H&SS eNews, July 2008

Greetings from H&SS!

The H&SS eNews is a monthly electronic publication of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.

For more H&SS news, go to our Web site, http://www.hss.cmu.edu/. For other Carnegie Mellon news, be sure to check out http://www.cmu.edu and http://www.cmu.edu/news/blog/.

This edition of the eNews was edited and compiled by Kelli McElhinny. You can email Kelli at kellim@andrew.cmu.edu.

For past eNews publications, please visit the H&SS eNews archive.

Student News

-- Masters in Professional Writing candidate Syeda Sara Abbas’ paper “Style Analysis of a Letter from Seventh Century South Asia: A Letter from the Grand Emir Hajjaj Bin Yousaf to General Mohammad Bin Qasim” has been accepted for the 37th Annual Conference on South Asia, which will be held Oct. 19 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center of South Asia.

-- Elizabeth Barsotti, a junior majoring in Creative Writing and Interdisciplinary Art, has been awarded the 2008 Charles C. Dawe Memorial Award to Encourage Creativity and Innovation in Publishing. The $2000 award will be used to produce prototypes of an original publication, tentatively titled “Mint.” The project is a trading card/literary journal hybrid designed to extend the reach and appeal of poetry beyond traditional literary audiences. The faculty sponsor for the project is Professor Gerald Costanzo. The Dawe Award is made possible through an endowment provided by the family of Vanessa Altman-Siegel (BA, Professional Writing, 1998) in recognition of the writing and publication opportunities she experienced through the English Department.

College/Faculty News

--Dr. Joseph (Jay) Devine has been named the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in H&SS. In this new role, he and Kristina Straub, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, will oversee the newly created H&SS Office of Undergraduate Studies.

As Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies, Jay will continue to handle many of his current roles and responsibilities including oversight of an expanded Carnegie Mellon pre-law program, the Phi Beta Kappa chapter, the H&SS Honors Program, and the H&SS teaching awards program. He will continue to play a vital role in the development of the H&SS General Education Curriculum and the inter-college programs such as the BHA and SHS. Moreover, Jay will continue to be the college’s most important representative to prospective students and their parents as they consider their college choice.

Jay will also be taking on a number of additional duties. The most important of these will be the development of a program, in coordination with the university, to prepare outstanding H&SS undergraduates to compete for major national and international scholarships, such as Rhodes and Fulbright Scholarships.

Because of his expanded role and the demands of this new position, Jay will be stepping down as the Director of the H&SS Academic Advisory Center. Jay has been involved in the AAC for more than 25 years, and his contributions there have been pivotal to the AAC’s development as a valuable resource for our students. A search is currently underway for an assistant dean to lead the AAC.

In Other H&SS News...

Department of English

-- Paul Hopper, Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of Humanities, was the keynote speaker at an international linguistics conference on “Emergent Constructions” held at the University of Freiburg, Germany, May 8-10. The papers read at the conference centered on Hopper’s theory of “emergent grammar.” Hopper is currently the first Senior Fellow of the newly launched Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), and was a guest at the Institute’s ceremonial inauguration on May 7th.

Department of History

-- Jay Aronson, an assistant professor in the Department of History, has received a National Institutes of Health grant of $152,600 for research on the history and politics of humanitarian DNA identification. The funding provides support for two full semesters of research, plus partial summer support, over the next two years.

Department of Psychology

-- Just as a disciplined exercise regimen helps human muscles become stronger and perform better, specialized workouts for the brain can boost cognitive skills, according to a team of researchers led by D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI) Director Marcel Just. Their new brain imaging study of poor readers, available online in the journal Neuropsychologia, found that 100 hours of remedial instruction - reading calisthenics, of sorts, aimed to shore up problem areas - not only improved the skills of struggling readers, but also changed the way their brains activated when they comprehended written sentences. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), CCBI Research Fellows Ann Meyler and Tim Keller measured blood flow to all of the different parts of the brain while children were reading and found that that the parietotemporal areas were significantly less activated initially among the poor readers than in the control group. However, the poor readers’ activation improved to near-normal levels following the remedial instruction. Further, the activation increases in remained evident even when the children's brains were scanned one year after instruction. The neural gains were not only maintained but became more solidified.

For more information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/June/june11_buffbrains.shtml

-- The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development recently awarded Associate Professor Kevin Pelphrey a grant of $1,414,579 for a project exploring how the brain influences how children develop abilities to understand numbers and individual differences in math abilities. His research will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify the patterns of change in brain activity associated with developmental changes in aspects of number perception and numerical cognition during early childhood. Specifically, the project will examine normal development of numerical processing neural circuitry in the four- to eight-year-old age period and compare it to that of adults in order to systematically investigate the longitudinal development and neural bases for the representation and manipulation of number. Pelphrey also recently received a $739,096 grant from the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative that will fund his research on basic genetic differences in the brain – in particular, variations in a gene that helps to regulate the brain’s serotonin supply – and how they influence the development of the neural circuit that governs social cognition, which in turn influences how people interact with others in the world as they grow up. The overarching goal of this work is to inform our understanding of the neural basis of autism.

-- Carnegie Mellon’s Children’s School has earned re-accreditation from the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) – the nation’s leading organization of early childhood professionals – and is one of the first early childhood programs to complete the more rigorous accreditation process that NAEYC introduced in September 2006. To earn NAEYC accreditation in the new system, the Children’s School completed an extensive self-study process, measuring the program and its services against the ten new NAEYC Early Childhood Program Standards and more than 400 related accreditation criteria. The Children’s School received NAEYC accreditation after an on-site visit by NAEYC Assessors to ensure that the program meets each of the ten NAEYC program standards. NAEYC-accredited programs are also subject to unannounced visits during their accreditation, which lasts for five years. .

Department of Social and Decision Sciences

-- A collection of essays titled “Rationality and Social Responsibility” was recently published in celebration of the Charles J. Queenan, Jr. University Professor of Psychology Robyn Dawes. The collection of essays, many of which were authored by Dawes’ former graduate students, was largely compiled from presentations from a Festschrift symposium celebrating Dawes’ contributions to social science research that was held at the 17th Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science in 2005. Additional colleagues who did not present at the symposium authored chapters as well, however. The topics covered ranged from gambling to breast cancer risk to wishful thinking and the World Cup.

Department of Statistics

-- In late May, the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition hosted the Fourth International Workshop on the Statistical Analysis of Neuronal Data (SAND4). Organized by Statistics Professor Rob Kass, SAND4 explored strategies for analyzing large, complex data sets that are generated by cutting-edge research projects in neuroscience. Co-sponsored by the Statistics and Machine Learning departments (and by the Department of Statistics at the University of Pittsburgh), with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation, the workshop attracted 174 participants from nearly 50 universities and other research institutions throughout the world. This series of workshops at Carnegie Mellon is unique among meetings in computational neuroscience because of its focus on data analysis.

For more information, including abstracts of the workshop's presentations, visit: http://sand.stat.cmu.edu/. Selected papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Computational Neuroscience.

Events

--For a complete list of upcoming alumni events, go to http://alumni2.tepper.cmu.edu/cmuEvents/.

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