Cynthia RockwellFrances Padilla ’81 was appointed president of the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, a nonprofit that has lobbied for universal health care in the state. Padilla, who joined the foundation in 2004 and served as executive vice president, succeeds Juan A. Figueroa, the founding president, who will step down in September. Under her leadership, the foundation has employed an activist philanthropy approach to build a movement for universal health care by funding results-oriented outreach, education and mobilization. She has also directed the foundation’s research and policy initiatives, which culminated in the development of Connecticut’s historic SustiNet health care reform…
David LowJay Geller ’75 is the author of The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (Fordham University Press). Geller considers how modernizing German-speaking cultures, undergoing their own processes of identification, responded to the narcissistic threat posed by the continued persistence of Judentum (Judaism, Jewry, Jewishness) by representing “the Jew”’s body—or rather parts of that body and the techniques performed upon them. Such fetish-producing practices reveal the question of German-identified modernity to be inseparable from the Jewish Question. Jewish-identified individuals, immersed in the phantasmagoria of such figurations—in the gutter and garret salon, medical treatise and dirty joke,…
Lauren RubensteinSteven Stemler, assistant professor of psychology, is the co-author of a new book, The School Mission Statement: Values, Goals & Identities in American Education," published by Eye on Education in March. Co-authored with Damian J. Bebell of Boston College, the book contains an extensive review of mission statements from a diverse range of schools, including public schools, charter schools, magnet schools, vocational schools, parochial schools and Native American schools. Stemler and Bebell developed a coding rubric to classify the mission statements according to eleven broad themes (eg. Foster cognitive development; foster social development; foster emotional development; integrate into global community).…
Olivia DrakeDana Royer and Ellen Thomas are among the 21 authors of a review paper, "The Geological Record of Ocean Acidification," published in Science, March 2012: Vol. 335, no. 6072, pages 1058-1063. In the paper, the authors review events exhibiting evidence for elevated atmospheric CO2, global warming, and ocean acidification over the past 300 million years of Earth’s history, some with contemporaneous extinction or evolutionary turnover among marine calcifiers. Ocean acidification may have severe consequences for marine ecosystems; however, assessing its future impact is difficult because laboratory experiments and field observations are limited by their reduced ecologic complexity and sample period, respectively. Royer is…
Magda Teter, the Jeremy Zwelling Professor of Jewish Studies, published an article, “Sacrilege and the Sacred and Profane Spaces: Jews and Christians in Early Modern Poland," which was published in Brotherhood and Boundaries: Fraternià e barriere by Edizioni della Normale, pages 215-224 in 2011. Teter also is chair and professor of medieval studies, professor of history, and professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies. This book offers a comparative study of secular and religious brotherhoods and networks of social relationships, analyzing role in the various forms of religious communities, national, cultural and social from the 14th to the 18th century. More information on…
Lisa Dierker, chair and professor of psychology, and Ruth Striegel, the Walter A. Crowell University Professor of the Social Sciences, professor of psychology, are co-authors of a paper titled, "Behavioral Symptoms of Eating Disorders in Native Americans: Results from the Add Health Survey Wave III," published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, 2011. In addition, Dierker is the author of "Alcohol Use as a Signal for Sensitivity to Nicotine Dependence: Cross-sectional findings from a Nationally Representative Sample of Recent Onset Smokers," published in Addictive Behaviors, Issue 36(4), pages 421-426, 2011. And "How Spacing of Data Collection May Impact Estimates of Substance Use…
A research group led by Manju Hingorani, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry, has published eight papers in 2011-2012 on the mechanisms of DNA replication and repair proteins, independently and in collaboration with research groups at Wesleyan and other national and international universities. The papers are: "Large conformational changes in MutS during DNA scanning, mismatch recognition and repair signaling," published in The EMBO Journal, 2012 (in press). "The Variable Sub-domain of Escherichia coli SecA functions to regulate in the SecA ATPase Activity and ADP release," published in the Journal of Bacteriology, 2012 (March 2 Epub). Don Oliver, the Daniel Ayres Professor of…
Philip Bolton, professor of chemistry; Dobroslawa Bialonska, postdoctoral fellow in in chemistry; and chemistry graduate student Kenneth Song are the co-authors of "Complexes of mismatched and complementary DNA with minor groove binders. Structures at nucleotide resolution via an improved hydroxyl radical cleavage methodology," published in Mutation Research, 726(1): pages 47-53, 2011. In this paper, the authors explain how they've developed a protocol to investigate the structures of the complexes of damaged DNA with drug like molecules. Tumor cell lines can replicate faster than normal cells and many also have defective DNA repair pathways. This has lead to the investigation of the inhibition of…
Lisa Dierker, chair and professor of psychology, Jennifer Rose, research associate professor of psychology and two postdoctoral fellows, together with researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, are the co-authors of two new papers examining nicotine dependence in teen smokers. “The Natural Course of Nicotine Dependence Symptoms Among Adolescent Smokers,” was published March 15 in the peer-reviewed journal, Nicotine & Tobacco Research. Wesleyan Postdoctoral Fellows Weihai Zhan and Arielle Selya contributed to the paper. The researchers followed novice adolescent smokers, as well as those who had never smoked before, for four years. They found that, before smoking 100 cigarettes, 20 percent reported…
Bill Herbst, the John Monroe Van Vleck Professor of Astronomy, chair of the Astronomy Department, is the author of "Infrared Variability of Evolved Protoplanetary Disks: Evidence for Scale Height Variations in the Inner Disk," published in The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 748, Issue 1, article id. 71, 2012. Roy Kilgard, research assistant professor of astronomy, is the author of "Chandra Observations of the Collisional Ring Galaxy NGC 922," published in The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 747, Issue 2, article id. 150, 2012.
Phil Resor, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, received a $246,728 grant from the National Science Foundation for his study on "Three Dimensional Characterization of a Pseudotachylyte-bearing Fault." The grant was awarded on March 15 and expires on June 30, 2014. In this study, Resor and Wesleyan students will use high-resolution x-ray computed tomography imagery of natural and experimental fault surfaces to quantify surface roughness, frictional contact area, and Pseudotachylyte fault rock thickness. "Pseudotachylytes are generally considered the only unequivocal evidence of earthquake slip velocities that is preserved in fault zones," Resor explains. The proposed project will improve the…
Two undergraduates each received a $5,000 grant from the NASA Connecticut Space Grant Consortium on Jan. 1. Lavontria Aaron '14 to will study minerals on Mars with Martha Gilmore, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences; and Craig Malamut '12 will research local interstellar mediums with Seth Redfield, assistant professor of astronomy.