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March 17, 2010

March 2010 People Notes

Jean Ayers, the new director of Web Communications in University Relations, started on March 1. She comes to Tufts with more than 20 years of experience in marketing and communications. For 12 years, she worked at Harvard Business School Publishing, where she rose to be the director of web marketing, setting the strategic direction for the web marketing group. She has also held management-level marketing positions with Sonicbids, the American Marketing Association and McPherson, Schultz & Williams.

Alana Bednarz, D12, was selected to compete in the 2010 American Association for Dental Research (AADR) Student Research Group DENTSPLY/Caulk competition, which will take place on March 4 during the AADR annual meeting and exhibition in Washington, D.C.

Patty Bode, a lecturer in education in the School of Arts and Sciences and director of art education for the joint Tufts/School of the Museum of Fine Arts Art Education Program, was named National Art Education Association (NAEA) Eastern Region Higher Education Art Educator for 2010. The awards presentations will take place at the NAEA Convention in Baltimore on April 15.

Charlene Desir, A95, received an Africana Center Leadership Award at the Africana Center’s 40th Anniversary Gala held on Feb. 20 at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. Desir is a doctoral enrollment counselor/program professor at Nova Southeastern University. She is also a co-founder of T.E.N. (The Empowerment Network) Global, an enrichment program that supports the academic, social, emotional and financial development of disenfranchised young women and children in the Americas and in the Caribbean basin.

Joanne Falzone, D80, has been promoted to clinical professor of prosthodontics and operative dentistry at the School of Dental Medicine.

Hanping Feng, a research associate professor at the Cummings School, presented a talk on “Antibody-mediated Enhanced Cytotoxicity of Clostridium difficile Toxin: Application in Diagnosis” at the sixth International Conference for Clostridia in October in Rome, Italy.

Melissa Friedman, associate director of admissions at the School of Dental Medicine, attended a December meeting of the American Dental Education Association (ADEA) in Washington, D.C., as a member of a task force reviewing ADEA’s policy on misconduct and irregularities in the admissions process for D.M.D., postgraduate and international students. The task force is revising the ADEA “Applicant Code of Conduct.”

Kevin P. Gallagher, a senior researcher at the Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE), traveled to New Orleans in February to give two presentations at the International Studies Association. He discussed how GDAE’s Globalization Program has worked with advocates on issues related to the financial crisis and presented a paper on the European Union’s lessons for North American economic integration. He and fellow GDAE researcher Timothy Wise are contributors to the TripleCrisisBlog, with an initial roster of economic analysts from nine countries. It was launched by GDAE, India’s Economic Research Foundation and the Heinrich Böll Foundation-U.S.

Andrew Hoffman, professor of large animal medicine at the Cummings School, gave four lectures at the North American Veterinary Conference in January in Orlando, Fla.: “Inflammatory Airway Disease (IAD) Etiologies,” “Bronchoalveolar Lavage Technique and Cytology Interpretation,” “Pulmonary Function Testing for IAD” and “Clinical Brief on Aerosol Therapies for IAD.”

Richard M. Lerner, the Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development, is the recipient of the 2010 John P. Hill Memorial Award, given by the Society for Research on Adolescence in recognition of his work to advance our understanding of the development and behavior of teens. He will receive the award on March 12, during the organization’s meeting in Philadelphia.

Rebekah Lucier, D11, and William Stuart McKenzie, D10, represented Tufts at the 2009 Table Demonstration Competition at the Greater New York Dental Meeting in November. Lucier was awarded first place in the dental student research competition. Both Lucier and McKenzie gave presentations at the meeting as part of their second- and third-place awards, respectively, at the dental school’s 2009 Bates-Andrews Research Day. Lucier’s project was on “Alterations of Three-dimensional Human Tissue Equivalents by Tooth-whitening Agents,” and McKenzie’s was on “Anatomical Changes Following SARPE Procedure.”

Dan Maxwell, a research director at the Feinstein International Center and associate professor at the Friedman School, was asked by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization to serve as external editor of its flagship report, “The State of Food Insecurity,” for 2010. The theme of the report will be food insecurity in protracted crises.

Simin Nikbin Meydani, director of the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, presented the first in a series of online seminars by Tufts faculty for the university’s leadership donors. Titled “No One Is Immune from Nutrition: How Diet Relates to Health,” the seminar is an exploration of the relationship among nutrition, immunity and infection. You can view the recording online at http://www.learningtimes.net/tufts/nutrition-recording.

Timothy Nagaoka, G02, a graduate of the MAT program in teaching Japanese as a foreign language, received the 2009 John E. Thayer Award from the Japan Society of Boston. The award is given to those who have made efforts to connect the United States and Japan. Previous recipients include conductor Seiji Ozawa and John Dower, a Pulitzer prize-winning professor of history at MIT. After graduation, Nagaoka taught Japanese at the Bradley Elementary School in East Boston, the Taylor Elementary School in Mattapan and the Timilty Middle School in Roxbury. He now teaches at the McCormack Middle School in Dorchester and the Channing Elementary School in Hyde Park.

Jean Papalia, director of Tufts Career Services, was invited to speak to the International Association of MBA Career Center Directors on “Marketing and Delivering Services to the Millennial Generation.” Papalia co-led the discussion with the director of career services at Brandeis University at the conference, which was held at the Harvard Business School.

Denise Phillips, program coordinator at the Africana Center, received the Africana Center Champion Award for her 18 years of service at the Africana Center’s 40th Anniversary Gala held on Feb. 20 at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge.

Robert Reppucci has been appointed director of facilities for the Medford/Somerville campus, with responsibility for the operation and maintenance of 2.9 million square feet of buildings. Reppucci, who has been at Tufts for 31 years, had been acting director of facilities for the past year.

Mitchell Robinson, A07, received an Africana Center Leadership Award at the Africana Center’s 40th Anniversary Gala held on Feb. 20 at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. He is a legislative assistant to Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), and was the Massachusetts college coordinator for Deval Patrick’s campaign for governor from 2004 to 2006.

Bea Rogers, a professor at the Friedman School, was in India for three weeks in December to initiate work on a multi-year study of food aid exit strategies. The study, funded by USAID through the FANTA2 project, will identify actions and strategies that agencies can use to ensure that the benefits of food assistance programs are sustained once the food assistance is withdrawn. Data will be collected at the time of program exit, and again in two years, to determine what activities and impacts are still in effect. Katie Houk, N11, is also working on the project.

David Rone, A84, received an Africana Center Leadership Award at the Africana Center’s 40th Anniversary Gala held on Feb. 20 at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. Rone is co-head of Creative Artists Agency Sports, and is chairman of the Board of Overseers for the School of Arts and Sciences.

Kate Sadler, a senior researcher at the Feinstein International Center, has received a two-year extension of a grant to continue investigating the health and nutritional status of children in pastoral communities. After meeting with project partners in Ethiopia, she traveled to the Somali region with the Tufts study team to start the process of selecting study communities, defining interventions for the project and piloting and testing nutritional surveillance tools. She also recently returned from a second research project in Bangladesh, where the team has recruited more than 400 children suffering from severe acute malnutrition, all of whom are being treated by community health workers in a trial to test the utility of community-based therapeutic feeding.

Kenneth Shadlen, a research fellow at the Global Development and Environment Institute, has two new publications: Politics of Intellectual Property: Contestation Over the Ownership, Use and Control of Knowledge and Information (Edward Elgar, 2009), edited by Shadlen and Sebastian Haunss, and “Politics of Patents and Drugs in Brazil and Mexico: The Industrial Bases of Health Policies” in the October issue of the journal Comparative Politics. The work is part of his ongoing research program on intellectual property and late development, examining the different ways that developing countries introduced new intellectual property (IP) systems in the 1990s in response to new global regulations, and how many countries subsequently modified their new IP systems in the late 1990s and early 2000s to address concerns over the price of patented medicines and also to bolster their national systems of scientific and industrial innovation.

Jacob Silberstein is the new administrator in the Department of Public Health and Community Service at the School of Dental Medicine. He received his bachelor’s degree in communications, with a focus in public relations and a concentration in graphic design, from Roger Williams University in 2007. Previously he was administrative assistant to the dean of the Forsyth Dental Hygiene Program at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science.

Lynn Solomon, associate professor of oral and maxillofacial pathology, was named one of “Top 5 People to Watch” in the December 2009 issue of Dental Products Report. Solomon, whose research focuses on developing a test to find antibodies that can help detect oral cancer and predict a patient’s prognosis, is profiled as an “up and comer” in dentistry. According to one colleague, Solomon “is good in the community and offers her teaching to people of all levels in the dental office. She came out to my office a year ago, and my staff still talks about her methodology.”

Leslie Warner, associate director of Alumni Career Services, co-led a presentation at the District 1 conference of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) held in Boston in January. The topic was “Alumni Career Services on the Road: Lessons Learned from Tufts University and Harvard Business School.”

Andrew Wilder, F89, F96, a research director at the Feinstein International Center and assistant professor at the Friedman School, testified at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs on “U.S. Aid to Pakistan: Planning and Accountability.” The focus of his statement and discussion during the Q&A was on the ineffectiveness of securitized aid in winning hearts and minds. Wilder had his article on “The Politics of Civil Service Reform in Pakistan” published in the Journal of International Affairs.

Timothy A. Wise, director of the Research and Policy Program at the Global Development and Environment Institute (GDAE), spoke at the February board meeting of the National Family Farmers Coalition in Washington, D.C. Wise was interviewed on Jan. 25 by BBC radio for a segment about the relief effort in Haiti and how the aid community can avoid repeating mistakes made in previous disasters, and in previous aid programs in Haiti. He and GDAE’s Kevin Gallagher presented “The Future of NAFTA” at the launch of the Pardee Center Task Force Report for the Future of North American Trade Policy on February 10 at Boston University.

Charles C. Yancey, A70, received an Africana Center Leadership Award at the Africana Center’s 40th Anniversary Gala held on Feb. 20 at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge. Yancey has been a Boston city councilor since 1983, the longest serving elected public official in the history of Boston politics. While an undergraduate, he was a founding member of the Afro-American Society and of the African American Cultural Center at Tufts.

Pamela Yelick, director of the dental school’s Division of Craniofacial and Molecular Genetics and associate professor of oral and maxillofacial pathology, has been elected to a three-year term on the North American Council of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS), which promotes education and research in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.