The University’s Mt. Hope Family Center has received two federal grants to support its evidence-based treatment and services for children and families who have experienced trauma and to train and support professionals nationwide. Together, the grants will help clinicians and researchers address child and family trauma at both the individual and systemic levels.

“These grants will enhance and sustain Mt. Hope Family Center’s commitment to addressing the effects of trauma across the life course,” says executive director Sheree Toth, a professor of psychology and psychiatry. The center provides services to more than 900 at-risk children and families in the region annually.

The funding, totaling nearly $1 million per year over five years, will support two projects.

The STRONGER project, established in 2016 and directed by Alisa Hathaway, will allow the center to expand its services for children and families in the Greater Rochester region who have been affected by trauma.

“We’ve been inundated with requests for trauma services because of the pandemic and the increase in community violence, both of which have had ripple effects across families, schools, and neighborhoods,” says Jody Todd Manly, a research professor of psychology, the clinical director of the center, and the principal investigator for both grants. “It’s been described as a tsunami of needs—and this funding gives us flexibility to address those needs.”

The Sustaining Change project will provide training, consultation, and technical assistance for child- and family-serving organizations and systems nationwide.

The goal is to improve the dissemination and implementation of evidence-based treatment models for child trauma among professionals. It builds on the work of the TRANSFORM Center, a national center run by the University of Rochester and the University of Minnesota that was established in 2018 to prevent and address child maltreatment.

Learn more.

Estimates of fetal weight in the third trimester of pregnancy, typically gathered using ultrasound-derived measurements, are often inaccurate, sometimes off by up to 40 percent for newborns weighing 4000 grams (8.8 pounds) or more at birth.

A new School of Nursing study, funded by the National Institute of Nursing Research, will focus on developing an image analysis algorithm to more accurately estimate fetal weight in the late third trimester of pregnancy. This is a potential first step to using data science to inform clinical assessment and decision-making during pregnancy.

“By having more accurate estimates of fetal weight, we could avert the cascade of obstetric interventions, thereby decreasing inductions and reducing unnecessary primary cesarean surgery,” says Caitlin Dreisbach, assistant professor at the School of Nursing. Learn more.

Left to right: Research associate Yiwen E and PhD student Kareem Garriga of Prof. Zhang’s Terahertz Research Group, and Gerrit Bruhaug, a PhD student in the High Energy Density Physics Experiments group at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, with the Multi-TerraWatt laser, one of two lasers they will use to generate terahertz waves of record intensity.

X.C. Zhang, the M. Parker Givens Professor at The Institute of Optics, has received a $500,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to collaborate with researchers at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics on using high-power, energetic lasers to generate terahertz waves of record intensity. Members of Zhang’s lab, including research associate Yiwen E, will work closely with PhD student Gerrit Bruhaug, a member of LLE’s High Energy Density Physics Experiments group.

Research since the 1980s has demonstrated how terahertz waves can penetrate solid objects without damaging them. And, unlike X-rays, a THz wave does not harm human tissue and DNA. These qualities offer tantalizing THz applications for everything from discovering bombs in suspicious packages to detecting tooth decay. But the generation and manipulation of intense THz waves is still evolving.

The collaboration could “open the doors for a large variety of linear and nonlinear light-matter interactions,” and “enable new science and advance numerous THz wave sensing and spectroscopy technologies,” Zhang says. Learn more.

Heather Owen, the new data librarian for humanities, arts, social sciences, and natural sciences on the River Campus, can help you manage and share research data—any type of raw material that can be used in research or in discovery—by:

• Helping you create research data management and sharing plans.
• Assisting you with managing data, organizing data, documenting data, naming data (by creating a file naming convention), finding data, curating data, cleaning data, preserving data, and sharing data).
• Using the DMPTool.
• Using Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs), such as LabArchives.
• Choosing and using a data repository, such as Dryad, OSF, Figshare, etc.

If you are interested in incorporating data literacy into the classroom, Owen can collaborate with you and your liaison librarian to have an instructional session. She can also brainstorm with you on how you can add data literacy into your curriculum. Please feel free to recommend her services to your students, as she is available to work with undergraduate & graduate students, faculty, staff, and researchers within all disciplines on the River Campus.

Owen is also interested in hosting workshops and events on data, so if you have any questions or requests, contact her at howen@library.rochester.edu. Regularly check River Campus Libraries Events to see if any data events are happening.

We now enjoy a window of opportunity to improve public health in Monroe County, and this window will not remain open forever, says Michael Mendoza, commissioner of public health for the Monroe County Health Department, and professor of clinical family medicine, public health sciences, and nursing.

Join a Public Health Grand Rounds Webinar at noon today, Friday, September 16, as Mendoza discusses critically re-examining our past and understanding what unfolded during the COVID pandemic in order to chart a path toward a future that more appropriately prioritizes prevention, health equity, and scientific evidence as the cornerstones of public health policy.

Register here.

The AS&E Graduate Education & Postdoctoral Affairs (GEPA) office is hosting an information session for the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program at noon today via zoom. Hear from students who have successfully been awarded these fellowships as well as faculty who have advised them, to learn more and ask questions.

To determine your eligibility for this program, please visit this website and feel free to contact Kristina Lantzky-Eaton with any questions at kristina.lantzky-eaton@rochester.edu

Master’s and PhD candidates in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering are invited to present their work during the AS&E Graduate Research Day on Wednesday, October 19 in the Feldman Ballroom.

Throughout the day, participants will present short research talks of 10 minutes plus 5 minutes of Q&A time, on any topic, including completed research, works in progress, small group research projects, etc. The event culminates with an awards ceremony and networking reception from 4 to 5 p.m.

Several $300 cash prizes will be awarded by AS&E staff and faculty judges.

To help prepare students for their talks, the GEPA office, Greene Center, and the River Campus Libraries will be sponsoring workshops on talking about your research and networking, so look for more information coming soon.

If you have any questions about the event or submission process, contact Katie Ferruzza.

SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION HERE by 5 p.m. Tuesday, September 20. Submissions will be reviewed and applicants notified no later than September 23.

The University’s Institutional Office of Equity and Inclusion is hosting a HIGHER Conference for Women in Higher Education from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday, September 22 in Feldman Ballroom.

This free event is designed to create space for conversations and connections that empower women in higher education to push through barriers to advancement, pay equity and other rights, in order to reach their career goals and to pull other women up along the way.

Faculty, administrators, healthcare professionals, alumni, grad students, and post-docs are invited to attend this event, which is facilitated by the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women at Case Western Reserve University and sponsored by the EAB consulting firm. Register here.

Are you looking for a new career in clinical research? Learn how a mentor can help your clinical research career at a webinar at 10 a.m. October 5, hosted by the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

Three mentor-mentee teams from the Wilmot Cancer Institute will share their experiences on mentorship, and how mentoring helps new clinical trialists. Please register and submit questions during the registration process.