Spectrum - Volume 19 Issue 27 April 10, 1997 - Achievers

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including The Conductor , a special section of the Spectrum printed 4 times a year

ACHIEVERS

Spectrum Volume 19 Issue 27 - April 10, 1997

Ansar S. Ahmed, an associate professor in the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology, presented two papers at international symposia. "A novel non-radioactive diagnostic test for evaluating cell-mediated function in the chicken" was presented at the Twentieth World Poultry Congress in New Delhi, India. Ahmed also presented "Antiphospholipid antibodies in estrogen-treated normal mice" at the Seventh International Symposium on Antiphospholipid Antibodies in New Orleans.

John C. Lee, associate dean for research and graduate studies in the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, was presented the Virginia Veterinary Medical Association's "1997 Friend of the VVMA" award during their recent annual meeting in Norfolk. Lee was honored for his efforts in support of companion-animal research.

David Moore, director of laboratory animal resources at Virginia Tech and associate professor in the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology, made a presentation at the 47th national meeting of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science in Minneapolis. Moore presented "An overview of alternative technologies for disposal of pathological and infectious waste."

Lisa Aumiller , a second year DVM student in the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, has been awarded a $5,000 summer fellowship from WARDS, a national organization "Working for Animals Used in Research, Drugs, and Surgery." Aumiller will conduct a summer research program designed to evaluate and identify methods for minimizing stress experienced by laboratory animals.

Marion Ehrich, a professor in the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology, was recently honored by the Society of Toxicology (SOT) during their annual meeting in Cincinnati. Ehrich received a commendation from the SOT's Education Committee and Sub-Committee for Minority Education Initiatives for her "decisive and unwavering contributions on behalf of toxicology education, and for pioneering leadership as a champion of minority education programs of the society."

Craig Thatcher , head of the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine's Department of Large Animal Clinical Sciences, and Nathaniel White II, the Theadora A. Randolph professor of surgery at the EMC, made presentations at "Equine Nutrition 101." The program was held at the Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center at Morven Park in Leesburg. Thatcher is a diplomate in the American College of Veterinary Nutrition and White is a diplomate in the American College of Veterinary Surgeons.

Karen Roberto , director of the Center for Gerontology and a Family and Child Development faculty member in the College of Human Resources and Education, and Rosemary Blieszner , associate director of the Center for Gerontology and a family and child development faculty member, have been named 1996-97 AGHE fellows in Gerontology and Geriatric Education by the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education. AGHE fellow status recognizes outstanding leadership in gerontology and geriatric education by established scholars and educators. Fellows are selected on the basis of outstanding achievement in teaching, scholarship, and research on educational issues; influential research publication or theoretical contributions used in gerontology and geriatric education and training; or leadership in administration and funding of gerontology and geriatric educational programs, including development of new programs.

Phyllis Greenberg , doctoral candidate in adult development and aging in the department of Family and Child Development, has been appointed to the Task Force on Women of the Gerontological Society of America. The Task Force is charged with working on ways to increase research on and knowledge about older women, increase the use of research on older women in policy and program development, and expand leadership opportunities for scholars, educators, and policy makers who work to benefit older women.

Eric Wiedegreen and Anna Marshall-Baker of the interior design faculty in the College of Human Resources and Education received a First Place Regional Chairs' Award for their poster presentation "Using Universal Design as a Core College Issue" at the 1997 Interior Design Educators Council International Conference, held in Cincinnati in March. Joan McLain-Kark , associate professor in the department of Housing, Interior Design, and Resource Management, and Pat Lindsey , Ph.D. '96, received the "best paper" award (out of 31 presented) at the conference. Their paper was titled "Comparison of Virtual Reality and Real Observations for Perception of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center."

Interior design junior Hansoo Kim received a Best in Show Award for the IDEC student international design competition. In addition to the $750 cash award for Kim, his sponsoring faculty members, Wiedegreen and Marshall-Baker, will receive an all-expense paid trip to the BASF Design Conference.

Layne Watson of the computer-science department presented "Aircraft multidisciplinary design optimization using design of experiments theory and response surface modeling" at the NASA Langley Workshop on Multidisciplinary Design Optimization in Hampton. The paper was co-authored by Anthony A. Giunta (AOE), Vladimir Balabanov (AOE), Dan Haim (CS), Bernard Grossman (AOE), William H. Mason (AOE), and Raphael T. Haftka (Aerospace Engineering, University of Florida).

Timothy W. Luke, professor of political science, presented the opening keynote address, "Miscast Canons? Universities and the Liberal Tradition in an Era of Flexible Specialization," at a conference on the political economy of higher education in Chico, Cal., sponsored by California State University-Chico and The Telos Institute. Luke was invited to open the Radical Philosopher's Association national meetings at Purdue University. He presented a paper entitled "The Disciplinary Governmentality of Environmentalism." He also made a presentation to the Department of Political Science at Purdue on the Unabomber affair, "Slow Burn, Fast Detonation, Killer Fragments: Re-Reading the Unabomber Manifesto."

Luke also presented a paper, "The Politics of Cyberschooling at the Virtual University," to the Virtual University Symposium, a major international conference convened at the University of Melbourne. This address examined the politics and economics of virtual educational environments as well as the development of Virginia Tech's cyberschool initiative. During this trip to Australia, he also was invited to address the faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, where he discussed his research on politics and ecology, "Environmentality as Green Governmentality: Geo-Power/Eco-Knowledge as Tactics of Normalization."

Luke's article "Humanities, Multimedia and the Information Society" was published in Sites: A Journal for South Pacific Cultural Studies . He presented this paper as the opening keynote address to the New Zealand Academy for the Humanities in Wellington last year at the conclusion of his service as the Fulbright professor for the culture and politics of the Information Society at Victoria University. This issue of Sites also carries an extensive interview of Luke by Keith Beattie, a Sites editorial board member in the Department of History at Massey University, addressing Luke's work on social theory, culture and the environment.

Luke has published three related articles on the politics of cultural representation at major museums. "Picturing Politics at the Exhibition: Art, History and National Identity in the American Culture Wars of the 1990s" appeared in The Australasian Journal of American Studies, "Inventing the Southwest: A Re-Examined History, the Heard Museum, the Fred Harvey Company, and Native American Art" was published by Art Papers , and "Memorializing Mass Murder: Entertainmentality at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum" appeared in Arena Journal.

Bruce Wallace, university distinguished professor of biology, chaired a session on "Population Differentiation and Speciation" at a colloquium on Genetics and the Origin of Species sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences. The colloquium was in honor of the 60th anniversary of Theodosius Dobzhansky's book Genetics and the Origin of Species . Wallace was one of Dobzhansky's graduate students. Three Virginia Tech graduate students, Alicia Schultheis, Jason Bond , and David Duvernell , attended the colloquium at the NAS Beckman Center at the University of California, Irvine.

Edward Fox of the Department of Computer Science presented two talks on digital libraries to Ohio State University. The first presentation was titled "National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations" and was hosted by the Graduate School and library. The second talk, "Digital Libraries: Theory, Educational Applications, and Use," was presented as part of the colloquium series for Ohio State Department of Computer and Information Science.

Matthew McAllister 's book The Commercialization of American Culture: New Advertising, Control and Democracy (Sage, 1996) was chosen by the January 1997 issue of Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book of 1996. Across 54 academic disciplines Choice recognized 641 books as OAB's; McAllister's was one of eight in the communication discipline so designated.

Mary Beth Rosson of the Department of Computer Science attended the HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) Consortium Winter Workshop in Colorado in February. At the workshop, Rosson presented "Reaching Out Over the Web: Sharing and Annotating Stories of Web Use." Also attending the workshop were computer-science Ph.D. candidates Hope Harley , Neil Kipp , and Joe Reiss. Each student presented a poster describing his or her dissertation research at the workshop.

Dan Mosser of the English department has received a Bibliographical Society (London) fellowship of 500 pounds to carry out research on the provenance of manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales .

Len Scigaj of the English department and Nancy Simmons of humanities in the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies have had their book review of Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture published in the October issue of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

Dennis Welch of the English department has his book review of Blake's Illuminated Books. Vol. 1 Jerusalem , edited by Morton D. Bailey, published in the January issue of English Studies.

Johann Norstedt of the English department recently published two entries in the Dictionary of Irish Literature, Revised and Expanded Edition edited by Robert Hogan. The entries are "Anthony Cronin" and "Thomas McDonagh."

Lisa Norris of the English department has had her short story "Interior Country" published in Kansas Quarterly/Arkansas Review .

Christine Kiebuzinska of the English department has had her book review including two books, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre and Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Biomechanics: Actor Training in Revolutionary Russia , published in Theatre Journal .

Jeff Mann of the English department has had his poem "Hilldale Woodgathering" published in Eureka literary magazine. Mann's poem "Hawaii Kai" was published in Amethyst.

Tiffany Trent, a graduate student in the English department, won second prize in non-fiction in the national writing competition sponsored by the AWP (Associate Writing Programs). The contest is offered to students in the creative writing programs of its 300 member institutions. Trent wrote her winning essay, "The House that Jack Built," while she was part of Simone Poirier-Bures's special study course "Writing Creative Non-Fiction." Her essay will be published in one of nine participating national literary magazines.

Joe Eska of the English department has had his article "On Syntax and Phonology Within the Early Irish Verbal Complex" published in Diachronica.

Katherine Soniat of the English department has had her poem "Oil and Water" published in Crazy Horse .

A paper by Marion R. Reynolds Jr . has been awarded the Best Paper Award for 1996 by IIE Transactions. The paper is titled "Variable-sampling-interval Control Charts with Sampling at Fixed Times." Reynolds, a professor in the Department of Statistics, will present his paper and will receive his award at the Industrial Engineering Research Conference in Miami in May 1997.

"Rootfree Blossomfree," Gyorgyi Voros 's review of Jori Graham's books Materialism and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 , was published in Terra Nova . Also, Voros's book Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens has just been published by the University of Iowa Press. Voros teaches in the English department.