UNIVERSITY NEWS

Collaborations for high-speed network

Tufts has joined 142 other research universities working to implement a second-generation advanced Internet capability known as Internet2

A project of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID), Internet2 provides leadership for advanced networking development. "UCAID membership allows us to be active on a national stage, contributing research and networking expertise, forwarding the development of the standards and protocols of higher speed networking,¾ said Lesley Tolman, director of telecommunications. "Tufts has much to gain from participation in this program. Researchers will realize increased productivity tied to increased network capacity and sophistication and new opportunities for collaborative research. Involvement on a national level increases Tufts' profile overall, and also will drive the evolution of our campus network, increasing power and capacity to everyone in the Tufts community."

Tufts has also been accepted as a Partner Institution in a National Science Foundation program that allows it to connect to an advanced national network known as the very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS).

Tufts was sponsored by the California Institute of Technology through its High Energy Physics department, which is collaborating closely with Tufts' High Energy Physics group. The connection will be through Boston University this spring. In addition, Tufts has applied to the NSF's High Performance Connections grant program, through which universities can obtain high-speed connections to the vBNS based on their ability to contribute to application development.

Once Tufts' new connection is operational, network access between Tufts and the 80 connected universities will be up to ten times faster than that currently provided. Tufts joins stand against drinking .

To combat underage and binge drinking, Tufts and 23 other Boston-area colleges and universities have signed a cooperative agreement believed to be the most comprehensive of its kind in the country

The agreement, signed on December 7 at Northeastern University, acknowledges the degree to which illegal and binge drinking can adversely affect the lives of students on and off campus and sets uniform goals for educational and social programming, discipline, community networking and training at the participating schools.

Participating schools included Brandeis, Harvard, MIT, Simmons, Wellesley, the Massachusetts College of Art and Bentley College.

A center for writing, thinking, speaking
A new Tufts initiative supports writing, critical thinking, and public presentation skills. The Writing, Thinking, and Speaking Center, 72 Professors Row, has a twofold mission: encouraging faculty to infuse courses with opportunities for writing, thinking, and speaking; and providing undergraduate and graduate students with resources for improving their analytical and communication skills. Created in response to Tufts' Higher Education Initiative, the Center offers faculty and students a range of programs in these key areas. The writing component works with faculty while at the same time providing writing support to graduate and undergraduate students. The critical thinking component, coordinated by Susan Russinoff, provides workshops and resources for faculty that highlight the importance of teaching students to think analytically and clearly, to frame arguments, to assess evidence, and to identify their own assumptions. "We wish to serve as a conduit for conversations about the connections between good writing and clear thinking," said Nadia Medina, director of the Center. "Our goal is to ensure that our students learn to think clearly and communicate effectively so they can assume leadership positions in and beyond the university."

Degree focuses on pain management
A new master's degree program in pain research, education and policy, believed to be the first of its kind in the United States, will enroll its first students this fall at the School of Medicine. The degree is the latest in a growing array of interdisciplinary degree programs at Tufts' medical school. They include an MD/MBA in health management; two new programs that combine an MD with graduate degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the College of Engineering; and master's degree programs in health communication, public health and public health/nutrition.

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THE COLLEGE

Admissions: Looking Up, Again
Good news again for the Office of Admissions as the number of high school students applying to Tufts sets another record. More than 13,450 applications were received for some 1,250 places in the Class of 2003, a 9 percent increase over last year. Interest runs high in the College of Engineering as well, which reports that more than 1,700 students applied for admission, an 11 percent increase over last year. Overall, applications to the college have climbed 78 percent since 1993.

A&S makes strategic plan commitment
Arts & Sciences will implement a strategic plan aimed at making sure the undergraduate college continues to attract a top-notch, diverse student body and faculty while also making a significant investment in information technology.

Segments of the plan dealing with financial aid and technology were unveiled by Mel Bernstein, vice president for arts, sciences and technology, at a meeting of the Arts & Sciences faculty in February, when President John DiBiaggio and Senior Vice President and Provost Sol Gittleman also addressed the need to find new sources of revenue.

"In the past decade, we have made tremendous progress because of our most valuable assetãpeople," Bernstein said. "In keeping with the goals of our mission statement and the community priorities that emerged from the Higher Education Initiative, we must support the efforts that propelled us to international visibility as a premier university.¾ The initiative will be implemented over five years and will aim to provide some $8 million a year. About $5 million of that amount will be earmarked for financial aid, with the rest going to diversity efforts, information technology and faculty development.

The money will come from administrative reorganization and business process redesign as well as increased funding from a modest tuition and enrollment increase, endowment funds and the continuing education program.

"It is difficult to make changes when things are going well," DiBiaggio said, "but increases in direct grants [to students] offered by other colleges and universities are forcing Tufts to find additional funds for scholarships."

DiBiaggio said that within the last year, schools such as Princeton, Yale and Harvard have begun providing more direct grants, instead of loans, to students, and that trend has now spread to schools with which Tufts directly competes, including Dartmouth, Cornell and Johns Hopkins.

Gittleman noted that other parts of the university are also taking a hard look at their expenses and revenues. "We have seven faculties," he said, "but this is one university."

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WHAT'S COOKING

In an unusual course last semester, students in "Gourmet Engineering" studied heat conduction by making meat loaf, radiation by broiling fish, microwaves by heating leftovers and the thermodynamics of water by boiling eggs. The new kitchen laboratory in Anderson Hall, outfitted with the corporate support of Frigidaire Home Products and Calphalon, has the potential to lead to innovations, noted Ioannis Miaoulis, E83, G86, PhD87, dean of the College of Engineering. Studying marshmallows in a microwave may lead to new kinds of radar apparatus, and the same theory of heat transfer that cools brownies may improve the manufacture of silicon chips. "Make no mistake, this is serious, hard science with important implications," said Miaoulis. "And, with any luck, even a few gourmet engineers will emerge."

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STUDENT LIFE

Between Hong Kong and Tufts, new friends
The first Tufts Institute for Leadership and International Perspective (TILIP) came to a successful conclusion with a two-day symposium that reunited the Tufts undergraduates and the Chinese students who first met in Hong Kong last summer.

The seven American and seven Chinese students continued their partnership during the school year via e-mail, in which they worked on business case studies they presented at a symposium on February 25-26.

The students agreed that a key part of the success of the program was the opportunity to meet and work with people from another culture. "The partnerships and friends we made was the best part of our experience," said Christopher Pape, an economics major. The symposium included discussions of topics such as the Asian economic crisis and leadership in the global economy. But it also allowed some of the Chinese students to see snow for the first time, wander through Faneuil Hall Market Place and sit in on lectures at Tufts.

"We were given a tour of Tufts on our first day," said Mabel Lee, a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "My impression is that Tufts is a very good place for studying with people who are dedicated." This is the inaugural year for TILIP, which provides a combination of practice-based learning while fostering leadership qualities and a global perspective. Students worked in teams for companies such as Morgan Stanley Asia, Saatchi & Saatchi Asia Pacific, Hongkong Telecom and Pacific Health Care.

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AT A GLANCE

Tufts in February joined Boston University and Boston College in a four-day fete honoring Joan Tower, considered the leading woman composer in America, on the occasion of her 60th birthday. As part of "Go Like 60 . . .."events, the Music Department paid homage to Tower with an open forum and a "Party to the Power of 60,¾ a concert featuring "birthday card¾ chamber pieces, and capped by awarding Tower with the department's Lifetime Achievement Award. The Boston College all-Tower concert included performances by the Muir Quartet and pianist John McDonald, Tufts associate professor of music and himself a noted composer.

The Tufts Institute of the Environment, better known as TIE, moved into new space in Miller Hall on the Medford/Somerville campus in December. TIE's role is to coordinate the wide range of environmental programs in research, education, outreach and service at Tufts.

Chinese dissident Wei Jingshen and Gherardo Colombo, a member of the Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) anti-corruption trials in Italy, were among the key speakers for "Global Crime, Corruption and Accountability,¾ an international symposium developed by students under Sherman Teichman, founder and director of Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship (EPIIC). The week-long event in early March included awarding the Dr. Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award to Luis Moreno Ocampo, president of Transparency International Latin American and the Caribbean, and Nigerian Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize winner in literature.

The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Resource Center on February 20 hosted the first of four statewide conferences to address gay and lesbian concerns on campus. The conference comes in the second year of a five-year contract with the Department of Public Health to administer the Safe Colleges Program of the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. Massachusetts is the first state in the country to launch such an initiative, and Tufts is one of only a handful of New England colleges with a full-time directorãJudith Brown, a PhD candidate in English, serving lesbian, gay and bisexual students.

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PLACES

In Good Faith Father David O'Leary was teaching moral theology at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore when Cardinal Law called him from Boston with a new job: breathing life into Tufts Catholic Center. O'Leary seemed the right match: at age 40, he was, as he puts it, "just young enough" to turn the Center, empty for three years, into a welcoming space for Catholic students, who, at 25 percent, represent the largest group among campus religions. And as a doctoral candidate in bioethics, he could bring strong scholarship to the classroom.

Today, O'Leary looks back on eight months of progress. In addition to his duties as an associate chaplain and lecturer in moral theology, he has single-handedly raised some $12,000 for extensive repairs to 58 Winthrop Street, including tackling a moldy basement where mushrooms sprouted through the carpet. "I didn't know what I was getting into," he says. "But students need a place to meet, for socializing, and for ongoing programs, and that can't happen without a safe building." (Sunday Mass is celebrated at 10 p.m. in Goddard Chapel.) Renovations have made a generous function hall open to various activities ranging from swing dance classes to wedding receptions, and the newly carpeted basement is popular for its comfortable couches and easy chairs, kitchen and laundry room. Nothing pleases O'Leary more than to have students drop in at all hours to enjoy the Center as a quiet place to study and relax. "For a long time this place has had potential and that's what I'm hoping to bring out. Ongoing repairs will require at least another $20,000." So far, Catholic student life has been able to flourish, with O'Leary and students organizing dinners, spiritual meetings and charity drives, among other activities. This spring, plans include a retreat and backyard cookouts. "The students are very bright and giving," says O'Leary. "They certainly deserve having a space to call their own."

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PEOPLE

Administration
President John DiBiaggio was elected chairman of the American Council on Education's board of directors at the organization's 81st annual meeting in Washington, DC, on February 13.

The American Council on Education, an association of 1,600 colleges and universities and nearly 200 national and regional higher education groups, analyzes issues in higher education and advocates on behalf of quality higher education programs. ACE represents higher education before Congress, federal agencies, the Supreme Court and the federal courts, coordinating the interests of higher education into a single voice on national policy issues. The organization operates a number of programs to increase access to postsecondary education, promote equity, ensure quality on the nation's campuses and train the next generation of leaders in higher education.

Tufts recently named two new overseers to provide further assistance to the university's president and Board of Trustees. Appointed to the Board of Overseers for the Medical School/Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences are:

Dr. Steven Jaharis, M87, of Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Medical Group, Evanston, Illinois, and
Dr. Richard Sackler, senior vice president of The Purdue Frederick Co., Inc., Norwalk, Connecticut.

Director of Athletics Rocky Carzo received the George C. Carens Award from the New England Football Writers Association (NEFWA) for his contributions to college football over the years. A former football coach at Tufts, Carzo has been actively involved in national and local administrations for college football since 1978.

The Faculty
Three Tufts faculty members have received Fulbright awards to lecture, consult, or conduct research abroad this year. The faculty and the countries in which they will be conducting their research are: Allen Taylor, senior scientist and chief of the Laboratory for Nutrition and Vision Research at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging: Israel; Pierre-Henri Laurent, professor of history: Belgium; Ellen L. Lutz, visiting associate professor of law: Uruguay.

Alexander Vilenkin, professor of physics, in November attended COSMO-98, an international conference on particle physics and the early universe. The conference featured a two-hour debate on quantum cosmology between Vilenkin, Stephen Hawking and Andrei Linde.

Dr. Johanna T. Dwyer, professor of medicine, community health, and nutrition and director of the Frances Stern Nutrition Center at the New England Medical Center, has been elected to the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences. A senior scientist at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, she is one of only two registered dietitians in this prestigious organization.

Jeswald W. Salacuse, Henry J. Braker Professor of Law at the Fletcher School, has been awarded the Fulbright Chair in Comparative Law for Italy. He will spend March through June 2000 at the University of Trento in Italy.

Jacob Selhub, a researcher at the Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging, is the winner of the 1999 Lederle Award for his "investigative contributions of contemporary significance to the understanding of nutrition,¾ given by the American Society for Nutritional Sciences. Selhub's expertise is in the area of homocysteine and folate metabolism. He is the head of the Vitamin Metabolism Laboratory.

Patrick Webb, associate professor of nutrition, was named an honorary professor by the University of Hohenheim in Stuttgart, Germany, on January 12. Webb spent two years at Hohenheim as an invited guest professor; he pursued research on the geographic dimensions of malnutrition and poverty in developing countries and was involved in setting up a new master's degree program in agriculture, food security and natural resources in the tropics.

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COMMUNITY

Art gallery welcomes schoolchildren
A mock fallout shelter and the "Fat Man"bomb casing were among the most intriguing artifacts for nearly 1,000 area schoolchildren who visited Hiroshima/Nagasaki: The Fallout¾ exhibition at the Tufts University Gallery during its nearly 12-week run. Their record attendance was made possible by a new three-year grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the first time the museum has received such sizable funding for building community connections.

"We've done similar programs in the past on a smaller scale and wanted to encourage what has been a very promising response," said Susan Masuoka, director of the art gallery. "Many of the children say how much they enjoy visiting the gallery and that they want to come back with their parents." Tufts undergraduates enrolled in the Interdisciplinary Studies course, "Cultural Legacy of the Atom Bomb," were docents.

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RESEARCH

New food pyramid for people over 70
Tufts nutrition experts have designed a modified food pyramid for people over 70. As published in the March issue of The Journal of Nutrition, the modified dietary guidelines include the addition of eight or more eight-ounce glasses of water at the base of the pyramid and a small supplement flag at the top labeled as calcium, vitamin D, and vitamin B-12. The pyramid for 70+ adults also has a narrower base to reflect a decrease in energy needs, while emphasizing nutrient-dense foods and fiber. It advocates the daily consumption of six or more servings of bread, fortified cereal, rice and pasta; three or more servings of vegetables; two or more servings of fruit; three servings of milk, yogurt or cheese; and two or more servings of the meat, poultry, fish, dry beans, eggs and nuts group.

Lyme arthritis discovery top rated The American Association for the Advancement of Science has named a Tufts finding on how Lyme disease can lead to treatment-resistant, autoimmune arthritis one of the top 10 scientific discoveries of 1998.

The discovery was made by Dawn Gross, a Tufts' MD/PhD student and her mentors, Allen Steere, holder of the Natalie V. Zucker and Milton O. Zucker, M.D., Chair in Rheumatology and Immunology at Tufts School of Medicine, and Brigitte Huber, professor of pathology.

The team discovered that an immune cell, called T cells, activated by the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, continues to cause joint inflammation after eradication of the bacterium, because these cells may mistake a human protein for a bacterium protein. Steere, who is also chief of rheumatology and immunology at New England Medical Center, said the finding "may give us valuable clues to understanding not only Lyme arthritis, but also other types of arthritis, such as rheumatoid arthritis.¾ Steere discovered Lyme disease in 1976 in children from Lyme, Connecticut, and traced the distinct grouping of childhood rheumatoid arthritis to the deer tick. He more recently headed up trials for the first vaccine to prevent Lyme disease.

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TECHNOLOGY

Funding supports Tisch Library digital ventures
As computer technology and internet search engines push the capabilities of research, the Tisch Library is meeting the challenge through several innovative Internet projects. These collaborations between faculty and library staff are funded by the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment, established in 1996 to retool staff for the high-tech digital library. Perhaps most important, however, the endowment allows librarians and faculty to transfer that knowledge to students and colleagues. That investment is now bringing impressive results, opening opportunities to study subjects as diverse as the biological sciences, Shakespeare, and the street layout of nineteenth-century London.

The first proposal supported by the endowment is called "A Biologist's Guide to Library Resources" (http://ase.tufts.edu/biology/bguide), a comprehensive web resource, developed by the Biology Department and the Tisch Library reference department and designed by Ryo Watanabe, A98. This site is dedicated to teaching essential library research skills, specifically, how to identify, locate, evaluate, and use many different kinds of library resources for writing papers and designing research projects. Nearing completion is "The Digital Practicum: A Database and Web Site on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Richard III,"led by Gregory Crane, professor of classics and Winnick Family Professor of Technology and Entrepreneurship; Kevin Dunn, assistant professor of English; and Laura Walters, head of collections, Tisch Library. The venture builds on a Tufts strength, the Perseus Project, a database on ancient Greece that is one of the oldest digital library projects in existenceãand that is now being expanded into Roman and Renaissance English materials. The outcome will include a web site on two of Shakespeare's plays widely read at both the secondary school and college level.

The Julius Caesar site (www.perseus.tufts.edu/JC) includes classical sources of knowledge about Caesar, such as selected letters and orations by Cicero. Work is under way in University Archives on a less well known but no less fascinating window on history, the Edwin C. Bolles Collection on the History and Topography of London. University archivist Gregory Colati is working with Crane, Associate Professor of English Carol Flynn, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Rob Jacobs, and Assistant Professor of Psychology Holly Taylor to bring attention to an unusual special collection. Bolles, a former chaplain at Tufts, assembled a substantial collection of London maps, books, pamphlets and images dating from 1762 through 1895, which he manually linked to a 3,000-page bibliography, Walter Thornbury's Old and New London, A Narrative of Its History, Its People and Its Places (1872). Specific artifacts include a panoramic view of London and the Thames in the 1870s on a handpainted eight-foot scroll.

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ATHLETICS

Jumbos shine on several teams
Jumbo pride is flying high following a memorable fall semester during which three teams qualified for their NCAA Championships.

Women's soccer won the NCAA New England Region title; football posted its first winning season since 1991 and was ranked fourth in the final ECAC Division III New England poll; men's cross-country placed 13th at the NCAA Division III Championships; and field hockey won 11 games and earned another NCAA Tournament berth.

With the fall season completed, Tufts is tied for 23rd in the national Sears Directors' Cup rankings, in which points are awarded based on each institution's finishes in the NCAA Tournament.

The men's soccer team advanced to the ECAC New England Championship game, losing to Wheaton. Ralph Ferrigno's team (9-7-1) upset No. 1 in New England, Middlebury 1-0 in the regular season finale to earn its fifth straight playoff berth. The volleyball team hosted the ECAC North Championship Tournament and lost in the semifinals to SUNY-

Geneseo. Kris Herman's squad posted a 20-15 record, lifted by the play of NESCAC Rookie of the Year Jessica Stewart, J02, and NESCAC All-Star Angela Yost, J99.Head coach Ken Legler's sailing program remains among the nation's best. The co-ed team was second at the New England Sloops.The women's team was second at the Atlantic Coast Championships.

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