Michael Jarvis’ latest digital history project couldn’t come at a better time.

“Black Past Lives Matter: Digital Kormantin,” funded with a $99,874 NEH Digital Humanities grant, will create a website with meticulously detailed virtual tours of a 1632 English fort on the coast of Ghana. The fort was among the earliest to send enslaved Africans to the American colonies.

Sustained Black Lives Matter protests have focused national attention on persisting racial inequalities in the United States. Because this racism “has been centuries in the making, reconciliation depends upon all Americans understanding a Black history extending back four centuries temporally and across the Atlantic world spatially,” says Jarvis, a history professor who also infuses archaeology and digital media studies in his teaching and research.

Moreover, the website will be accessible to millions of people who, even without the travel barriers raised by COVID 19, would never have the means or opportunity to visit the coast of Ghana.

“Although no substitute for an actual visit, this project will make virtual visitation possible for an historic site every bit as important to American history as Jamestown or Plymouth Rock,” says Jarvis.

Enormous data sets for the project have already been amassed from previous archaeological excavations, photogrammetry, and laser scans conducted as part of the Ghana summer field school Jarvis helped conduct at the site.  The current project enlists scores of students, researchers, and faculty members from multiple disciplines and institutions, both in the US and abroad. The project also plans to make a follow-up visit to Ghana early next year to capture 360-degree videos and to interview site guides.

The project culminates in a round table conference next May that Jarvis describes as “equal parts academic critique and responsive design game-jam.” Historians, archaeologists, video game designers, technologists, digital humanities theorists, and education specialists from the US, Ghana, and Netherlands who contributed to the project will play through the tours and share their reflections, criticisms, and suggestions, which will be implemented in real time during the conference where possible.

Read more.

Medical Center researchers are part of a new collaborative project, led by the University of California, Los Angeles, to study concussions in children and teens. The project, which was awarded $10 million from the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, will test ways to predict which kids will develop persistent symptoms after a concussion, so researchers can study how to help them recover faster.

The grant to the Four Corners Youth Consortium, a group of academic medical centers studying pediatric concussions, will support Concussion Assessment, Research and Education for Kids, or CARE4Kids, a multi-site study that will enroll more than 1,300 children and teens nationwide, including an estimated 240 in the Rochester area.

“Prolonged concussion recovery can have an enormous impact on the lives of teens and pre-teens, often setting the stage for academic difficulties, persisting mood disorders, and chronic pain,” says Jeffrey Bazarian, professor of emergency medicine, who will lead the Rochester study site. “Early evaluation and treatment for kids at high risk for prolonged recovery is our best hope for preventing an acute injury from becoming chronic.”

The study, which focuses on children between the ages of 11 and 18, will first evaluate children with concussions to identify a set of biomarkers — including those related to changes in blood pressure, heart rate and pupil reactivity — that could predict which kids will develop persistent symptoms after a concussion. The second part of the study will seek to confirm that these biomarkers accurately predict prolonged symptoms in a second group of children diagnosed with concussions.

Ultimately, the team hopes to develop an algorithm to help healthcare providers diagnose and treat concussed kids and to enable the future development of therapies that could help kids recover from concussions faster. Read more.

Dry mouth is the most frequent side effect of medications taken by adults and can lead to aggressive and rampant decay, quickly destroying teeth.

“Decreased saliva production and dry mouth can range from being a nuisance to something that has a major impact on patients’ general health, oral health, appetite and food enjoyment,” says Szilvia Arany, assistant professor with the Eastman Institute for Oral Health. “Dry mouth, or xerostomia, can also lead to soft tissue damage, problems with speaking and swallowing, aggressive bacterial colonization, and upper respiratory tract infections.”

A five-year study she will lead, funded by the National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research, part of National Institutes for Health, will explore potential genetic markers for dry mouth, by genotyping certain liver enzymes to predict oral health damages and reduced saliva secretion.

About 500 different medications block the normal function of the salivary glands, and 20 percent of the U.S. adult population now takes five or more drugs.

“While saliva secretion is very sensitive to these medications,” Arany says, “information on the oral health side effects is minimal.

“Our patient population at Eastman Institute’s Specialty Care Clinic includes a high number of middle-aged and older adult patients with complex medical-socio-psychological issues who are at risk for dry mouth because multiple medications are often necessary for those with chronic diseases.”

Read more.

From left to right: Ashley Clark, Kendall DeBoer, Michael Orsmsbee, and Alice Wynd, recipients of this year’s Edward Peck Curtis Awards for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student.

The four recipients of this year’s Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student come from different disciplines. But they have several things in common.

PhD students Ashley Clark, Kendall DeBoer, Michael Ormsbee, and Alice Wynd are invariably described by students and faculty alike with terms like “stands out among peers” or “the best teaching assistant I have ever worked with.” And all are credited with playing a critical role in helping their respective departments pivot to online learning because of COVID-19.

“The nomination letters really outline how our graduate students were amazing in the face of a really different time in terms of teaching,” says Melissa Sturge-Apple, vice provost and University dean of graduate education.

Read the accolades from faculty mentors and students who benefited from working with these four talented teachers.

The open availability of preprints — scholarly non-peer-reviewed author manuscripts submitted for publication — is changing the research culture in many disciplines and raising questions around impact, assessment, and science communication.

Join the library and a group of faculty experts for a series of events to learn more about preprints and enjoy a chance to ask questions. Click here for full descriptions and registration information.

• The New Open Access Ecosystem: Finding your Niche (4 p.m., Monday, October 25)–Overview of the open access (OA) movement and how it is transforming academic publishing.
• Introduction to Preprints (10 a.m., Tuesday, October 26)–Learn more about preprints, the key pros and cons and where to deposit them.
• Free Your Paper (11 a.m., Tuesday, October 26)–Interested in sharing your publications openly with the world? Let us check the options for you.
• Preprints in Science: Friend or Foe?  (4 p.m., Wednesday, October 27)–Join us for a faculty panel with UR researchers who have shared their work on well-established preprint servers. Learn from the experts how to take advantage of them and to avoid potential pitfalls. Panelists: Alex Iosevich, professor of mathematics; Amanda Larracuente, associate professor of biology; Dongmei Li, associate professor at the Clinical and Translational Science Institute; and Andrew White, associate professor of chemical engineering.
• Reproducible Code and Research Workflows (10 a.m., Thursday, October 28)–Learn tips and tricks to make your code more readable and easy to share, allowing experts to reproduce the results and enhance their credibility.
• Free Your Paper (11 a.m., Thursday, October 28)–Interested in sharing your publications openly with the world? Let us check the options for you.

Sharing sensitive information about a research trainee without their explicit permission. Ignoring a research trainee’s opinions or dismissing them without consideration. Using aggressive questioning under the guise of the “Socratic method” to intentionally badger or humiliate a research trainee.

These are examples of behaviors of a mentor toward a trainee, a postdoc toward a student, and from one trainee toward another that are inappropriate and undermine positive and supportive training environments.

John Cullen, director of diversity and inclusion for the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR CTSI), was part of a working group at the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) that recently produced an 18-page guide on the appropriate treatment of research trainees.

The guide contains principles for fostering supportive and inclusive graduate and postdoctoral training environments, examples of behaviors incompatible with these principles, and a framework for identifying and addressing these issues.

UNCONSCIOUS BIAS AND ITS IMPACTS

Cullen and Adrienne Morgan, senior associate dean for Equity and Inclusion at the Medical Center, will facilitate a workshop on unconscious bias and strategies for reducing bias in academic environments, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., Wednesday, October 27. Learn more.

John Morris Barry ’69, author of The Great Influenza, will present, “The Past is Never Over: It Isn’t Even Past – Pandemics Then and Now,” at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 27 at the Rochester Academy of Medicine.

The National Academies of Science named his 2004 book about the 1918 flu epidemic the year’s best book on science or medicine. In 2004 he began working with the National Academies and both the Bush and Obama White Houses on pandemic preparedness and response.

Register to attend via Zoom or in-person. Vaccinations and masks are required for in-person attendance.

The event is sponsored by the University and the George Washington Corner Society for the History of Medicine.

Sponsored by the Office of the Provost, a series of workshops and social events offer practical knowledge and expanded alliances that link faculty to research and scholarship resources, clarify the path to promotion, and support faculty progress. Learn more about each session and register online to attend or email Adele Coelho. 

• Unconscious Bias and Its Impact on Our Academic Environments: Wednesday, October 27, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• Mentoring In Academia: Thursday, October 28, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• When Students Are Struggling, Troubled, or Troubling: Sources of Insight and Assistance: Wednesday, November 10, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
• Perspectives on the Promotion Process, Part I: Promotion to Associate Professor: Thursday, November 11, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
• Mapping, Aligning, and Assessing Outcomes: Tuesday, November 16, from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m.

The 2021 Biomedical Ultrasound Symposium Day, hosted by the Rochester Center for Biomedical Ultrasound (RCBU) from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday Nov. 3 in the Feldman Ballroom of Frederick Douglass Commons, will feature two distinguished lecturers.

Kevin J. Parker, the William F. May Professor of Engineering and dean emeritus of engineering and applied sciences, will deliver the Distinguished Edwin L. Carstensen Lecture.

Maggie Zhang ’03 MS ’07 PhD of biomedical engineering, now a clinical assistant professor of radiology at the University of Michigan, will deliver the Distinguished RCBU Alumni Lecture.

The symposium will also include graduate student presentations, a poster session, lunch and networking. RSVP to carla.boff@rochester.edu, including name, dietary restrictions and whether you will be presenting a poster. Find full details here.

Mary Jane Curry, associate professor at the Warner School of Education, and her doctoral student coauthors Weijia Li, Ting Zhang, and Yanhong Zuo will hold a conversation and signing for their new book An A to W of Academic Literacy: Key Concepts and Practices for Graduate Students at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, November 4 in LeChase Hall, Room 215 (Zoom option available).

Curry will moderate a discussion with her coauthors about the process and experience of collaborating on this publication and how the volume can be useful for graduate students of all language backgrounds and at any level of study, writing consultants, and instructors across the disciplines. Please register to attend.