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 Maria Kukuruzinska, professor in BUSDM's Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, has been selected to serve as chair of one of the first Roadmap reviews to be conducted by the National Institutes of Health.
 Salomon Amar, professor of periodontology and oral biology, has been named to the FDA's Dental Products Panel. This panel, a subsidiary of the Medical Devices Committee, reviews and evaluates data on the safety and effectiveness of marketed and investigational progducts and makes recommendations for their regulation.
Margrit Betke, an associate professor in Boston University’s Computer Science Department and director of undergraduate studies in the department , has been selected as one of 10 “Women to Watch in New England” by the Boston-based business and technology newspaper Mass High Tech.
 Stan Sclaroff, an associate professor of Computer Science, has been elevated to the rank of a Senior Member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). Sclaroff founded the Image and Video Computing group in the Department of Computer Science in 1995.
David Starobinski, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has received an Early Career award from the U.S. Department of Engergy for a research project entitle, "A Theory of Stability for Communication Networks."
Courtenay Harding, professor of rehabilitation counseling and director of the Institute for the Study of Human Resilience at Sargent College is the recipient of the Alexander Gralnick Investigator Research Award. This award presented biennially by the American Psychological Foundation, recognizes "exceptional individuals working in the area of serious mental illness."
 Bahaa Saleh, chairman of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and CenSSIS deputy director, was honored with the 2004 BACUS Award. Formerly the "Bay Area Chrome Users Society" and now part of SPIE, BACUS is the most influential international voice of the photomask industry. Saleh was honored for his work on Optical Proximity Correction (OPC), or the introduction of deliberate changes in the mask to equalize known optical error in the lithographic system. OPC has become a mainstay for the huge photomask industry.
Donald C. Fraser, director of the Photonics Center, received the 2003 Roosevelt Gold Medal for Science from the Navy League of the United States for lifetime technology achievement and for his contributions to the creation and development of public and private sector enterprises exploiting the technology of light.
Geoffrey Hill (UNI) was elected an Associate Fellow by the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick (UK).
Hans Kornberg (UNI) was elected an Honorary Fellow by the Institute of Biology, the highest honor awarded by the Institute which is the principal organization for biologists in the UK. He also received the Distinguished Service Award of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Bruce Redford (UNI) is the recipient of a Senior Fellowship of the National Humaities Center in North Carolina for 2004/05. This Fellowship is offered once a year by invitation only to a distinguished art historian.
 Rosanna Warren (UNI) was awarded a prize in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her recent book "Departure: Poems" was a finalist for the 24th Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry.
Robert Master (SPH), associate professor of health services, was selected as a recipient of the 2004 Massachusetts Heal Council Award from the Massachusetts Health Council. This annual award recognizes outstanding contributions of physicians who have dedicated their lives to addressing the health care needs of vulnerable populations.
Michael Grodin (SPH) professor of health law, bioethics, and human rights, has been elected to the Gold Humanism Honor Society, a national public foundation dedicated to fostering humanism in medicine. [Oct. 18]
 Elaine Alpert (SPH) Associate professor of social and behavioral sciences, has received the Family Violence Prevention Fund's Educator Award from the National Conference on Health Care and Domestic Violence.
Winnie Roche (SPH) assistant professor of health law, has been appointed by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to serve as a member of the Catastrophic Illness in Children Relief Fund Commission. The commission acts as the final authority in reviewing expenditures from the fund, which was established as a safety net for families who live in the Commonwealth. Information on the fund is available at www.mass.gov/cicrf. [Sept. 24]
The Lead-Safe Yard Project, an intervention that H. Patricia Hynes (SPH) professor of environmental health, and EPA Region 1 conducted with community partners, including the Bowdoin Street Health Center and city health and housing agencies, has been selected as one of 10 case studies featured by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Prevention Institute, as national examples of built environmental interventions that affect community health. The CDC-funded project, "The Built Environment and Health," will be featured on the CDC and Prevention Institute's respective Web sites. [Sept. 17]
 Robert E. Murowchick, research associate professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, has received an Asia project grant of $190,000 from the Henry Luce Foundation to support a volume he is editing on bronze metallurgy in China. The volume will be part of a series, entitled Science and Civilisation in China, published by the Joseph Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, England.
Murowchick is director of the International Center for East Asian Archaeology and Cultural History (ICEAACH) at Boston University. He is one of the founding editors of the new Journal of East Asian Archaeology (JEAA) which is edited at BU and published by Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden. He is also an Associate in East Asian Archaeology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Photo: Excavations at the Neolithic site of Shantaisi, Henan province, China. The Sino-American team, from left: Li Yung-ti (Harvard University), Gao Tianlin (Institute of Archaeology, CASS), Leng Jian (Washington University, St. Louis), Robert Murowchick (Co-PI, Peabody Museum, Harvard and ICEAACH, Boston University), and Zhang Changshou (Co-PI, Institute of Archaeology, CASS).
Saligrama honored with Presidential Early Career Award
 Venkatesh Saligrama, assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Established in 1996, this is the nation's highest honor for professionals at the outset of their independent research careers. Saligrama was nominated by the Department of Defense, one of eight federal departments and agencies that annually nominate scientists and engineers at the start of their careers whose work shows the greatest promise to benefit the nominating agency's mission.
 (Boston, Mass.) — H. Eugene Stanley, a professor of physics at Boston University and director of its Center for Polymer Studies, has been elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The election, held during the Academy’s 141st annual meeting today, added 72 new members from U.S.-based institutions and 18 new foreign associates from 13 countries to the NAS roster.
Election to membership in the Academy is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a U.S. scientist or engineer. Individuals are elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. The current group of new members brings the number of active Academy members to 1,949. The new foreign associates bring the number in this NAS body to 351.
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When freshman Benjamin Lambert arrived on campus for the 1951–52 academic year, he wasn’t sure how he was going to pay for his tuition and student fees. His widowed mother, with five other children, did her best to support him, and with a small scholarship from his high school and a part-time job, he made ends meet until spring, when the University awarded him an Augustus Howe Buck Scholarship covering full tuition and providing a stipend for living expensess. Read the full story
Boston University has been at the forefront nationally in fostering creative and productive collaboration in the sciences and engineering. Recently life science researchers on both the Medical and Charles River campuses gathered for a full-day retreat to explore new possibilities for collaboration across departments, schools, and campuses. Presentations from the retreat are now available online.
$10 million grant from NIAAA funds new SPH center to study youth drinking, promote public awareness
 Ralph Hingson has long been concerned about the effects of alcohol on public health, and especially on the lives of young people. Numerous studies by the associate dean for research and professor at the School of Public Health have shown that drinking takes a devastating toll on the nation's youth.
On February 17, however, Hingson had cause to smile, and not merely because West Virginia had just become the 47th state to lower its threshold for impaired driving from .10 blood-alcohol content to .08 — a law whose implementation he has been pushing nationwide. On the same day, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) announced a $10 million grant to SPH to fund a Center to Prevent Alcohol-Related Problems Among Young People. Read the full story
 Boston University unit signs memorandum of understanding with Opticsvalley
(Boston, Mass.) — Boston University President ad interim Aram Chobanian and Photonics Center Director Donald Fraser recently joined Francis Mer, France’s Minister of Economy, Finance, and Industry, in announcing a joint initiative for technology commercialization and company development in optics and photonics. The memorandum of understanding between the Center and France’s Opticsvalley, a consortium of optics and photonics companies, aims to foster the establishment of French start-up companies in the United States. Read the press release
Photo: Abdel Soufiane, Verrillon CEO (left); Donald Fraser, Photonics Director; Francis Mer, French Minister of Economy, Finance, and Industry; Aram Chobanian, BU President ad interim.
With approximately 500,000 foster children in the United States today, more than 20,000 leave or "age-out" of foster care each year upon reaching their 18th birthday. Many of these young adults need to deal with employment, education, housing and health, skills on their own. For this reason, it is vital that the nation's welfare workers, the people who teach these young adults important life skills, be properly trained.
To address this, the Boston University School of Social Work will assess how well federally funded child welfare training programs meet this need. The school's efforts will be supported by a three-year $1,049,180 grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's National Children's Bureau.
Under the direction of Dr. Mary Elizabeth Collins, an associate professor and director of the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in sociology and social work, the grant establishes the National Evaluation Project which is aimed at assessing the welfare worker training program. (from the Allston-Brighton Tab, January 16, 2004)
 On January 14, President Bush proposed that NASA make a return trip to the moon by 2020, and eventually send astronauts to Mars and beyond. What will astronauts eat on these long flights in space, and how will they stay fit?
At present, with a stepped-up focus on studying how humans can live off the Earth for long periods, nutrition experts such as Caroline Apovian are helping establish healthful and tasty diets for astronauts on prolonged missions, as well as developing a minimal set of clinical measurements and evaluations to assess crew health and fitness. Read the full story
 As NASA's space rover Spirit pokes around the surface of Mars collecting and analyzing samples of sediment for the next three months, scientists will wait eagerly for signs of water and life on the red planet. But for Paul Withers, a CAS research associate at the Center for Space Physics, the most exciting part of Spirit's trip is over. An expert in the upper regions of the Martian atmosphere, Withers is interested in the aerodynamic measurements Spirit took as it approached Mars, so he can better understand how the chemistry and dynamics of its atmosphere compare to those of Earth's. Read the full story
 From a distance, the millions of Brazilian free-tailed bats pouring out of south-central Texas caves and spreading out against the deep blue summer evening sky look like huge plumes of smoke. With a sound like sheets snapping in the wind, the bats emerge from their daytime resting places in seemingly endless dark swaths — their exodus from a large cave can take as long as four hours. Like the locals who pile onto specially built grandstands to watch the spectacle, Thomas Kunz is awestruck before what he calls one of “the great wonders of the world.” Read the full story
A BU celebrity sighting — in a September Boston Herald column usually reserved for Hollywood luminaries? True, Les Kaufman's appearance in the newspaper played second fiddle to a Jennifer Lopez–Ben Affleck wedding rumor, but the CAS professor of biology is still pleased. Read the full story
Shocking kidney stone
 Robin Cleveland has never had a kidney stone, but he can sympathize with friends, colleagues, and the 1.3 million Americans who develop the excruciatingly painful stones every year. About 10 percent of Americans will have a kidney stone at some point in their lives, Cleveland says, and in most cases, doctors will use shock waves to slay the demons of the urinary tract. Extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL), as the procedure is known, “works beautifully,” he says. “It's completely revolutionized the treatment of kidney stones. But there are growing concerns that doctors have not given enough attention to the fact that shock waves can do some damage to the tissues around a stone.” Read the full story
 Former director of Fogarty Center will Lead BU Programs in International Health Research and Education
In a move that underscores the world-class role of Boston University in the growing field of global health, President ad interim Aram Chobanian named Gerald T. Keusch, M.D., to head up the University’s international health efforts. Keusch currently is the associate director for international research and director of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The addition of Keusch highlights the pivotal role Boston University has in this field and signals its commitment to increasing its position as a leader in research and education in global health. Read the full press release
Seven Researchers receive Special Program for Research Initiation Grants (SPRInG awards)
SPRInG awards, inaugurated by the Provost in 2001, provide seed money to help launch and develop new, cross-disciplinary research projects on the Charles River Campus. The aim of this program is to encourage innovative new projects that require an initial research effort in order to be competitive for significant, long-term, extramural support.
2004 SPRInG award winners include:
Matt Wachowiak (CAS/Biology) and Howard Eichenbaum (CAS/Psychology): Imaging olfactory activity in the awake behaving brain
Michael Ruane (ENG/ECE): Test cell resonant cavity imaging biosensors
Tejal Desai (ENG/BME), Paul Cook (CAS/Biology), and Tania Vu (ENG/BME): Quantum dot probes for visualization of physiological activity in living neural circuits of the retina
Joyce Wong (ENG/BME) and Baltazar Aguda (MED/Genetics, Genomics): Development of an integrated experimental and computational platform to probe endothelium-induced control of cell cycle and apoptosis in smooth muscles
Harlan Spence (CAS/Astronomy) and Rick Murray (CAS/Earth Science): Paleo solar activity: Revealing ancient space weather through analysis of NO(y) impulsive precipitation events in polar ice
James McCann (CAS/Center for African Studies, History)" New evidence of disease effects of agro-ecological change
Mary Erskine (CAS/Biology): Estrogen receptor knock-out mice and initiation changes of pregnancy
Further information about SPRInG awards
 Sir Hans Kornberg, a UNI professor, director of UNI, and a CAS professor of biology, was elected by the Institute of Biology, the principal organization for biologists in the United Kingdom, as an honorary fellow, the highest honor awarded by the institute.
(Boston, Mass.) — H. Eugene Stanley, a professor of physics at Boston University and director of its Center for Polymer Studies, has been named to receive the 2004 Boltzmann Award. This award, presented every three years by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) Commission on Statistical Physics, honors outstanding achievement in the subfield of physics known as statistical physics. The award presentation will take place during the Commission's upcoming international meeting, Statphys 22, to be held in Bangalore, India, July 4–9.
In submitting his nomination to the Commission, the signatories — a group that included five recipients of the Nobel Prize — characterized the research papers produced during Stanley's nearly four decades of scientific endeavor as innovative and original, noting that many of the papers had “an outstanding impact, some of them even in scientific disciplines outside of physics. ”
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 Jim Collins, professor of biomedical engineering and co-director of the Center for BioDynamics and director of the Applied BioDynamics Laboratory, has been named one of twenty-four MacArthur Fellows for 2003. Commonly known as the "genius" awards, each of the fellows receives $500,000 in “no strings attached” support for a period of five years.
According to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Fellows Program is designed to emphasize the importance of the creative individual in society. Fellows are selected for the originality and creativity of their work and the potential to do more in the future. Candidates are nominated, evaluated, and selected through a rigorous and confidential process. No one may apply for the awards, nor are any interviews conducted with nominees.
Sometime last week Collins received a phone call from the Foundation. “The call comes out of the blue and can be life-changing,” said Jonathan F. Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation. “ The Fellowship offers highly creative people the gift of time and the unfettered opportunity to explore, create, and accomplish.”
Collins received the award for his work in applying principles of physics and mathematics to the solution of biological problems. He works on both the organism and the cellular level. A recent paper published in the British journal, Lancet, established new advances in work Collins originated that uses vibrational noise applied to the bottom of the feet through innersoles, to enhance balance and prevent falls. In other recent work (see research brief) Collins applied systems similar to those used to engineer large communication and control systems to understand how genes and proteins interact to regulate processes within a cell, a tissue, or an organism.
Nancy Kopell, professor of mathematics, and co-director with Collins of the Center for BioDynamics is also a MacArthur Fellow (1990).
 $1.5M award for career contribution to the humanities expected to launch first-ever edited collection of the works of Victorian legal thinker Sir James Fitzjames Stephen
Christopher Ricks, a professor at Boston University and a well-known literary critic, has been named a recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award for significant contributions to the humanities.
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 Alan H. Strahler, professor of geography has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for his pioneering work in remote sensing of land cover and land cover dynamics, including modeling and testing directional reflectance of plant canopies.
Three hundred forty eight individuals were elevated to this rank because of their efforts to advance science or applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. New Fellows will be presented with an official certificate and a gold and blue (representing science and engineering, respectively) rosette pin Saturday, February 14, at the Fellows Forum during the 2004 AAAS Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington.
Strahler has pioneered the use and development of geometric-optical models of reflectance of forest canopies. He is currently a member of the science team for the MODIS instrument to be included in NASA's EOS program. His roles for the science team are to provide global land cover and land cover change maps, and a bi-directional reflectance (BRDF/albedo) product to be used in correcting many of the MODIS products such as vegetation indices. Additionally, he has a joint research project with the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on measurement and modeling of bi-directional reflectance of a variety of vegetation canopies.
 Biomedical Engineering Professor Herb Voigt was recently inducted into Johns Hopkins' Society of Scholars. The society was established to honor the significant accomplishments of men and women who spent part of their careers at Johns Hopkins
The first of its kind in the nation, the society inducts former postdoctoral fellows and former junior or visiting faculty at Johns Hopkins who have gained marked distinction in their fields of physical, biological, medical, social or engineering sciences or in the humanities and for whom at least five years have elapsed since their last Johns Hopkins affiliation.
The Committee of the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars, whose members are equally distributed among the academic divisions, elects the scholars from the candidates nominated by the academic divisions that have programs for postdoctoral fellows. There are currently 445 members in the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars
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Tejal Desai . . . one of PopSci's "Brilliant 10"
 Tejal Desai, an associate professor of biomedical engineering has been named one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10". This is the magazine's second annual list of ten young scientists who are doing extraordinary work. Desai was recognized for her work in the field of tissue engineering.
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