The
O'Shea Report: September 2003
At every monthly
faculty meeting during the school year, Dean of Faculty Donal
O'Shea presents brief overviews of recent publications and other
achievements by the Mount Holyoke faculty. Here are excerpts from
his report for September 2003.
GRANTS
Mary E. Woolley Assistant
Professors of Chemistry Wei Chen and Darren Hamilton,
and Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Chemistry Megan
Núñez have been awarded $145,945 by the National
Science Foundation's Major Research Instrumentation Program to
support their project: Acquisition of an Atomic Force Microscope.
A laboratory curiosity in the mid-80s, atomic force microscopes
have emerged as the tool of choice over the last decade for probing
molecular behavior on surfaces. By running a very sharp tip over
a sample, they allow one to see features at a scale of several
nanometers (a nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter), which
means, for example, that one can actually observe DNA molecules
on a cell membrane. Megan plans to use the microscope with her
students to study how some predators alter the membrane structures
of bacteria on which they prey and how some bacteria adhere to
protozoans. Wei and her students will use it to further their
studies of adsorption of latex particles and proteins on various
surfaces. Darren and his students will use it to further their
design and study of a class of molecules that readily accept and
trap electrons. The department also plans to integrate the AFM
into its curriculum.
Assistant Professor
of Chemistry Maria Gomez has received a grant of $35,000
from the Petroleum Research Fund for her project Proton Conduction
in Perovskite Oxides. Perovskites comprise a diverse class
of ceramics which form nice cubic lattices of great interest for
both theoretical and practical reasons. In particular, some conduct
protons and show great potential for use in developing ever more
efficient fuel cells. However, although there are a lot of conjectures,
how this proton conduction takes place is poorly understood. Maria
plans a systematic study of calcium and barium perovskites with
a view to modeling proton transfer, determining whether the size
of the lattice contributes to the rate of proton transfer (and
conjecturally related phenomena such as transition state energies,
vibrational frequencies, and the like), and comparing to experimental
data. The computations that she proposes to do, and have her students
do, are massive and require a series of ganged-together computers
working in parallel. The reviewers' comments are highly laudatory
and betray an eagerness to see the results, along with an awareness
that these computations push current electronic structure methods
to the limit. In addition to getting the grant, Maria gave birth
to a baby boy last week, Conrad Sebastian Gomez-Haibach
(7 lbs., 14 oz., which works out to 3,570 grams).
Assistant Professor
of Biological Sciences Gary Gillis's request to the National
Science Foundation for $201,486 to support his project Body
Size, Limb Posture, and Muscle Strain during Terrestrial Locomotion
has been funded. Nothing about this proposal has gone as expected.
Gary submitted it in the knowledge that the sort of change of
research direction he was proposing would probably not be funded.
Then he was informed that the proposal was declined, but that
they really wanted to fund it because the reviews were so amazing:
"This proposal by Gillis stands as the best RUI (proposal for
Research in Undergraduate Institutions) that I have seen since
reviewing proposals for NSF and as one of the better proposals
in any category. The PI presents an excellent research plan in
which he plans to integrate students from one of the best small
college student bodies in the country" or "This is the best RUI
proposal that I have read in more than 15 years of reviewing proposals
for the NSF... The questions addressed are important and timely."
The proposal was "undeclined," meaning not awarded, but not declined.
Then came word that they thought they could find the money and
were recommending it. Finally, it is official. The proposal will
allow Gary and his students to study in vivo the size-dependent
differences in muscle activity in similar muscles in closely related
species. Several features distinguish the proposed work from other
work in the field: the work is being done in vivo (and
not on dissected muscles in the laboratory), and among very closely
related species, and aims at some very specific quantitative results
(for example, he conjectures that the degree of stretching experienced
by knee extensors during one particular phase of movement is inversely
proportional to body size, a result that allows him to predict
that these extensors perform different mechanical functions in
animals of different sizes).
Darren Hamilton
has been awarded $135,000 by the National Science Foundation for
his project RUI: Supramolecular Utility of a Versatile New
Electron Acceptor. With his students, Darren has worked on
synthesis of an unusual class of molecules containing highly symmetric,
planar structures called triimides that accept electrons nicely
and that can also be used to build molecules with prescribed topologies.
This proposal will allow them to continue to explore this class
of objects. One of their ideas is to try to construct new liquid
crystals with attractive properties.
Clare Boothe Luce
Assistant Professor of Physics Janice Hudgings and
her collaborator, Rajeev Ram, at MIT, have been awarded $270,000
by the National Science Foundation for their project High Performance
Thermal Profiling of Photonic Integrated Circuits. One of
the developments of the last decade has been the beginnings of
the development of photonic integrated circuits, which are the
analogue of integrated circuits for optical circuits (that is,
the placement of two or more optical circuits on a single substrate).
They propose to develop a set of thermoreflectance techniques
that will give them unprecedented access to what happens inside
such circuits and their components (such as lasers). Preliminary
work by Janice and her colleague indicate that they can deduce
the properties they need from measuring thermal distributions
in lattices. They will use Mount Holyoke undergraduates to conduct
experimental measurements, having them work with an MIT graduate
student to adapt some of the equipment, and a postdoctoral fellow
to coordinate efforts between the campuses.
Megan Núñez
has received a $20,000 startup grant from the Camille and Henry
Dreyfus Foundation for her project Needle in a Haystack: Removing
Base Lesions from DNA. She will try to determine how lesions
in DNA are recognized by inducing such lesions and studying structural
factors that might allow recognition of them. She will have students
measure the lengths of damaged DNA using atomic force microscopy.
Associate Professor
of Geology Alan Werner has been awarded $79,283 by the
National Science Foundation for his portion of a collaborative
project with Brown University, Northern Arizona University, and
the University of Illinois entitled Holocene Climatic Variability
in Southern Alaska--Quantitative Estimates of Temperature and
Precipitation, Warm Intervals, and Possible Cyclicity. Growing
concerns over global warming have resulted in intense studies
of climactic changes in the Holocene era (which is the name of
our era, the period since the last ice age 11,000 years ago).
Studies of ice samples from northern Europe suggest the existence
of climactic cycles with periods on the order of a century. This
grant will allow Al and his students to join students from Brown,
Illinois, and Northern Arizona universities to try to see whether
ice and lake patterns in Alaska show evidence of similar cyclical
variation. This grant is in addition to the $507,581 grant that
Al, and his colleague Steve Roof of Hampshire College, received
this summer to bring students to high arctic in Norway to study
modern climate change.
BOOKS
If you listened to
any public radio station this summer, or if you watched C-Span,
you would have heard discussions with Senior Lecturer in Women's
Studies Martha Ackmann about her book The Mercury 13:
The Untold Story of Thirteen American Women and the Dream of Space
Flight, which appeared in June with Random House. The book
gives a whole new perspective on the beginnings of the U.S. space
program. It recounts the heartbreaking and shameful, and for me,
completely new, story of 13 women who had been recruited to participate
in the early space missions, who had been tested and trained and
allowed to hope and dream, and who were then summarily brushed
aside purely on account of their sex. Martha's account is careful
and utterly absorbing. One learns a great deal about Jerrie Cobb
and the much-better-known, but not wholly admirable, Jackie Cochran,
and of the differences between the two. You won't ever think of
John Glenn in the same way. Read it and rage, or weep, or both.
Professor of English
and Codirector of the Weissman Center for Leadership Christopher
Benfey's new book The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese
Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan, which appeared
with Random House in June, gets my nomination for the "if-you-read-just-one-book-this-year,
this-should-be-it" award. It is an utterly engaging account of
nineteenth-century New Englanders who became fascinated with Japan,
and their Japanese counterparts who were drawn to the West. The
subject seems a bit offbeat at first, but winds up touching an
enormous number of aspects of the era. It gives Chris a launching
point for character sketches that sympathetically bring to life
an enormously unlikely range of characters. Where else would one
encounter the Cabots and the Lodges in the same narrative as Creole
historians, Japanese orphans, Rabindranath Tagore, samurai, and
delusional novelists? Chris's limpid prose beguiles as surely
as a fine postprandial brandy, and reading the book seems very
like joining a series of dinner conversations among old friends
in which the conversation lingers on friends of friends and ranges
freely over time and place with many points of contact among them.
In the introduction (which is better read last), Chris hopes that
he has sketched a map of intersecting journeys as much as a history.
He succeeds brilliantly. His prose and sheer narrative ability
mask the scope and range of the scholarship that undergirds his
map.
Occasionally one comes
across a book that opens up a whole new world. Such was the case
for me with Irene Kaplan Leiwant Professor of Jewish Studies Larry
Fine's Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac
Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship, which appeared
in early summer with Stanford University Press. The book provides
a very accessible, and even compelling, introduction to medieval
Jewish history and mysticism through the study of one of its most
mysterious and influential figures, Isaac Luria. Larry begins
by outlining the ironies of Luria's short life and extensive influence:
Luria's desire to restrict teachings to a small number of initiates
contrasts with the huge amounts of literature his teaching inspired;
the wide scholarly acceptance of the centrality of Luria to the
development of Jewish mysticism contrasts with the paucity of
scholarly studies of Luria; Luria's emphasis on people and praxis
contrasts with the almost exclusive focus of scholars on Luria's
mythic conceptions. In a way that is as artful as it is difficult
to describe, Larry creates enough mystery about Luria that you
simply cannot put the book aside because you want to know more.
You find yourself asking how an individual who did not seek fame,
who wrote little, and who lived such a short time, could exert
such an influence on others. You want to know the answers to the
questions that Larry raises, to know what Luria's spouse and friends
thought. Once hooked, you hang on Larry's account of what is actually
known, and with what degrees of certainty and why. Like him, you
wish for more and follow closely as he sifts through writings
and oral accounts. The book unites textual analysis, history,
the history of religion, Jewish studies, performance studies,
and even feminist criticism. It is clearly the fruit of decades
of study and reflection, and bears the mark of a master patiently
laying out a case, knowing that what is being said will break
new ground and forever change the way future scholars will approach
the subject. This is the real thing. The wonder is that it is
so accessible and so compelling.
You have to see Associate
Professor of Theatre Arts Vanessa James's visually stunning
The Genealogy of Greek Mythology: An Illustrated Family Tree
of Greek Myth from the First Gods to the Founders of Rome
to fully appreciate it. It appeared this summer as a result
of a collaboration between Melcher Media and Gotham Books (a member
of the Penguin Group). It looks like a book, but is actually a
cross between a two-sided scroll and a book. It is a long (over
20 feet) two-sided, beautifully illustrated and annotated genealogical
chart, fan-folded between two covers. You can read it page by
page like a book or open up several pages at once. On one side
you have the gods; following the lines down and turning it over,
you get the first generations of mortals issuing from those gods.
It is scholarly, it is beautiful, and it is impossible to stay
out of. After you see it, you will never again want to consult
a standard encyclopedia of mythology.
A new book of Emily
Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Mary Jo Salter's
poems, entitled Open Shutters, has just appeared with Alfred
A. Knopf. The poems are wonderful and defy description. They are
full of surprises, of unexpected shifts of tempo and wording and
tone that always delight and that often freeze time much as a
flash does. Dickinson's injunction to "tell all the truth, but
tell it slant" comes to mind. Mary Jo tells it slant, and the
results are often unforgettable, be they about the neighbor's
dog who "stands on the deck in back of their house like a figurehead
fixed on the wrong direction ... His profile's imperial, nearly
Egyptian," or a father's loss, or a riff on Raymond Chandler.
Her poems "TWA 800" and "An Open Book" are as lovely and as unlikely
memorials as I have ever read. I keep trying to decide on my favorite
two or three poems in this collection and can't. There is too
much to like, and I keep changing my mind.
Two new books by William
R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Roberto Marquez arrived on my desk. I've not had a chance
to read them, so will report next time. Likewise, I have not had
a chance to do any more than look at the pictures in a new book
by Associate Professor of Art Anthony Lee and John Pulz.
The book, with a foreword by Florence Finch Abbott Director of
the Museum Marianne Doezema, came out last month with Yale
University Press and is entitled Diane Arbus: Family Albums.
It accompanies the Diane Arbus exhibition at the art museum. (If
you haven't done so already, go see the exhibition -- it is spectacular.)
Wen Xing's
translation into Chinese of Robert Hedricks book Lao Tzu's
Tao Te Ching appeared with Academy Press, Beijing, 2003. Sadly,
we lost Wen to Trinity University. However, he will be returning
to campus this year to participate in and help organize a conference
on the recently discovered older versions of the Tao Te Ching
that differ considerably from what had been considered the canonical
versions.
PERFORMANCES AND AWARDS
Professor of Music
Allen Bonde's composition Celebrate was performed fives
time this summer in Australia (including at the Sydney Opera House).
Assistant Professor
of English and American Studies Jeffrey Santa Ana received
a Ford Fellowship for Minorities to finish up his dissertation
work (which deals, among other things, with the commodification
and globalization of ethnic and racial identities).
Visiting Associate
Professor of Italian Francesca Santovetti has won a fellowship
for the spring 2004 semester from the Bogliasco Foundation. The
fellowship will allow her to work on her manuscript Picturing
Southern Questions: On the Politics of Adaptation.
--The May 2003 O'Shea
Report more>
--The April 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The February 2003 O'Shea Report more>
--The December 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The November 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The October 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The September 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The May 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The April 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The March 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The February 2002 O'Shea Report more>
--The December 2001 O'Shea Report more>
--The November 2001 O'Shea Report more>
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