Marybeth Salmon '77, manager of data processing for the New York State Police, has been appointed as the new Director of University Business Systems.

"Marybeth will be instrumental in our initiative to replace our administrative legacy systems, ushering our student-related, human resource and financial recording into the administrative systems of the future," said Leo F. Neveu, University Controller and Associate Vice President for Finance and Business. Salmon received a computer science and applied sciences degree from the University, and immediately began a 20-year career with the State Police, starting as a computer programmer/analyst.

A reception is being held to welcome the new staff member on Thursday, May 1, from 10 to 11 a.m. in Business Administration Room 220A.

"Litigating on Behalf of Battered Women: the Advocate and the Lawyer's Role" was the theme of a on-day training conference developed and conducted by the Center for Women in Government's G. Kristian Miccio on April 5 at the ABC-television studios in New York City, where more than 100 participants gathered.

Helping them to learn about the litigation process on behalf of battered women was State Senator Catherine Abate. The event culminated in a mock trial.

Miccio is director of the Center's new Domestic Violence Studies Project, and is teaching a new graduate course, "Gender, Public Policy, and the Law," this summer.

Herman Prins Salomon of the Department of French Studies has been invited to give a series of lectures on "Bibles d'Albe (1422-1433), de Constantinople (1547) et du Ferrare (1553)" and on the 17th Century religious philosopher Uriel da Costa at the Sorbonne's Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris in May and June of 1997.

In the early 1990s, Salomon published an analysis of da Costa's Examination of Pharisaic Traditions Compared to Scripture, which made the claim that Rabbinic Judaism had falsified the Bible by creating non-literal interpretations, including the Judeo- Christian belief in the immortality of the soul. Da Costa's writings served as forerunner to those of future Jewish heretic Benedict de Spinoza.

Da Costa and his work were denounced in his native Amsterdam when the work was published in 1624. The entire publisher's run of the 214-page volume was thought destroyed. Succeeding where countless other historians, combing all the major libraries of the world, had failed, Salomon in September of 1990 discovered a beautifully printed copy of the work in an all-but-forgotten nook of the major Copenhagen library. He was told it had probably not been removed from its shelf for two and one-half centuries.

Salomon, an Amsterdam native, also has published three books on the 17 Century Portuguese settlements in that city, and he taught a course at the Sorbonne in the Spring of 1990. He joined the Albany faculty in 1969.