Dr. Edward Hallowell

basically put his research career on hold to figure out what was going on.

And we discovered it was one of many suicides in that department in the previous decade.

And the reason for it was...

the community was horribly disconnected.

It was like a dungeon.

It was just, there was no connection.

Everyone was paranoid.

There were two coping styles, work harder or get drunk.

And most people did both every day.

So you had an entire department with five Nobel Prize winners in it and some thousand brilliant little genius postdocs and graduate students miserable because they were so disconnected.

So we had to figure out a way to connect them.

Now, with that group of people, really smart, often middle European, barely English speaking, very high IQ folks, if you said, let's have a mixer, nobody would show up because it's not in their comfort zone.

And so we had to figure out how do you bait the trap?

How do you bring people out of hiding?

Because they were hiding.

They were paranoid.

Well, you know, one of the universal answers to that question is food.

So we'd reach out to the best restaurants in Cambridge and we'd cater weekly buffets where, you know, there'd be wonderful good food.

There'd be some beer and wine.

And these introverted, shy grad students would come out of hiding for food.