Founded in 1948 in the aftermath of World War II, the World Health Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations focused on international public health. Theodore Brown, professor emeritus of history and public health sciences, and two co-authors have written The World Health Organization: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2019), a comprehensive look at how world politics have influenced and shaped the organization, its operations, and ultimately affected the fate of its mission.

A constant undercurrent at the WHO has been a struggle in vision between two dueling camps: the agency’s “verticalists” who believe that the primary actions should be biomedically-based technical interventions—and the “horizontalists” who believe that the role of international agencies is to help countries and areas build up their own health infrastructures and get local players involved in maintaining and preserving their populations’ health.

The battle has been “raging within international health for well over a century,” says Brown, who was the Charles E. and Dale L. Phelps Professor of Public Health and Policy for five years before he retired in 2018.

During its first decades, WHO was the “acknowledged international leader on matters of health and disease” and  “played a preeminent role in the political validation of international health as a field and helped shape the notion of technical health assistance for developing countries,” the authors write.

Some of the most successful WHO programs led to access to essential drugs and antiretroviral treatment, childhood immunizations, and the control of tobacco use—often through a vertical approach—the three authors argue. The WHO also pushed for the development of basic, local health systems instead of centralized, top-down interventions—following essentially the ideals of the “horizontalists.”

The authors point to a shift at the end of the 1980s, when the agency increasingly came under widespread criticism from many sides—health policy experts, international entities such as the World Bank, and specific countries—for its inefficiency, lack of transparency, politicization, and ultimately irrelevance.

One of the agency’s largest failures, says Brown, was that it “allowed itself to become so politicized.” Part of the reason was that the United States contributed an outsized portion of the agency’s budget in its early years. US policymakers believed they were entitled to set policy, says Brown, pitting the US often directly against the Soviet Union.

In later decades, a different set of funders began to assume a large role in the WHO’s direction. While these partnerships helped reduce morbidity and mortality, they usually rely on short-term and ultimately limited strategies, write Brown and his co-authors. They also contributed to a loss of truly democratic decision-making, putting technical expertise before local input.

Recently, the agency has regained a certain amount of authority and credibility—among governments and private players alike. This is likely “because the world of global health has become so chaotic, and there have been so many competing interests that even those with the big resources realized that there is no way of achieving any kind of uniform consensus about what programs should be initiated,” says Brown.

There’s reason to be optimistic, he says. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia, selected as the WHO’s newest director general, is the first African to hold that position—marking a conscious shift toward giving greater voice to local interests. Read more here.

Motivated by emerging evidence that brain stimulation might aid learning, University researchers have collaborated with colleagues at the Italian Institute of Technology to study how different types of non-invasive brain stimulation affect visual perceptual learning and retention in both healthy individuals and those with brain damage. Their results, published in a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience, could lead to enhanced learning efficacy for both populations and to improved vision recovery for cortically blind patients.

Learning is difficult and often takes a long time, “because after early childhood our brains become less plastic,” says Duje Tadin, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences. The brain’s ability to change and reorganize itself decreases as a person ages, so learning new tasks, or re-learning tasks after experiencing a brain injury, becomes more challenging.

To test if and how visual perceptual learning might be accelerated, the researchers, who also included Krystel Huxlin, the James V. Aquavella, M.D. Professor in Ophthalmology, showed study participants clouds of dots and asked them to determine which way the dots moved across a computer screen. The task measured the participants’ motion integration threshold; motion perception is important in enabling people to see movement and either to avoid or interact with moving objects. Participants were then asked to perform the task while sub-groups were given different types of brain stimulation, each involving a non-invasive electrical current applied over the visual cortex. The researchers found that one particular type of brain stimulation, called transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS), had remarkable effects on improving participants’ motion integration thresholds when they performed the task.

Surprisingly, the researchers also found that when they re-tested the participants six months later, the participants in the tRNS group had retained what they had learned and were still able to do better on the motion task compared to the groups that were given other stimulation techniques or training alone.

Tadin, Huxlin, and their colleagues then extended their findings to patients who had suffered a stroke or other traumatic brain injury that affected their visual cortex, rendering them partially blind.

Huxlin had previously developed an eye-training system to assist stroke patients with recovering vision. Working with participants who had experienced traumatic brain injuries, the researchers coupled Huxlin’s visual training therapy with tRNS brain stimulation applied to both damaged and undamaged parts of the patients’ brains. These participants, too, experienced improvement in visual processing and function after only 10 days.

“This fast improvement is something we’ve never seen in this patient population,” Huxlin says.

Read more here.

Govind Agrawal, the James C. Wyant Professor of Optics, who is this year’s recipient of the 2019 Prize for Applied Aspects of Quantum Electronics and Optics from the European Physical Society and its Quantum Electronics and Optics Division. Agrawal is recognized for “pioneering and groundbreaking research that underpins a wide range of current photonic technologies in the fields of semiconductor lasers, nonlinear fiber optics and optical communication systems.” The European Physical Society provides an international forum for physicists and acts as a federation of national physical societies.

Jeff Tithof, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, who has received a prestigious $500,000 Career award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, an independent private foundation dedicated to advancing the biomedical sciences. Tithof, who has been appointed as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, is deferring his appointment for one year to continue his research in the lab of Douglas Kelley, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Rochester. The two have been helping the lab of Maiken Nedergaard explore the brain’s glymphatic “waste removal” system, along with Jack Thomas and Jessica Shang, also faculty members in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Read more here.

The Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC) will once again host workshop training sessions for a 5-week period starting on July 23. Known as the “CIRC Summer School,” these workshops will feature 6 different languages and tools. Faculty, students, and staff may register for any one or multiple topics prior to the start of the training sessions.

Topics will include basic training in Linux, programming languages, data analytics tools, and visualization. The courses are designed for beginners and 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, located 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.

A series of three one-credit courses on writing for journal publication will be available in the fall and spring semesters.

The modules are designed for doctoral students, postdocs, and faculty members.

Graduate students matriculated in schools outside of the Warner School of Education should email Crys Cassano to request a code to register for each class online. Email Mary Jane Curry, an associate professor at the Warner School and the module’s instructor, for more information.

Rebeckah Burke, chemistry, “Colloidal Semiconductor Nanocrystals for Photocatalytic Proton Reduction.” 10 a.m. June 11, 2019. 108 Goergen Hall. Advisor: Todd Krauss.

Philipp Birklbauer, mathematics, “Theoretical and Computational Explorations in Vector Spaces Over Finite Fields.” 2:30 p.m. June 12, 2019. Hylan 1106A. Advisor: Alex Iosevich.

Molly McCann, epidemiology, “Degree of Bystander-Patient Relationship and Prehospital and Emergency Department Care for Opioid Overdose.” 10 a.m. June 14, 2019. Helen Wood Hall | 1W 502. Advisor: Todd Jusko.

Jie Luo, biology, “The Role of Androgen Receptor in Different Prostate Cancer Therapies.” 12:30 p.m. June 14, 2019. Room 2-6424 Medical Center. Advisor: Chawnshang Chang.

June 12: “Twice Written Tales: On First Looking into Palimpsests and Other Hidden Texts” by Gregory Heyworth, associate professor of English and textual science and director, Lazarus Project. 2019 Summer Colloquium Series, Goergen Institute for Data Science. 12 noon to 1 p.m.,1400 Wegmans Hall. Free to all faculty, staff, students and community members. Lunch sponsored by the Goergen Institute for Data Science. Pre-register here.

June 19: One Step Beyond @ the Carlson. TED-like event (speaker series) at Comedy at the Carlson to help build a clinic in Kenya that will provide sustainable health care and proper diagnostics to more than 2,000 families. Speakers include Evan Dawson, Jennifer Johnson, Hélène Hofer, Todd Youngman, and Mike Alcazaren. 6:30 p.m. Humans for Education. Read more here.

June 26: “Probabilistic Earth Imaging with Ground Vibrations: Explaining the Softness in Earth’s Stiffest Rocks” by Tolulope Olugboji, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences. 2019 Summer Colloquium Series, Goergen Institute for Data Science. 12 noon to 1 p.m.,1400 Wegmans Hall. Free to all faculty, staff, students and community members. Lunch sponsored by the Goergen Institute for Data Science. Pre-register here.

July 10:  “Software and Hardware for Mobile Visual Computing” by Yuhao Zhu, assistant professor of computer science. 2019 Summer Colloquium Series, Goergen Institute for Data Science. 12 noon to 1 p.m.,1400 Wegmans Hall. Free to all faculty, staff, students and community members. Lunch sponsored by the Goergen Institute for Data Science. Pre-register here.

July 17:  “Aging & Engaging: Development of a Web-based Communication Coach for Older Adults” with Kimberly Van Orden, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the School of Medicine. 2019 Summer Colloquium Series, Goergen Institute for Data Science. 12 noon to 1 p.m.,1400 Wegmans Hall. Free to all faculty, staff, students and community members. Lunch sponsored by the Goergen Institute for Data Science. Pre-register here.