The following University at Albany professors have been awarded a 2004-2005 Fulbright Scholar grant: Anthony Deblasi, associate professor of East Asian studies, who will conduct research on �Purifying Communities: Monastic Reform in Premodern China� at the Chinese Academy of Social Science, Beijing, China, from January to July 2005; Richard F. Hamm, associate professor of history, who will be a distinguished lecturer on �American History Through Legal History� at the University of Erfurt, Erfurt, Germany for the academic year; and Christopher Smith, a professor in the Department of Geography and Planning, who will lecture and conduct research on the �Environment and Culture in Urban Contexts� at Chinese University of Hong Kong through August 2005.

Distinguished Professor Judith Langer of the Department of Educational Theory and Practice, has been named by the State University of New York to its University-wide Honorary Degree Committee for a three-year term.

Professor Joachim Frank of the Department of Biomedical Science in the School of Public Health, is co-author of an article that was published in the August 20 issue of Cell 118/4. Title of the article is �Cryo-EM Visualization of a Viral Internal Ribosome Entry Site Bound to Human Ribosomes: the IRES Functions as an RNA-Based Translation Factor.� The research has potential impact in two areas: it contributes to the understanding of how the ribosome works in eukaryotes, and to the development of drugs that interfere with the interaction of viral IRES with the human ribosome. One of the important findings is that the IRES from cricket paralysis virus interacts with the ribosome in a very similar way as IRES from hepatitis C virus, which is in the same class as poliovirus. Further characterization of the binding interaction, along with high-resolution information on the structure of the human ribosome, could lead to the development of anti-viral drugs that block IRES-ribosome interaction for a number of viruses, and thus prevent those viruses from replicating.

Eminent plant scholars from around the world converged in the D�Ambra Auditorium of the new Life Sciences Research Building October 15-17 for a conference organized by UAlbany Professor of Biological Sciences Dmitry Belostotsky and Alice Cheung of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst on Frontiers in Sexual Plant Reproduction II. Belostotsky said, �Among the participants were the members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the Royal Society, and many premier researchers from academia and plant biotech companies from the U.S., Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Norway, Mexico, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy Berel Lang has been awarded a Lady Davis Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for the spring and summer terms, 2005. The project for which the fellowship was awarded is Minorities in a Majority World: From Genocide to Group Rights. Two books by Lang are scheduled for publication in December, 2004: Post-Holocaust: Interpretation, Misinterpretation, and the Claims of History (Indiana University Press); and A Holocaust Reader (Basil Blackwell), co-edited with Simone Gigliotti. Lang is also serving on the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association and is chair of the APA Committee on Lectures, Research, and Publications.

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