Posts filed under ‘Eberly College of Science’
Exploring at AstroFest
I don’t know about you, but when I pick up a program at an event and discover that one of the featured presentations is titled “Galactic Cannibalism,” I immediately plan the rest of the evening’s activities around, yes, “Galactic Cannibalism.”
And that did turn out to be one of the highlights of my Thursday night visit to AstroFest, the annual celebration of astronomy that the Department of Astrophysics hosts every year during the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts. But it was just one of many. All of the students and researchers at AstroFest went out of their way to make sure all of us had a good time.
And it’s continuing Friday and Saturday nights, so if you’re in town for Arts Fest, you should stop by. Especially if you’ve got kids. (more…)
Dora the Explorer Has Nothing On Beth Shapiro
I imagine Beth Shapiro is getting used to this sort of thing by now. Named last year as a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius Grant,” Shapiro this week was honored as an Emerging Explorer by the National Geographic Society. Shapiro, an assistant biology professor known for her work studying ancient DNA (like that of the dodo whispering in her ear above), will receive a $10,000 award to “assist with research and to aid further exploration.”
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Trying—Unsuccessfully—to Keep up with Faculty Research
Hershey prof Wafik El-Deiry talks about his cancer research.
One of the challenges in covering research a university as big and diverse as Penn State is that, well, it’s just too big and diverse.
In my previous job (1983-96), I was in charge of communications for the College of Health and Human Development, and I felt like I had at least half a chance to get my arms around things. I knew just about all of the faculty and saw them in the halls regularly. I could tell you that that Barbara Rolls was studying olestra before it became commercially available, that John Beard (now deceased) had just gotten a new grant to look at iron deficiency, or that Warner Schaie and Sherry Willis had a very cool project called the Seattle Longitudinal Study but that the results weren’t quite ready to be reported yet.
Now, of course, I’m editor of the university alumni magazine, and our “beat” is bigger. Waaaaaaaay bigger. It’s hard to know how to learn about all of the research going on—we can’t attend each and every seminar, and I no longer have the luxury of spending an afternoon reading recently funded grant proposals or just-published scholarly papers. I have this persistent sense that we’re not doing such a hot job in the magazine of covering faculty research.
So when I do get to hear a faculty member talk about his or her research, it’s a treat, but it’s also a source of frustration, because it reminds me of how much we’re probably missing.
Steve Schiff
I heard about a bunch of research last weekend as part of the kickoff for Penn State’s new capital campaign, and maybe some of it will end up the magazine eventually. I learned, for example, that the pioneering work done by William Pierce on a heart-assist pump is still ongoing, though Pierce is retired—a guy in bioengineering named Keefe Manning is leading that effort. It’s a good example of where engineering (in this case fluid dynamics) meets medicine, and more and more I’m getting the sense that that intersection of engineering and health sciences is a real strength at Penn State.
I also heard an interesting presentation by Steve Schiff, director of the Penn State Center for Neural Engineering, who has done a lot of public-health research in Africa. He got our attention when he said, “More than one million babies worldwide will die in their first four weeks—of preventable infections.” In Uganda, he has done a lot of scientific detective work—including collecting many specimens of animal dung—to figure out what bacteria are causing hydrocephalus (water on the brain) in infants. The villages’ huts, which are insulated with cow dung, are a very likely culprit: “To be honest,” Schiff said, “I’m surprised any infant survives in this environment.”
Schiff strikes me as the kind of guy who would be good to work with on a magazine story. He’s quotable, good at explaining things in lay terms, and funny. His bio, handed out at the presentation, included this memorable line: “He plays viola in a rather out-of-tune manner.”
In that same session I also heard a Hershey prof named Wafik El-Deiry talk about his cancer research. El-Deiry is chief of hematology/oncology; Penn State just recently lured him away from the University of Pennsylvania. He’s an American Cancer Society Research Professor, which is a pretty rare honor—there are only 40 of them at any given time—and he too is very good at talking about his work in everyday terms. (Any medical researcher who has a Twitter feed is OK in my book.)
El-Deiry’s talk reminded me that there is a ton of research going on at Hershey that we need to learn about. Senior editor Lori Shontz got to see some of it on a recent field trip there, and we really need to do more to familiarize ourselves with what the faculty there are doing—especially the cancer research, which is an increasingly major strength at Penn State.
Tina Hay, editor
Science wing to be named after Stephen Colbert?
Looks like Stephen Colbert may soon make another mark on American history (beyond his TV show and book and existence) as his name has won the most votes for naming the new science wing in Ritenour Building (aka “wait an hour,” as you may have endearingly called it when it was the site of the health center).
The Daily Collegian reports that what started out as a joke between Penn Stater Ian Weissman and his friends turned into a Facebook force to be reckoned with: a group called “Rename The Science Wing After Stephen Colbert!” with almost 1,600 members.
Soon entries for the Eberly College of Science naming contest started pouring in, and Stephen Colbert looks to be the winner, with 85 percent of the vote.
The official name is “S.COLBERT (Science Center Of Learning: Bringing Educational Resources Together).”
“I’m a big fan of the show, and there’s a running joke on it that he gets things named after him, so I thought it would be funny,” Weissman told the Collegian.
Will the name make it past the administration? Possibly—at least until a donor comes along. Unless Stephen Colbert would like to sponsor the new wing like he’s sponsoring the Olympic speedskating team.
Amy Guyer, associate editor
William Hartmann: Mixing Art and Astronomy
William Hartmann ’63 is an interesting Penn Stater whom we’ve talked from time to time about featuring in the magazine at some point. He’s a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, and he also is an artist who specializes in painting the planets and other parts of the cosmos.
Last week he gave a talk on space art at St. Mary’s College of California, and the school’s student newspaper ran a story yesterday about that.
Hartman was a physics major at Penn State; he went on to get a master’s and Ph.D. in geology from the University of Arizona. In addition to his work at PSI, he also has written three college textbooks on astronomy and planetary science, plus some popular-press books, including A Traveler’s Guide to Mars (2003) and The Grand Tour: A Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System (2005), among others.
Tina Hay, editor
Breast Cancer Choices
Monica Morrow ’74 has long contended that some women who are diagnosed with breast cancer are too quick to opt for a mastectomy, when breast-conserving surgery in many cases offers the same survival rate. Dr. Morrow is chief of breast surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York; we ran a Q&A with her on this subject in our September-October 2008 issue.
A new study led by Dr. Morrow finds that physicians are doing a good job of conveying the treatment options to women who have breast cancer, and that 75 percent of the women chose breast-sparing surgery, at least at first. But some still insisted on a mastectomy, not because their doctor recommended it, but because they believed it would improve their odds of survival. The study was published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association; you can read more about it here and here. Read about a related study by Dr. Morrow earlier this year here.
Tina Hay, editor
Philadelphia or Pittsburgh? Discuss.
I love this blog entry by Michael Weinreb ’94 on growing up in State College (his dad is on the faculty in the Eberly College of Science) and having to decide whether he was a Pittsburgh fan or a Philadelphia fan. Mike offers an interesting assessment on the pluses and minuses of each sports city.
Best line:
In Pittsburgh, they name major landmarks after squirrels. In Pittsburgh, they name their beers after metallic ores. In Pittsburgh, they serve the french fries in the sandwich.
Mike, by the way, has written a great feature for us on Wally Triplett ’49 and his teammates on 1946 and 1947 Nittany Lion teams that helped break the color barrier in college football. You’ll see that in our November-December issue.
Tina Hay, editor
Beth Shapiro, Penn State’s Very Own “Genius”
We’d love to take credit for helping Beth Shapiro earn a “Genius Grant,” but we’ve got a feeling the short “Everyday People” profile we ran on Shapiro in our July/August 2008 issue had less to do with this recognition than did her remarkable research.
Shapiro, an assistant professor of biology in the Eberly College of Science, has been named a 2009 MacArthur Fellow for her work studying molecular evolution. She is one of 24 recipients this year of the so-called “genius awards,” given annually to “talented individuals, in a variety of fields, who have shown exceptional creativity, originality, dedication to their creative pursuits, and potential to make important contributions in the future.” The fellowship includes a no-strings-attached $500,000 grant that Shapiro says she plans to put toward further research on evolutionary processes.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Vicki Glembocki on Covering Ronald Mallett
The story in our July-August issue that seems to stick out for most of our readers is Vicki Glembocki’s profile of Ronald Mallett ’69, ’70g, ’73g, a respected physicist who has devoted his career to building a time machine. (Not as impossible a quest as it may seem, by the way.) Mallett’s reason for wanting to go back in time is poignant: He wants to see his father again.
A number of people have commented on how touching the story is. And the other day, a colleague of mine—the editor of the alumni magazine at another school—asked me if I could tell her more about exactly how Vicki reported the story. That is, did she read Mallett’s book? Interview him? Talk to others who know Mallett?
I e-mailed Vicki, and I thought her response was interesting; it reveals a bit about how she approaches human-interest stories like these. I’m printing her comments here with her permission:
Of course, how can you fail with the premise of a guy building a time machine to go back in time to save his father’s life…right?
Mallett’s book was very well written and had lots of detail, though it was lacking in the emotional stuff: how he felt about his dad, and his marriages, and pretty much dedicating his life to a failed project.
When I interviewed him (and I did that in person, on his turf), I asked him to tell me his whole story again, even though I’d already read it, because I knew that what he chose to highlight in talking to me would be the most dramatic/important moments. And that’s when he told me all about Spike Lee and the movie and how he was so worried about who would play his dad, which I would never have gotten had I not talked with him for so long, and if I wasn’t the kind of person who asked personal questions of people not expecting you to ask personal questions.
He was a great interview, though … took me to his apartment, took me to the time machine, etc. I usually just sit with a tape recorder and have a conversation. I feel that taking notes is not only hard, but reminds your source, constantly, that this is an interview-with-a-capital-I. I don’t even have a list of questions out. (Though, it’s in my bag, and I might refer to it at the end just to make sure I have everything.) This was a TON of tape. But it was worth the hours transcribing it.
As Vicki mentioned, Mallett’s book, Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality, has caught the attention of filmmaker Spike Lee, who is planning to make a movie about it.
Tina Hay, editor
“Millennium Science Complex” in the Works
The construction site of the Millennium Science Complex at University Park. Click to see it full-size.
Last evening I took a quick drive up to campus to see if I could get some shots of the construction site for the Millennium Science Complex, which is being built in the space roughly between Eisenhower Auditorium and Pollock Road. Dave Shaffer ’77 of the Center for Performing Arts had posted on his Facebook page last week a panoramic shot he took from the top of the Eisenhower Parking Deck, and I wanted to see if I could get something similar.
Turns out you can’t really get to the top of the parking deck—at least not legally (uhhhhhh … Dave?). Some sort of construction has the access blocked off, so I had to shoot from the next-to-top deck. That, plus the fact that the sun was getting low in the sky, cast a bit of a shadow over the foreground of the photo. I’ll have to go back another time and try again.
What you see here isn’t a panoramic; it’s just an ultra-wide-angle shot. I did also take some photos for use in stitching together a panorama in Photoshop, and maybe we’ll run one of those in the magazine sometime. (If you’re interested in learning how to make panoramas in Photoshop, just Google “Photoshop photomerge”; it’s a fun and fairly easy technique.)
Just to orient you in this photo: Eisenhower Auditorium is behind you; the dorms you see just above the center of the photo are Pollock Halls; and that’s Mount Nittany in the distance, of course.
You can read more about the Millennium Science Complex at the link above, and also here. We really haven’t covered it in the magazine yet, and we probably should. It’s being designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects, so it will probably be amazing. It’s scheduled for completion in 2011.
Tina Hay, editor
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