirty years ago, just a few miles down the road, Michael Scharf served as captain of the Shaker Heights High School debate team. The topic was American foreign policy. Immediately, his interest was piqued. That interest has remained ever since. Scharf went on to Duke University, where he was the s...

Last fall, Distinguished University Professor Richard Boyatzis was named one of the top 10 influential thinkers around the globe. This spring, he will share his insight with the world when his massive open online course, or MOOC, launches May 1. More than 50,000 people—and counting—have signed up f...

Leadership, friendship and service. They’re the three tenets of Alpha Phi Omega—and also three of the words its president, junior Katie Paul, lives by. As president of the Case Western Reserve University chapter of the national co-ed service fraternity, Paul has expanded her leadership skills, help...

When Jim Edmonson accepted the position as curator of the Dittrick Museum of Medical History, he thought his stint would be short-lived—two years, tops. That was 1981. Today, Edmonson still reigns over the museum, which he’s helped grow from a doctors’ museum to a more universal health and medicine...

When people hear the term “cancer research,” they might think cures, genes or even prevention. Mary Step’s studies take a different route. As an assistant professor of family medicine and community health, she studies the communication between cancer patients and their physicians. And as the honora...

By the time he was 16, Juscelino Colares knew he wanted to be a lawyer when he grew up. The only difference between Colares and many other teenagers with the same dreams? He actually started law school then. Colares grew up in Brazil, where he started college at the age of 16. Law is an undergradua...

When Becky Sloan was about 13, her love for writing took root. Now, nearly 60 years later, she’s published her first novel, Branches—a work that took years of writing, rewriting, editing and retooling in order to be fit for print. Sloan’s long journey led her to realize four crucial words of wisdom...

For Maxwell Mehlman, everything happens for a reason. Take, for example, his entire career. “Everything that has happened to me was part of a sequence of fortuitous events,” Mehlman said. When Mehlman graduated from law school at Yale University, he headed to Washington, D.C., to practice. He took...