For the record
Crown passes to Goldstein
Rodney L. Goldstein became chair of the Medical Center Board of Trustees on June 3, replacing interim chair James S. Crown. The managing director of Chicago-based private-capital-investment firm Frontenac, Goldstein has been a member of the Medical Center board since 1992 and a University Trustee since 2006.
Friedman protest flares again
Ann Beha Architects, a Boston firm known for adaptive reuse of landmark buildings, will assess the Chicago Theological Seminary as a home for the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. The news prompted 174 faculty to sign a petition arguing that the institute "runs contrary to the University's tradition of free inquiry and unfettered debate." President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Thomas F. Rosenbaum responded in a June 9 statement, reiterating the process that led to MFI and calling its "rigorous economics scholarship" a reflection of Chicago's commitment to academic freedom.
An operatic honor
Martha Feldman, professor in music and the College, has received the University of Chicago Press's Gordon J. Laing Prize for her 2007 book, Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy. The Laing Prize honors the faculty author, editor, or translator of a book published in the past three years.
Confucius comes to Chicago
The University has established a campus-based Confucius Institute for research about China, a collaboration with the Chinese Language Council International. Representatives from China's Renmin University and the Chinese Consulate in Chicago joined University and council officials for a June 1 roundtable discussion that marked the institute's opening. A five-member board—Social Sciences Dean John Mark Hansen, Humanities Dean Martha Roth, Vice President for Strategic Initiatives David Greene, and two representatives of Renmin University—will oversee the institute.
Preventative reading
Second-year internal-medicine resident Shantanu Nundy argues that simple, well-established preventative practices—a daily aspirin, flu shots—could save 100,000 lives a year, including his mother's. Nundy's effort to answer her medical questions prompted her son to collect "generally accepted truths" about preventing disease in his 2010 book, Stay Healthy at Every Age: What Your Doctor Wants You to Know (Johns Hopkins University Press). The book includes 18 pages of lists detailing necessary preventative measures at each phase of life.
Grant echoes across the country
A $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities supports the Smart Museum's traveling exhibition Echoes of the Past: The Buddhist Cave Temples of Xiangtangshan. Mixing ancient sculpture with digital reconstruction of dispersed objects, Echoes of the Past will be on view at the Smart from September 10-January 16, with subsequent visits to Southern Methodist University and the San Diego Museum of Art.
Jolly Guggenheim fellows
Three faculty members have received Guggenheim fellowships: Margaret M. Mitchell, professor of New Testament and early Christian literature in the Divinity School, will complete a translation of fourth-century Greek sermons by John Chrysostom; Marta Ptaszynska, the Helen B. and Frank L. Sulzberger professor of music, will use her fellowship to compose a symphony, Of Time & Space; and Adam T. Smith, an archaeologist and associate professor in anthropology and the College, will study the role that material objects play in forming political communities.
Advancement leader
Thomas J. Farrell became the University's Vice President for Alumni Relations and Development July 1. Before coming to Chicago, Farrell was associate vice president for undergraduate and individual giving at the University of Pennsylvania, where his broad set of management responsibilities included serving as lead planner for Penn's $3.5 billion Making History campaign.
Election evolves around Jablonski
Paleontologist David Jablonski was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in April. Jablonski, the William R. Kenan Jr. professor in geophysical sciences, focuses on macroevolution—the study of large-scale evolution above the species level. He is the co-editor of three books, Evolutionary Paleobiology (1996), Patterns and Processes in the History of Life (1986), and The Encyclopedia of Paleontology (1979). He has published more than 100 scientific papers and book chapters.
Sugarmans honor Fermi's finest
The Enrico Fermi Institute presented the 19th annual Nathan Sugarman Awards for Student Research to an undergraduate and two graduate students. Fourth-year Sean Johnson was cited "for his leading role in thoroughly exploring the properties of a probable new class of extragalactic sources." Physics graduate student Alison Brizius, was honored "for her considerable contributions to the QUIET experiment measuring the polarization of the cosmic microwave background." Ryan Keisler, also a physics grad student, has done "groundbreaking studies of the fine angular scale anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background using the South Pole Telescope."
Degrees of achievement
Oceanographer David Karl, astronomer Robert Kirshner, and mathematician Anil Nerode, AB'49, SB'52, SM'53, PhD'56, received honorary degrees at June Convocation. Karl, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii and member of the National Academy of Sciences, studies underwater carbon and nutrient cycles. Research on supernovae by Harvard astronomer Kirshner led to the 1998 discovery that the universe's expansion is accelerating—named "Science Breakthrough of the Year" by Science magazine. Cornell mathematics professor Nerode has advanced the fields of theoretical computer science and mathematical logic.
Kid stuff
A new faculty and staff child-care facility will be built near the Medical Center, Provost Thomas F. Rosenbaum announced in June. A University committee will select a provider to operate the facility, scheduled to open in 2012 with a capacity for 120 children between six weeks and five years old. Rosenbaum said that he expects existing University partnerships with two local child-care providers to continue after the new center opens.
Don't mess with the Zoltan
Assistant professor and research associate Zoltan Takacs has been named a National Geographic "Emerging Explorer." One of 14 "visionary, young trailblazers," Takacs received a $10,000 award to fund his research and exploration. A pharmacology PhD and a professional photographer, Takacs combines interests in drug development and exotic travel to research snake venom, a source in several medications for high blood pressure, heart attacks, and diabetes. "The snake that can kill you," Takacs says, "can cure you."
Serfdom USA
F. A. Hayek's seminal book The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944) rose to No. 1 on the Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com sales charts in June. Talk-show host Glenn Beck recommended the 66-year-old book by the former professor in the Committee on Social Thought, and his audience responded.
Finance research financed
Entrepreneur and investment manager John A. "Mac" McQuown and his wife, Leslie, have made a $25 million gift for a planned Chicago Booth research center. Named for Eugene Fama, the Robert R. McCormick distinguished service professor of finance, and the late U of C Nobelist Merton Miller, a mentor to McQuown and Fama, the center will support and promote faculty finance research.
Sacred composition
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and flautist Shulamit Ran shed light on her creative process May 4 in the annual Ryerson lecture. Ran, a professor of music and the artistic director of the University's music collective, Contempo, explained how she composed an intricately harmonized symphony for voice and instruments based on a poem about the Holocaust for a sacred music festival.
Luce purse strings
Three students have received Luce Fellowships worth a year's tuition and an additional $22,000. Olga Turanova and Jessica Lin in mathematics, and Erin Martell in astronomy and astrophysics, earned the fellowships, which support women who are first-year physical-science graduate students. Martell also won a Microsoft Research 2010 Graduate Women's Scholarship.
The world comes to campus
Dozens of diplomats from Iraq to Lesotho visited the University May 14 as part of a three-day State Department-sponsored tour of Chicago. The diplomats met with faculty, administrators, and students, and attended a breakfast where President Zimmer discussed the historic, scientific, economic, and legal advancements that have happened at the University.
Startup funding bears fruit
Three UChicago startup companies were named in the Science Coalition's list of 100 "success stories" of federally funded research stimulating economic growth. The companies—Chromatin Inc., which develops agricultural and pharmaceutical technologies; Integrated Genomics, whose services support genetic research; and Maroon Biotech, which develops pharmaceuticals—were all founded with University research. Since 1987, the University has seeded 48 startup companies generating more than $91 million in revenue.
Contemporary Hinduism explored
The University's top South Asian studies scholars discussed issues facing Hindu communities in India and beyond at the Divinity School's May conference on contemporary Hinduism. Hindu communities in both India and the U.S. have begun questioning how the culture is represented in a global society, according to Divinity School professor Wendy Doniger, author of the 2009 book The Hindus: An Alternative History, which reached No. 1 on the Indian nonfiction best-seller list.
Stigler's a statistical star
Stephen M. Stigler, the Ernest DeWitt Burton distinguished service professor in statistics, has been named to the Belgian royal academy of sciences. Stigler, one of 50 foreign members, has written about one of the academy's important figures, Adolphe Quetelet, in his History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty Before 1900 (Harvard University Press, 1986) and other publications.
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