University News
NSF Awards $11.97 Million to Caltech for Distributed Data Analysis of Neutron Scattering
The National Science Foundation awarded $11.97 million to the California Institute of Technology for computer software to analyze neutron-scattering experiments. This work could show how to design new materials for a huge variety of applications in transportation, construction, electronics, and space exploration.
The five-year Distributed Data Analysis for Neutron Scattering Experiments (DANSE) project is led by Brent Fultz, a professor of materials science and applied physics at Caltech, with coprincipal investigators Michael A. G. Aivazis of the Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech, and Ian S. Anderson of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
Neutron scattering is a method of analyzing the stability of materials, molecules, and condensed matter at various temperatures and pressures by looking at the positions and motions of the atoms making up the materials. According to Fultz, the research will find the principles of how atoms can be combined to form stable materials and will eventually show how new materials could be optimized for characteristics such as mechanical strength, electrical conductivity, energy storage, and resistance to corrosion.
To date, many neutron-scattering measurements have been impaired by the low intensities of today's neutron sources. This will change in 2008 as the SNS, constructed at a cost of $1.411 billion, begins to operate at high power. The unprecedented quality of data from the SNS will allow a deeper understanding of atom interactions, for example, and will require better methods for interpreting the measurements.
The DANSE project is an opportunity arising from recent developments in computing, materials theory, and the new experimental facilities at the SNS. The project integrates new materials theory with high-performance computing to push the science of the SNS and other neutron facilities to a higher level of sophistication. The project will also extend a capable software framework developed at Caltech to include distributed computing on today's networked computing hardware.
The DANSE project is centered at Caltech where its software technology effort, inelastic neutron-scattering research, and project administration will be conducted. The total grant includes smaller awards to four other universities for subfields of neutron-scattering research-neutron diffraction (Simon Billinge, Michigan State University), engineering diffraction (Erstan Ustundag, Iowa State University), small-angle scattering (Paul Butler, University of Tennessee), and reflectometry (Paul Kienzle, University of Maryland). All these different subfields need advanced scientific computing for comparing experimental data to underlying physical models or simulations, and all will benefit from a shared development effort. DANSE will develop new methods for doing neutron-scattering research in these subfields.
Planning for DANSE began during the Angular-Range Chopper Spectrometer (ARCS) project at Caltech, a five-year, $14.9 million dollar neutron-scattering instrument project initiated in 2001 with support from the U.S. Department of Energy. A detailed plan for DANSE was developed with a $980,000 design award from the NSF to Caltech in 2004. In a series of software releases, the DANSE project will deliver by 2011 a set of capabilities for neutron scattering, tested with actual science.
The NSF funding will also support an outreach effort in teacher education, which is being created by Iowa State University.
The DANSE award is the first construction award made by the Division of Materials Research under the Instrumentation for Materials Research-Mid-Scale Instrumentation Project since its inception in 2004.
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Former University of Vermont Professor Sentenced to Jail for Fraud
Former University of Vermont professor Eric Poehlman on Wednesday became the first academic researcher in the country to be sentenced to prison time for fabricating data in scientific studies.
Poehlman who now lives in Montreal, stood expressionless in federal court in Burlington as Judge William Sessions III chastised him for violating the public's trust and ordered him to spend a year and a day in custody.
In spring 2005 Poehlman pleaded guilty to one count of making false statements in a successful 1999 application to the National Institutes of Health for a $542,000 grant, but he also admitted faking results in numerous studies and proposals for a decade beginning in 1992.
The unprecedented sentence will radiate through the American scientific community with a clear message, Sessions said: Fraud this egregious is unacceptable.
Sessions gave the former academic 60 days to report to whichever facility the federal Bureau of Prisons specifies; the judge said he will recommend Poehlman serve his time at a work camp in Maryland.
Poehlman, who faced up to five years in prison but sought a sentence of probation and community service, declined to comment as he left U.S. District Court after the five-hour hearing. His lead attorney, Robert Hemley, said the defense was considering an appeal. 'A new era' Poehlman worked at UVM's College of Medicine from 1987 to 1993 and from 1996 to 2001. In court Wednesday, he apologized for his conduct, sought forgiveness from those he harmed and asked Sessions for probation and community service.
He said he had developed a new outlook since leaving academia and starting work in Montreal as an elementary and high school teacher.
Hemley had encouraged Sessions to craft a punishment more in line with sentences other researchers received for committing fraud.
Investigators and prosecutors said the case represented the most serious instance of American scientific misconduct in more than 20 years. The government said Poehlman, an expert on the effects of aging on the human body, used grant applications filled with phony data to win $2.9 million in federal money.
The 1999 grant dealt with hormone-replacement therapy for women experiencing menopause.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Kelly said Sessions' ruling could herald a sea change in how the government confronts scientific fakery. Only one other case of research misconduct, in 1988, has been referred for criminal prosecution, and the perpetrator received a suspended sentence.
Sessions focused his ire less on the money Poehlman received through tainted grants than on the impact his spurious findings had on the scientific community, where research often builds on earlier studies. Sessions also was upset with the former professor's aggressive tactics in fighting the allegations after a research assistant discovered and reported them in 2000.
Poehlman for years denied wrongdoing, attacked his assistant's credibility and scientific acumen, and at one point sued UVM in federal court. The lawsuit sought to prevent UVM from turning over to government investigators the incriminating conclusions from the school's investigation into the allegations.
In the lawsuit, Poehlman testified under oath -- in the same courtroom and before the same judge -- that he had not conjured or manipulated his data.
The research assistant, Walter DeNino, now a 29-year-old researcher at a New York City hospital who will begin medical school at UVM in August, said the sentence sends a necessary message.
UVM launched an "exhaustive" review of Poehlman's work that is expected to conclude soon, said Frances Carr, vice president for research and graduate studies. Poehlman's actions were an aberration among scientists, Carr said.
Poehlman has fulfilled other requirements of his sentence, specified in last year's plea deal: pay $180,000 in restitution and $16,000 to cover DeNino's attorney's fees; send 10 letters of retraction to scientific journals that published work based on fabricated data; and agree to a lifetime ban on receiving federal funding.
That, too, was a first for scientific fraud.
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Alumnus Gives $1 Million to Penn Engineering and Law
A $1 million gift from Harold and Renee Berger will benefit the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Law School at the University of Pennsylvania.
The gift will create the Harold and Renee Berger Auditorium and Lobby in Skirkanich Hall, the new bioengineering facility, and the Law School's Harold and Renee Berger Seminar Room. It will also support annual giving at the Law School.
Longtime supporters of Penn, the Bergers previously endowed the Berger Annual Lecture Series and National Award at SEAS, the Honorable Harold Berger Award in Electrical Engineering and the Harold and Renee Berger Endowed Scholarship Fund.
Harold Berger, senior partner and managing principal of Berger & Montague, P.C., a Philadelphia law firm, is a member of the SEAS Board of Overseers, chair of the Friends of Biddle Law Library and former judge in the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia.
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U. T. Dallas Scientists Win Two Awards For Nanotechnology Breakthroughs
Scientists at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) NanoTech Institute, together with an Australian collaborator, learned this week that they have won two awards – one in Australia and the other in the United States – for their breakthroughs in fabricating carbon nanotube yarns and transparent nanotube sheets, which promise important industrial applications.
The UTD team, lead by Dr. Ray H. Baughman, and an Australian colleague, Dr. Ken Atkinson from Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation Textile and Fibre Technology, were awarded the prestigious NanoVic Prize by Nanotechnology Victoria Ltd., a venture involving three universities and the government of the Australian state of Victoria. While interest in exploiting various aspects of the researchers' discoveries is worldwide, the NanoVic Prize, which includes a $10,000 award to team members, specifically recognizes innovation in nanotechnology research of importance to companies in Australia.
The scientists also garnered a Nano 50 Award, presented by NanoTech Briefs, a digital monthly magazine that highlights engineering breakthroughs in nanotechnology and micro-electro-mechanical systems. The annual awards recognize the top 50 technologies, products and innovators that have significantly impacted, or are expected to impact, the state of art in nanotechnology.
The researchers successfully assembled trillions of carbon nanotubes into strong, tough, electronically and thermally conducting nanotube yarns and transparent nanotube sheets and demonstrated their utility for such diverse applications as electronic textiles, protective clothing, artificial muscles, supercapacitors, fuel cells, organic light-emitting displays, solar cells and high-intensity sources of field-emitted electrons for lamps and miniature x-ray tubes. These and other related team advances are covered in a 430-page international patent application, important aspects of which are available for licensing nationally and internationally.
The breakthroughs were first reported in the Nov. 19, 2004 and August 19, 2005 issues of the prestigious journal Science, and subsequently described in television, radio, newspaper and magazine reports around the world. Discover magazine listed the advances as 8th of the 100 most important science news stories of 2005. Team members were also honored last year at an international conference in Frankfurt, Germany, involving 20,000 technologists and industrialists, where they received the New Materials Innovation Prize of the Avantex International Forum for Innovative Textiles.
Individual nanotubes have spectacular properties, including strengths ten times higher than commercial fibers or yarns, a thermal conductivity higher than diamond and a thousand-fold higher current-carrying capability than copper. The challenge has been in developing methods for correctly assembling billion-mile lengths of oriented individual nanotubes for every pound of fabricated yarn and sheet, and doing so at industrially useable rates. The award-winning processes, first demonstrated in UTD NanoTech Institute laboratories, initially used relatively inexpensive multiwalled nanotubes. These multiwalled nanotubes, comprising seamless cylinders of carbon arrayed like rings in a tree trunk, are a thousand times thinner than a human hair and much longer than nanotubes that can be processed in other ways.
Starting from chemically grown, self-assembled structures in which nanotubes are aligned like trees in a forest, the sheets and yarns are produced at up to 10 meters per minute by the coordinated rotation of a trillion nanotubes per minute for every centimeter of sheet width. By comparison, the production rate for commercial wool spinning is 20 meters per minute. Unlike previous fabrication methods using dispersions of nanotubes in liquids, the dry-state process developed by the UTD-Australian team can use the ultra-long nanotubes needed for optimization of properties.
“Industrial interest has been enormous and is accelerating – new inquiries are arriving daily from companies wanting to apply our nanotube yarns and sheets in products,” said Baughman, Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry and director of the NanoTech Institute. “While process and property improvements are still being made, present properties are so remarkable that suggested product names come from the realm of fantasy, including “Mithral,” the fictional material from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and “transparent aluminum” from the science fiction television show Star Trek.
“While transparent and so light that four ounces would cover an acre, the nanotube sheets are stronger than the same weight of steel plate,” Baughman added. “The carbon nanotube yarns are much tougher than graphite yarn and, unlike other yarns and fibers, do not degrade in strength and toughness when knotted or knitted.”
The awardees come from around the world: NanoTech Institute research scientists Dr. Mei Zhang and Dr. Shaoli Fang from China; associate director of the institute Dr. Anvar Zakhidov and institute research scientist Dr. Sergey Lee from Uzbekistan; institute research scientist Dr. Ali Aliev from the Ukraine; Atkinson from Australia; and UTD Physics Department graduate student Christopher Williams and Baughman from the U.S.
The research leading to the awards was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Texas Advanced Technology Program, the Robert A. Welch Foundation, the Strategic Partnership for Research in Nanotechnology and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
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Law School Vice Dean Livingston Nominated to U.S. Court of Appeals
Debra A. Livingston, vice dean and Paul J. Kellner Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, has been nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Livingston is co-author of Comprehensive Criminal Procedure, the leading casebook on criminal procedure and has done pioneering work on community policing. She has written and lectured about domestic surveillance and the delicate balance between security issues and individual rights.
From 1986 to 1991, she was assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, where she prosecuted public corruption cases and served as deputy chief of appeals. From 1994 to 2003, she served as a commissioner of the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board, overseeing complaints about police brutality. She also served as legal consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Bangkok (1982-83) and was an associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Livingston began her academic career in 1992 at the University of Michigan Law School and joined the faculty of Columbia Law School in 1994. As the Paul J. Kellner Professor of Law at Columbia, she teaches criminal procedure and evidence, as well as seminars on national security and terrorism. She co-directs the school's Center on Crime, Community and Law and served as vice dean of the Law School and chair of the Appointments Committee. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and her J. D. from Harvard Law School. After graduation, she clerked for the Honorable J. Edward Lumbard, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
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Oxford Creates UK's First Chair in Law and Finance
Oxford University has created the UK's first chair in law and finance following a donation of more than £500,000 over five years from the international law firm Lovells.
The chair will be known as the 'Lovells Professor of Law and Finance' and is designed to give leadership in the popular fields of corporate securities and financial law, areas of increasing importance among both researchers and post-graduate students studying at Oxford University's Law Faculty, and also in the Saïd Business School and the Department of Economics at Oxford.
The post is due to be advertised over the summer with the successful applicant taking up the position at the beginning of 2007 and initiating a new law and finance course during the autumn.
Financial law is now the most popular choice among Oxford's post-graduate law students. Examples of the graduate work done in this field include analyses of electronic auctions, debt subordination, stock mergers and new approaches to taxing derivatives. International students also research topics from jurisdiction and economies outside Europe and America, such as financial law in Malaysia, Brazilian arbitrations systems or corporate governance in Sri Lanka.
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Professorships at University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration to Advance Research on Mental Health and Major Urban Problems
The study of pressing urban social problems, such as child welfare, public education and community recovery following widespread trauma, will get special attention at the University of Chicago through research done by four current faculty members who have been appointed to named professorships at the University's School of Social Service Administration (SSA).
The scholars named to the chairs are Tina Rzepnicki, who will be the first David and Mary Winton Green Professor at SSA; Mark Courtney, who will be SSA's first McCormick Tribune Professor; Melissa Roderick, who will be the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor at SSA; and Froma Walsh, who will be the first Mose and Sylvia Firestone Professor at SSA. The appointments were effective July 1.
The David and Mary Winton Green professorship is the result of a new $2 million gift to the school by David and Mary Winton Green made to recognize and support the work of a distinguished clinical faculty member. “Supporting the work of the University is our way to show our gratitude for a rewarding education which is still part of our everyday life and to share the experiences with students today,” said Mary Green, a 1949 graduate and former field instructor for SSA. Her husband David is also a graduate of the University of Chicago, having received an A.B. in Economics in 1942 and an A.M. in Social Sciences in 1949.
The couple has also made a gift of a named professorship in the Political Science Department.
Tina Rzepnicki, a distinguished scholar of social work practice, will be the first David and Mary Winton Green Professor at SSA. She is director of the Center for Social Work Practice and principal investigator of the Program Practices Investigation Project with the Office of Inspector General of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
Rzepnicki is currently evaluating the impact of task-centered intervention training delivered to more than 60 employees of the Teen Parent Services Network that covers the greater Chicago area. Collaborating with colleagues from the University of Minnesota, the evaluation will measure changes in job performance of direct service staff and their supervisors.
In addition, she recently piloted the application of root cause analysis to errors in decision making in human services, particularly errors that result in severe injury or death of a child. This method was originally developed to examine catastrophic outcomes in high risk situations, such as airline crashes and nuclear accidents, for the contributions of individual behavior, administrative practices and policies, as well as other contextual factors. Rzepnicki believes that root cause analysis offers the best opportunity to uncover multi-level factors contributing to negative outcomes, in this case, child fatalities. It facilitates the examination of case decision errors by emphasizing the identification of faulty organizational processes that might lead to them. “Root cause analysis seems to hold a lot of promise for human services,” she noted, “because solutions that may prevent similar errors in the future also become evident.”
Widely published in the area of child welfare and social work clinical practice, she has co-authored four books and most recently co-edited, with Harold Briggs, the volume Using Evidence for Social Work Practice: Behavioral Perspectives, in which she also authored several chapters.
Mark Courtney, one of the nation's leading scholars in welfare reform and child welfare services, will be SSA's first McCormick Tribune Professor.
He has been the director of the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago since 2001, but will be stepping down as leader of the child and family policy research center to return full-time to teaching and research effective September 1. He will remain a faculty associate at Chapin Hall.
A common thread running through Courtney's past and current work is a concern about how public institutions deliver social services at the community level. In an early pathbreaking book, co-authored with then-Dean of the University of California-Berkeley School of Social Welfare Harry Specht, Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work has Abandoned its Mission, Courtney urged social workers to return to the origins of the profession in the community and to refine their practice in that context. In more recent research, he has focused on the interaction of communities with child welfare work. “In the child welfare system, for example, there is a push to keep kids in the communities they came from,” noted Courtney. “Yet many policies and practices of child welfare and other formal systems rip children out of their communities.”
Courtney's current work includes a project that uses government administrative data on involvement of Chicago's low-income population in city and state social service, health, and education systems to help program managers better coordinate services. He is also involved in a longitudinal study in Milwaukee County that is following 1,100 families that applied for public assistance in 1999 and two studies of youth who are leaving the foster care system due to reaching the age of majority. One of the latter studies follows 732 youths in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin as they “age out” of foster care, through their 21st birthdays. The other study is a federally-funded experimental evaluation of the effectiveness of programs that are intended to prepare foster youth for adulthood.
This endowed professorship and one at the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies are part of a grant from the McCormick Tribune Foundation to create the Program for Urban and Community Leadership. This program was designed to bring students from the Harris School and SSA together to address issues facing urban communities.
Melissa Roderick, a prominent scholar on education and co-director at the Consortium on Chicago School Research, will be the Hermon Dunlap Smith Professor at SSA. She is an expert in urban school reform, high-stakes testing, minority adolescent development, and school transitions. At SSA, Professor Roderick is the faculty director of the Community Schools program.
Her work has focused attention on the transition to high school as a critical point in students' school careers, and on the transition to college among Chicago Public School students. Roderick's latest work is a joint project between CPS and the Consortium, focusing on the relationship between students' high school careers and preparation, their college selection choices, and their post-secondary outcomes. The first report from this partnership was released in April, in which she announced findings showing that grades are a more important predictor of college enrollment and graduation than entrance exam scores for graduates of Chicago Public Schools. The Consortium study also found substantial differences across colleges in graduation rates among highly qualified CPS graduates, suggesting that college selection matters a great deal. Roderick is also in the midst of a longitudinal study tracking 105 CPS students who have just graduated high school. The study will continue through two years after high school graduation, and also follows those who did not attend college.
From 2001 to 2003, Roderick served the administration of CPS as founding director of the Department of Planning and Development.
The Hermon Dunlap Smith Professorship was established in 1976 in honor of Smith, who was chairman of the SSA Visiting Committee at its first meeting in 1955. He was a distinguished civic leader in Chicago, and served as chairman and chief executive officer of Marsh & McLennan.
Froma Walsh, a leading mental health scholar on family resilience and strengths-oriented, community-based family therapy, will be the first Mose and Sylvia Firestone Professor at SSA. A member of the faculty since 1982, Walsh also has an appointment in the Department of Psychiatry, Pritzker School of Medicine, and is co-director of the Chicago Center for Family Health.
Walsh's scholarly work has focused on the development and application of her research-informed family resilience framework for interventions to strengthen families facing crisis, trauma or loss; disruptive transitions; and prolonged adversity. Her model is used in research, program development and direct practice in many parts of the world. Her most recent work addresses family and community resilience in response to widespread trauma and catastrophic events, including natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, war-related losses, refugee experiences, and terrorist attacks. She will be traveling to Jerusalem on July 11, at the invitation of the United Nations Relief and Work Agency, to provide training for community mental health workers serving children and families suffering severe trauma and loss. “A resilience-oriented approach is valuable in early intervention and prevention of serious, long-lasting post-traumatic stress disorder,” said Walsh.
Her books and articles, hailed as milestones in the clinical literature and widely used as classroom texts, include Strengthening Family Resilience, (2nd ed.); Normal Family Processes: Growing Diversity and Complexity, (3rd ed.); Living beyond Loss: Death in the Family (2nd ed.); Spiritual Resources in Family Therapy; and Women in Families. Professor Walsh has received many honors for her distinguished contributions to theory, research and practice, including awards by the American Psychological Association's Division of Family Psychology, the American Association for Marriage and the Family, and the American Family Therapy Academy (of which she is a past president).
Dr. Mose Firestone, a 1943 graduate of the School of Social Service Administration, is a nationally respected leader in social work and widely credited as a pioneer in psychiatric social work. He was among the earliest proponents within the military in identifying and treating what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder in combat veterans. Firestone and his wife Sylvia, who also spent her career as a professional social worker, live in Beverly Hills, California. The Mose and Sylvia Firestone Professorship was established in 1995.
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Location Chosen for UTA's Smart Hospital
The University of Texas at Arlington School of Nursing has announced the location of a new building to house the Smart Hospital , a simulation learning center for graduate and undergraduate nursing students.
With funding from The University of Texas System ENTER program and a grant from the Amon Carter Foundation, UTA has purchased the Pachl Office and Classroom Annex buildings, located on W. Nedderman Drive. Renovations will take place over the next few months with plans to open the Smart Hospital™ in spring 2007.
The more than 13,000-square-foot, two-building complex will house state-of-the-science patient care units such as an emergency department, intensive care unit (ICU), labor and delivery, pediatrics and medical/surgical rooms with infant, child, adult and birthing manikins, as well as trained actors who play the role of patients and family members.
Currently located in P ickard Hall, the Smart Hospital uses 27 manikins (simulated patients), task trainers and computer simulations of patient conditions/nursing interventions to educate students in acute, trauma, emergency, intensive and primary care interventions. The 12 high-fidelity simulated patients can be programmed to present an array of health care problems across the life span with different degrees of severity and disease variations.
The Nursing ENTER (Enrich Nursing through Exceptional Recruitment) Program is intended to provide a laboratory to retain current faculty and facilitate the recruitment of faculty whose area of interest and research is the use of simulation and technology in the teaching/learning process.
