Bill HolderMarch 6, 20122min
The Wesleyan community celebrated the grand opening of 41 Wyllys Avenue during a reception and ribbon-cutting ceremony on Feb. 24. The building is the new home of the College of Letters, Art History Program and the Wesleyan Career Center. This historic building boasts beautiful new spaces enhanced with light, color and technology. The Career Center now possesses state of the art equipment to aid students in their employment pursuits by providing unparalleled face to face access to alumni, parents, and employer partners from around the world. The renovation has provided greatly improved spaces for two distinguished departments, the College of Letters…

Lauren RubensteinMarch 6, 20123min
For the roughly one-third of temporal lobe epilepsy patients for whom drugs are not an option, researchers at Wesleyan are paving the way for alternative therapies using stem cells. Faculty members Janice Naegele, Gloster Aaron and Laura Grabel, together with Xu Maisano, Ph.D. ’11, Elizabeth Litvina, B.A. ’10/M.A. ’11, and Stephanie Tagliatela, the lab manager in the Naegele lab, recently published a landmark study in the Journal of Neuroscience on the use of embryonic stem cells to treat temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). The researchers derived neural “parent cells” in culture from mouse embryonic stem cells, and transplanted them into the…

Cynthia RockwellMarch 6, 20122min
Over winter break, eight volunteers from Wesleyan, including founder Raghu Appasani ’12, traveled to India with the MINDS Foundation to complete the first phase of their three-phase program in India. The organization, founded by Appasani in 2010, is committed to eliminating the stigma of mental illness in developing nations. Through a grassroots approach, they provide educational, financial, medical, and moral support for patients suffering from mental illness in developing countries. Volunteers Shyam Desai '15, Sam Douglas '12 (a psychology major and director of research & development), Emma Kingsberg '12, Rehan Mehta '14, Lauren Seo '14 (president of the Wesleyan chapter…

Olivia DrakeMarch 6, 20124min
Through the American Muslim Civic Leadership Institute, Wesleyan's Muslim Chaplain Marwa Aly is engaging with experts in various fields and is articulately developing a vision and purpose in her work as a chaplain. As one of 22 prominent Muslim Americans who received a 2011-2012 Civic Leadership Fellowship, Aly is connecting to a network of civic leaders across the country and facilitating a forum for constructive intra-Muslim dialogue. She's learning how to identify leadership needs, ways to guide the development of projects, partnerships and resources and gaining practical skills in communication, community mobilization, leadership, advocacy and organizational management. "I am looking…

Lauren RubensteinMarch 6, 20124min
In this issue of  The Wesleyan Connection we ask 5 Questions of Daniel Long, assistant professor of sociology. Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy has made education reform a major priority this year. He has proposed a sweeping package of reforms, including overhauling teacher tenure, increasing Education Cost Sharing grants to struggling districts, funding more preschool slots for low-income children, and requiring districts to contribute additional money for students to attend charter schools. Q: Connecticut suffers from the highest black/white and poor/non-poor achievement gap in the country. What can be done to address this? A: In Connecticut—as well as nationwide—longitudinal studies have shown…

Bill HolderMarch 6, 20122min
Wesleyan’s Board of Trustees voted on Feb. 25 to increase tuition and residential comprehensive fees by 4.5 percent for the 2012-13 academic year. Continuing its commitment to a strong financial aid program, Wesleyan will increase its budget for aid by 11 percent over this year’s expenditures. Through grants and loans, Wesleyan meets the full demonstrated need of all students eligible for financial aid. Tuition will be $45,358 for all students in 2012-2013. For freshman and sophomores, the residential comprehensive fee will be $12,574. For juniors and seniors, the fee will be $14,294. The higher residential comprehensive fee for juniors and seniors reflects…

David PesciMarch 5, 20122min
U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia will be the featured speaker at the annual Hugo L. Black Lecture on Freedom of Expression, which will be held 8 p.m., March 8, in Memorial Chapel. Tickets to the lecture in the chapel were scooped up almost immediately, as were tickets for the simulcast viewing at the Center for Film Studies. The lecture will also be simulcast in CFA Hall, PAC 001 and PAC 002 where tickets are not needed and seats are available. Justice Scalia's speech will be titled “The Originalist Approach to the First Amendment.” In addition to the speech,…

Bill HolderFebruary 20, 20122min
President Michael S. Roth and Professor Kari Weil have made a $100,000 gift to Wesleyan in support of endowment for financial aid. In announcing the gift, Joshua Boger ’73, chair of Wesleyan's board of trustees, said:  “I can’t thank Michael and Kari enough for their generosity. Their gift represents the kind of ‘stretch gift’ that we are frequently soliciting from other alumni and their families, and I hope that all members of the Wesleyan community will follow their lead in making Wesleyan a philanthropic priority. Their support of financial aid underscores Michael's and Kari’s superb leadership and dedication to Wesleyan’s…

Bill HolderFebruary 13, 20123min
The former Squash Courts Building located at 41 Wyllys Ave. on Wesleyan’s historic College Row has opened as the renovated home for Art History, the College of Letters and the Career Center. Notably, several College of Letters and Art History alumni have provided gifts for the project to honor faculty members from their undergraduate days. David Resnick ’81, P’13, joined by his wife Cathy Klema P’13, contributed the lead gift to name the Art History Wing in honor of John Paoletti, the William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of the Humanities and Art History. Resnick, now chairman of global financing advisory…

David PesciFebruary 13, 20122min
  Seth Redfield had to cut short his first Astronomy 224 class of the 2012 spring semester, but he had a good excuse: he was presenting at an international press conference being held by NASA on one of its recent missions. Redfield, an assistant professor of astronomy, was chosen by NASA to be a non-mission expert to help verify results from the space agency’s ongoing IBEX (Interstellar Boundary Explorer) mission, an unmanned probe that analyzes the interstellar boundary that protects much of our solar system, including the Earth, from deadly cosmic rays from interstellar space. One of Redfield’s primary areas…

Olivia DrakeFebruary 13, 20124min
Nearly half of the nation’s students - 44 percent - are students of color, but only one of every six teachers is a teacher of color. To help recruit, support and retain individuals of color as K-12 public school teachers, the Woodrow Wilson-Rockefeller Brothers Fund Fellowships for Aspiring Teachers of Color offers scholarships to to ensure that greater numbers of highly qualified teachers of color enter public school classrooms around the country. This year, the Fund awarded fellowships to two Wesleyan seniors: Randyl Wilkerson '12 and Nastassia Williams '12. Wilkerson, an English major, and Williams, an African American Studies major, were chosen…

Lauren RubensteinFebruary 13, 20123min
Professor of Art Tula Telfair’s latest exhibition, Out of Sight: Imaginary Landscapes, opened at the Forum Gallery in New York, N.Y. on Jan. 5 to a packed crowd. The 15 large panoptic paintings shown in the exhibition, which ran through Feb. 11, depict majestic mountainous landscapes dominated by dramatic skies that reflect a broad range of locations and weather patterns. As with Telfair’s past work, her landscapes are derived from memory and imagination. Telfair, director of Wesleyan’s Arts Studio Program, finds it fascinating when people tell her they can identify a particular location, since none actually exist. “Since I have…