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Case Studies

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Case studies illustrate the kinds of decisions and dilemmas managers face every day, and as such provide an effective learning tool for project management.

Due to the dynamic and complex environment of projects, a great deal of project management knowledge is tacit and hard to formalize. A case study captures the complex nature of a project and identifies key decision points, allowing the reader an inside look at the project from a practitioner’s point of view.

Going to Extremes NEEMO Case Study

Oco-2: a second chance to fly, seven axioms of good engineering: development of a case study-based course for nasa, knowledge legacy – from the x-15 to the space shuttle, columbia’s last mission, the deepwater horizon accident – lessons for nasa, weathering the storm: lessons from hurricane ike, lunar crater observation and sensing satellite, sts-119 flow control valve issue, the cassini-huygens mission, ares i-x upper stage simulator, redesigning cobe, launching new horizons: the rp-1 tank decision, gravity probe b, space-to-space communications system, viking gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, vegetation canopy lidar, miniature seeker technology integration (pdf), advanced general aviation technology experiment (pdf), high-speed research program (pdf), wide-field infrared explorer (pdf), goddard space flight center.

The Office of the Chief Knowledge Officer (OCKO) at the Goddard Space Flight Center has developed a collection of case studies to enhance learning at workshops, training, retreats and conferences.

Catalog of Case Studies

Orbital Debris Management and Risk Mitigation

APPEL’s Orbital Debris Management and Risk Mitigation (ODM) training course provides mission-critical knowledge that helps NASA missions implement the agency’s overarching strategic goals and the U.S. National Space Policy goals for sustainability in space. The iBook supplements the existing course taught by Mr. Nicholas L. Johnson, Chief Scientist in the Orbital Debris Program Office at Johnson Space Center.

Learn more and download a copy of the book

Shared Voyage: Learning and Unlearning from Remarkable Projects

Shared Voyage is about four remarkable projects: the Advanced Composition Explorer (NASA), the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (U.S. Air Force), the Pathfinder Solar-Powered Airplane (NASA), and the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (U.S. Air Force.)

Download the the PDF version of the book

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Chapter 5 – Case Studies

Case Study – Space Shuttle Challenger

Please see the earlier section in this textbook that gives more background on this disaster.

Introduction to the Case

On January 28, 1986, seven astronauts were killed when the space shuttle they were piloting, the Challenger, exploded at just over a minute into the flight. The failure of the solid rocket booster O-rings to seal properly allowed hot combustion gases to leak from the side of the booster and burn through the external fuel tank. The failure of the O-ring was attributed to several factors, including faulty design of the solid rocket boosters, insufficient low-temperature testing of the O-ring material and of the joints that the O-ring sealed, and lack of proper communication between different levels of NASA management.

Here are a list of case studies relating to this incident

Engineering.com

posted this case study in  The Engineer   on October 24, 2006

https://www.engineering.com/Library/ArticlesPage/tabid/85/ArticleID/170/The-Space-Shuttle-Challenger-Disaster.aspx

Adapted from material by the Department of Philosophy and Department of Mechanical Engineering  at Texas A&M University   NSF Grant Number DIR-9012252

How does the implied social contract of professionals apply to this case?   What profressional responsibilities were neglected, if any?   Should NASA have done anything differently in their launch decision procedure?

Texas A&M Univerisity Case Studies

https://ethics.tamu.edu/case-studies/

American Society for Engineering Education Case 2014 Study

https://www.asee.org/file_server/papers/attachment/…/2013-Paper-ASEE-Shuttle.pdf

The Challenger Disaster: A Case of Subjective Engineering from the IEEE

From the IEEE archives: NASA’s resistance to probabilistic risk analysis contributed to the Challenger disaster

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/the-space-shuttle-a-case-of-subjective-engineering

To the extent possible under law, Jennifer Kirkey has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Engineering and Technology in Society - Canada , except where otherwise noted.

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Featured Case Studies

Tenri station, academy of music bus stop, fruitvale bart station, hal's parklet, la mariposa, river garden, malón urbano, macon connects, dispersione zero, seeds for change, kalobeyei public space project, the seawall, stanley park, chulalongkorn centenary park, waterplein benthemplein, corktown common park, hunter's point south, pop-up park at városháza park, türkenmarkt, piazza del campo, montclair community street quilt, perth cultural centre, burnside park, portsmouth square, plaza de la constitución de oaxaca (zócalo), grand place, paris plages, 7th street se, feria de san telmo, detroit eastern market, granville island public market, reading terminal market, stockholm city hall, east village, tompkins square park, arts centre, dergah park and mosque complex, the galleria, hotel de ville (city hall), circular quay, granville island, riverwalk & waterplace park.

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Planar Mosaic Video Walls Pay Tribute To NASA's Challenger and Columbia Missions

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Planar Mosaic Video Walls Pay Tribute To NASA's Challenger and Columbia Missions

The Kennedy Space Center, in Merritt Island, Fla., owes its popularity to the unique way it connects people to the storied U.S. space exploration program. That connection was made stronger with the opening of the Forever Remembered memorial at the center’s visitor complex. The exhibit—a tribute to the astronauts who were lost in the Challenger and Columbia shuttle missions—uses multimedia storytelling featuring three Planar® Mosaic® Architectural video walls.

Each of the Planar Mosaic video walls includes four 46-inch tiles (Planar® Pablo™ AD46) and two 22-inch square tiles (Planar® Salvador™ AD22) that are arranged in creative configurations to maximize impact. Located in a key hallway exhibit space, the video walls display 4K video footage and provide a platform for presenting the astronauts’ stories in a unique way.

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Modern, Low-Budget and Easy to Build Living Spaces: the Case Study House Program

• Written by Fabian Dejtiar | Translated by Maggie Johnson
• Published on March 29, 2021

Between 1945 and 1966, the Case Study Houses program , following the Weißenhof-siedlung exposition, commissioned a study of economic, easy-to-build houses. The study included the creation of 36 prototypes that were to be built leading up to post-war residential development. The initiative by John Entenza, editor of Arts & Architecture magazine, brought a team to Los Angeles that featured some of the biggest names in architecture at the time, including Richard Neutra , Charles & Ray Eames, Pierre Koenig, and Eero Saarinen , among others.

The program's experiment not only defined the modern home and set it apart from its predecessors, but it also pioneered new construction materials and methods in residential development that continue to influence international architecture to this day. Take a detailed look at some of the program's most emblematic work together with recommendations for facing contemporary challenges. 

Modern Living Space: Adapting to new needs, activities, and lifestyles

"What is a house?" asked Eames. He soon answered his own question with a drawing that captured the new ways that people used and lived in the contemporary home: listening to music, watching movies, entertaining, and relaxing. These functions led to the introduction of open floor plans and multi-purpose rooms divided between public and private spaces, which quickly became the norm for modern house design. 

In this sense, living spaces also began to stand out for the creative details that began to link the inside of the residence with the outside, mainly by maximizing the use of open air spaces. Sliding doors, furniture, and other elements were another facet to the personalization of spaces in an attempt to satisfy the the tastes and wants of the future residents while keeping in mind their security and privacy.  

Another interesting factor was the attention given to storage spaces such as cabinets, shelves, and closets, especially in kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms. In this sense, as shown in the film “House: After Five Years of Living,” made by Eames in 1955, the resident's personal possessions and where they are exhibited play an important role in humanizing a living space.

• 6 Tips for Designing and Building a Tiny House
• Smart Configurations for Small Kitchens
• Storage Spaces for Small Houses: Solutions and Useful Examples

Low-Budget Housing: Understanding New Materials and Reducing Energy Costs 

As can be seen in numerous examples, the decision to use materials such as cement blocks, plywood, and industrial glass dramatically reduced the project's costs. In turn, by using the resistance of the metal, the designers were able to use smaller dimensions for the columns and beams, resulting in smaller frameworks to enclose the spaces. Maintenance costs were even lower. The materials could be left exposed in their raw form or covered with a light coat of paint and could easily be replaced in the event of breakage. 

The low-cost trend gained even more momentum with the development of various methods to reduce heating and lighting expenses. The use of large floor-to-ceiling windows maximized natural light and their sliding fixtures allowed for optimal air-flow. Furthermore, the wide incorporation of plants and green space also worked to keep the home cool and comfortable. 

• How to Make a Facade with Recycled Materials: 16 Notable Examples
• The Golden Age of 3D Printing: Innovations Changing the Industry
• Unfamiliar Living Spaces with Recycled Materials (Spanish Text)

Easy-to-build Living Spaces: Using the Most Efficient Construction Methods

An interesting aspect that could be seen in numerous houses was modular construction - giving homes a simple geometry that not only facilitated the standardization of the building process but also allowed homes to be pre-manufactured as a way to reduce building time. 

Pre-fabricated systems reduced the number of construction jobs that needed time to dry or set and offered a feasible and more importantly, replicable, solution with the intelligent mixing of materials, such as aluminum and wooden frameworks. If a method could not be replicated across different experiments, it still served as an example in the research and development of construction technology in housing. 

Another important element of pre-fabrication is the idea of "core services" that house the plumbing and heating installations that center around kitchens and bathrooms as a way to consolidate one of the living space's biggest expenses. 

• 5 Projects That Illustrate the Huge Potential of Prefab
• This Brazilian Startup Creates Smart, Pre-Fabricated Homes in Half the Time
• This Concept Uses a Pre-Fabricated Timber System to Enable Modern, Self-Built Homes
• This Off-Site Construction System Duplicates Floors in Barcelona Buildings in 3 Days

For more information and examples, we recommend visiting the following links where you can get a first-hand look at the living spaces and their layouts:

• Case Study House #1 / Julius Ralph Davidson
• Case Study House #2 / Sumner Spaulding & John Rex
• Case Study House #3 / William W Wurster & Theodore Bernardi
• Case Study House #4 / Ralph Rapson’s "Greenbelt House"
• Case Study House #6 / Richard Neutra: The Omega House
• Case Study House #7 / Thornton M Abell
• Case Study House #8 / Charles y Ray Eames: The Eames' House
• Case Study House #9 / Charles & Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen: The Entenza House
• Case Study House #10 / Kemper Nomland & Kemper Nomland Jr
• Case Study House #11 / J R Davidson
• Case Study House #12 / Whitney R Smith
• Case Study House #13 / Richard Neutra: The Alpha House
• Case Study House #20 / Richard Neutra: The Bailey House
• Case Study House #21 / Pierre Koenig
• Case Study House #22 / Pierre Koenig: The Stahl House
• Case Study House #23 / Killingsworth, Brady & Smith
• Case Study House #24 / A. Quincy Jones & Frederick Emmons
• Case Study House #26 / Beverley David Thorne

See more articles about topics of contemporary living spaces in the following links:

• Will Open-Source, Technological Solutions Ever Lead to the Dream of Universal Affordable Housing?
• 6 Thoughts On Materials and Construction: Decisions That Improve People's Quality Of Life
• OPEN Architecture and Xiaomi Unveil MARS Case Housing Prototype at China House Vision 2018

Editor's note: This article was originally published on March 25, 2019.

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Searching for Signs of Intelligent Life: Technosignatures

Our first confirmed proof of life beyond Earth might not involve biology at all. It’s possible that we might intercept communication through electromagnetic waves, like radio, or find telescopic evidence of epic engineering.

While the search remains largely focused on non-technological life, NASA scientists also have begun to consider what technological traces of intelligent life – “technosignatures” – might look like. They wouldn’t come from planets in our solar system, but rather far-flung exoplanets that we cannot see up close. Among the possibilities are laser or radio pulses, signs of artificial chemicals in the atmospheres of distant planets, or “Dyson spheres” – massive structures built around stars to collect their energy.

And as acceptance in the scientific community slowly grows, a field once derided as a search for “little green men” is showing early signs of blossoming into a mature, serious investigation.

“That’s something we’ve worked very hard on: to establish our legitimacy, and distance ourselves from pseudo-science,” said Jill Tarter, an astronomer known for decades as a leader in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. “If anything, my conviction that this is an important and reasonable thing to do has increased.”

Tarter is the co-founder and former director of the Center for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Research at the SETI Institute, as well as the inspiration for the main character in Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel “Contact.” She says one of the biggest challenges today is moving the search for signs of technology beyond just radio signals.

“We still want to look at all the sky all the time, at all wavelengths,” Tarter said, including pulses of laser light that might be used for communication.

Another challenge is short-lived “transient” signals, one-time events that can be bright and energetic. Mixed among the many natural sources for such signals, like gamma-ray bursts or supernovae, might be artificial transients from distant civilizations – an engineered signal lasting less than a few minutes. But teasing them apart likely would require enormous amounts of computer time.

“We’re trying to figure out how to do that,” Tarter said. “That is our focus now.”

Artificial intelligence could prove an ally in such searches. Sophisticated algorithms can sort through large amounts of data for patterns that could indicate an engineered signal. And AI searches likely would have fewer of the possible biases of human analysts, who might tend to focus their search on types of signals they’ve defined in advance, or view as more likely.

Stretching boundaries in the search for technosignatures is a high priority for Ravi Kopparapu, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who specializes in the hunt for habitable worlds as well as technosignatures.

He, like Tarter, seeks to define potential signals beyond the radio realm.

In published work, Kopparapu has explored using “nitrogen dioxide pollution as a signature for technology,” he said. After all, Earth’s pollution levels reflect human activity. Satellites monitoring our own planet have observed changes, too – for example, a temporary dip in such pollution around urban centers during COVID-19 lockdowns.

“I thought, OK, can we use that as a signature of technology another civilization might be using?” he said.

Carbon is the fourth most abundant element in the observable universe, and is relatively reactive, making it a natural candidate for involvement in synthetic reactions that any life-form might use. Carbon has formed the basis of life and many technologies on Earth.

“We should expect similar things to happen on other planets,” Kopparapu said. “They should be having the same elements we have here; then they could have carbon-based life, carbon-based technology, and fossil fuel technology as well.”

Another clearly artificial chemical would be chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, once heavily used as refrigerants here on Earth. Highly damaging to the planet’s protective ozone layer, they were phased out after the Montreal Protocol agreement in the late 1980s. Detection of the chemical in the atmospheres of exoplanets – planets around other stars – might be possible under some conditions, Kopparapu said.

And another phenomenon sometimes considered a form of “pollution,” at least by astronomers, is artificial light. Though difficult to observe, capturing the glimmer of “city lights” on the night side of a rocky, Earth-sized planet would be a clear sign of at least moderately advanced technology.

One speculative product of a super-advanced civilization could be “Dyson spheres” – megastructures around other stars, as outlined decades ago by the late physicist Freeman Dyson. A hypothetical structure could partially block the light from, say, a mature, Sun-like star, as it gathers the star’s energy. A Dyson sphere’s presence would be revealed by “waste heat” – observed as excess infrared radiation.

“If the technology is using lots of solar energy, giant solar panels in space blocking 1% of the star’s light, there will be a huge, whopping infrared signature,” said Jason Wright, an astronomy and astrophysics professor at Penn State who works on a variety of problems involving stars, planets and the potential for life in the universe.

Infrared radiation is usually associated with young stars, surrounded by dusty disks where planets are forming. The disks absorb the starlight and emit an excess of telltale infrared light.

"An old star like the Sun doesn't have any right having that much [infrared] emission coming off it,” Wright said.

Investigations of these and other potential technosignatures have begun to proliferate, prompting some NASA astrophysicists to conduct a survey of such efforts – and to identify the technologies the investigators might require.

Nick Siegler, chief technologist for the Exoplanet Exploration Program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, and his team have so far catalogued more than 40 technosignature investigations by scientists in related fields.

The investigations run from the familiar to the exotic. That includes well-known searches for radio signals as well as novel approaches: looking for strange gamma-ray emissions that might indicate highly advanced propulsion systems, or light signatures of large, obviously artificial structures passing in front of – “transiting” – their stars.

“Imagine that some ETs, for not a huge price, built a massive triangle,” Siegler said. “Those don’t naturally appear in the cosmos. The light curve [measurements of the star’s brightness over time] of a massive, transiting triangle doesn’t look like a disk.”

He sees the renewed focus on technosignatures as a natural outgrowth of NASA’s broader search for life beyond Earth. And he says technosignatures, defined as evidence of advanced life, are a subset of biosignatures – evidence of all biological life, including microorganisms.

“NASA is fully committed to the search for life being one of its key science goals,” Siegler said. “Technosignatures will be part of the continuum of evidence of life we will search for on exoplanets.”

Tarter was, in fact, the project scientist for NASA’s former SETI Microwave Observing Project and High Resolution Microwave Survey from 1989 to 1993. But NASA’s recent, more visible involvement in technosignature searches began with a workshop in Houston in 2018. The organizer, exoplanet researcher Dawn Gelino, says both the number and membership of technosignature working groups have grown since then. And several agency research programs have begun to allow technosignature proposals.

Gelino is deputy director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, and also a co-lead for NASA’s Nexus for Exoplanetary System Science (NExSS) research coordination network. She says NExSS’ technosignatures working group is planning a webinar on the topic in summer 2023. NExSS also supported the NASA-sponsored “Technoclimes” online workshop in 2020 to develop a research agenda for non-radio technosignatures.

More workshops by privately funded groups also are being added to the mix.

“We have to show everyone that technosignatures is a real field of study – quantitative, hard science – and needs funding in order to be able to grow and be part of the whole exoplanet ecosystem,” Gelino said.

One way to grow technosignature studies, Tarter, Siegler and other scientists say, is to “piggyback” on studies of exoplanets and other cosmic phenomena. If a space telescope is already looking at a star for other reasons, the same data can be examined for signs of technosignatures. That would help contain costs while widening the aperture in the search for signs of technological civilizations.

And seeking technosignatures in data beyond radio – chemistry, for example, or patterns in absorption and emission of energy – also could broaden the scientific basis of technosignature investigations.

“It’s a really exciting time to be in the search,” said Wright, the Penn State researcher. “I think we have a real shot if something’s out there.”

Search for Life

This article is one in a series about how NASA is searching for life in the cosmos.

Beginnings: Life on Our World and Others

Life on Other Planets: What is Life and What Does It Need?

The Hunt for Life on Mars – and Elsewhere in the Solar System

'Life' in the Lab

Finding Life Beyond Earth: What Comes Next?

Related Terms

• Terrestrial Exoplanets
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Moderna and OpenAI partner to accelerate the development of life-saving treatments.

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Moderna partners with OpenAI to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise to thousands of employees across the company. Now every function is empowered with AI, creating novel use cases and GPTs that accelerate and expand the impact of every team.

Moderna has been at the intersection of science, technology, and health for more than 10 years. Moderna’s mission is to deliver the greatest possible impact to people through mRNA medicines—with the COVID-19 vaccine being their most well-known breakthrough. 

The company has partnered with OpenAI since early 2023. Now, ChatGPT Enterprise is evolving how Moderna operates across each function.

Moderna is using its platform for developing mRNA medicines to bring up to 15 new products to market in the next 5 years—from a vaccine against RSV to individualized cancer treatments. In order to achieve its ambitions, Moderna has adopted a people-centric, technology-forward approach, constantly testing new technology and innovation that can increase human capacity and clinical performance.

We believe very profoundly at Moderna that ChatGPT and what OpenAI is doing is going to change the world. We’re looking at every business process—from legal, to research, to manufacturing, to commercial—and thinking about how to redesign them with AI.

Moderna brings AI to everyone

Moderna adopted generative AI the same way Moderna adopts other technology: with the mindset of using the power of digital to maximize its positive impact on patients. To allow AI to flourish, they knew they needed to start with the user and invest in laying a strong foundation for change.

Moderna’s objective was to achieve 100% adoption and proficiency of generative AI by all its people with access to digital solutions in six months. “We believe in collective intelligence when it comes to paradigm changes,” said Miller, “it’s everyone together, everyone with a voice and nobody left behind.” For this, Moderna assigned a team of dedicated experts to drive a bespoke transformation program. Their approach combined individual, collective and structural change management initiatives.   

Individual change management initiatives included in-depth research and listening programs, as well as trainings hosted in person, online and with dedicated AI learning companions. “Using AI to teach AI was key to our success”, Miller points out. Collective change management initiatives included an AI prompt contest to identify the top 100 AI power users who were then structured as a cohort of internal Generative AI Champions. Moderna’s culture of learning led to local office hours in every business line and geography, and scaled through an internal forum on AI, which now has 2,000 active weekly participants. Lastly, structural change management initiatives included engaging Moderna’s CEO and executive committee members to foster AI culture through leadership meetings and town halls as well as incentive programs and sponsored events with internal and external experts.  

 This work led to an early win with the launch of an internal AI chatbot tool, mChat, at the beginning of 2023. Built on OpenAI’s API, mChat was a success, adopted by more than 80% of employees across the company, building a solid foundation for the adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise.  

90% of companies want to do GenAI, but only 10% of them are successful, and the reason they fail is because they haven’t built the mechanisms of actually transforming the workforce to adopt new technology and new capabilities.

Building momentum with ChatGPT Enterprise

With the launch of ChatGPT Enterprise, Moderna had a decision to make: continue developing mChat as an all-purpose AI tool, or give employees access to ChatGPT Enterprise?

“As a science-based company, we research everything,” said Brice Challamel, Head of AI Products and Platforms at Moderna. Challamel’s team did extensive user testing comparing mChat, Copilot, and ChatGPT Enterprise. “We found out that the net promoter score of ChatGPT Enterprise was through the roof. This was by far the company-favorite solution, and the one we decided to double down on,” Challamel said.  

Once employees had a way to create their own GPTs easily, the only limit was their imaginations. “We were never here to fill a bucket, but to light a fire,” Challamel said. “We saw the fire spread, with hundreds of use cases creating positive value across teams. We knew we were on to something revolutionary for the company.”

The company’s results are beyond expectations. Within two months of the ChatGPT Enterprise adoption: 

• Moderna had 750 GPTs across the company
• 40% of weekly active users created GPTs 
• Each user has 120 ChatGPT Enterprise conversations per week on average

Augmenting clinical trial development with GPTs

One of the many solutions Moderna has built and is continuing to develop and validate with ChatGPT Enterprise is a GPT pilot called Dose ID. Dose ID has the potential to review and analyze clinical data and is able to integrate and visualize large datasets. Dose ID is intended for use as a data-analysis assistant to the clinical study team, helping to augment the team’s clinical judgment and decision-making.

 “Dose ID has provided supportive rationale for why we have picked a specific dose over other doses. It has allowed us to create customized data visualizations and it has also helped the study team members converse with the GPT to further analyze the data from multiple different angles,” said Meklit Workneh, Director of Clinical Development at Moderna. 

Dose ID uses ChatGPT Enterprise’s advanced data analysis feature to automate the analysis and verify the optimal vaccine dose selected by the clinical study team, by applying standard dose selection criteria and principles. Dose ID provides a rationale, references its sources, and generates informative charts illustrating the key findings. This allows for a detailed review, led by humans and with AI input, prioritizing safety and optimizing the vaccine profile prior to further development in late-stage clinical trials. 

“The Dose ID GPT has the potential to boost the amount of work we’re able to do as a team. We can comprehensively evaluate these extremely large amounts of data, and do it in a very efficient, safe, and accurate way, while helping to ensure security and privacy,” added Workneh.

Improving compliance and telling the company’s story

Moderna’s legal team boasts 100% adoption of ChatGPT Enterprise. “It lets us focus our time and attention on those matters that are truly driving an impact for patients,” said Shannon Klinger, Moderna’s Chief Legal Officer. 

Now, with the Contract Companion GPT, any function can get a clear, readable summary of a contract. The Policy Bot GPT helps employees get quick answers about internal policies without needing to search through hundreds of documents. 

Moderna’s corporate brand team has also found many ways to take advantage of ChatGPT Enterprise. They have a GPT that helps prepare slides for quarterly earnings calls, and another GPT that helps convert biotech terminology into approachable language for investor communications. 

“Sometimes we’re so in our own world, and AI helps the brand think beyond that,” explained Kate Cronin, Chief Brand Officer of Moderna. “What would my mother want to know about Moderna, versus a regulator, versus a doctor? How do we tell our story in an effective way across different audiences? That’s where I think there’s a huge opportunity.”

A team of a few thousand can perform like a team of 100,000

With an ambitious plan to launch multiple products in the next few years, Moderna sees AI as a key component to their success—and their ability to stay lean as a business while setting new benchmarks in innovation. 

“If we had to do it the old biopharmaceutical ways, we might need a hundred thousand people today,” said Bancel. “We really believe we can maximize our impact on patients with a few thousand people, using technology and AI to scale the company.” 

Moderna has been well positioned to leverage generative AI having spent the last decade building a robust tech stack and data platform. The company fosters a culture of learning and curiosity, attracting employees that excel in adopting new technologies and building AI-first solutions.

By making business processes at Moderna more efficient and accurate, the use of AI ultimately translates to better outcomes for patients. “I’m really thankful for the entire OpenAI team, and the time and engagement they have with our team, so that together we can save more lives,” Bancel said. 

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Home > Student Work > Undergraduate Research > Research Symposium > 2024 > Presentations > 23

Oral Presentations

Transit Vanity Projects in Los Angeles

Presenter Information

Luca Johnson , Oberlin College

PANEL: A Sociological Look into Communities through Trans Experiences, Transit, and Attitudes Towards Marriage CELA Moffett

Document Type

Presentation

4-26-2024 10:00 AM

4-26-2024 11:00 AM

Focusing on Los Angeles, this paper introduces the idea of “transit vanity projects” as a new way of understanding the relationship between space and social (in)justice. It proposes five qualities that define a transit vanity project: they are primarily focused on their stylistic quality; they are functionally unnecessary; they are isolated and disconnected from other transit; they serve a small, bounded population; they reflect and reproduce a selective understanding of the past or future. The paper contrasts the case studies of The Getty Tram, The Grove Trolley, and the Angel’s Flight Funicular with the embodied realities of using public transit in LA. It is based upon 3 weeks spent in Los Angeles relying only on public transit, a total of 75 hours on the bus and train. The resulting ethnographic observations provided me a first-hand understanding of how the public transportation services upon which poor and working-class Angelenos depend differ from transit vanity projects. The paper's analysis draws upon work done in the field spatial justice studies, and specifically upon Edward Soja’s 2010 book Seeking Spatial Justice. Spatial justice, in this context, refers to the principle that everyone has a right to safe and reliable transportation. The paper analyzes transit projects on a continuum from brutal or realistic necessity to vanity transit, and explains how these opposing approaches towards transit development should be recognized in future transit planning in order to create more equitable public transit.

Public transit, Spatial justice, Urban sociology

Recommended Citation

Johnson, Luca, "Transit Vanity Projects in Los Angeles" (2024). Research Symposium . 23. https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/researchsymp/2024/presentations/23

The Jerome Davis Award

Project Mentor(s)

Alicia Smith-Tran, Sociology Joshua Davidson, Statistics and Data Science Greggor Mattson, Sociology

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