A newly created Department of Black Studies in Arts, Sciences & Engineering will work in close collaboration with the University’s Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies.

Until now, the institute, which is part of the School of Arts & Sciences, incorporated faculty who had primary appointments in other departments. The Department of Black Studies, however, will be able to hire faculty fully committed to its mission. That will result in a greater focus on the study and research of issues central to the institute.

“This is an important and necessary step as we work toward being a global research university of the future,” says University President Sarah Mangelsdorf. Learn more.

The J. Lowell Orbison Endowed Chair of Biochemistry & Biophysics and founding director of the UR Center for RNA Biology will present “Nonsense-mediated mRNA Decay and Human Disease” from 4-5 p.m., December 12 in the Ryan Case Method Room (1-9576).

The Dean’s Lecture Series showcases high caliber research and high impact topics in clinical medicine and related biomedical fields.

Maquat’s work has elucidated the role of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) in destroying faulty, disease-causing mRNAs. She’ll discuss recent efforts that have revealed surprising mechanisms by which NMD influences normal and disease-associated metabolism, possibly opening new avenues for the development of therapeutics.

Mark Taubman, dean of the School of Medicine and Dentistry, and Jeff Hayes, Shohei Koide Professor and chair of biochemistry and biophysics will welcome and introduce Maquat. The talk will be followed by a reception on the Forbes Mezzanine (1-9580).

A photograph of Corporal Thomas William Belton, who died in Belgium in World War I at age 25, is placed on the railings surrounding the staging of “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” at the Tower of London.

Each year on November 11, bright red artificial poppies appear prominently across the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth—pinned to clothing, made into wreaths, and placed at monuments, and in more recent years, added digitally to social media profiles. In the years following the war, the poppy became the quintessential symbol of Remembrance Day, itself a commemoration of the end of the First World War and those who died in the line of duty.

“World War I is when many of the rituals we associate with the memorialization of the dead start: poppies, the two-minute silence, listing the names of the fallen, reading certain poems,” says Bette London, a professor of English. London explores the rise and evolution of such memorialization rituals in a new book, Posthumous Lives: World War I and the Culture of Memory (Cornell University Press, 2022).

“A recurring concern of the book is the question of how remembrance practices change when the war drops out of living memory,” London says. Learn more.

Di Yan, health services research & policy, 10 a.m. November 21, 2022. Zoom link.
Effects of Minimum Wage Policy on Direct Care Workers and Quality of Care in Nursing Homes
Host: Shubing Cai.

Mukta Palshikar, biophysics, 1 p.m. December 1, 2022, K207 (2-6408) Medical Center.
Executable models of signaling pathways built using omics data
Host: Juilee Thakar

Venkatesan Guruswami from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley will give a talk on efficient algorithms from 12-1 p.m. today in Wegmans 1400.

The seminar is hosted by the Center for Integrated Research Computing (CIRC) and the Department of Computer Science.

Lunch will be served.  A Zoom option is also available.

The Health Sciences Center for Computational Innovation (HSCCI) is sponsoring pilot awards for faculty with interest in biology and health-related areas that use high performance computing. Please see the attached document for the RFA.

Applications are due December 2. If you have any questions, please contact Ben Miller (Benjamin_Miller@urmc.rochester.edu).

The Rochester Resource-based Center for Bone, Muscle and Orthopaedic Research is requesting applications from new investigators for funding of pilot projects of up to $25,000 for one year.

Multidisciplinary research is strongly encouraged, as well as translational and clinical research that moves new discoveries along the translational continuum to humans and the community. Submit proposals by Monday, December 5. Learn more.

The next issue of Research Connections will be December 2.