A former postdoctoral fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies (FDI) has returned to the University 14 years later to lead the institute.

“We want a richly interdisciplinary Black studies program that not only deals with the everyday lives of Black people, but also thinks beyond the everyday,” says Jeffrey McCune Jr., an award-winning scholar on issues of race, gender, and identity. “It needs to span Black cultural practices and communities and spaces.”

As an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, McCune enjoyed a reputation as an engaging and stimulating professor. His sought-after course on Kanye West—“a case study for interrogating the interplay between fame, gender, sexuality, and race”—made a USA Today list of “11 college courses in pop culture we wish we could take” in 2017.  Learn more and see “Introducing new faculty members” below.

McCUNE TO PRESENT INAUGURAL LECTURE

Frederick Douglass Institute Director Jeffrey McCune Jr. will present the inaugural Frederick Douglass Lecture, “The Politics of Disobedience is the Future,” at 3 p.m. EDT tomorrow, September 25 to conclude a two-day symposium, “We Have Nothing to Lose but Our Chains: Black Study and Its Futures.” The symposium, which is being held in person and streamed live, features some of the top scholars in the field discussing the trajectory of Black studies within and outside the academy.

Ocean currents, propelled by kinetic energy from the wind, are the great moderators of our climate. By transferring heat from the equator to polar regions, they help make our planet habitable. And yet, the large-scale models used by scientists to study this complex system fail to accurately account for the impact of wind on the ocean’s most energetic components: swirling, mesoscale eddies.

In a paper in Science Advances, Hussein Aluie, associate professor of mechanical engineering; lead author Shikhar Rai, a PhD student in his research group, and collaborators at Los Alamos National Laboratory describe how the wind, which propels larger currents, has the opposite effect on eddies less than 260 kilometers in size. This results in a phenomenon called “eddy killing.”

The researchers, for the first time, were able to directly measure the overall impact of eddy-killing: a continual loss of 50 gigawatts of kinetic energy from the ocean’s currents.

By applying a coarse-graining approach to satellite imagery, the researchers were able to separate the complex, multiscale structures of ocean currents and eddies embedded within each other. The method will hopefully be adapted by oceanographers to further explore other factors that may influence eddy killing, and the role these eddies play in other aspects of the oceans’ circulation, heat flow, salt concentrations, and up-welling of nutrients and marine organisms, Aluie says.

He praises Rai for doing “all the heavy lifting” for the paper. “There were many technical issues, but he persevered and was able to figure them out,” Aluie says. “He’s got a lot of talent and promise.”

Aluie has received a $575,843 National Science Foundation grant to not only explore eddy-killing more thoroughly but also other energy pathways within the ocean and its interaction with the atmosphere. Read more.

COVID-19 is known to trigger a wide range of symptoms in people who had been infected, some lasting even long after individuals test negative for the virus. Yet the mechanisms by which COVID-19 causes these diverse complications remain poorly understood.

In a new paper published in the journal PeerJ, John (Jack) Werren, the Nathaniel and Helen Wisch Professor of Biology, and recent undergraduates Austin Varela ’20 and Sammy Cheng ’21 studied proteins that closely evolve with angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), the receptor used by the SARS-CoV2 virus to enter human cells.

Using an evolutionary approach, the researchers detected proteins that “coevolve” with ACE2 in mammals as a way to identify networks of proteins that likely interact with ACE2.  Their rationale is that disruptions caused by COVID-19 in normal functions of ACE2 could contribute to the unusual pathologies of the disease. Learn more.

Left to right: New faculty members Susana Marcos, Jeffrey McCune, and Pablo Postigo.

(This is the last of three posts about new faculty members in Arts, Sciences & Engineering.)

Susana Marcos . . .

. . . has joined the faculty as the Nicholas George Professor of Optics, professor of ophthalmology, and the David R. Williams Director of the Center for Visual Science.

Marcos, who previously served as a professor at the Institute of Optics at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid, is an internationally recognized expert who conducts interdisciplinary research to understand basic mechanisms in human vision, develop diagnostic instruments in ophthalmology, and invent new optical solutions to correct common vision problems.

She has made significant contributions to ocular speckle interferometry, wavefront sensing, adaptive optics, and quantitative anterior segment optical coherence tomography, with applications in laser refractive surgery and intraocular lenses, among many others.

Jeffrey McCune, Jr. . . .

. . . has joined the faculty as an associate professor of English and director of the Frederick Douglass Institute. Previously he served as an associate professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies and of African and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

McCune has published widely in the area of race, gender, sexuality, and performance. He is the co-editor of the New Sexual Worlds book series at University of California Press.

As director of FDI, McCune will bring together faculty, students, and staff from across academic disciplines to collaborate in the study of the African diaspora and offer programming that explores and promotes African and African American studies at the University.

Pablo Postigo . . .

. . . joins the Institute of Optics as a professor after serving as senior research scientist at the Institute for Micro and Nanotechnology at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid. His research is focused on the design, fabrication, and characterization of new nanophotonic devices.

Postigo specializes in the manufacture of new nanomaterials (such as quantum dots) and new nanostructures (such as photonic crystals) for functional photonic devices with enhanced properties.

Some examples are microlaser emitters with record efficiency, single-photon emitters for quantum photonics, solar cells with enhanced efficiency, nanowire optical biosensors or chips with integrated optofluidic nano-channels for optical biodetection, among others.

Read more about these and other new faculty members in AS&E.

Yeates Conwell, professor of psychiatry, and Harry Reis, professor of psychology, will lead off the 2021-22 “In These Times: A Humanities Program for Today” with a discussion of Isolation, Relationships, Aging, and the Lessons of COVID-19, from 7-8:30 p.m. Oct. 13 by zoom.

The theme of the humanities-based discussion program this year is Looking Forward: Reimagining Lives and Societies after Crisis. The focus will be not only the individual and social consequences of COVID-19, but also the new visions of human existence inspired by other departures from the “normal,” such as war, revolution, migration, and economic change.

Other discussions this fall will be:

• Wednesday, October 20: Associate Professor Katherine Mannheimer, Undoing and Restoration in Seventeenth-Century Britain
• Wednesday, October 27: Professor Laura Smoller, Reimagining the Black Death in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Plague, Cholera, and the Role of Disease in History
• Wednesday, November 3: Associate Professor Grace Seiberling, Envisioning America after the Civil War
• Tuesday, November 9: Associate Professor Tanya Bakhmetyeva,  Love in the Time of the Revolution
• Wednesday, November 17: Professor Stewart Weaver, After Armageddon: Reimagining Europe After the Great War

The fall series will conclude with an in-person reception and informal conversation about topics discussed throughout the program on November 18. Six additional sessions in the spring will focus on the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

As discussion leaders, University faculty members will draw on historical documents, visual arts, social science, and literary texts to examine the challenges and opportunities that crisis has created, past and present. Register and learn more here.

Carlos Diaz-Balzac, an endocrinology fellow, who was recently awarded The Career Award for Medical Scientists (CAMS) from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for his project titled Transcriptional regulation of neural circuit formation in intellectual disabilities. Diaz-Balzac was one of 12 investigators nationwide to receive the CAMS in 2021. The $700,000, five-year award focuses on the transition of physician-scientists from postdocs into an independent research position. Learn more here about Diaz-Balzac’s project.

CRoFT, the Center for Research on Flavored Tobacco, will hold its annual meeting on October 12-13 via Zoom and will host a virtual poster session.

All faculty and students are invited to submit scientific posters in the area of tobacco regulatory science, including posters that were submitted for previous and/or future conferences.

All accepted posters will be featured on the CRoFT website, where meeting attendees and guests can comment and rate each poster. Submit all posters as a PDF document via REDCap by Monday, September 27.

Applications are open once again for the KL2 Career Development Award, offered through the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR CTSI). The award provides two years of support for early-career, multidisciplinary clinical and translational scientists.

The program fosters transition of KL2 scholars to an independent career as a clinical and translational investigator, generally by means of an individual K- or R-award.

View the 2021 request for applications and submit letters of intent by 5 p.m., Friday, October 8, 2021.

The Electron Microscopy Resource of the Center for Advanced Research Technologies is accepting samples for cryo-EM analysis on its FEI Talos L120C electron microscope.

Researchers are invited to present potential projects for this system at a “speed dating” event on Thursday, October 14, from 11 a.m. to noon EDT. If you are interested in attending this event, email Sharleen Slaunwhite to receive the Zoom link.