Cara Anne Nickolaus, a third-year economics graduate student, “died suddenly” Sunday morning, President L. Rafael Reif wrote in an email to campus on Monday.

There is no such thing as bad science — or at least that’s the general theme of the Ig Nobels. Every year, Nobel laureates convene at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre to award ten lucky groups Ig Nobel awards, consisting of “ten trillion Zimbabwean dollars” and a potted plant. And all they had to do was come up with some of the strangest scientific results.

MIT Faculty Talks, a series of chats intended to build a closer relationship between students and faculty, launched last Wednesday, Sept. 16. The joint effort between the chancellor’s office and Lorna Gibson, a professor of materials science and engineering, opened with a presentation on “teaching, scholarship, and the imposter syndrome” by Arthur Bahr, a medieval literature professor.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker toured MIT’s campus and delivered a speech on Sept. 18 at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Her address was followed by a Q&A session with President L. Rafael Reif, in which they discussed the challenges in academic research when long-term projects are only backed by short-term investments.