UAlbany In the News
By Lisa James Goldsberry
The April 18 edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education featured an article written by Jeffrey Berman of the English department. “Crying in the Classroom” dealt with the topic of how he handled an incident in which he became emotional during class in front of his students. He described how, in an expository writing class, he took over reading an essay for a student who was too choked up to continue, only to be so moved by the personal essay he began crying himself. Berman said the experience seemed to give his students permission to show emotion about the essay themselves. Berman’s latest book is Risky Writing: Self-Disclosure and Self-Transformation in the Classroom.

The May 5 issue of The New York Times quoted Jose E. Cruz, an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. The story reported on demographic changes that have made Hartford, Conn., the city with the largest percentage of Hispanics of any major city north of Florida and east of the Mississippi. Cruz was asked to comment on the political and socio-economic implications of this transformation.

The May 15 edition of The New York Times featured quotes by Jonathan Wolpaw, laboratory chief at the Wadsworth Center of the New York State Department of Health and professor of neuroscience at UAlbany. The article, “What’s Next: Wired to the Brain of a Rat, a Robot Takes on the World,” focused on a robot under development at Georgia Tech whose nerve center commands are relayed by about 2,000 cells from a rat’s brain. Wolpaw, in commenting on the experiment, said that the research could yield a simple system for exploring the capacity of neurons and circuits to change based on incoming activity. “These changes could be analogues of what happens in learning,” the article quoted him as saying.

The Winter 2003 issue of Conduit magazine features an extensive interview with George Aaron Broadwell, a professor of linguistics in the anthropology department and director of the Institute for Mesoamerican Studies at UAlbany. The article, “Broadwell’s Burning Museum of Languages,” focused on how and why a language becomes extinct. “A language begins to die when no children are speaking it,” the article quoted him as saying. “And when the last of the current speakers dies, then the language itself is dead.” Conduit is an international magazine of poetry, art, fiction, non-fiction, and interviews.

Faculty & Staff
By Carol Olechowski

Lowery Named Vice President for Finance and Business
President Karen R. Hitchcock has announced the appointment of Kathryn K. Lowery as vice president for Finance and Business, effective July 15. Lowery’s appointment was the result of an intensive national search.

“I am most grateful to the Search Committee, chaired by Dean Alain Kaloyeros, for the outstanding job he and all the other members did on behalf of our University,” Hitchcock said.

Since joining the University in 1978, Lowery has held a number of increasingly senior positions in the Division of Finance and Business and the University’s Computing Center. She has served as interim vice president for Finance and Business since April 2002, when Paul Stec left to become vice president for finance at Siena College.

“By every standard, and by all accounts, Kathy has discharged the multifaceted and demanding responsibilities and challenges of that position with exemplary leadership, skill, and dedication,” Hitchcock said. Lowery earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UAlbany.

Susan Phillips Named School of Education Dean
President Karen R. Hitchcock has announced the appointment of Susan Phillips to the position of dean of the School of Education, effective immediately.

Phillips has served as interim dean since March 1, 2002, following the untimely death of Ralph Harbison. Phillips received her Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Columbia University in 1979. She has more than 21 years’ experience at UAlbany. Phillips has been a full professor since 1997, and chair of the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology since 1998.

Zyskowski Joins FBI’s Summer Internship Program
Stacey Zyskowski, a part-time keyboard specialist in UAlbany’s Advisement Services Center/Undergraduate Studies (ASC/US) and a full-time student in the School of Criminal Justice, has been selected for the FBI’s summer internship program. As one of only 55 participants from around the United States, Zyskowski will be posted to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., until August 8. During the internship, she hopes to “shadow” a profiler. The Presidential Honors Society member, who earned a degree in individual studies from Hudson Valley Community College, will be a senior at UAlbany in the fall. She is grateful for the support she has received from her ASC/US colleagues and her internship sponsor, Professor of Criminal Justice and recent Excellence in Teaching Award winner James Acker.

UAlbany Advisement Wins Honors
The University at Albany’s electronic advising publication, Advisement Services Center Web Site, http://www.albany.edu/advisement, has won an Outstanding Electronic Publication Certificate of Merit as part of the 2003 National Academic Advising Association’s (NACADA) National Awards Program. The publication was developed by Dan White, Advisement Services Center/Undergraduate Studies (ASC/US).

Judging was on the basis of content, presentation, clarity, and creativity. This award will be presented at the NACADA national conference in Dallas, Texas, in early October.

In other advisement news, NACADA has recognized Linda Scoville of ASC/US as an Outstanding Academic Advisor. Scoville, a doctoral student in English, began advising as a graduate assistant in the English Advisement Office in 1996 and became a full-time academic advisor at ASC in 1999. She advises 300 to 400 undeclared undergraduates each semester and works with her colleague, pre-law advisor Dawn Kakumba, in assisting students interested in law.

Kaloyeros and Langer Honored
School of NanoSciences and NanoEngineering Founding Dean and Albany NanoTech Executive Director Alain Kaloyeros, and Center for English Learning & Achievement Director and Department of Educational Theory and Practice Chair Judith Langer were among the scholars honored by SUNY Chancellor Robert King at a dinner May 12 at State University Plaza in Albany. Kaloyeros and Langer received the Excellence in the Pursuit of Knowledge award. Also honored were Albert Millis, chair of the biology department, for his first patent; and Eric Lifshin and Fatemeh Shahedipour-Sandvik of the School of NanoSciences and NanoEngineering, and Ana Perez, director of the Mouse Transgenic Facility, Center for Functional Genomics, as promising inventors.

Hoff Report
Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management Timothy Hoff, Ph.D., has written The Power of Frontline Workers in Transforming Government: The Upstate New York Veterans Healthcare Network. In the publication, part of the IBM Endowment for The Business of Government’s Transforming Organi-zations Series, Hoff detailed how the Upstate New York Veterans Healthcare Network markedly improved its performance in the 1990s.

Dewar Selected
Diane Dewar, an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy, Management and Behavior, has been selected as a reviewer for the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Educational Foundation’s 2003 American Fellowship Panel. Dewar, who earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in economics at UAlbany, has taught at the University for nearly a decade.

Town-Gown Workshops
This spring, Director of Personal Safety and Off-Campus Affairs Thomas Gebhardt spoke at several conferences in the Northeast. In March, with Albany Police Department Sgt. Fred Aliberti, he co-presented “Success Story: Bringing the Community and Industry Together” at a Syracuse conference. At subsequent events in Troy, Saratoga Springs, Poughkeepsie, and Willimantic, Conn., Gebhardt spoke about campus-community relations, underage drinking, and substance abuse prevention.

Fulbright from Nepal Finishes Stay at UAlbany
Professor Sitaram Byahut, the first senior Fulbright Scholar to visit the Department of Physics and the first Fulbright Scholar in the sciences to be chosen from Nepal, spent the spring semester at UAlbany. Byahut is a professor at Tribhuvan University of Kath-mandu, Nepal. He also worked on the current National Science Foundation Grant from the NSF South Asia Division (U.S.-Nepal collaboration) on research problems in materials science and environmental physics (on ozone-ultra violet interaction) involving the faculty of the physics department at Tribuhuvan, as well as physics professor Tara Prasad Das’s research group on “U.S.-Nepal Cooperative Research: Theoretical and Experimental Investigations on Some Current Electronic Structure Related Topics in Condensed Matter Systems and Ozone-UV Interaction.” Byahut and his colleagues wrote seven papers presented by Das’s group at the American Physical Society meeting in March.