Sarah C. Mangelsdorf, who was named president of the University this week, is an experienced academic leader recognized for her work on issues of academic quality, educational access, and diversity and inclusion at some of the nation’s leading public and private institutions.

Currently the provost at the University of Wisconsin­–Madison, she is also a professor of psychology who is internationally known for her research on the social and emotional development of infants and young children. Mangelsdorf will be the first woman to lead the University when she formally takes office in the summer of 2019. She will succeed Richard Feldman as the University’s chief executive.

Mangelsdorf currently serves as the chief operating officer at Wisconsin, where her responsibilities include oversight of all academic programs and budget planning for 12 schools and colleges, including Education, Business, Engineering, and Graduate Studies, as well as the Schools of Medicine and Public Health and of Nursing, which are affiliated with UW Health, the integrated health system of the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

She served as dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University before becoming provost at Wisconsin in 2014. She began her academic career at the University of Michigan and in 1991 moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she later was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Colleagues throughout her career have recognized her as a leader who creates a collegial climate and who is admired and respected for her integrity and her ability to make hard decisions in a fair and transparent way. She has earned wide recognition for developing important strategic initiatives tailored to the goals of each institution and for taking a leading role in building both financial and institutional support for those goals.

She is a third-generation academic: her father, Paul C. Mangelsdorf Jr., was a professor of physics at Swarthmore College and her grandfather, Paul C. Mangelsdorf, was a professor of botany at Harvard University.

Read more here.

Eight of Claude Monet’s more than 40 paintings of the same scene—London’s Waterloo Bridge— are on display at the Memorial Art Gallery. In these paintings, the impressionist artist manipulates viewer perception in a way that scientists at the time did not completely understand.

Today, research conducted at the University’s Center for Visual Science provides insight into the complexity of the visual system, illuminating Monet’s processes and the intricacies of his work.

An article on this research, written by Lindsey Valich, explains:

• how our eyes and brain work together to allow us to see color.
• how the visual system got so complicated.
• how we perceive 3-D forms on a 2-D canvas.
• how we perceive light in Monet’s paintings.
• how a colorblind person or person with vision or brain disorders views art.

The Memorial Art Gallery’s exhibition is Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process.

Lorne Farovitch, a doctoral trainee in translational biomedical science, was recently interviewed by Verge Science regarding his research on tick-borne diseases and microbes. Farovitch has a focus track in Infection and Immunity: From Molecules to Populations, taking his bench research and extending it to the top translational layer – population and global health.

Add in the fact that Farovitch is deaf and that his first language is American Sign Language (ASL), and it adds a new level of difficulty to the mixture.

Many words in English do not have good visual signs in ASL. For example, anaplasma phagocytophilum would require signing each letter individually, which can cause communication to break down.

Farovitch works with groups such as ASLCORE and ASL Clear to develop new, standardized signs for scientific terms. In a video posted by Verge Science, Farovitch explains the process and thought behind these new signs, and how it can help the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities to visualize science better.

During her 18 years as dean, Raffaella Borasi transformed the Warner School. “Warner’s growth during this time is a great credit to an innovative leader who leaves a significant legacy of accomplishment,” says University president Richard Feldman. “I am optimistic that Warner will see even more success in the future because of the solid foundation that Raffaella has built.”

Borasi, whose deanship ends December 31, will continue to serve as founding director of the Center for Learning in the Digital Age, which she helped launch in spring 2018.

The center aims to be a catalyst for schools and other organizations to better capitalize on technology in educational settings, while learning from each other’s mistakes as well as best practices. The center will help advance the Warner School’s mission of promoting change to improve education and support positive human development by working at the intersection of research and practice.

That mission is also reflected in other centers Borasi established at Warner, including the Center for Professional Development and Education Reform (established in 2001), the Center on Disability and Education (established in 2008 as the Institute for Innovative Transition), and the Center for Urban Education Success (CUES) (established in 2016 with Borasi’s support).

CUES has played a valuable role in the research and work the Warner School does to identify and address issues at East High School, which was on the brink of closure before a partnership with the University nearly doubled graduation rates, improved math and ELA test scores, and significantly reduced annual suspensions and dropout rates. CUES continues to leverage the knowledge gained at East to impact K-12 urban education in Rochester and beyond.

Click here to read more about other changes at Warner during Borasi’s deanship. Incoming Dean Anand Marri begins his tenure January 1.

• Peter Christensen, assistant professor of art and art history, and Aaron Hughes, the Philip S. Bernstein Professor of Jewish Studies, who have each received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
  Christensen’s project, concurrently supported by the Richard Rodgers Fellowship from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, is titled “Materialized:  The Global Life of Steel.”  It will examine the emergence of steel in the 19th century—focusing on the German companies Krupp and Thyssen—and its global impact on architecture and the environment.
  Hughes’s project is “Silent History: Judaism on the Arabian Peninsula at the time of Muhammad,” which will challenge “the basic narrative that the Jews were the midwives to the birth of Islam,” Hughes says. “I want to try and argue the opposite – that when Islam arose on the Arabian Peninsula, in the 7th century, it helped to firm up Judaism.”
• Tanya Bakhmetyeva, an associate professor on instruction in gender, sexuality, and women’s studies, has received the 2018 Harry C. Koenig Book Prize for best Catholic biography. Bakhmetyeva’s Mother of the Church: Sophia Svechina, the Salon, and the Politics of Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Russia and France (University of Northern Illinois Press, 2017) details the life of the Russian émigré and Catholic convert, whose Parisian salon became a social epicenter for the French intellectual elite. Read more here.
• Wolfgang Theobald, a senior scientist at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE), and Mingsheng Wei, manager of the National Laser Users Facility Program at the LLE, who were named 2018 fellows of the American Physical Society.
  Theobald’s citation is for “pioneering experiments and seminal contributions in suprathermal electron generation and transport in laser-driven inertial confinement fusion plasmas including fast-ignition and shock ignition implosions.”
  Wei’s citation is for “contributions to the field of experimental high intensity laser plasma interactions and in particular for improved understanding of hot electron transport with regard to applications such as fast ignition fusion and ion acceleration.”

Have you ever wanted to learn how to program or add a new programming language to your existing knowledge? Have you been looking for the right time to pick up a few essential technical computing skills to help with your research projects or course work? Now you have the opportunity during the CIRC Winter Boot Camp.

The Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC) hosts the 6 week program to help students, postdocs, research staff, and faculty learn new programming languages and sharpen their computing and data analytics skills. The classes are designed for beginners and will cover basic topics to give enough direction to move on to self-learning tutorials or other more advanced coursework.

Topics will include basic training in Linux, programming languages, data analytics tools, and visualization. Extra emphasis will be placed on using these languages, libraries, applications, etc. specifically on BlueHive.

The classes will take place on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings and afternoons in the University’s large-scale, interactive visualization facility, the VISTA Collaboratory, on the first floor of the Carlson Library.

See the table on the registration page for the topics, dates, and times and to register for the sessions. Classes start on January 22 and continue through February 28. Space is limited, so register early!

(Note that the registration link is only accessible from a UR/URMC trusted network or VPN.)

This program annually awards grants of $60,000 each to five women postdoctoral scientists for their contributions in STEM fields and commitment to serving as role models for younger generations.

The program is the U.S. component of the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science International Fellowships program. Candidates must have completed a doctorate and have started in their postdoctoral position by the application deadline.

Celebrating its 15th year in the U.S., the program has awarded 75 postdoctoral women scientists nearly $4 million in grants. Learn more

Apply by Friday, February 1, 2019.

Due to the holidays, the next issue of Research Connections will be January 11.

Jan 2.: Letters of intent/initial abstracts due by 8 a.m. for Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) Incubator award from the School of Medicine and Dentistry to foster the establishment of extramurally funded, nationally recognized centers of excellence in biomedical research.  View details and application instructions and the SAC Incubator Program RFA. Contact Anne Reed for more information.

Jan. 14: Applications due for pilot funding from the Environmental Health Science Center to support projects relevant to the theme of “Environmental Agents as Modulators of Human Disease and Dysfunction.” Forms and guidelines can be found on the Environmental Health Sciences Center web site. Send applications to Pat Noonan-Sullivan.

Jan. 15: Deadline to submit cancer research grant applications for new collaborative studies targeting future MPI R01, P01, and U01 funding from National Cancer Institute. Applications should be submitted electronically to  Pamela_Iadarola@urmc.rochester.edu at the Wilmot Cancer Institute. Questions should also be directed to her.

Jan. 24: Phelps Colloquium Series: Donald Hall, the Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences & Engineering, “Looking Beyond Our Horizons: Interdisciplinary Education and Civic Responsibility.” Pablo Sierra Silva, assistant professor of history, “Pirates, Captives, and the Digital Archive: Researching Afro-Mexican History in the 21st Century.” 4-5:30 p.m. Feldman Ballroom, Douglass Commons. Register here. Questions? Contact Adele Coelho or call 273-2571.

Jan. 30: Entry forms due for the America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent student competition. Teams propose a solution to align with the FDA Regulatory Science priority areas. Visit the UR CTSI website to learn more.

Feb. 1: Initial proposal abstracts due for Department of Public Health Sciences funding for esearch pilot projects that have a substantial component of or impact on public health sciences, practices, or policies. See submission criteria and other details.

Feb. 4: Applications due for University Research Awards, which provide “seed funding” for promising, high-risk research projects. Completed applications should be directed to Adele Coelho, Faculty Outreach Coordinator in the Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President for Research, at adele.coelho@rochester.edu

Feb. 15: Applications due for Wilmot Cancer Research postdoctoral fellowship providing mentored research training for physicians with MD or MD/PhD degrees who have completed their residency training and intend to pursue an academic career in clinical, translational, or basic cancer research. View application details. For questions, email Pamela Iadarola or call 585-275-1537.