Olivia DrakeAugust 3, 20101min
Adam Jensen, research associate for the Astronomy Department, received a $68,012 grant from the Space Telescope Institute, AURA, for his research on “Definitive ISM Abundances through Low-mass X-ray Binaries as Lighthouses.” This research program will use 13 orbits of Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observing time along with archival data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory to better understand the composition of the interstellar dust in our galaxy.  One HST observation was executed in June, with additional observations to follow this fall.  The project is funded through May 31, 2012.

Olivia DrakeAugust 3, 20101min
Laura Grabel, the Lauren B. Dachs Professor of Science and Society, professor of biology, received a $28,750 grant from the Connecticut Stem Cell Initiative for a “Human Embryonic Stem Cell Core” outreach component. The grant is subcontracted with the University of Connecticut Health Center. Outreach activities include running a seminar program for Connecticut colleges and universities, and holding a workshop every summer at the UConn Health Center.

Olivia DrakeAugust 3, 20101min
Ann Burke, professor of biology, received a $5,700 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, to support a symposium on “Evolution and Development in the Lateral Plate Mesoderm.” This symposium was part of the program of the Ninth International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology held July 26-31 in Punta del Esta, Uruguay. The funds supported the housing and registration costs for six invited speakers. The symposium brought together paleontologists, developmental and evolutionary biologists to discuss major morphological innovations occurring in the lateral plate mesoderm.

Olivia DrakeAugust 3, 20101min
Carl West ’11, Tsampikos Kottos, assistant professor of physics, and Tomas Prosen of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, are the co-authors of an article titled “PT-Symmetric Wave Chaos,” published in Physical Review Letters 104 in 2010. "This work studied the universal properties of this crossover and demonstrated that a simple scaling function could embody the effects of such dramatically different changes as increasing the system size, varying the initial energy, or having varying degrees of imperfections / disorder in the system," West explains. "While these results were obtained from a toy model, they carry direct applications to optics where…

Olivia DrakeAugust 3, 20101min
Richard Grossman, professor of economics, is the author of the book, Unsettled Account: The Evolution of Banking in the Industrialized World since 1800, published by Princeton University Press in June 2010. The 400-page book provides a comparative history of banking focusing on four types of events that have been central to the lifecycle of banking systems: crises, bailouts, mergers and regulatory reform.