College launches interactive lecture series
Smashing summer project: Students working with supercollider scientists
Molecular biosciences professor earns grant
Recent history graduate finds favored foods change with the times
College launches interactive lecture series
Steve Hawley, physics and astronomy professor and former astronaut, on Sept. 14 will kick off a new performance-based lecture series hosted by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. The presentations, which aim to educate while they entertain, will showcase the skills and talent of College faculty.
The eight-part series will focus on a variety of subjects including physics, English, geography and theatre. It also will highlight current events, such as presentations on campaign rhetoric, immigration policies and childhood obesity.
Each event is free and open to the public, and parents are encouraged to bring their children. All performances take place on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at Spooner Hall, with the exception of Professor Maryemma Graham’s presentation in May. That event will be held in the Hall Center for the Humanities.
Following is a list of the series, dates and presenting faculty.
Sept. 14: “My Life with the Hubble Space Telescope,” Professor Steven Hawley, physics and astronomy
Oct. 12: “The Audacity of Hope or a Maverick You Can Trust: The Role of Rhetoric in the 2008 Presidential Campaign,” Professor Robert Rowland, communication studies
Nov. 9: “What Makes a Monster? From Godzilla to Spore,” Professor Bill Tsutsui, history, and Professor Randi Hacker, Center for East Asian Studies
Dec. 7: “Globe-O-Mania: The Public Challenge,” quiz show-style presentation hosted by the Department of Geography
Feb. 8: “Putting a Human Face on U.S. Immigration Policies: How our Laws Affect Citizens and Families,” Professor Tanya Golash-Boza, sociology
March 8: “The Symbolic DNA of Terrorism,” Professor Rowland
April 19: “The Price is Too High: Balancing Children’s Nutrition,” Professor Ric Steele, applied behavioral science
May 3: “Lineage: A Song Cycle/A Musical Adaptation of Margaret Walker Poetry,” Professor Maryemma Graham, English
Visit the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Web site for schedule updates.
Smashing summer project: Students working with supercollider scientists
Five students and two spring graduates worked in Switzerland this summer with scientists who today launched a supercollider project that could change fundamental knowledge of the universe.
The students are working on projects for the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva. The gigantic supercollider is known as Large Hadron Collider. When operational, two beams of subatomic particles called hadrons will speed in opposite directions inside a circular 16.5-mile underground track.
The supercollider is designed to create conditions that existed following the “Big Bang” that some say created the universe. Scientists hope find how does energy works and why atoms survived the Big Bang.
Two KU faculty members in physics and astronomy, Alice Bean, professor, and Michael Murray, associate professor, are among more than 1,000 U.S. scientists working on supercollider projects. Bean and Murray each had students working on their research projects in Switzerland during June and July. They helped build the Compact Muon Solenoid,; a detector to track particles which explode from collisions. Murray returned from Switzerland July 1 and will return to Geneva in September. Bean will return to KU in November.
Bean is a lead researcher with a $2.5 million five-year grant from the National Science Foundation Partnerships for International Research and Education. The grant includes scientists from KU, Kansas State University, the University of Nebraska, the University of Illinois-Chicago and the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez. Their work focuses on high-energy physics. The grant supports undergraduate and graduate students from the partner universities to work at the European Center for Nuclear Research each year.
Since May, Bean has worked at the Paul Scherrer Institute located near Zurich with 11 students, including three from KU: Chris Martin, Manhattan junior in mathematics and physics; Jennifer A. Sibille, Lafayette and Ruston, La., doctoral student in physics; and Corbett Clark Bennett, a spring 2008 physics, classics and philosophy graduate from Mission Hills. Two KU research associates in physics and astronomy, Valeria Radicci and Jo Cole, both of Lawrence, also are working at the institute.
Murray works with heavy ion physics researchers to bring online a new detector designed and built at KU. Called the Zero Degree Calorimeter, the detector will help physicists monitor collisions of particles in the supercollider. Those collisions will occur about 40 million times per second, Murray noted in explaining the need for a detector that can record data at super speeds. His research is funded by a U.S. Department of Energy grant.
Murray’s group includes four KU students: Alexander J. Krejci, Lawrence senior in geology and physics and astronomy; Heidi JoAnn LeSage, Plymouth, Minn., sophomore in chemistry; Laura Stiles, a spring 2008 graduate in engineering physics from Prairie Village; and Jeff Wood, Lawrence doctoral student in physics. The undergraduates, including Stiles, received NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates grants to support their work. Krejci and LeSage also have related Undergraduate Research Awards from KU. Wood received a KU Graduate Research Fellowship for his work at CERN.
Molecular biosciences professor earns grant
Stuart J. Macdonald, assistant professor of molecular biosciences, has received nearly $2.5 million in federal funding to study the genetic control of traits that affect crop yield, human disease risk and drug response. Macdonald heads the five-year project funded by the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institutes of Health.
“Ultimately, we wish to identify the precise DNA sequence differences that exist among individuals and determine which cause variation in traits like height, hair color and, of course, disease risk,” Macdonald said. “Our work will provide valuable insight into the genetic control of such traits using the powerful experimental tools available for the model organism Drosophila melanogaster (the fruit fly).”
The new grant will provide the research community with a multifaceted set of resources and tools to efficiently identify genetic factors that cause trait variation in the fruit fly. Results will help guide the design and interpretation of future studies that seek to identify variations in those genetic factors as they relate to human disease risk.
“Stuart’s work will lead to better techniques for identifying the genes that underlie complex diseases like cancer, heart disease and diabetes,” said Robert Cohen, professor and acting chair of the department of molecular biosciences. “The identification of such genes is the critical first step in the development of both drugs that combat diseases’ progression and screening procedures to identify people at risk for the diseases.”
The grant will fund experimental biology at KU’s Lawrence campus. Much of the necessary computational work will take place at the University of California-Irvine under the direction of Tony Long, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
Recent history graduate finds favored foods change with the times
The 1950s were marked with extreme change in American living. The war was over, babies were booming and, perhaps most importantly, the TV dinner was invented.
Tim Miller of Holton, who recently earned a doctorate in history, researched the era for his dissertation, specifically looking at the foods people ate and how they reflected the cultural shifts in that time period. His findings squash the notion that food is just food.
“The foods we eat are connected to other aspects of our lives,” Miller said. “We saw the rise of convenience foods in the ’50s. That’s because more women were going to work. The middle class was growing. They didn’t have as much time, but they had more money.”
The idea to study how food intersects with culture was born when Miller discovered the Clementine Paddleford archive at Kansas State University. Paddleford, a Kansas native, was a noted food writer in the ’50s. Sandwiched in more than 300 boxes were Paddleford’s collection of menus, book manuscripts, cookbooks and newspaper columns. While digging through the treasure trove, Miller determined his dissertation topic.
For a year and a half, Miller conducted his research. He found that barbecues and cocktail parties both saw surges in popularity during the ’50s—this because postwar houses were smaller, and it was easier to entertain guests out of doors than in cramped kitchens. He also wrote a chapter about ethnic foods. Miller found that many white people wouldn’t eat traditionally African-American foods unless they were called “Southern” foods. But they didn’t reject ethnic foods entirely—Italian cuisine was extremely popular with mainstream Americans.
“I’m a baby-boom kid myself, and I appreciated Tim’s curiosity about this crucial period in postwar American history,” said Karl Brooks, associate professor of history at KU and Miller’s adviser. “With the food we eat becoming more important to our environment, as well as to our culture, Tim’s study will have wide influence on historians as well as the general public.”
Miller hopes to turn his dissertation into a book, and he will teach courses on American history next year at KU. But his doctoral research has left him hungry for more: Miller’s next big project will track the history of the chocolate chip cookie. Yum.
Visit the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Web site for more information.
