At only 33 years of age, Neri Oxman’s list of accomplishments and accolades that is exhaustive. The graduate student in the School of Architecture was most recently commissioned for an exhibit, Neri Oxman: At the frontier of ecological design, currently on display at the Museum of Science here in Boston, that highlights the unique biological influence in her design. She has been variously described as an architect, engineer, biologist, and computer scientist for her work that melds these myriad disciplines. She is intelligent and thoughtful, gracious and warm, and highly photogenic as a quick google image search of her name will prove.

Although an architecture student, Oxman’s work is a thing of art.  Taking inspiration from the natural world, she transforms nature, using computer algorithms, into impossibly complex, organic, three dimensional forms.  Her models are based on the fine structure of butterfly wings, bones, cells, informed perhaps by her earlier pursuits in the field of medicine.

For example, Raycounting, featured at last year’s Design and the Elastic Mind Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, resembles a cartilaginous carapace, a landscape of light and shadow created by a double curvature of its walls forming thick and thin areas of varying opacity.  It is one of Oxman’s pieces from the exhibit that are now a part of MoMA’s permanent collection.

This month, 40 years after “the eagle” landed successfully on the moon, MIT as an institution and it’s alumni as heroes, are once again nourishing our history. Thus, this issue of The Graduate wants to commemorate the work of an incredible group of people during a historic moment.

It is well known that generating positive changes in the world and achieving dreams fueled by passion, commitment, teamwork, and organized efforts are parts of MIT’s DNA. The University’s relationship with space missions isn’t something new either. As official data from it’s website states:

“ More than one-third of the nation's space flights have included MIT-educated astronauts, who have logged a total of more than 15,000 hours in space. NASA has chosen more MIT graduates to become astronauts than graduates of any other private educational institution. Only the US Air Force Academy, the US Naval Academy and the US Naval Postgraduate School have had more graduates selected for the astronaut program. Four of the 12 astronauts who walked on the moon during the Apollo program were MIT alumni. They logged a total of 51 hours exploring the lunar surface from 1969-72”.

But MIT’s impact on the world’s space-flights and particularly on the Apollo 11 mission was even deeper. “Landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth” was one of those few events in history that made all the countries be united as one, that made every frontier vanish, that combined different languages into a unique message of hope that flooded everyone’s hearts, and that made the whole world look up at a same objective at the same time. July 20, 1969 was when it happened, and MIT was a major player in that historic crusade.