I've had a busy month and a half of work in Massachusetts and Rhode Island for the Chronicle of Higher Education, one of my favorite publications to work for. The subjects have been all over the place, from a jars of fecal transplant material with Open Biome at MIT to the Kennedy Library for a portrait of Harvard professor Elaine Scarry on her book about how nuclear capability is fundamentally at odds with democracy to the University of Massachusetts - Amherst's plans to reduce the size of its campus to an interdisciplinary graduate program at Brown University (where I photographed grad student Arielle Schilit Nitenson, who's researching how smell operates in mice).

If you're a subscriber, you can read the articles at these links: Less is More: Campus Officials Trim Square Feet to Cut Costs, Student-Led Project Banks on Promise of Fecal Transplants, A Literary Scholar's Voice in the Wilderness: Elaine Scarry fights American complacency about nuclear arms, and Brown U. Tests Approach to Interdisciplinary Graduate Work.

A few weeks back, I had a great assignment from MSNBC to cover the US Senate campaign of Shenna Bellows as she traveled to town Democratic caucuses around the state. Bellows is trying to unseat incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins, whom I met while photographing behind the scenes of Scott Brown's re-election campaign. As with any campaign, following Bellows presented a lot of difficulty. She would show up at a caucus immediately before giving a 5-minute speech, and then quickly she'd quickly leave to go to the next location.

You can see more images on my archive: Shenna Bellows Senate Campaign in Maine - Town Caucuses

You can read Meredith Clark's story on MSNBC.com, which includes a few of my pictures from the day: A Democratic Senate candidate makes waves in Maine.

I spent a couple of very cold days at Boston College right before and after the new year working on a project detailing the college's involvement in the Belfast Project, a secret oral history of Northern Ireland's Troubles. The Belfast Project collected interviews with people directly involved in bombings and other violence in the decades-long struggle in Northern Ireland with the promise to participants that even the existence of these interviews would not be made known until after they died. About 10 years ago, authorities learned of the project and it became a focal point of diplomatic negotiations between the US and the UK, leading ultimately to legal requests for Boston College to divulge the contents of these interviews for a 40-year-old murder investigation. Boston College eventually gave some of the tapes to authorities, though not all have been happy with the college's actions. The case has interesting implications for academic and journalistic privelege.

You can read the fascinating article (and see a few more of my pictures) at the Chronicle of Higher Education website: Secrets from Belfast.

More images from Boston College are available at my archive: Boston College - Belfast Project - the Troubles - Northern Ireland conflict

The Cranberry Harvest Celebration at the farms of AD Makepeace has been going for 10 years. People gather to watch workers harvest cranberries from flooded bogs. Speaking with the workers, I learned a couple interesting facts: the cranberry plants in bogs have very high yield, but their product goes only to processed foods, not the bags of fresh cranberries you see in a grocery store; the plants on a cranberry farm might be as old as 100 years; and cranberries straight from a bog taste pretty good.

For Education Week's ongoing coverage of the Common Core curriculum in American schools, I photographed assistive technology as it's used by students at Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts. The technology, primarily BrailleNote notetakers, was fascinating to see in person; the devices were basically laptops without visual screens, outputting email, websites, and text documents, instead on a quickly-changing line of braille characters along the bottom edge of the machines. Some of the students had a lot of experience using the machines, but others were just learning the ins and outs of file management and gmail navigation, for instance. The article is available online for subscribers.

You can see more images from the shoot at my archive: Assistive Technology at Perkins School for the Blind

I spent a few days with Wall Street Journal reporter Thomas Catan working on a story about prescription drug addiction among US military veterans with PTSD and other injuries. We profiled two marine veterans, one of whom died a few months after we met him, who started using oxycodone as a result of injuries received during military service. Both had since turned to illegal sources for the drugs and, eventually, illegal street drugs such as MDMA and heroin. Their drug use had ravaged their lives, ultimately taking Eric's, and destroyed relationships. But the two saw no alternative due to issues with receiving alternative treatment from the VA. Neither could work due to injuries and criminal charges. It was an incredibly tough story to work on, but the resulting article is well worth a read, I think, and will hopefully do some good for others in these tough situations.