Celebrated for her work as a novelist, Joanna Scott, the Roswell Smith Burrows Professor of English, returns to the short story format in a new collection, Excuse Me While I Disappear (Little, Brown, 2021).

The last time Scott published a short story collection was in 2006, with the release of Everybody Loves Somebody (Little, Brown). She has written 10 novels, including Arrogance, a Pen-Faulkner finalist, The Manikin, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Follow Me, a New Times Notable Book.

Scott, who teaches modern fiction, contemporary literature, and creative writing at Rochester, says she likes her short story collections to have “some unifying concept, in which each story illuminates something about the problem or theme I’m treating in the collection.” Her new collection, Excuse Me While I Disappear, explores the nature of lost stories. What happens to stories if we – as individuals or civilizations – are not around to tell them?

Learn more in a Q&A with Jeanette Colby.

David Figlio will serve as University of Rochester Provost beginning July 1.

An internationally recognized economist and educational leader whose interdisciplinary research spans educational, public, and social policy, including the link between health and education, has been named the new provost at the University of Rochester.

David Figlio, currently the Orrington Lunt Professor of Education and Social Policy and dean of Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy and a fellow of the National Academy of Education, will begin his Rochester role on July 1, 2022.

As provost, Figlio will serve as Rochester’s chief academic officer, overseeing four of the University’s main academic units of Arts, Sciences & Engineering; Eastman School of Music; Simon Business School; and Warner School of Education. He will also lead a number of University-wide operations, including academic affairs, graduate education and postdoctoral affairs, the library system, and information technology.

He succeeds Sarah Peyre, who has served as interim provost since July 2021 and will return to her role as dean of the Warner School of Education.

President Sarah Mangelsdorf says, “David is widely recognized as a leader of a nationally ranked school, one that has earned accolades throughout higher education for teaching and research excellence, focus on community engagement, and innovative approaches to addressing societal issues.

“He is also a remarkable scholar whose innovative work on the economics of K-12 and higher education has yielded new areas of research. As dean of Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy, he has demonstrated how universities and university communities can positively impact the world around them.” Learn more.

A year later, a large majority of Republican voters still refuses to acknowledge that President Biden won the 2020 election, which doesn’t bode well for US democracy. The most recent Bright Line Watch survey finds that just 27 percent of Republicans believe Biden is the rightful presidential winner, compared to 94 percent of Democrats.

Bright Line Watch, a nonpartisan watchdog group of leading political scientists who monitor US democratic practices, was cofounded by Gretchen Helmke, a professor of political science at Rochester and her colleagues at the University of Chicago and Dartmouth College. The watchdog group started regular surveys about the health of US democracy in February 2017.

“For a democracy to survive, parties must be willing to lose elections and politicians must be willing to acknowledge when they have lost,” warns Helmke. “The fact that the Republican Party is unwilling to acknowledge the 2020 loss fundamentally undermines the most basic principle of our democracy.”

The group’s latest survey finds that voters’ confidence in next year’s midterm elections has already been affected: only 62 percent of Americans said they were “very” or “somewhat confident” that votes nationwide would be counted correctly. Divisions along partisan lines have notably deepened. While 80 percent of Democrats generally expressed confidence in fair elections, only 42 percent of Republicans felt that way. Learn more.

FEAR OF RETALIATION DETERS ANTI-DEMOCRATIC PRACTICES

Given that politicians and political parties generally want to stay in power, why would they ever forgo dirty tricks to win elections? The answer may simply boil down to this: fear of revenge.

Worries over retaliation by the opposition party can deter the incumbent party from using antidemocratic tactics to win, argue a team of Rochester political scientists— Gretchen Helmke and Jack Paine, and their former colleague Mary Kroeger, now at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. However, they warn, under certain conditions this natural “democratic deterrence” may break down.

In their recent paper, “Democracy by Deterrence: Norms, Constitutions, and Electoral Tilting,” published in the American Journal of Political Science, the team argues that a self-enforcing democracy requires political parties to refrain from exploiting legal opportunities to tilt electoral rules: informal norms of mutual restraint and formal constitutional rules are fundamentally intertwined into a “logic of deterrence.”

“Gerrymandering and vote suppression are two key areas of contemporary American electoral politics that really threaten our fundamental principles of democratic representation,” says Paine, an associate professor of political science whose research focuses on authoritarian politics.

“Another troubling development,” Paine adds, “is that these asymmetries are now affecting another sacred democratic principle—conceding electoral loss. Republicans increasingly seem inclined to use their advantage in statehouses to gain leverage over vote counting in the 2024 election.” This practice can undermine the public’s trust in fair elections—a necessary hallmark of a stable democracy. Learn more.

Under high temperatures and pressures—the conditions that exist within many planets, such as Jupiter—hydrogen goes through a series of phase transitions and takes on the properties of a liquid metal. One of the metallic properties it takes on is becoming an electrical conductor.

In a new paper in Nature’s “Matters Arising,” researchers at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE), including lead author Valentin Karasiev, an LLE staff scientist; graduate student Josh Hinz; and Suxing Hu, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and a distinguished scientist at the LLE, respond to a 2020 Nature paper that used machine learning techniques to study the liquid-liquid phase transitions of dense hydrogen from an insulating liquid to a liquid metal.

In their response, Karasiev and his colleagues outline how these machine learning techniques produced incorrect results in describing hydrogen’s phase transitions. Their research has important implications in building more accurate computer models to study hydrogen, which can lead to a better understanding of the interiors of planets and stars and the physical properties of processes like nuclear fusion.

“This physics character of first-order phase transition can have profound implications in understanding what giant planets’ interior structures look like, such as de-mixing of hydrogen and helium in Jupiter,” Hu says. Learn more.

Edith Williams, a candidate for the Dean’s Professor of Health Equity Research and Director and Founder of the Office of Health Equity Research in the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, will share the lessons she’s learned along her academic and professional trajectories during a special session of Public Health Grand Rounds.

The Zoom webinar will be held from noon to 1 p.m. today. Register here. Contact Carolyn_Settle@URMC.Rochester.edu with questions.

Williams is currently associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences and the Center for Health Disparities at the Medical University of South Carolina.

The University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR-CTSI) is offering a UNYTE Translational Research Network Pipeline-to-Pilot grant opportunity of up to $10,000.

The main goal of this program is to stimulate early phase research partnerships between University of Rochester faculty and faculty at UNYTE member institutions, facilitating their ability to compete as a collaborative team for future funding for translational biomedical research. Apply by Monday, January 10. Learn more.

Researchers will receive an overview of how to access health data from different sources during a meeting hosted by the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (UR CTSI) from 10-11 a.m., January 13.

Presenters will discuss:

• Which public health databases are available for researchers and how to work with them.
• How to use TriNetX, an online cohort discovery tool.
• The new Secure Environment for Research Data Analysis (SERDA).

Registration is required. If you would like to pose a question to the speakers, please feel free to add your question during registration. Learn more.

Developing and presenting an elevator pitch–a quick synopsis of your research goals–is an important skill for early-stage faculty to acquire.

Thomas J. Mariani, David Hamilton Smith Endowed Professor of Pediatrics, and David Long, program administrator of dermatology, will discuss the key aspects of an ideal elevator pitch from 4-5 p.m., January 19.

The second half of the session will be devoted to helping you create an elevator pitch for your research, so bring along your ideas. Register here.

The meeting is hosted by the URSMD Junior Faculty Biomedical Research Association (JFBRA), an academic peer group designed to serve the unique needs of early-stage Ph.D. and M.D. faculty.

The Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC) announces the availability of seed grant funding towards two IDDRC cores, Cell and Molecular Imaging and Translational Neuroimaging and Neurophysiology.

The funds enable new and established IDD investigators to generate preliminary data that will lead to competitive applications for extramural funding.

Applicants can be awarded up to $7,500 by completing a short application. Application and requests are due by January 21.  Please contact Sherry Mentor at sherry_mentor@urmc.rochester.edu with questions.

The annual America’s Got Regulatory Science Talent Student Competition provides an opportunity for students from across the University to compete for a chance to present their regulatory science ideas to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

For 2022, the FDA has particularly expressed interest in proposed solutions that utilize data science techniques.

The competition will be held from noon to 1:30 p.m., February 23, location to be determined.

The completed entry form is due by 5 p.m., Wednesday, January 26.

Applications are now being accepted for the next round of University Research Awards, which provide seed money for innovative research projects.  Applications are sought from faculty across the University, and funding is awarded to recipients who demonstrate that their projects, when sufficiently developed, are likely to attract external support. Applications for planning grants are also encouraged.

Learn more here about the request for proposal and application. Completed applications should be directed to Adele Coelho by 5 p.m. on January 31.

The UR CTSI’s Digital Health Seedling Award provides up to $25,000 to support research that advances the development, approval, adoption and use of innovative digital health tools, methods and approaches.

The one-year award is available to full-time faculty at the University who are studying digital health approaches, tools, and data including using sensors and mobile technologies, electronic medical records, data from registries or other real world data to advance clinical research and address regulatory science needs. Apply by Monday, February 7, 2022.