September People Notes

Frank Ackerman, director of the research and policy program at Tufts’ Global Development and the Environment (GDAE) Institute, spent periods of the summer in Europe at work on various projects. Ackerman participated in a conference in June in Geneva on the state of trade modeling, cosponsored by the WTO and the International Institute for Sustainable Development. In Vienna, he presented GDAE’s recent study of the impacts of the new EU chemicals policy, “REACH,” on developing countries to a joint session of members of the European Parliament and their counterparts from developing countries. In London, Ackerman met with Friends of the Earth UK about his current project reviewing the economic costs of climate change. And in the Netherlands, he met with a member of the Dutch National Research Council about a new government project studying the limitations of cost-benefit analysis and then attended a conference on eco-efficiency where he presented a paper on valuation of externalities based on abatement costs.

Julian Agyeman, associate professor of urban and environmental policy and planning, was a discussant in the plenary session on “Justice, Nature and the City: Environmental Justice in Post-Hurricane New Orleans” at the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers conference on “Global Social Justice and Environmental Sustainability” at the Royal Geographical Society in London August 29-September 1. He will present a paper, “Just Sustainability: A US/UK Comparison,” at the UK’s Sustainable Development Research Network annual research conference on September 21 in London.

Elizabeth Ammons, Harriet H. Fay Professor of Literature, gave an invited lecture on “Harriet Beecher Stowe and Activism” at the inauguration of the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) at the University of Hull, England, in July.

Susanne Belovari, the archivist for reference and collections at Digital Collections and Archives, has been elected a member of the International Council on Archives SUV Steering Committee for a term that ends in 2010. The International Council on Archives (ICA) is the only global organization of archivists, and SUV is its section on University and Research Institution Archives. She will present a paper on “Record Owners/Creators and the Making of an Archives: The Case of the Historical Archives of the Jewish Community of Vienna, Austria” at the ICA’s annual seminar of the Section on University and Research Institution Archives in Reykjavik, Iceland, September 13-20. She presented a paper on “Adapting Archival Practices to the Human Rights Mission of Records: Challenges in Re-Constructing the Historical Archives of the Jewish Community of Vienna (IKG), Austria” in Washington, D.C., this past summer. She also presented a paper, “Rediscovered Historical Records of the Jewish Community of Vienna (IKG), Austria,” at the annual conference of the British Association of Jewish Studies at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom July 11-13. Before she came to Tufts, Belovari was archivist and restitution historian for the Holocaust Victims’ Information and Support Center, Jewish Community of Vienna, Austria. In addition to Holocaust restitution research and case studies, she designed a new archival framework and infrastructure for the archives closed down by National Socialists in 1938. She processed and cataloged newly discovered Holocaust records and historical registry material and collaborated with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Genealogical Society of Utah to have records microfilmed. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative sociology/history and an M.A. in sociology, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Brian Brenner, professor of civil and environmental engineering, has been appointed editor of the Journal of Leadership and Management in Engineering, a publication of the American Society of Civil Engineers that examines contemporary issues and principles of leadership and management.

Dr. Lais Costa has been appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences at the Cummings School. She received her M.V. (Medica Veterinaria) from Sao Paulo State University in Brazil in 1987, and in 1988-89, participated in a specialization program in large animal surgery at the same institution. She did an internship in equine medicine and surgery at Louisiana State University and was a visiting scientist, graduate research assistant and a research assistant at the University of Kentucky. In 1994, she completed her M.S. in veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, followed by two years of postdoctoral work at the University of California-Davis. In July 1996 she returned to Louisiana State University for a three-year residency in equine medicine. She is a diplomate of the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine. In September 1999, Costa was appointed a clinical instructor in large animal medicine in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Georgia. She completed her Ph.D. at Louisiana State University in May 2005. Costa’s Ph.D. research in particulate-induced injury to horses and her work in stem cell research complement the current projects of the Cummings large animal research group.

Deborah Digges, professor of English, had her new poems, “Dancing with Emerson” and “The Birthing,” appear in the New Yorker. Four new poems will be published in the fall issue of Kenyon Review: “Haying,” “Dance of the Seven Veils,” “Don’t Cut Your Hair” and “The House That Goes Dancing.” During her sabbatical, Digges traveled in Africa to the Tumaini Orphanage at the foot of Mount Kenya in Nyrie to work with children and young adults on native dance, song and poetry.

Kevin Dunn, dean of academic affairs and acting dean of the College of Special Studies in Arts & Sciences, has stepped down from those posts to return to full-time teaching and research in the English department, where he is an associate professor. He is on leave during the 2006-07 academic year.

Leila Fawaz, Issam M. Professor of Lebanese and Eastern Mediterranean Studies, with a joint appointment at the Fletcher School and in the Department of History, has been elected an overseer to Harvard University. She also was awarded a visiting fellowship at All Souls College at Oxford University, where she will spend her sabbatical leave this fall semester and work on her new long-term project involving the social history of the late Ottoman Empire. As director of the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts, she is organizing an international conference on “The ‘War on Terrorism:’ Where Do We Stand?,” which will take place at Tufts on January 25-26, 2007.

Catherine Freudenreich, associate professor of biology, had some of her recent research, done in collaboration with graduate student Haihua Zhang, highlighted in an article in the June 9 issue of the journal Science (“DNA’s Molecular Gymnastics”). The article describes their discovery of a short DNA sequence that causes DNA to be “fragile” or break in a region of the genome that is prone to rearrangements that cause cancer. This discovery could explain the generation of some cancers and also suggests a way to identify individuals who are more prone to cancer-causing chromosome rearrangements at this location. Freudenreich studies genome stability in yeast, in particular sequences that expand and break to cause human genetic disease or cancer.

Hilary Glazer, A06, who received her undergraduate degree in biology in May, is the recipient of a prestigious Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Scholarship, which provides up to $50,000 annually for tuition, room, board, fees and books for graduate school for up to six years. She is the first Tufts recipient of the award. The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation helps young people of exceptional promise reach their full potential through education. This year’s 77 recipients were chosen after a nationwide selection process that drew 1,100 nominees. Glazer will start medical school at Washington University this fall.

Dr. Kristen Goodell, a third-year resident in Tufts’ Family Medicine Residency Program, was elected the national resident representative to the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine Board of Directors during the National Congress of Family Medicine Residents and Student Members on August 5 in Kansas City, Mo. After she earned her undergraduate degree from Colby College, Goodell worked for the public health laboratories in Boston and then managed an educational program on board a schooner in Long Island Sound. She received her medical degree from the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and did a residency in general surgery at Tufts-New England Medical Center. After two years, she decided her true calling was to be a family physician.

Dante Goytizolo has joined the Tufts Dining staff as food and beverage manager for Tufts Catering. He also manages the Mugar Café and the Faculty Dining Program in the Chase Center.

Christine Graham, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Neuroscience, has been named a Dean’s Fellow for 2006-07. She is studying the role of a classic stress-related neuroendocrine system, the urocortin-corticotropin releasing hormone receptor system, in the inner ear and addressing its potential to protect against local stressors in the inner ear such as noise-induced hearing loss. Her advisor is Douglas Vetter, assistant professor of neuroscience.

Claudio X. González Guajardo, a Fletcher School alumnus who has worked to improve education in Mexico, is the recipient of the James L. Fisher Award for Distinguished Service to Education from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. He received the award, named in honor of CASE’s second president, during ceremonies July 10 in New York City. González is co-founder and president of UNETE Foundation and co-founder and president of Televisa Foundation. Under his guidance, the not-for-profit organization UNETE has provided computer equipment to more than 2,800 public schools in Mexico, helping more than one million students. As president of Televisa Foundation, he has directed the launch of a number of national educational initiatives, including campaigns to promote teacher training and reading. Based on findings that many individuals in Mexico read only one book a year, the foundation launched a promotion to encourage the use of dictionaries, encyclopedias and other books in public elementary schools. As a result of that campaign, nearly 450 public elementary schools have received nearly 135,000 books since 2002.

Tawanda Gwena, assistant professor of mathematics, attended two conferences this summer: the International Congress of Mathematicians’ satellite conference, held in the historic city of Segovia, Spain, and the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, where Gwena gave a talk on August 23 on “Degenerations of Cubic Threefolds and Prym Varities.” The International Congress of Mathematicians is the biggest math conference in the world and takes place every four years. King Juan Carlos I of Spain opened the conference on August 22.

Boris Hasselblatt, professor of mathematics, visited the University of Tokyo in July to give a lecture, and he visited Northwestern University for a research collaboration in August. He co-authored an article on “Degree-growth of Monomial Maps” with James Propp of the University of Wisconsin and the University of Massachusetts. It discusses issues at the interface of two disparate fields of mathematics—dynamical systems and algebraic geometry—and it was accepted for publication in the journal Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems. Another article to appear this year is titled “Problems in Dynamical Systems and Related Topics,” which discusses a range of unsolved problems in a broad area of mathematics. Hasselblatt is also cofounder and managing editor of the Journal of Modern Dynamics, the first issue of which will appear in January 2007. In addition, he served as guest editor for an issue of the journal Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems. He published his 150th review in Mathematical Reviews, which provides timely reviews or summaries of articles and books that contain new contributions to mathematical research. Last April, Hasselblatt served as faculty host for the Tufts Travel-Learn trip “Village Life along the Waterways of Holland and Belgium.”

Dr. Paul J. Hesketh, professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Hematology Oncology at Caritas St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, has been elected president of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer (MASCC). He began his term, which runs through June 2008, at the association’s annual meeting, held in Toronto, Canada, in June. MASCC is an international, multidisciplinary organization with members representing more than 50 countries on six continents. It is the largest and most prestigious professional organization in the world dedicated to advancing scientific knowledge, education and patient advocacy issues pertaining to the supportive care of patients with cancer. Its official journal, The Journal of Supportive Care in Cancer, is an influential forum for the publication of important research advances in this area. Hesketh has been a member of the board of directors of MASCC since 2000, and in 2002, served as chairman of the group’s annual meeting, which was held in Boston.

Yanmei Huang and Madelaine Rosenberg, both postdocs in the Department of Neuroscience, have received grant awards from the Natalie V. Zucker Research Center for Women Scholars. The center is devoted to furthering the research careers of women in the basic and clinical sciences at Tufts School of Medicine and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences.

Robert Jacob, associate professor of computer science, has been named to the editorial board of the journal Human-Computer Interaction. He continues to serve on the editorial boards of the ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, ACM Interactions and the Springer International Series on HCI, which together comprise the leading publications in the field of human-computer interaction.

Matthew E. Kahn, associate professor of international economics at the Fletcher School, is the author of a new book, Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment (Brookings Institution Press, August 2006). The book takes the reader on a tour of the extensive economic literature on the environmental consequences of urban growth. Kahn starts with an exploration of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC)—the hypothesis that the relationship between environmental quality and per-capita income follows a bell-shaped curve. He then analyzes several critiques of the EKC and discusses the implications of growth in urban population and surface area, as well as income. The concluding chapter addresses the role of cities in promoting climate change and asks how cities in turn are likely to be affected by this trend. As Kahn points out, although economics is known as the “dismal science,” economists are often quite optimistic about the relationship between urban development and the environment. In contrast, many ecologists and environmentalists remain wary of the environmental consequences of free-market growth. Rather than try to settle this dispute, this book conveys the excitement of an ongoing debate. For more, go to http://www.brookings.edu/press/books/greencities.htm.

Eugenia Kim, a 2004 graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has joined the university as the administrative assistant for the web communications and photography teams in University Relations. Her work experience as an office assistant combined with her undergraduate degree in electronic media, arts and communications makes her a terrific fit for the web and photo teams.

Paul Kirshen, research professor of civil and environmental engineering, has co-edited a new book, Climate Change and Variability: Local Impacts and Responses (Edward Elgar Publishers, Cheltenham, England, 2006). His co-editors are Matthias Ruth of the University of Maryland and Kieran Donaghy of the University of Illinois. The book presents results from six research projects on the impacts of and possible responses to climate change and climate variability at urban and regional scales. The projects have been carried out over the course of more than three years as part of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP). The six separate research groups concentrated on a diverse set of topics, including changes in wildland fires dynamics, water use in agriculture, air quality impacts on human health and reliability of urban infrastructure systems—all under a wide range of climate, socioeconomic and management scenarios. Each of the six studies focuses on a finer geographic scale than is customary in integrated assessment research and contributes to the knowledge of localized experiences of climate change, how it affects different sectors, how different stakeholders perceive its implications and are adapting to it, and how decision support systems can promote dialogues among researchers, stakeholders and policymakers.

Kofi Laing, assistant professor of computer science, was an invited mini-symposium speaker at the 2006 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Discrete Math, which was held in Victoria, British Columbia. In the session on “Locality in Distributed Computing,” he spoke on “A Space Lower Bound for Name-Independent Compact Routing in Trees,” which is joint work with M. Arias, L. Cowen, R. Rajaraman and O. Taka. Laing also attended the 18th annual Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, held in Boston, where he presented a research paper, “Playing Push vs. Pull: Models and Algorithms for Disseminating Dynamic Data in Networks,” which he co-authored with R.C. Chakinala, A. Kumarasubramanian, R. Manokaran, C. Pandu-Rangan and R. Rajaraman. It was published in the Proceedings of the 18th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures, pages 244-253.

Dr. Stefania Lamon-Fava, an assistant professor at the Friedman School and a scientist at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging (HNRCA), has received a three-year, $377,000 grant from the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service to study the effect of the most common dietary fatty acids on the molecular aspects of the reverse cholesterol transport, a pathway involved in the protection of the arterial wall from atherosclerosis. She will give a presentation on coronary atherosclerosis and hormonal replacement therapy in postmenopausal women at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Chicago in November.

Leslie Lawrence, lecturer in English, has had her essay about the aftermath of her spouse’s death accepted for publication by Prairie Schooner.

Richard M. Lerner, the Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science, will give the keynote address at the National Mentoring Partnership’s Research and Policy Council, which will take place in Boston on September 27.

Sara M. Lewis, an evolutionary ecologist in the biology department, has been promoted to full professor. She has received a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to fund her research on bioluminescent fireflies and a $390,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to fund research on genetic and environmental influences on sexual selection in flour beetles.

Naomi Marr has joined University Relations as associate director of web communications. She comes to Tufts after eight years at Progress Software Corp., where she was heavily involved in the successful implementation of its content management system. Marr plays a similar role here at Tufts, serving as the technical project lead for the deployment of the Fatwire Content Management system and web templates. She will also serve as web communications’ main liaison with TCCS, helping to plan the technical infrastructure necessary to achieve many of its long-term initiatives.

Ann Yelmokas McDermott, project director for the Boston Obesity, Genetics and Lifestyle Study at the HNRCA, competed in the XI FINA World Masters Swim Championships, which took place August 4-13 in the Olympic-sized pool at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. More than 7,300 swimmers, water polo players, synchronized swimmers and divers ages 25 to 100 from 75 countries participated, including more than 100 former Olympians. “It was quite inspirational to see world records fall right and left at all ages,” McDermott said, noting that 161 world records were broken at the international meet. To compete, swimmers had to achieve time qualifying standards based on their age, which “led to a very tight and competitive field of swimmers,” said McDermott, who trains with the New England Masters Swim Club. McDermott competed in five individual events—100- and 200-meter breaststroke and 50-, 200- and 800-meter freestyle—and on three relays. She finished 20th overall in the 200-meter breaststroke, and her times also earned her second or third place in the New England Masters Long Course Meters records for women ages 50-54.

George McNinch, assistant professor of mathematics, and Eric Sommers of UMass-Amherst, organized a special session on algebraic groups at the sectional meeting of the American Math Society at the University of New Hampshire last spring. His paper, “On the Centralizer of the Sum of Commuting Nilpotent Elements,” was published in a 2006 volume of the Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra, which was dedicated to the 65th birthday of Eric Friedlander.

Mitch McVey, assistant professor of biology, has been named a New Scholar in Aging by the Ellison Medical Foundation. This four-year award provides funding for his lab’s research investigating DNA repair pathways and their dysregulation during aging in the model system Drosophila melanogaster.

Herbert W. Mower, assistant clinical professor of radiation oncology and director of radiation oncology physics at the Lahey Clinic, was elected a fellow of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) at its annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., in July. He is currently serving as vice chair of the American College of Medical Physics (ACMP) and coordinated the organization’s annual meeting in Las Vegas in June. On January 1, Mower will become chairman of the ACMP. As a representative of the ACMP, Mower is promoting the Consumer Assurance of Radiologic Excellence bill before Congress. The legislation will require states, in conjunction with the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, to establish minimum training, experience and continuing education requirements for individuals involved with the use of radiation in medical imaging and/or in the treatment of human patients.

Jocelyn Muller, a Ph.D. student in biology, has been awarded a $13,000 Switzer Environmental Fellowship for the 2006-07 academic year in recognition of outstanding leadership and dedication to working in the environmental field. Her advisor is Astier M. Almedom, the Henry R. Luce Professor in Science and Humanitarianism.

Dr. Siobhan Murphy-Zane, assistant professor of orthopedic surgery, received the St. Giles Young Investigator Award from the Pediatric Orthopaedic Society of North America at its annual meeting in San Diego in May. The award will support her research in scoliosis.

Julie A. Nelson, senior research associate at the Global Development and Environment Institute, has a new book coming out from the University of Chicago Press. Economics for Humans shows how the mistaken belief that economics is separate from ethical values has been used to justify irresponsible corporate behavior, on the one hand, and impoverish workers whose jobs involve care, on the other. Drawing on intellectual history and current affairs, the book points toward more adequate ways of understanding economic life. Nancy Folbre, author of The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, writes that the book is “a stunning rebuke of conventional assumptions that describe our economic system as a robot-like machine. In this deeply intelligent and personally engaging book, Julie Nelson emphasizes the tremendous influence of ethics and emotions on economic outcomes. She challenges both the left and the right to think more creatively about the relationship between love and money.” Nelson traveled to Australia in July for various activities. She was a visiting professor at the Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies at the University of South Australia; she delivered her paper on “Ethics and International Debt” at the International Association for Feminist Economics conference in Sydney; and she attended a meeting of associate editors of the journal Feminist Economics.

Kent E. Portney, professor of political science, was invited to give four talks on sustainable cities policies and programs in the U.S. during April and May. He gave a talk to the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City on April 26; to the Grand Rapids Sustainable Business Forum in Grand Rapids, Mich., on May 8; to the Grand Valley State University/Annis Water Resources Institute in Muskegon, Mich., on May 9; and to the Community Sustainability Partnership Summit in Grand Rapids, Mich., on May 10. See Portney’s web site at http://ase.tufts.edu/polsci/faculty/portney/web.asp and click on “Sustainable Cities” for more information about these presentations.

Todd Quinto, Robinson Professor of Mathematics, co-organized the conference on Mathematical Aspects of Tomography at the Mathematisches Institut Oberwolfach in Germany in July. He co-organized a Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Imaging Science Mini-symposium and presented joint work he did with Summer Scholar Sohhyun (Holly) Chung, A06, on a new method for emission tomography. He gave talks at Indiana University, University of Missouri and Universitaet Karlsruhe, where he was a Humboldt Fellow. Quinto also talked at a CENSSIS (National Science Foundation Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems) forum at a Northeastern University conference that brought together engineers and mathematicians to talk informally about their problems and solutions. He presented his newest uniqueness theorems for sphere transforms on manifolds (curved spaces) at the Tsukuba Conference on Integral Geometry and Harmonic Analysis. The Tsukuba conference was organized by Fulton Gonzalez, associate professor of mathematics, Prof. Toshio Oshima of the University of Tokyo and Prof. Tomoyuki Kakehi of the University of Tsukuba. The conference featured a stimulating atmosphere in which researchers in representation theory and integral geometry presented their latest research. Gonzalez was also awarded a Foreign Research Fellowship for a month of study in July at the University of Tsukuba. He presented his latest results on matrix radon transforms at the Tsukuba conference and on spherical wave equations at a workshop at the Tambara Institute of Mathematical Sciences of the University of Tokyo. In May, Gonzalez gave an invited lecture on integral geometry at the International Conference on Mathematical Analysis and Its Applications in Bangkok, Thailand, and another lecture on representation theory in August at the National University of Singapore.

L. Michael Romero, recently promoted to full professor in the biology department, has received two grants from the National Science Foundation. The first is a three-year award to study how the stress response helps wild animals survive stressful stimuli such as predators, storms or anthropogenic changes. The focus of that research is on wild birds in Massachusetts. The second is a five-year grant to study stress in Galapagos marine iguanas.

Scott Rynne, who has 11 years of college football coaching experience, has been named the new offensive coordinator and receivers coach for the Tufts football team. He previously was the interim head football coach at Pomona-Pitzer College in California. He also has worked as special teams coordinator and defensive backs coach at Union College and as the offensive line coach at Susquehanna University. A 1991 graduate of Williams College, Rynne was a member of the first undefeated team in Ephs history and was the team’s Most Valuable Player. Tufts opens its 2006 football season at home against Hamilton on September 23.

Dr. Ernst J. Schaefer, a Distinguished University Professor and director of the HNRCA Lipid Metabolism Laboratory, has been appointed to the Clinical Research Study Section of the National Institutes of Health. He was also named chairman of the 15th International Symposium on Atherosclerosis, which will take place in June 2009 at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Schaefer has received a specialized clinical center from the NIH along with Dr. Bela Asztalos, a scientist in the Lipid Metabolism Laboratory, and researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Joslin Diabetes Clinic, to examine the effects of an intensive lifestyle intervention program focusing on weight loss, exercise and nutritional supplementation on coronary atherosclerosis in patients with heart disease and metabolic syndrome versus usual care alone as assessed by new prototype 256 slice CT angiography.

Diane Souvaine, professor and chair of computer science, was a visiting scientist at MIT and a Radcliffe Institute Fellow during the 2005-06 academic year. She gave invited presentations on “Computational Geometry and Depth-Based Statistics” at the Radcliffe Institute last November and at Discrete Mathematics and Computer Science Day at Albany in March. She participated in invitation-only workshops on “Computational Geometry for Music Information Retrieval” at the Bellairs Research Institute January 27-February 3 and on “Discrete and Computational Geometry: Twenty Years Later” at the American Mathematical Society Summer Research Conferences June 17-23. At the 22nd annual Association for Computing Machinery symposium on computational geometry in Arizona June 5-7, Souvaine presented “Tight Bounds for Connecting Sites across Barriers,” co-authored with Tufts emeritus professor David Krumme, Tufts postdoctoral associate Eynat Rafalin (Tufts Ph.D. 2005) and Csaba D. Tóth from MIT. At the 2006 International Conference on Robust Statistics in Lisbon, Portugal, from July 16-21, she presented “Medians in Multimodal Data and the New Proximity Data Depth,” coauthored by Rafalin and Kathryn Seyboth, A06. At that conference, graduate student John Hugg, E05, presented “Depth Explorer: A Software Tool for the Analysis of Depth Measures,” joint work with Souvaine and Rafalin.

Judith Stafford, senior lecturer in computer science, presented a tutorial, “Documentation Principles and Practices that You Can Live With,” during the conferences on Quality of Software Architectures and Component-Based Software Engineering (QoSA/CBSE 2006), held June 27-July 1 at Mälardalen University in Västerås, Sweden. She also chaired a session at the workshop on the “Role of Software Architecture in Testing and Analysis,” which was held at the International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis in Portland, Maine, July 17-20. Next summer Stafford, as the general chair, will bring QoSA/CBSE 2007 to Tufts’ Medford/Somerville campus.

Vickie Sullivan, professor of political science and dean of academic affairs for the Arts and Sciences, published the article “Against the Despotism of a Republic: Montesquieu’s Correction of Machiavelli in the Name of the Security of the Individual” in the journal History of Political Thought, Vol. 26 (Summer 2006): 263-289.

Jeff Taliaferro, associate professor of political science, delivered a lecture, “U.S. Grand Strategy Post-Iraq: The Need for Prudent Realism,” at the 60th reunion luncheon for the Tufts Class of 1946 on May 20. He also co-chaired a conference on “Neoclassical Realism, the State and Foreign Policy” at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, on May 24 and 25.

The short story, “Japanese Times,” by Grace Talusan, lecturer in English, won first prize in the Ivy Terasaka Short Story Competition, sponsored by Our Own Voice, a literary journal on the Internet. The story, which is based on her uncle’s childhood experience during World War II, appeared online in the July/August issue at http://www.ourownvoice.com.

Pamela A. Walsh, a graduate student in neuroscience at the Sackler School, attended the Spinal Cord Injury Research Training Program at Ohio State University July 16 through August 5. The three-week program focused on surgical techniques, electrophysiology and anatomical and behavioral analyses of recovery of spinal cord injuries in animal models. The participants also met with patients at the university’s extensive injury clinic to discuss their experiences and priorities for research.

Dr. Xiang-Dong Wang, professor of nutrition and director of the HNRCA’s Nutrition and Cancer Biology Laboratory, presented the invited Elkin Lecture on “Carotenoid Paradox in Cancer Prevention” at the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University on June 30.

Timothy A. Wise, deputy director of Tufts’ Global Development and the Environment (GDAE) Institute, was featured by the author of a weekly news roundup for the German Marshall Fund’s Trade and Development Program who did a taped interview with Wise in May about his new policy brief with GDAE senior researcher Kevin P. Gallagher on the stalled Doha talks. The German Marshall Fund Doha roundup can be found at http://www.gmfus.org/trade/news/article.cfm?id=128 and includes a link to the audio file for the 15-minute interview. Wise and Gallagher’s policy brief, “Doha Round and Developing Countries: Will the Doha Deal Do More Harm than Good,” can be found on GDAE’s website at http://www.ase.tufts.edu/gdae/Pubs/rp/DohaRIS2Apr06.pdf.