October People Notes

Astier M. Almedom, the Henry R. Luce Professor in Science and Humanitarianism and a fellow of the Institute for Global Leadership, had her article, “Re-reading the Short and Long-Rigged History of Eritrea, 1941-1952: Back to the Future?” published in the Nordic Journal of African Studies, Vol. 15, (2) 2006, pp. 103-142. The journal is accessible free of charge at http://www.njas.helsinki.fi/abstracts/vol15num2/abstract_15_2_1.html.

T.J. Anderson, professor of music emeritus, received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Iowa, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1958. Anderson is regarded as one of the most important American composers of our time for his ability to create music that melds classical Eastern and Western traditions with the modern African-American experience. He has published more than 80 musical works.

Roxanne Beal has joined Tufts as associate director of corporate and foundation relations in the Advancement Division. Her 15 years in development has included academic institutions and nonprofit hospital organizations. On the academic side, she held positions at Brown University in corporate and foundation relations and in donor relations. At the University of Rhode Island, where she earned a BA in journalism and public relations, she was a grant writer prior to being named director of donor relations. She also worked in the Lifespan development office, where she headed foundation relations for the organization’s four affiliated hospitals. Most recently, Beal was a corporate and foundation relations development officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Carla Brodley, Lenore Cowen and Donna Slonim, all faculty members in computer science, have been awarded a one-year exploratory grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Working with Prof. Jonathan Eisen of the UC-Davis Genome Center, they will explore methods for discriminating between natural and unnatural DNA. The goal of the project is to improve upon methods that can take genome sequence data and determine whether it came from an organism that has been modified by humans. This is of critical value in developing responses when an unexpected pathogen shows up in some detection system. For example, suppose an outbreak of an infectious disease is traced to a bacterium. With new sequencing methods, one could determine to a high degree of accuracy the sequence of this organism in a few days. It would be extremely valuable to be able to screen the genome sequence and determine the probability that this was a “natural” or an “unnatural” organism, which would inform the response of medical, legal and military agencies.

Richard C. Eichenberg, associate professor of political science, served on the advisory board for Transatlantic Trends 2006, the latest in a series of yearly public opinion surveys in the United States and 12 European countries that is sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. The survey explores such topics as U.S. foreign policy, the NATO Alliance, international threats and the tradeoff between civil liberties and national security policies. The full report from this year’s survey is available at www.transatlantictrends.org.

Ioannis D. Evrigenis, assistant professor of political science, delivered a paper titled “Recovering Plato’s Thrasymachus: The Power Struggle of Republic I” at the American Political Science Association conference in Philadelphia on August 31.

Kevin P. Gallagher, senior researcher at Tufts’ Global Development and the Environment Institute, has been appointed an adjunct fellow at Research and Information Systems for Non-Aligned Developing Countries, a quasi-governmental think-tank founded and funded by the government of India and located in New Delhi. Gallagher will serve as a researcher and advisor on international trade and development policy.

Mary-Ann Kazanjian Hagopian, secretary in the history department for 25 years, married Henry Hagopian at the St. James Armenian Church in Watertown, Mass., in May in a traditional Armenian ceremony. In addition to family and friends, guests included members of the history department.

James Joseph, director of the Neuroscience Laboratory at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA), discussed “Antioxidant Food Versus Supplements: Animal Evidence,” and Martha S. Morris, a scientist in the HNRCA Nutritional Epidemiology Program, spoke on “B-Vitamins & Cognition: Clinical & Prospective Epidemiologic Evidence” at the IANA 2006: Nutrition and Alzheimer’s Disease/Cognitive Decline Symposium in Chicago May 1-2.

Dr. Michael A. Kahn has been appointed chair of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology at the School of Dental Medicine. Kahn has been a valuable member of the dental school faculty since his appointment as a professor with tenure in 2002. He serves as the laboratory director of Tufts Oral Pathology Services and director of the basic human pathology course and the pre-doctoral oral and maxillofacial pathology course. Nationally, Kahn is a fellow and secretary-treasurer of the American Academy of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology and a diplomate of the American Board of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology.

Jim Lindquist has joined the Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations as an assistant director. He most recently worked at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he was responsible for sales at WIDE World, the school’s online professional development group serving educators and administrators. He has also held positions in both corporate and academic publishing, including Harvard Business School Publishing Inc., Houghton Mifflin Co. and the MIT Press. He lives in Brookline, Mass., with his wife, Gwenyth, and their daughter, Claire, a freshman at Brookline High School.

Melissa Marko, a doctoral student in nutrition, defended her thesis on “Vitamin E-induced Enhancement of T Cell Receptor Proximal Signal Transduction Events in CD4+ T Cells from Old Mice” at the HNRCA on July 28. Her advisor was Simin N. Meydani. She is a postdoc in the HNRCA Nutritional Immunology Laboratory.

Heather Mernitz, a doctoral student in nutrition, gave her thesis presentation on “The Chemopreventive Effects of 9-cis Retinoic Acid and 1alpha, 25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 against NNK-Induced Lung Carcinogenesis in A/J Mice” at the HNRCA on July 17. Xiang-Dong Wang was her advisor. She is working as a postdoctoral associate in the HNRCA Nutrition and Cancer Biology Laboratory.

Dr. Mohsen Meydani, director of the HNRCA Vascular Biology Laboratory, discussed “Polyphenols Modulation of Cell Proliferation and Angiogenesis” at the 13th biennial Congress of the International Society for Free Radical Research in Davos, Switzerland, in August, and “Fat Soluble Needs of the Elderly: Vitamin E” at the Canadian Society for Clinical Nutrition in Edmonton, Alberta, in May.

Dr. Simin Meydani, HNRCA associate director and director of its Nutritional Immunology Laboratory, chaired the 2006 meeting of the American Aging Association, held at the HNRCA June 2-6. She discussed “Vitamin E and Respiratory Infection in the Elderly” as part of the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation Scientific Seminar Series in Marshfield, Wisc., in July. She spoke on “Molecular Mechanisms and Clinical Implications of the Age-associated Changes in the Immune Response: Can They Be Modified by Nutritional Interventions?” at Massachusetts General Hospital in June.

Dr. Ray Murphy, professor of medicine, was honored by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in September when the University hosted the 31st annual meeting of the International Lung Sounds Association (ILSA). The award was given in recognition of Murphy’s role as co-founder of ILSA, an organization of physicians, engineers, nurses and other health-care providers interested in improving noninvasive diagnosis and monitoring of patients using acoustics. The first meeting of ILSA, which was sponsored by Tufts, took place at the Faulkner Hospital in Jamaica Plain, where Murphy was chief of the pulmonary service. Since then, the organization has met in England, Germany, France, Italy, Scotland, Sweden, Finland, Canada and Mexico. The 32nd annual meeting is scheduled to be held in Tokyo, Japan. While the initial studies presented and discussed at meetings in the early years of the organization involved work done with large, cumbersome computers, advances in computer technology have made it possible to bring this type of sophisticated analysis to the bedside to realize Murphy’s long-term goal of computerizing the stethoscope.

James H. Nichols, associate professor of pathology and medical director for clinical chemistry at Baystate Health in Springfield, Mass., has been elected to serve on the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) for a term that ends in 2010. The 20-member committee provides scientific and technical advice and guidance to the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, the assistant secretary for health, the director of CDC and the FDA commissioner.

Susan Ostrander, professor of sociology, and Kent Portney, professor of political science, have been elected to the Arts & Sciences Faculty Executive Committee for terms that end in 2009.

Dr. Christopher N. Otis, associate professor of pathology and director of surgical pathology at Baystate Medical Center, has been elected president of the Association of Directors of Anatomic and Surgical Pathology, an organization that represents more than 200 academic anatomic pathology departments, primarily in the United States and Canada. The association is responsible for making recommendations for the practice of and training in anatomic pathology.

Dr. Mark Pokras, associate professor of environmental and population health and director of the Wildlife Clinic at the Cummings School, will be a keynote speaker at the ReMaine Wild Conference 2006, which will take place October 20-22 at the Chewonki Foundation in Wiscassett, Maine. “Sharing the Planet” is the theme of this wildlife rehabilitators’ conference.

Iris Ponte, a doctoral student in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development, has been awarded a coveted Fulbright grant to research preschools in China for one year. Ponte plans to gather data on how preschools in Beijing handle misbehavior and will draw comparisons between American and Chinese styles of intervention. Ponte is one of 1,200 U.S. citizens awarded the international educational exchange grant for the 2006-07 academic year.

Helen Rasmussen, senior research dietitian at the HNRCA and an instructor at the Friedman School of Nutrition and Science Policy, presented a paper at the 27th Urban Ethnography in Education Research Forum at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. The topic was “Factoring in Multicultural Issues while Teaching Qualitative Research in Graduate School Settings.”

Stephen J. Ricci, E67, E88P, J88P, a senior partner with Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, Mass., and Kenneth L. Bloom, E85, president and CEO of Preferred Rubber Compounding Corp. in Barberton, Ohio, have been appointed to the Board of Overseers to the School of Engineering.

David Rivard, lecturer in English, has been selected to receive this year’s O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Founded in 1991, the Hardison Prize honors an American poet whose art and teaching demonstrate the spirit of inquiry, imagination, daring and scholarship exemplified in O.B. Hardison’s life and work. Rivard will receive $10,000 and give a reading at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., on October 27.

Susan B. Roberts, director of the HNRCA Energy Metabolism Laboratory, participated in the Imaging Workshop on Body Composition in New York City on June 6 and in the pre-meeting workshop on “Caloric Restriction” at the 2006 meeting of the American Aging Association in Boston in June.

David B. Rone, A84, executive vice president for network development and rights acquisition for Fox Sports Networks, and John K. Halvey, A82, a partner with Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy in New York City, have been named to the Board of Overseers to the School of Arts & Sciences.

Dr. Michael B. Rothberg, assistant professor of medicine, is one of 23 junior physician-scientists in the country to receive Clinical Scientist Development Awards from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. The awards are for $135,000 a year for three years. Rothberg will use the grant money to support his research on “VTE Prophylaxis in Medical Patients.”

Dr. Robert M. Russell, director of the HNRCA, conducted a Food and Nutrition Board workshop on the research recommendations presented in the eight Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI) reports on June 7-8, providing perspectives on important research needs in the micronutrient area. He attended the Novartis Foundation Symposium No. 282 in London May 8-11 and discussed “Setting Dietary Intake Levels: Problems and Pitfalls.” He also gave a public lecture on the same topic at University College, London, on May 12.

Anna Seleny, professor of the practice of international politics at the Fletcher School, published an article titled “Tradition, Modernity and Democracy: The Many Promises of Islam” in Perspectives on Politics (September 2006, Vol. 4/No. 3). This past winter, Cambridge University Press published her book, The Political Economy of State-Society Relations in Hungary and Poland: From Communism to the European Union.

Charles B. Shoemaker, has been appointed professor of biomedical sciences at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Iowa in 1979. Following a distinguished career in teaching and industry, he was appointed as a part-time research professor in biomedical sciences at the Cumming School in 2003. Shoemaker has distinguished himself as an internationally recognized investigator in the field of parasitology.

Richard Shultz, director of the International Security Studies Program and professor of international politics at the Fletcher School, and Fletcher Ph.D. candidate Andrea Dew are the authors of a new book, Insurgents, Terrorists and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat (Columbia University Press), which investigates the history and politics of modern asymmetrical warfare. By focusing on four specific hotbeds of instability—Somalia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq—Shultz and Dew conduct a careful analysis of tribal culture and the value of clan associations. They examine why these “traditional” or “tribal” warriors fight, how they recruit, where they find sanctuary, and what is behind their strategy. Traveling across two centuries and several continents, Shultz and Dew examine the doctrinal, tactical and strategic advantages and consider the historical, cultural and anthropological factors behind the motivation and success of the warriors of contemporary combat. In their provocative argument, Shultz and Dew propose that war in the post-Cold War era cannot be waged through traditional Western methods of combat, especially when friendly states and outside organizations like al-Qaeda serve as powerful allies to the enemy. The book examines how non-state armies fight, identifies the patterns and trends of their combat and recommends how conventional militaries can defeat these irregular, yet highly effective organizations.

Jill Shuman, an adjunct faculty member at the Friedman School and the School of Medicine, has won the 2006 Will Solemine Award for Excellence in Medical Communication from the American Medical Writers Association. Her piece, “Heed the Warnings about Infectious Disease,” appeared in the June 2005 issue of Patient Care: The Journal of Best Practices for Today’s Physician.

Enrico Spolaore, professor and chair of economics, has been appointed to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Program on Political Economy. This recently formed program focuses on the interaction between economic policies and outcomes and political institutions, including the evolution of legal and administrative institutions, social interactions, international trade and international relations.

Michelle Tangredi, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Neuroscience, has received a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. She received the award for her current project, “S6KII: a MAPK-activated Regulator of Casein Kinase 2 in the Drosophila Circadian Oscillator,” and her work in the community in the GAP Junction program in South Boston and the Boston Regional Brain Bee. Her advisor is F. Rob Jackson, professor and interim chair of neuroscience.

Dr. Noriko Tonomura has joined the Cummings School as a postdoctoral associate in clinical sciences. She earned a D.V.M. from Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, and a Ph.D. in animal biotechnology and biomedical sciences and molecular and cellular biology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is working with Dr. Chieko Azuma, assistant professor of clinical sciences, on the American Kennel Club’s canine genome project.

Paul Waldau, director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at the Cummings School, appeared on the National Public Radio program “Justice Talking” in August as part of the program “Protecting People and Their Pets.” Waldau also attended the human-animal bond conference at Purdue University’s School of Veterinary Medicine, which convened the directors of human-animal studies programs based at U.S. and Canadian veterinary schools. His article “Hope-Full Animals” was published in September by the Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals.

Dr. Xiang-Dong Wang, director of the HNRCA Nutrition and Cancer Biology Laboratory, spoke on “Smoking, Alcohol and Vitamin A” at the American Institute for Cancer Research’s International Research Conference on Food, Nutrition and Cancer July 13-14 in Washington, D.C. He discussed “Carotenoid Oxidative Metabolites: Implications for Cancer Prevention” at the International Society for Free Radical Research’s 13th Biennial Congress August 15-19 in Davos, Switzerland. He gave a talk on “Alcohol, Retinoids and Hepatocellular Cancer” at the International Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism 2006 World Congress on September 10-13 in Sydney, Australia.

Dr. Harry C. Webster, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, has been appointed chair of the School of Medicine’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and interim physiatrist-in-chief at Tufts-New England Medical Center. Webster joined Tufts-NEMC nearly 20 years ago and has served as chief of the Floating Hospital’s Division of Pediatric Rehabilitation since 1988. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California School of Medicine, he completed his postgraduate training in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Tufts-affiliated residency program in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Board-certified in pediatrics and physical medicine and rehabilitation, his clinical specialties include general pediatric rehabilitation, spasticity/tone management and treatment, pediatric orthotics, muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy and long-term care of chronically neuromotor-impaired children and young adults. Webster has received numerous awards and honors for his work and is known throughout New England for his compassion and dedication to his patients and their families.

Richard Weiss, professor of mathematics, held a two-week intensive course in September on “The Theory of Buildings.” The course was given in Toblach, which is in the Italian Alps just south of the Austrian border and is the site of an annual Gustav Mahler Festival. The course took place in the music school adjacent to the town concert hall and was accompanied by some superb pianist practicing in the adjacent rooms. In the following week, he gave a lecture at a meeting in Bielefeld, Germany, honoring the mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl, who died 50 years ago.