November People Notes

Julian Agyeman, assistant professor of urban and environmental policy and planning, has been appointed to the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation's Stewardship Council, a 13-member citizen advisory group appointed by Gov. Mitt Romney to work with Secretary of Environmental Affairs Ellen Roy Herzfelder, Commissioner of Conservation and Recreation Kathy Abbott and agency staff. The Stewardship Council will assist in providing a safe, accessible, well-maintained and well-managed system of open spaces and recreational facilities.

Valerie Anishchenkova has been appointed a lecturer in the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literatures. She is completing her doctoral studies in Arabic literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She has an M.A. in Near Eastern studies from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and an M.A. from St. Petersburg State University in Oriental and African studies. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Albert Hourani Memorial Fellowship and the Ernest McCarus Prize in Excellence in Arabic, both from the University of Michigan. She has taught Arabic at the University of Michigan, Middlebury College and the Russian Cultural Center at the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Cairo, Egypt. Her interests focus on Arabic literature, language and culture and film studies.

Christian Benes has joined the faculty as an assistant professor of mathematics. He comes to Tufts from Duke University, where he completed his doctoral studies in mathematics. He has received several awards for excellence in teaching from both Duke and Cornell universities. He has also received several prestigious grants, including a NATO grant for the Workshop on Conformal Invariance and Random Spatial Processes at the NATO Advanced Study Institute in Edinburgh, two National Science Foundation grants and a National Security Agency grant. His primary field of research is probability, particularly working with discrete models arising in statistical physics. His dissertation tackled a problem regarding the number of holes generated by planar random walk.

Carla E. Brodley, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, is serving as a visiting professor of computer science at Tufts. She received her bachelor's degree in mathematics from McGill University and her M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Brodley's research interests include computer security, machine learning and knowledge discovery in databases. She has worked in the areas of intrusion detection, anomaly detection in networks, hardware support for security, classifier formation, unsupervised learning and applications of machine learning to remote sensing, computer security and content-based image retrieval of medical images. Program co-chair for the 2001 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) and general chair for the 2004 ICML, Brodley is an associate editor of both the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and Machine Learning and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Machine Learning Research. She is a member of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research, which received the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring for "significant achievements in mentoring women across educational levels."

Bonnie Chakravorty of the Program in Community Health completed a fellowship in medical informatics sponsored by the National Library of Medicine. The program was held at the National Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. She presented a workshop, "Sexuality, Intimacy and Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency Related Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease," at the second annual Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency Educational Conference in Dublin, Ireland, October 8-10.

Janet Davis has been promoted to budget and account analyst in the Advancement Division's Finance and Planning Office. Davis has been a key member of the advancement implementation team and managed the $7 million A2A project budget and the A2A project's online resource center and put together the project reports for presentations to university constituencies.

Ellen Diep, who received her master's degree in computer science from Tufts, traveled to Austin, Texas, in October to attend IEEE's 2004 InfoVis Symposium on Information Visualization. She presented her work with Robert Jacob , associate professor of computer science, titled "Visualizing E-mail with a Semantically Zoomable Interface."

Barbara A. Driscoll de Alvarado has been appointed a lecturer in history. She is an associate professor of research at the Center for the Study of North America at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She received her doctorate in Latin American history from Notre Dame and has served as the Antonio Madero Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. Her current research projects focus on the bracero program of World War II and on a comparison of Mexican migration to the U.S. Southwest with French Canadian migration to New England.

Paul Drongowski has joined the faculty as a lecturer in computer science. He returns to academic life after several years in industry, where he has worked as a software engineer and a research team leader. In his position at Hewlett Packard, he was involved in software performance engineering through the analysis of program performance, performance tuning, collection and use of program profiles and tool building. Before joining Hewlett Packard, he led and managed a team of scientists tackling problems in medical imaging, patient monitoring and industrial automation at Siemens Corporate Research. Drongowski received his bachelor's degree in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon and his M.S. in computer engineering from Case Western University. In 1982, he earned his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Utah. At Case Western, he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in computer architecture, VLSI design, operating systems and C language programming. He has also taught VLSI design at Princeton University. Apart from his technical interests in computer/software performance and architecture, he is also a musician and enjoys audio and video production and developing graphics software.

Roger A. Fielding has been appointed director of the Nutrition, Exercise Physiology and Sarcopenia Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA). Fielding received his B.S. in applied physiology from Boston University in 1983, master's in human bioenergetics from Ball State University in 1985 and Ph.D. in human nutrition from Tufts in 1993. He returns to Tufts after having served on the faculty at Boston University since 1993. Since 1999, he has been a tenured associate professor in BU's Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation. He is a past recipient of the Brookdale Foundation National Fellowship in aging research and now serves as a member of the Brookdale Institute on Aging. He is a member of the American Physiological Society and the American College of Sports Medicine. His research interests include the impact of exercise and physical activity on successful human aging, skeletal muscle alterations with advancing age in disabled and non-disabled populations and age-related alterations in the control of skeletal muscle protein turnover. Fielding has received support for his research from the National Institutes on Aging, the American Federation for Aging Research, private foundations and industry.

Joseph Goodrich, a junior at Tufts, is participating in the Marine Corps Enlisted Commissioning Education Program as an active duty enlisted sergeant. Goodrich attended Officer Candidate School (OCS), an intense six-week training program, this past summer in Quantico, Va. He graduated from OCS on August 20, and upon graduating from Tufts in December 2005, he will be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps.

Neva Goodwin, co-director of the Global Development and Environment Institute, and her colleagues have had their textbook, MicroEconomics in Context, published by Houghton-Mifflin.

Jonathan Grosshans, a master's degree candidate in urban and environmental policy and planning, gave a presentation on "Environmental Justice and 'Just Sustainability' in Planning," co-authored with Assistant Professor Julian Agyeman at the American Planning Association's New England Planning Expo in Springfield, Mass., on October 1. In the paper, Grosshans discussed the inclusion of equity in the paradigm of sustainability and reviewed research of organizations that exemplify this inclusion. Other Tufts urban and environmental policy and planning students and faculty who gave presentations at the expo included Brett Baden , assistant professor, "Impact Fees and Environmental Justice: Is Pay As You Go Really Fair?," co-authored with Agyeman and Jon Witten , lecturer. This research investigates whether the use of impact fees (a one-time tax on new residential development) acts as a barrier to minorities trying to enter the housing market in the Chicago suburbs. M.A. candidate Dana LeWinter and Baden presented "Federal Plans, Local Realities and Neighborhood Investment: Lessons Learned from Elizabethport HOPE VI," based on their co-authored evaluation of the redevelopment of a public housing project in Elizabeth, N.J. Witten served as moderator for all the presentations. Baden also gave a presentation on "Smart Growth and Equity: New Evidence on Barriers to Homeownership" October 28 at the 26th annual conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Research in Atlanta.

Tawanda Gwena has joined the faculty as an assistant professor of mathematics. He just completed his doctoral studies in mathematics at the University of Georgia. His main research interest is algebraic geometry, especially the study of degenerations of abelian varieties, cubic threefolds and moduli questions. His most current work focuses on degenerations of Prym varieties associated to cubic threefolds. He has taught several pre-calculus and calculus courses, as well as serving as the first Writing Intensive Program teaching assistant in the mathematics department.

Sung Nim Han has been promoted to scientist II in the HNRCA Nutritional Immunology Laboratory and assistant professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.

Dr. Marc J. Homer, professor of radiology at the School of Medicine and chief of the mammography section at Tufts-New England Medical Center, was an invited lecturer at the 31st National Conference on Breast Cancer. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Connecticut.

Shafiqul Islam has joined the School of Engineering faculty as a visiting professor of civil and environmental engineering. He comes to Tufts from the University of Cincinnati, where he has been a professor since completing his Sc.D. at MIT in 1991. His research and teaching interests are in the hydrologic sciences. At Cincinnati, he served as the director of the Earth Systems Science Program, an interdisciplinary graduate program that involves more than 20 faculty from three different colleges. He also developed international partnerships with the faculty and students at MIT, BUET in Bangladesh, the University of Tokyo and ETH in Switzerland to initiate and sustain a multi-year, multidisciplinary research project to address arsenic contamination in India and Bangladesh. Islam has published 50 refereed journal articles. He has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Research Initiative Competitive Grants Program and the National Institute for Global Environmental Change. He has also served as a member of the GEWEX Panel of the National Academy of Sciences, Remote Sensing Committee of the Hydrology Section of the American Geophysical Union and the ASCE Task Force on Artificial Neural Networks in Hydrology. He comes to Tufts as the first Gordon Faculty Fellow in the School of Engineering.

Robert Jacob, associate professor of computer science, and Ph.D. graduate Horn-Yeu Shiaw attended the 2004 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Tucson, Ariz. Shiaw presented her thesis research, "The 3D Vase Museum: A New Approach to Context in a Digital Library," at the conference.

James Joseph, director of the HNRCA's Neuroscience Laboratory, was awarded the American Aging Association's Harman Research Award at the 33rd annual meeting of the American Aging Association June 4-7. Joseph was honored for his contributions to aging research, centering on his premier research in the recognition and definition of the role of nutrition in modulating age-related changes in neuronal function and behavior.

Shruti Kapila has been appointed an assistant professor of history in the School of Arts & Sciences. She earned her doctoral degree from the University of London Department of History, School of Oriental and African Studies. Since completing her doctoral studies, she has been working on a collaborative monograph on the globalization of western medicine at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford. Her research centers on early modern, colonial and post-colonial Indian history, including the breadth and depth of its intellectual, social, political and economic aspects. She is currently revising her doctoral thesis for publication as a book titled The Mind of a Civilization: Psycho-Sciences and Personhood in British India.

Leslie Kolterman has joined the Advancement Division as senior director of development for the School of Medicine. Before coming to Tufts, she was director of leadership gifts for Harvard Medical School, where she worked to establish strong relationships with faculty and researchers and then partnered them with the financial support of grateful patients, friends and alumni donors. Her record of accomplishment includes greatly enhanced programs, bench research efforts and permanent endowments at Harvard Medical School, particularly in the departments of Cell Biology, Pathology, Microbiology and Systems Biology. As a major gifts officer and annual fund manager, Kolterman led fund-raising teams at Brigham and Women's Hospital for seven years. She also has served as director of public relations for Leominster Hospital. Kolterman began her career as an English teacher after she earned a master's degree from the University of Iowa.

Norman Krinsky, professor of biochemistry emeritus, is a co-editor of a new book, Carotenoids in Health and Disease, published by Marcel Dekker in New York. His co-editors on the 568-page book are Susan Mayne from Yale and Helmut Sies from Dusseldorf, Germany.

Leslie Lawrence, lecturer in English, had her short story, "Heaven, Man, Earth," about a paraplegic's adjustment period, published in the fall 2004 issue of Prairie Schooner.

Zhiqiang Li has joined Tufts as a lecturer in the Department of German, Russian and Asian Languages and Literatures. He comes to the university from Boston College, where he taught in the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages for the past year. He received his M.A. in applied linguistics from Beijing Foreign Studies University and his doctoral degree in linguistics from MIT. His dissertation, The Phonetics and Phonology of Tone Mapping in a Constraint-Based Approach, addresses phonetic and phonological aspects of tone mapping in various Chinese languages. He is very active in disseminating his work in publications and conference presentations, including two presentations at the North Eastern Linguistic Society Conference.

Gary Lowe, senior director of development for Arts & Sciences, has accepted a new position as chief advancement officer at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where he will oversee the development and external relations operations for that institution. In his 11 years at Tufts, Lowe leaves a record of achievement that impacts faculty and students every day. From his work with the Pritzker family and the special financial aid resources generated by their challenge, to the many donors who have teamed up to support Tufts' planned music facility, Lowe has built strong, permanent relationships with some of the university's top donors to Arts, Sciences and Engineering.

Melissa Marko, a graduate research assistant and a student in cellular and molecular nutrition at the Friedman School, and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Tanvir Ahmed shared the Oxygen Club poster award at the New York Academy of Sciences meeting on Vitamin E, held at the HNRCA in May. Dr. Mohsen Meydani , director of the HNRCA's Vascular Biology Laboratory, served as meeting co-chair. Dr. Dayong Wu , a scientist in the Immunology Laboratory and assistant professor at the Friedman School, received a fellowship award to attend the meeting.

Paul McCormack has joined the School of Engineering as a lecturer in electrical and computer engineering. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Tufts in 1994. His areas of research focus are software defined radio (SDR) and engineering education. Following his graduate studies, he was an assistant and then associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Suffolk University for seven years. While at Suffolk, he also served as director of the Computer Engineering Program and co-director of the Suffolk University High School Physics Program. Following his term at Suffolk, he was appointed assistant professor of computer technology and telecommunications at Middlesex Community College. He has worked as a consultant for M/A-COM and as a senior development engineer and project manager for Optical Monitors Products at Nortel Networks.

George J. McNinch, an assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Notre Dame since 1996, has been appointed an assistant professor of mathematics. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Oregon, and his research focuses on algebraic groups, geometry and number theory.

Lynn Meltzer, adjunct associate professor of child development, was the guest editor for a special issue of Learning Disabilities Research and Practice (Vol. 19, No.1). The articles in the issue focused on the importance of fostering strengths and building resilience in students and stemmed from recent work presented by Meltzer and others at the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities conference in Bangor, Wales, in July 2003. Meltzer's paper, "Positive and Negative Self-Perceptions: Is There a Cyclical Relationship between Teachers and Students' Perceptions of Effort, Strategy Use and Academic Performance?", summarized ongoing research conducted at the Research Institute for Learning and Development in Lexington, Mass. That article was co-written by Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development alums Bethany Roditi and Laura Sales Pollica , Eliot-Pearson doctoral student Christina Theokas and psychology alumna Julie Sayer .

Dr. Mohsen Meydani, director of the HNRCA Vascular Biology Laboratory, gave a presentation on "Nutrition and Aging" to medical students at Central University in Quito, Ecuador, July 5-9. He discussed "Molecular Mechanism of EGCG Inhibition of Angiogenesis" at the American Institute for Cancer Research/World Cancer Research Fund's International Research Conference on Food, Nutrition and Cancer in Washington, D.C., July 15-16, and he spoke on "Phytochemical Protection against Inflammatory Diseases" at the American College of Sports Medicine's 51st annual meeting in Indianapolis June 2-5.

Dr. Simin Nikbin Meydani, director of the Nutritional Immunology Laboratory at the HNRCA, has been elected as the incoming president of the American Aging Association. She gave presentations on "Changes in Early T Cell Activation, Immune Synapse Formation, Lipid Raft Function" and "Clinical Effects of Vitamin E Treatment" at the Aging and Immunity conference at the Trudeau Institute in Saranac Lake, N.Y., October 2-5. She also discussed "Aging and Immune Function" at the 26th ESPEN Congress September 10-13 in Lisbon, Portugal. She spoke on "Immune System Optimization" at a workshop on at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Mass., August 9-11.

Nancy Palermo, staff assistant in the HNRCA's Bone Metabolism Laboratory since 2000, is now project coordinator for the Vitamin K Laboratory. She is managing volunteer activity and the associated data management for a study that is evaluating the effect of vitamin K on age-related bone loss.

Emily Pinkham and Jeremy Scanlan, both senior political science majors who participated in the Tufts-in-Washington program last spring, won Best Research Paper awards for their work in D.C. The Tufts-in-Washington program is run through American University's Washington Semester Program. Approximately 20 Tufts students participate in the program each year, based on a competitive application process at Tufts. The awards for best paper are given across the entire Washington Semester Program, so Tufts students are competing with students from universities across the country. Last spring, approximately 200 students completed the research paper option that made them eligible for the best paper award. Pinkham's paper was on "How Much Authority Can the Federal Government Exercise during a State of Emergency?" The paper "was very timely because it examines the impact of the U.S. Patriot Act on civil liberties," said David Brown, dean of the Washington Semester Program. Scanlan's paper, "Not Just Racial Aesthetics," examines the Michigan affirmative action cases that were recently heard before the Supreme Court. Through a case analysis, he presented a compelling discussion of the diversity rationale.

Kris Powers, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Berry College, has joined the Tufts faculty as a lecturer in computer science. Prior to Berry College, she taught at the University of Illinois at Springfield, Bradley University and Hamilton College. She received her bachelor's degree in computer science and applied mathematics from the College of Charleston and her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her interests are in graph theoretic aspects of system communication, especially VLSI circuit layout, network emulation and routing on multiprocessor machines. Her more recent educational work has focused on enhanced teaching methodologies for computer science founded on constructivist educational theories. Powers is a member of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and has been a reviewer for the annual ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education technical symposium since 1995. She serves on national and regional steering committees for the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges.

Carol Quinlan, screening coordinator in the HNRCA Metabolic Research Unit (MRU), retired on September 17. A member of the MRU staff since February 1985, Quinlan guided many volunteers through the human studies screening process.

Cristina Vimo has been promoted to senior development officer for Arts, Sciences and Engineering. Vimo works on strategic initiatives to build larger reservoirs of major gift donors and dollars for the fund-raising priorities of the deans, president, provost and trustees. She will also play an important role in training and mentoring new major gift officers, giving them the benefit of her six years at Tufts as a major gifts officer and associate director of development.

Robert F. Willson, research associate professor of astronomy and senior lecturer in the medical school's Department of Anatomy and Cellular Biology, gave invited lectures about his ongoing work on solar astrophysics at the International Astronomical Symposium 223 in St Petersburg, Russia, in June and at the Committee on Space Research meeting in Paris in July. His research, which is supported by NASA, involves collaborative studies of the solar corona and its eruptive activity using the world's largest radiotelescope, the Very Large Array in New Mexico, and several NASA orbiting solar missions.