Olivia DrakeRex Pratt, the Beach Professor of Chemistry, is the co-author of “Substituted aryl malonamates as new serine b-lactamase substrates: Structure-activity studies,” published in Bioorganic & Mecicinal Chemistry,18, 282 in 2010; “Approaches to the simultaneous inactivation of metallo- and serine- b-lactamases,” published in Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Letters,19, 1618; 2009; “Inhibition of class A and C b-lactamases by diaroyl phosphates,” published in Biochemistry, 48, 8285, 2009; “Intramolecular cooperativity in the reaction of diacyl phosphates with serine b-lactamases,” published in Biochemistry, 48, 8293, 2009; “Structural basis of the inhibition of class A b-lactamases and penicillin-binding proteins by 6-b-iodopenicillanate,” published in the Journal of the…
Q: Joseph, you are a Ph.D candidate in ethnomusicology. How many years have you been at Wesleyan and when will you finish your Ph.D? A: I began my graduate studies in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan in the M.A. program in 1995, and don't you know you're not supposed to ask when the dissertation will be done? I'm anticipating finishing this summer. Q: What are you studying, specifically? A: I have done fieldwork in Chennai, India, on the film music industry there. It's a huge musical, social, and economic phenomenon that is under-studied in academia. I hope that my dissertation will be…
Cynthia RockwellMusicianCorps, the brainchild of CEO and founder Chris “Kiff” Gallagher ’91, was the subject of a March 8 segment on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. National correspondent John Yang ’81 reported, interviewing Gallagher and a number of the MusicianCorps Fellows and students and showing footage of their music classes. Modeled after such programs as Americorps and City Year, Gallagher’s nonprofit Music National Service launched MusicianCorps to offer a job and paycheck to musicians eager to make a difference in a community by sharing their passion for music in an under-resourced teaching environment. The students benefitting from MusicianCorps — dubbed…
Mollie Lane, custodian in Physical Plant – Facilities, is the recipient of the 2010 Morgenstern-Clarren Social Justice Employee Prize. She received a $1,500 award. The award was announced April 1 by awards coordinator Marina Melendez, dean for the Class of 2010. Eligible employees included custodians, dining staff, grounds crew, and building maintenance staff. Barbara Schukoske, administrative assistant in Graduate Student Services, nominated Lane for the award. She cited Lane for going beyond her usual duties to ensure that students and staff alike have a clean, safe environment in which to work. “Ms. Lane’s work in keeping the Science Library clean in the past has…
David LowMissed Connections, a short documentary directed and produced by Mary Robertson ’01, will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan in April. Once found on the back pages of local papers, Missed Connections is a forum on Craigslist where those who regret their timidity make appeals to the "Ones Who Got Away." Robertson’s documentary peers inside these popular online messages-in-a-bottle asking whether love lost can be found again. Robertson is a producer and director of nonfiction media. For television she has produced and directed long- and short-form documentary programs for major broadcasters. She recently completed work…
The sophomore effort Congratulations was released by electro-pop duo MGMT (a.k.a. Ben Goldwasser ’05 and Andrew VanWyngarden ’05) this month and covered by media across the United States and abroad. Goldwasser and VanWyngarden first wrote and played their music as students at Wesleyan and found success after graduation that many musicians would die for. They were signed to the major label Columbia, and their full-length debut album, Oracular Spectacular, went gold on the Billboard charts with more than three million songs downloads globally. They had a hit single, “Time to Pretend” that won adoring fans who started to dress like…
National Geographic Entertainment has picked up the rights to Restrepo, the documentary by journalists Sebastian Junger ’84 and Tim Hetherington that follows a platoon of American soldiers in Afghanistan. The film won the Sundance Film Festival grand jury documentary prize and is set for release on June 2. The National Geographic channel, which has worldwide TV rights, will broadcast the film next fall. The film was named after a 15-man outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, considered one of the most dangerous postings in the U.S military. “From May 2007 to July 2008, Hetherington and Junger dug in with a platoon of…
Ellen J. Zucker ’83, a partner at the Boston-based firm of Burns & Levinson LLP, was honored as one of the 10 "Top Lawyers of the Year" by Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, the statewide lawyers' newspaper. David Yas, publisher and editor-in-chief of the publication, pronounced Zucker a “fabulous litigator,” noting in particular two of her recent successes at the trial court and appellate levels. He touted Zucker’s representation of Malvina Monteiro, a former employee of the City of Cambridge, who claimed that she had faced retaliation after filing a complaint of race discrimination. The jury agreed and awarded Monteiro more than…
Growing up, Steve Almond ’88 secretly desired to live the life of a rock star but after taking piano lessons he realized he had no musical talent. Though he didn’t become a musician, he became the next best thing: an obsessive music fan, particularly of rock and roll—or what he calls “a drooling fanatic.” Almond’s new book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (Random House), recounts his love for music from his earliest rock criticism to his devotion to obscure bands to his meeting with Erin, a former heavy-metal “chick” who became his wife. As he has shown in…
Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (University of Chicago Press) by Seth Lerer ’76 has been honored with the 2010 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. The $30,000 award, the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism, is administered for the Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Lerer, dean of arts and humanities at the University of California San Diego, where he is distinguished professor in the Department of Literature, will receive the award in a free, public event at 4 p.m. Thursday, May 6, in the Senate Chamber…
Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, received a five-year Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled "Magnitude Biases in Mathematical Cognition, Learning, and Development." The grant supports research on the development of children's mathematical understanding. The grant is worth $761,005. More about her grant and studies can be found here. Read more here.
Wesleyan's Center for the Arts received a grant for $10,000 from the New England Foundation for the Arts for the "Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance -Summer 2010-Pilot Program."