American Magazine: November 2013

Naden Krogan
Biology, CAS
Todd Prono
Finance and Real Estate, Kogod
Jessica Waters
Justice, Law and Society, SPA
WOOD ENGRAVINGS BY CHRIS WORMELL
As a youngster in Saskatchewan, Naden
Krogan spent summers on the family farm
studying crops. It was there, in Canada’s
prairie province, that the seeds of intellectual
curiosity were planted. “And I haven’t left
the lab since,” he says.
Most developmental biologists study
animals, but Krogan’s research on the
formation of patterns in multicellular
organisms centers on plants. He uses “model
organisms” like Physcomitrella patens—moss,
which shares genetic and physiological
processes with vascular plants—to understand
more complicated models of life.
“One of the most fascinating questions in
biology is how a complex organism, with all
its intricate patterns, develops from a single
cell,” says Krogan, who began working with
Physcomitrella patens as a biology major at the
University of Regina–Saskatchewan. Lessons
learned from the moss, a tuft of which is the
size of a nickel, can help scientists tackle
everything from global hunger to cancer.
“What we learn from this very simple plant
is fundamental to all organisms,” says Krogan,
who keeps petri dishes of the small but mighty
moss in his AU lab. “I continue to be amazed
by its power.”
His current research focuses on another
model organism: Arabidopsis, a small,
flowering plant closely related to broccoli and
mustard—and the first plant to have its entire
genome sequenced. “If we can manipulate the
genes, we can produce more and bigger fruit
that are more easily harvested.
“We can’t bring crops into the lab, but what
we learn in the lab can be applied to crops.”
Long before he made his first pilgrimage
to Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull in his
early 20s, Todd Prono was inspired by what
the iconic bronze sculpture symbolizes:
aggressive financial optimism. The 7,100-pound
bull, which stands proud in Bowling Green
Park, just off Wall Street in lower Manhattan,
represents “a raging market, which has the
implication of a future price path and, by
extension, the variability of prices.”
“That intrigues me,” says the quant
wonk, who came to AU this semester from
the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Prono’s fascination with finance began
when he picked up the Wall Street Journal
as a teenager, dabbling in the markets before
heading off to Cornell to study economics.
Today, he’s analyzing something more complex
than the Journal’s stock charts.
The regulator-turned-academic’s research
centers on asset pricing models that are used
by banks, brokerages, and insurance firms to
infer the price of a stock, bond, or derivative.
Prono also works to decipher volatility—the
amount of uncertainty or risk in an asset’s
value—and is developing new models to
estimate volatility, testing their accuracy
through simulated experiments and with
real financial data.
His research informs risk-management
practices at financial firms, which seek to
protect their balance sheets against severe
losses that occur in times of financial distress.
“The simple tradeoff between risk and
return—and how we think about managing it—
is compelling,” he says.
For years, Jessica Waters, SPA/BA ’98, WCL/
JD ’03, was an attorney moonlighting as
an adjunct professor. She logged 80 hours
a week at WilmerHale law firm, where
she specialized in criminal defense and
reproductive rights litigation, and taught one
class a week at the Washington College of
Law. “I loved those three hours,” she says.
“I knew it was time for a change.”
Waters joined SPA in 2008, bringing the
courtroom gusto to her classroom. Law, she
tells her students, is more than process and
theory: “We talk about law in the abstract, but
it’s all about people.”
“When someone comes to a lawyer, they’re
in the worst place of their life. That’s a huge
responsibility.”
A reminder of that awesome responsibility
hangs over her desk: a baby quilt for her now
six-year-old son, Finn, made by the mother of
an Iraq War veteran, whom Waters defended
in a federal murder case. The case dragged
on for years, and Waters became close with
the family. “I was touched that she thought
enough of me to do that.”
As director of SPA’s new Politics, Policy,
and Law Scholars Program—a rigorous
three-year bachelor’s degree, which
welcomed its first cohort of 20 students in
August—she reminds students, many of
whom have their sights set on law school,
that even the most monumental cases
started small.
“Look at Tinker v. Des Moines: three kids
just wanted to protest the Vietnam War, and
that became one of the seminal cases for
student rights in schools.”
LET’S TALK #AMERICANMAG 23