David LowRon Medley ’73 is a featured speaker in the hour-and-a-half commentary on the DVD of How to Survive a Plague, (Sundance Selects), a highly acclaimed documentary directed by David France that was nominated for an Academy Award. (Medley also appears briefly in the movie.) The film tells the story of the brave men and women in two coalitions—ACT UP and TAG (Treatment Action Group)—whose activism and innovation turned AIDS from a death sentence into a manageable condition. Despite having no scientific training, these improbable, self-made activists infiltrated the pharmaceutical industry and helped identify promising new drugs, moving them from experimental…
Cynthia RockwellDr. Jeffrey Burns ’80, chief of critical care at Boston Children’s Hospital and associate professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School, is program director of OPENPediatrics, the newly created and first cloud-based global education technology platform designed to improve the exchange of medical knowledge on critically ill children around the world. OPENPediatrics was created by IBM and Boston Children's Hospital. “Nothing breaks down walls and brings people together like caring for a critically ill child," said Burns in an IBM press release, noting that with the corporation’s “technology and services arsenal” and the hospital’s expertise in pediatric critical care, the…
Natalie Robichaud ’14Karen Ocorr Ph.D. ’83 is sending fruit flies into space to study their heart development and function outside of Earth’s gravity. An assistant research professor in the Development and Aging Program at the Sanford-Burham Medical Research Institute, Ocorr is collaborating with fellow researchers at NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University to study the effects of space travel and microgravity on the heart function of fruit flies. “We believe that our studies with fruit flies can provide us with important information that will impact astronauts’ heart health when they spend extended periods in microgravity including current missions aboard the ISS…
In her academic study Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan), Margaret Koehler ’95 identifies a pervasive cultivation of attention in 18th-century poetry. The book argues that a plea from a 1692 ode by William Congreve—'Let me be all, but my attention, dead'—embodies a wider aspiration in the period’s poetry to explore overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention. It historicizes 18th century accounts of attention and pioneers a link between the period's poetry and recent discussions of attention in cognitive psychology. Koehler’s book contributes to the largely neglected history of a psychological trait that…
Jenifer McKim ’88 joined The New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR) as the assistant managing editor and senior investigative reporter. With close to 25 years of experience as a news journalist, most recently for The Boston Globe, McKim has won many awards for her work, including the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism in 2011 for a story about the domestic sex trafficking of minors and the California AP Investigative Journalism Award in 2008. In 2005, she led a group of reporters to write about the importation of lead-tainted Mexican candles, a project that was nominated as a finalist for…
Not So Fast: Parenting Your Teen Through the Dangers of Driving (Chicago Review Press) by Tim Hollister ’78 is an informative and empowering guide to help parents understand the causes of teen crashes and head them off each time before their teens get behind the wheel. Most of the information available to parents of teen drivers acknowledges that driving is risky, and then advises parents that their obligation is to teach their teens how to operate a vehicle. However, missing from most resources are explanations of why teen driving is so dangerous and specific, proactive steps that parents can take…
David Rabban '71 is the author of Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History (Cambridge University Press), concentrating on the central role of history in late 19th-century American legal thought. In the decades following the Civil War, the founding generation of professional legal scholars in the United States drew from the evolutionary social thought that pervaded Western intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. Their historical analysis of law as an inductive science rejected deductive theories and supported moderate legal reform, conclusions that challenge conventional accounts of legal formalism. The book is unprecedented in its…
Olivia DrakeBy examining highly-detailed satellite images, researchers can spot small channels formed on the sides of craters on Mars. These channels may be evidence of flowing water on Mars. Since scientists don't exactly know what the surface of Mars is composed of, Wesleyan student Peter Martin ’14 created a modeling program that can simulate the kinds of salty water, or brine, solutions that would possibly form on Mars. For his efforts, Martin was awarded the Thomas R. McGetchin Memorial Scholarship Award. The $1,500 prize is given annually by the Universities Space Research Association in honor of the former Lunar and Planetary Institute Director, and…
On Sept. 24, NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day featured a figure that Assistant Professor of Astronomy Seth Redfield generated as part of his research on the interstellar medium, the gas and dust surrounding the Sun and other nearby stars. Each day, NASA features a different image or photograph of the universe, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. The explanation of the figure states: “The stars are not alone. In the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy about 10 percent of visible matter is in the form of gas, called the interstellar medium (ISM). The ISM is not…
Albert J. Fry, the E. B. Nye Professor of Chemistry, is the author of four new papers published in 2013. "Ion pairing and association effects between tetraalkylammonium Ions and nitrobenzene redox species: Ion pairing to neutral substances” and " Ion pairing of tetraalkylammonium ions to nitrosobenzene and benzaldehyde redox species: A general binding motif for the interaction of tetraalkylammonium ions with benzenoid species," were published in the March and August editions, respectively, of the Journal of Organic Chemistry. The third, "The 'steric effect' of tetraalkylammonium ions on electrochemically generated anions is not steric" was published in the August edition of Electrochemistry Communications. These are the 7th, 8th,…
Lauren RubensteinPsyche Loui, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, recently had a paper, "Effects of Voice on Emotional Arousal," published in Frontiers in Psychology. Loui is lead author, and co-wrote the paper with Justin Bachorik, Hui C. Li and Gottfried Schlaug of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/ Harvard Medical School, where Loui worked as an instructor before coming to Wesleyan this year. The study explores the effects of lyrics and the voice on the emotional processing of music and on listeners' preferences. The researchers found robust effects of vocal content on participants' perceived arousal, independent of the familiarity of the…
Bill FisherIn this video, learn about Ellen Paik '16, who comes to Wesleyan from Seoul, South Korea. A member of the varsity crew team and the Wesleyan Student Assembly, Paik said Wesleyan lets her explore the full range of her many passions. Watch this video and many more on the Video @ Wesleyan website. [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://youtu.be/ohcuQtQswqk[/youtube] #THISISWHY