Mr. Logan Goes to Washington; Graduate Students Play a Key Role
Greta Petry
When UAlbany sociologist John Logan went to Washington, D.C., on April 3 to talk to the National Press Club about how the 2000 Census results show a persistent trend of segregation in metropolitan areas, he was supported by the work of a team of his UAlbany doctoral students.

“We set out to have an impact on the way the 2000 census would be reported, and by providing data that the media could use - on an easily accessible Web page and with a turnaround time of less than a day - we did that. It’s amazing what a range of talents our graduate students have and how well they pitched in together under pressure. I couldn’t be more proud of what they accomplished,” Logan said.

Behind the scenes at UAlbany’s Lewis Mumford Center, which Logan directs, doctoral candidate Deirdre Oakley, 38, of Williamstown, Mass., had written the press release and report that were given to the media at the National Press Club.

“This project was a group effort in every sense,” said Oakley. “Everybody contributed to its success. I don’t think that I’ve ever worked with people who are so willing to cooperate with each other, and work hard under a very tight deadline to get out the best product possible. Dr. Logan’s openness to ideas from his graduate students was also a key.”

Oakley, who used to write for Fortune magazine, is a graduate research assistant. Her job on this project included “taking the data analysis, charts, graphs, and maps done primarily by Brian Stults and Jake Stowell, and assisting Dr. Logan and the rest of the team in formulating the story line.” She said that once the press release and report were written, the report was modified and posted on the Mumford Center’s Web site.

At the meeting at the National Press Club, civil rights leaders said that “the analysis had wide-ranging implications on the enforcement of fair housing laws, quality schools for minority children, and race relations throughout the nation,” according to an April 4 story in The New York Times.

Doctoral candidate Brian Stults’ job was to “prepare for, acquire, manipulate, and analyze the data.” In the weeks leading up to the release of data for the first few states, he wrote the programs that would extract the data and generate the segregation indices. When the data began to be released, the Census made available a handful of states almost every weekday.

“Our goal was to process the states released on a given day and have the data on our Web site by the next morning,” said Stults, 28, a Kalamazoo, Mich., native who will be a professor of sociology at the University of Florida in the fall. “It was my responsibility to get the raw data from the census, calculate the segregation scores, and send the numbers to Vadivel Kumari as soon as possible so she could generate the Web pages. Amazingly, we achieved the goal, for the most part.”

Stults was also responsible for designing and creating much of the Web site, and for overseeing its development.

Stults said the project taught him to take sophisticated sociological analysis and convey it to a widespread public audience. “Much of what we do in sociology is of direct relevance to people’s lives, and should inform public policy, but we often fail to package it in a way that people can understand. While we should always work hard to maintain our scientific rigor, we also need to work towards sharing our knowledge with the rest of the world,” he said.

Kumari, 27, of Thirunelveli, South India, is a doctoral student in information science who is expected to earn a master’s degree in geography in May. She handled “data visualization” over the Web. Kumari said, “It’s about publishing the results of a statistical analysis on the Internet as tables, pie charts, bar charts, and textual information. The census data is downloaded and analyzed in various steps by Brian and then he sends the final results data to me in an Excel sheet. I write C++/Visual Basic programs that take the one Excel sheet and spit out 988 Web pages. With a few clicks of the mouse, we can create and edit all 988 files once a program is written.”

Other students who were a part of Logan’s team include Charles Zhang and Jacob Stowell. Stowell, 27, of San Diego, Calif., is a doctoral student in sociology who produced maps depicting national patterns of segregation. These maps were used to illustrate how metropolitan areas with high and persistent levels of residential segregation tend to be clustered in different areas of the country than those characterized by moderate and declining levels of segregation.

He was also responsible for calculating segregation scores (dissimilarity and isolation) for the New York metropolitan area from 1960 to 2000.

Wenquan “Charles” Zhang, a Ph.D. student in sociology in his 30s from Beijing, People’s Republic of China, prepared Census data from 1960 to 1980 for the Greater New York-New Jersey metropolitan area for historical comparison. Then, he mapped the “Racial Polarization of Residential Areas in the New York area” with the Census 2000 data, and did a comparative analysis of county level racial distribution from 1990 to 2000 in the New York region.

Alain Kaloyeros, professor of physics and executive director of the Institute for Materials, wrote an article that was published in the March 2001 issue of Semiconductor Magazine. Titled “Big Plans for the Tiny World of Nano Technology,” the article focused on how university, industry, and government cooperate on a new technology model to provide some critical answers in this field.

Malcolm Sherman, associate professor of mathematics and statistics, was quoted in an article in the April 7 edition of the Rocky Mountain News of Denver, Co. In an article titled “Win One, Lose One: Racial Preferences on Trial in Michigan,” he was listed as an author of a report on racial preferences by the National Association of Scholars.

Edward Salsberg of the School of Public Health was quoted in an article on “Health Workers Taking IT Route, Many Enjoy Sector’s Pay, Job Satisfaction” in the April 8 issue of The Boston Globe. The article also mentioned a study by UAlbany’s Center for Health Workforce Studies, which listed the health care sector overall as an unattractive workplace.

The University at Albany was featured in an article that appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, April 8. The article, which was titled “Where Westchester Goes to College,” stated that in a survey of 27 high schools in Westchester County, it was found that UAlbany was the second most popular choice among high school graduates.

Master Plan
By Mike Boots

Arts and Sciences Renovation: The Old Administration Building is more than half completed, with an expected opening date of Jan. 15, 2002. The project, formerly known as the Old Administration Building Project, has most of the steel studs covered with sheet rock; offices and classrooms are beginning to take shape. The Arts and Sciences Dean’s suite will be located on the east end of the second floor and new faculty offices will flank the north and south sides of both the second and third floors. The west end first floor entrance will be closed and moved to the south side facing the main library.

Fire Alarm Installations: New fire alarms are being installed in all buildings around the podium. This work is occurring at night so as to not interrupt the work day. The alarms will have both smoke and heat detectors. They will also have bright flashing lights and horns that are Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliant.

Steinmetz Hall: Steinmetz Hall on State Quad is under renovation. All asbestos has been removed and work on the mechanical room has begun. In addition to the refurbishing of the bathrooms and painting and carpeting of living spaces, Steinmetz will have a new roof and a sprinkler system installed. The residence hall will be back online for August.

IROW Presents Berry May 2
The Institute for Research on Women will present a lecture by Mary Frances Berry on “Race, Gender: The Enduring Paradox,” on Wednesday, May 2, at 2 p.m. in the Campus Center Assembly Hall. Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches history and law. In 1980, she was appointed by President Carter and confirmed by the Senate as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. After President Reagan fired her for criticizing his civil rights policies, she sued him and won reinstatement in federal district court. In 1993, President Clinton designated her chairperson of the Civil Rights Commission. She was reappointed in January 1999.

Berry has appeared as a guest on numerous television news shows, including Nightline, Crossfire, The News Hour, Face the Nation, the Today Show, Oprah Winfrey, and Good Morning America.

She is also one of the founders of the Free South Africa Movement, which instigated protests at the South African Embassy in the struggle for democracy in South Africa. She was arrested and jailed several times in the cause.

Berry was assistant secretary for education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare during the Carter Administration. In that post, she coordinated and gave general supervision to nearly $13 billion of federal education programs.

Prior to her service at H.E.W., Berry was a provost at the University of Maryland at College Park, and chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Educated at Howard University, the University of Michigan (Ph.D. in history), and the University of Michigan Law School, she is a member of the District of Columbia Bar.

Berry has received 28 honorary doctoral degrees and numerous awards for her public service and scholarly activities, including the NAACP’s Image Award, The Rosa Parks Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Hubert Humphrey Award of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. She is a past president of the Organization of American Historians.

Berry’s lecture, which is free and open to the public, is co-sponsored by: the Office of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Women’s Studies, University Auxiliary Services, Black Faculty and Professional Staff, and the Ford Foundation-funded “Women and Global Perspectives” project.

Li Niu joins the chemistry department as a new assistant professor, where he teaches biochemistry and physical chemistry. He is also affiliated with the Center of Biochemistry and Biophysics and the Center for Neuroscience Research. For three years he was a National Cancer Institute Post-doctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, conducting research with Nobel laureate H.G. Khorana. He studies cell surface receptor proteins - specifically how they translate external signals, such as light and neurotransmitters (small chemical molecules), into a cell.

John T. Welch, chair of the chemistry department, says, “Dr. Niu’s addition to the faculty has already stimulated the revitalization of the Center for Biophysics and Biochemistry in the Department of Chemistry, helping the department enrich and expand its interactions with the Department of Biological Sciences. His cutting-edge research interests will no doubt lead to his becoming a central explorer of the vast new interdisciplinary research horizons confronting us in the new century.”

Niu’s research involves applying various methods and techniques, ranging from chemistry and biology to neuroscience, designed to enable understanding of the functions of glutamate receptors on the cell surface within a time window as short as a microsecond to a few milliseconds. The functions of the glutamate receptors are linked to brain activity such as memory and learning, while abnormal functions of the receptors have been implicated in a number of neurological diseases like Parkinson’s disease and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

In his laboratory, Niu hopes to make new molecules as potential drugs to control precisely the receptor activity in disease states. For example, Niu and his colleagues recently published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA concerning the mechanism-based discovery of new molecules (RNAs) that can prevent the inhibition of the receptor by the addictive drug cocaine.

Christopher Thorncroft comes from the University of Reading in England, where he received degrees in meteorology and studied as a university fellow. He was also a faculty member there for five years. As a new associate professor, he teaches Dynamic Meteorology II and Synoptic-Dynamic Meteorology in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

Thorncroft’s research is in tropical meteorology with a special focus on synoptic weather systems, including easterly waves and tropical cyclones. He also relates these weather systems to longer time scales, including seasonal and interannual.

Department Chair Vincent Idone said, “His emphasis on climate brings a needed component to departmental course offerings and opportunities for graduate students.”

Thorncroft has been a coordinator and principal investigator on several projects, such as the European Union-funded West African Monsoon Project, and the JET2000 experimental project in West Africa. The latter involved using a Hercules aircraft to make high-resolution observations of West African weather during the summer of 2000.

Idone noted that Thorncroft, as co-chair of the World Meteorological Panel on Variability of the African Climate System, “brings a specialization in the interannual variability of African climate and interactions with the tropical Atlantic.”

Christine Konen Wagner, a 1984 University at Albany graduate with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, rejoined the University in January with a Ph.D. in neuroscience and zoology from Michigan State University. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, where she teaches Behavioral Neuroscience.

She is also affiliated with the Center for Neuroscience Research, an interdisciplinary research group of faculty members from several departments on campus. Wagner’s teaching experience began five years ago at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she was a research assistant professor and assistant professor in the psychology department and an assistant professor in the Neuroscience and Behavior Program. In addition, she was a research assistant and postdoctoral fellow at Rutgers University’s Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience. In 1991, she was also a postdoctoral student in the Department of Pharmacology/Toxicology at Michigan State University. In 1995, she received a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award.

Wagner was invited to last year’s U.S. and Japan International seminar on Neuroplasticity, Development, and Steroid Hormone Action, in Hawaii. She has also been the co-chair for the Center for Neuroendocrine Studies’ annual symposium planning committee at UMass.

She has been a reviewer for National Science Foundation Research Grant Proposals. Her research has been published in several prominent publications, such as the Journal of Comparative Neurology, Endocrinology, Journal of Neuroscience, and Journal of Neurobiology. Wagner currently has a $500,000 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to study the role of maternal hormones in fetal neural development.

Distinguished Librarian Lecture Honors Butler April 24
In honor of her appointment to the rank of Distinguished Librarian, Dean of the University Libraries Meredith A. Butler will give a lecture on Tuesday, April 24, at 3 p.m. in the Standish Room of the new library. The title of her talk will be “Women Librarians Never at the Top.”

For nearly three decades, Butler has been a model librarian, administrator, leader, and University and professional citizen. Her efforts have been instrumental in guiding the campus into the information age. She was the principal leader in planning and introducing automated technologies in the University Libraries. She provided critical direction and oversight for the planning and construction of the University’s new library. She also led and coordinated the University’s Campaign for the Libraries, which raised more than $3.8 million to complete this new facility and to renovate the existing University Libraries.

Through her professional service and research, Butler has had substantial impact on the theory, practice, and development of librarianship throughout New York State and the nation.

As she has assumed ever-expanding responsibilities both within and outside of the institution, Butler has remained a productive scholar. Her publications include books, book chapters, articles, reviews, handbooks, guides, and bibliographies. Her work is widely known and respected for being timely, rigorous, creative, and useful.

Butler is the first librarian in the State University of New York system to be promoted to the rank of Distinguished Librarian.

Obituaries

Professor Paul C. Lemon, noted ecologist
Professor Emeritus Paul Clipfell Lemon, 88, died in Ashland, Ore., on March 12. Professor Lemon was a member of the University faculty from 1948 until his retirement in 1969. He served as chair of the Department of Biological Sciences from 1956-1966. After retirement, he was a consulting ecologist.

Professor Lemon played an important role in building the University's strength in biology at a time when the department was starting to grant Ph.Ds. Under his leadership, the department grew from seven to 14 faculty with strength in ecology.

A native of Nebraska, Lemon earned degrees from the University of Nebraska, the University of Illinois, and the University of Minnesota. Before joining the Albany faculty, he conducted field research at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, then with the United States Forest Service in the Rocky Mountains and in its Southeastern Division. He also conducted field research in Africa as a Fulbright Fellow, and in the Philippines.

Professor Lemon was a pioneer in ecology, as he was in prescribed forest burning. His areas of special interest were management of mountain range land, zebra and larger antelopes, fire-grazing interactions, and prairie grasses.

Lemon was a founding member of the Eastern New York Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, the first chapter of that organization.

In the mid-70s, Professor Lemon and his wife, Virginia Cooper Lemon, established the Lemon Fund, which sponsors public lectures at the University by eminent scientists in ecology or conservation. Lectures alternate with awards to the graduate student with the best thesis or dissertation in the field of ecology or conservation.

Professor Lemon is survived by his wife, Virginia, of Ashland, Ore.; a daughter, Laurel Springborn, of Loudonville, N.Y.; a son, Gary Lemon, of Anchorage, Alaska; a stepdaughter, Susan Richardson, of Napa, Calif.; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

German Professor Frederick John Beharriell
Professor Frederick John Beharriell, 82, of Niskayuna, died suddenly on April 4 at Ellis Hospital.

A native of Toronto, Canada, he earned an honors B.A. and was medalist in modern languages in 1939, and a master's degree in 1946, from the University of Toronto. In 1950 he earned a Ph.D. in German literature and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

For 20 years, he was a professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University. A life Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation, he directed research and taught graduate work in German literature, a field in which he published some 30 scholarly studies dealing with the influences of philosophers, especially Sigmund Freud, on 20th century literature. His course Literature and Psychoanalysis regularly enrolled several hundred students, and his course Literature and Ideas drew doctoral candidates from all humanities disciplines. In 1978 the State University honored him with the Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 1981 he was chosen by the American Council of Learned Societies as evaluator in the nationwide assessment of doctoral programs in German. Prior to coming to Albany, Beharriell had taught for 20 years at Indiana University, Bloomington; at the University of Wisconsin, Toronto; and the University of Toronto.

He visited Austria frequently to carry out research at the University of Vienna, including appointments as Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Research Fellow.

Professor Beharriell is survived by his wife, Barbara Jean (McBroom) Beharriell; two daughters, Professor Ruth Antosh of Fredonia, N.Y., and Shirley K. Beharriell of Albany; and a son-in-law, Dr. John Antosh of Fredonia.

SUNY Regatta
On Saturday, April 21, the UAlbany rowing team travels to Binghamton, N.Y., for the first annual SUNY Championships Regatta.

Binghamton University will be hosting the regatta, made possible by the support of Lois DeFleur, the president of Binghamton University. Also attending the regatta will be rowers from SUNY Geneseo, SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Oswego, and SUNY Stony Brook.

“The story of how the regatta came to fruition is an interesting one,” said Travis Geary, head coach of the UAlbany rowing team. “My old coach at Binghamton University, Dan Hogan, spoke with the captain of the Geneseo crew about the possibility of a SUNY regatta. The captain of Geneseo crew then went to the president of SUNY Geneseo, who then got in touch with SUNY Chancellor [Robert] King. Mr. King, who has an interest in crew, contacted Lois DeFleur at Binghamton University. A committee was then set up and thus, the SUNY Championships Regatta was born.”

Geary said, “The regatta is a terrific opportunity for SUNY and for Albany Crew.”

One of the boats used by the UAlbany rowing team is named the Karen Hitchcock in honor of the president. Geary noted that, “Rowing is one of the fastest growing collegiate sports, and there has been dramatic growth at the high school level as well. Burnt Hills, Shaker, Saratoga, Shenen-dehowa, and others in the Capital Region have established rowing programs.” He added that the positive publicity that the institution will receive from this regatta will benefit the entire University.

For more information on the SUNY Championships Regatta, contact Geary at (518) 438-4896.