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One of William Blake’s illustrations for The Four Zoas, one of Blake’s most challenging works. The William Blake Archive has now created a digital edition.

‘Indispensable’ Blake manuscript now online at archive

William Blake’s Vala, or The Four Zoas, is a messy, complex manuscript of nearly 150 pages that has resisted efforts to edit it successfully in print.

“But for those who aim to grasp the full compass of Blake’s artistic, social, and spiritual aspirations, the manuscript is indispensable,” write the editors of The William Blake Archive, including Morris Eaves, a professor of English and the Robert L. Turner Professor of Humanities at Rochester.

They have announced publication of a digital edition based on fresh photography from the British Library.

The digital edition is presented in Preview mode in the Blake Archive, with enlargements and basic bibliographical information but without transcripts or illustration descriptions.

“We’ll continue working on prototypes of digital scholarly editions of The Four Zoas until we arrive at one that can handle the job,” Eaves says. The work is a collaboration between the Blake Archive team and Joshua Romphf, a senior technical associate with the Digital Scholarship Lab in the Humanities Center.

Considered “one of Blake’s most formidable creative efforts, The Four Zoas is a long narrative of nine “nights” that is “epic and cosmic in scope, an attempt to explain the human situation – and to offer a vision of redemption based on a kind of corrected Christianity that requires a complex retelling of the mental, physical, and spiritual history of the world.”

The 20-year-old William Blake Archive, sponsored by the University with the Library of Congress and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has for the first time fully brought together Blake’s writings and illustrations as he originally produced them.

Read more about The Four Zoas and see the digital edition here.


Book chronicles Warner School, community collaboration at Freedom Market

The story of a collaboration among community members and University faculty and students, who transformed an urban corner store—the Freedom Market—into a cornerstone of the Rochester community, is the focus of Community Literacies as Shared Resources for Transformation.

The book, coedited by Joanne Larson, the Michael W. Scandling Professor of Education at the Warner School, and George Moses, executive director of North East Area Development Inc., demonstrates the feasibility of university faculty and students collaborating with community members to produce sustainable social, cultural, political, economic, and educational change.

The Warner School has a long history of partnering with NEAD and several community partners in the city’s Beechwood community. When NEAD purchased the Freedom Market on Webster Avenue more than six years ago, the Warner School’s involvement with one of Rochester’s most impoverished communities continued to grow.

Warner School faculty, including Larson and assistant professor Joyce Duckles, and graduate students have been on the ground working to help transform and rebuild the storefront into a community hub. Throughout the book’s seven chapters, the team of community-university researchers illustrates the complexities with community urban transformation and its related issues through collaborative participatory action research in pursuit of social justice.

“Through this important collaborative activist ground work and research, we hope to show how this unique community-university partnership in Rochester, N.Y. can be replicated more broadly,” explains Larson, “and demonstrate how this can play out in other cities.”

Larson’s research draws on language and literacy practices that mediate social and power relations in literacy events in schools and communities.


In-school care, telemedicine cut ER visits for children with asthma

Children with asthma in the Rochester City School District who received a combination of telemedicine support and school-based medication therapy were less than half as likely to need an emergency room or hospital visit for their asthma, according to new research from the Medical Center.

The new study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, expands on previous research at URMC showing that children with asthma who took their preventive medication under the supervision of their school nurse were less likely to have asthma issues. The addition of telemedicine — which enables a primary care provider to stay readily involved in a child’s care — makes the program more sustainable and scalable, and potentially a model for urban-based asthma care nationally.

“Clinicians and researchers across the country are designing similar programs, using resources available in their communities to reach underserved children with asthma and help them get needed assessments,” says Jill Halterman, chief of the Division of General Pediatrics and the study’s lead author. “But regardless of how you’re reaching them initially, those children may continue to have issues if they aren’t taking their medications regularly. The integration of telemedicine with supervised treatment through school provides one model to ensure that children receive consistent, effective asthma treatment.

The study enrolled 400 students between the ages of 3 and 10 in the Rochester City School District. Half were given their asthma medication by their school nurse; these students had an initial asthma assessment as well as up to two follow-up school-based visits with primary care clinicians via telemedicine over the course of the school year.

The other students were given recommendations for preventive care and advised to schedule follow-up visits with their primary care clinician; these students were not enrolled in the school-based medication program, nor were follow-up visits scheduled by telemedicine.

Students in the first group had more symptom-free days than those in the second group, and only 7 percent of them required an emergency room visit or hospitalization for asthma over the course of the school year, compared with 15 percent in the second group.

Halterman said that the role of the Rochester City School District — and the school nurses, in particular — were critical to the success of the program.

The school nurses didn’t receive additional pay to partner with us on this study — and many of them cover several schools each day,” she said. “They do this extra work because they want to focus on preventing symptoms, and they feel it is important for the health of the children in the district.”

The study was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.


Aluie awarded 90 million more hours on supercomputer

This image is from one of the simulations Hussein Aluie, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and doctoral student Dongxiao Zhao created on the MIRA supercomputer, using a high-performance computing code they developed.

The concept of inertial confinement fusion seems simple enough. Concentrate enough laser energy to implode a spherical target of deuterium and tritium, and it should trigger a self-sustaining fusion reaction that could provide a virtually endless supply of clean energy.

However, despite years of progress at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics and other national labs, the barriers to achieving inertial confinement fusion remain daunting.

Among those barriers are the fluid instabilities that occur during implosion, preventing the fuel core from reaching high enough temperatures and densities.

Last year, Hussein Aluie, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering with expertise in fluid dynamics, was awarded a huge time chunk of time—47 million hours—on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers to create detailed simulations of how those instabilities occur.

His results were so promising that the Department of Energy recently awarded Aluie an additional 90 million hours on the computer—Argonne National Laboratory’s MIRA supercomputer—to conduct additional simulations.

During inertial confinement fusion, lasers compress and heat a small spherical capsule of fusion fuel consisting of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. When energy is applied to the exterior of the capsule, the capsule’s surface explodes outward, causing a reaction force on the inner portion of the capsule, which implodes. The implosion compresses and heats the interior fuel, which undergoes fusion and releases energy.

Fluid instabilities occur when the lasers turn the outer shell into a hot, low-density plasma that pushes against the colder, denser plasma inside, Aluie explains. “It’s like having water over oil. The heavy part is on top and it’s unstable. It wants to sink, and the light fluid wants to rise.” As a result, “different materials start moving through each other, degrading the implosion. It removes heat from the center, and brings in impurities from the outside. The target core doesn’t reach high enough temperatures and densities.”

With the first 47 million hours of access to MIRA, Aluie and his doctoral student Dongxiao Zhao used a high-performance computing code they developed to complete two controlled simulations of fluid instabilities, producing the highest resolution models achieved to date.

With the additional hours, Aluie and Zhao will factor in minute flaws on the target surface or slight variations in laser distribution that can contribute to fluid instabilities. “What we propose is to seed a controlled number of perturbations with specific wavelengths, so we can understand how they couple with each other, and grow at different rates,” Aluie says.

Once researchers have a better picture of what happens during fluid instabilities, Aluie says, they might find ways to overcome them.

Read more here.


Finding cancer's fingerprint

“No two cancers are the same,” explains Yi Ding, associate director of the Molecular Genetic Pathology Unit. “Each delivers customized mutations that cannot be fully anticipated. It’s like a puzzle, and we’re trying to put all the pieces together.”

Ding and her team are keeping Wilmot Cancer Institute at the leading edge of precision medicine. Working closely with Wilmot’s clinicians, they are developing new tests to identify the genetic and molecular features of different cancers. Their work is essential to clarifying diagnosis and informing treatment plans, especially with complex cases. Not only can they help oncologists identify targeted therapies or clinical trials that address those features, their results are also a starting point for monitoring minimal residual disease for clinical and research questions.

Click here for a conversation with Ding, in which she explains more about how molecular genetic pathology is changing the way we understand and treat cancer.


Congratulations to . . .

Mark Bils, who has been elected a fellow of the Econometric Society, an international organization dedicated to advancing economic theory in its relation to statistics and mathematics. Bils, the Hazel Fyfe Professor in Economics, is one of 20 fellows named to the society in 2017, and the fourth member of Rochester’s economics department to be inducted into the society, following Ronald Jones (1971), William Thomson (1990), and Narayana Kocherlakota (2005). Bils’s work has focused on how wages and prices respond to the business cycle, and the repercussions this has for fluctuations in employment. Bils has also studied the role of schooling in explaining a country’s economic growth and has work measuring the economic impact of new and better consumer products. Read more here.


Introducing a new faculty member

Kegon Tan has joined the Department of Economics as an assistant professor.  Tan is an applied micro-economist, broadly interested in the issue of human-capital development and its impact on socioeconomic outcomes. His current work examines the mechanisms by which certain parental choices and skills affect children. Bequests to children are a key factor in parental saving behavior; and the choice of which neighborhood to live in is a key determinant of educational outcomes of children. Tan and coauthors provide the quantitative estimates of these links. In a separate but related work, Tan examines the nurturing effects of the cognitive and non-cognitive skills of parents in transmitting human capital to children. He received his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.


L'Oréal offers scholarships for female postdocs in STEM

Women make up only 24 percent of STEM workers in the United States, only 14 percent of the country’s engineers, and 27 percent of computer science professionals. Without appropriate female representation, the potential science innovations of tomorrow will be missing half of the talent in the world.

L’Oréal USA, in partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, will award five women postdoctoral scientists with grants of $60,000 each for their contributions in science.

The deadline to apply is February 2.

Postdoctoral fellows or colleagues who may be interested in this program, can view the details and apply at: L’Oréal USA For Women In Science.

Since 2003, the L’Oréal USA For Women in Science fellowship program has awarded 70 postdoctoral women scientists more than $3.5 million in grants.


Mark your calendar

Jan. 23: CIRC Winter Boot Camp begins. Helps students, postdocs, research staff, and faculty learn new programming languages and sharpen their computing and data analytics skills. Click here for a list of courses and to register. Space is limited, so register early.

Jan. 31: Deadline to apply for Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) awards to promote inter-institutional research collaboration between faculty, staff, and students from the University and from Research Centers in Minority Institutions (RCMI). For further information, contact Timothy Dye or Ivelisse Rivera. Read more here.

Jan. 31: Deadline to enter the fifth annual America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent Student Competition,  in which students from across the University compete for a chance to present their regulatory science ideas at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Additional information, an entry form, and instructions on how to apply are on the America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent web page. Submit entry forms to Scott Steele by January 31, 2018.

Feb. 1: Deadline to submit initial abstracts for Public Health Science (PHS) pilot projects to stimulate new collaborations with PHS faculty. Proposals are being solicited that support collaborative relationships between investigators who do not have a recent history (past 3 years) of joint funding or who want to expand their current collaborative efforts in new directions and for whom the pilot project would be catalytic in their effort to obtain extramural funding. More information can be found at the PHS website.

Feb. 8: “Deserts, Dust, and Iron Fertilization of the North Pacific Ocean: Cause or Consequence of Global Cooling?” Presented by Carmala Garzione, Helen F. and Fred H. Gowen Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., Feldman Ballroom, Frederick Douglass Commons. Click here to register.

Feb 23: Deadline to apply for University Research Awards. The Request for Proposals and application are available here. Completed applications should be directed to adele.coelho@rochester.edu.

Feb. 23: Deadline to apply for AS&E PumpPrimer II Awards, which provide seed money to stimulate extramural funding for innovative and high-risk projects otherwise difficult to launch. Faculty in Arts & Science should refer questions to Debra Haring, and those in Engineering to Cindy Gary.

March 1: “Doing Better Next Time: Policy Lessons from the Great Recession and Not-So-Great Recovery.” Presented by Narayana Kocherlakota, Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., location TBD. Click here to register.

April 12: “The American Health Paradox: What’s Missing?” Presented by Nancy Bennett, professor of medicine and public health sciences, director of the Center for Community Health, and co-director of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Phelps Colloquium Series. 4-5:30 p.m., Helen Wood Hall. Click here to register.



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Rochester Connections is a weekly e-newsletter all faculty, scientists, post docs and graduate students engaged in research at the University of Rochester. You are receiving this e-newsletter because you are a member of the Rochester community with an interest in research topics.