Archive for the ‘Great reads’ Category

Documentary about Stanford brain research gets local Emmy nod

May 13th, 2013

Dylan’s Gift, a documentary detailing how one family’s generosity is advancing research on a little-understood childhood cancer, has been nominated for a 2013 San Francisco/Northern California Emmy Award. The film, which was inspired by a 2009 Stanford Medicine story, explores the work of Stanford physician-scientist MICHELLE MONJE, who cares for pediatric brain cancer patients and conducts research on a rare, vicious brain tumor that arises in school-aged children and usually kills them within a year of diagnosis.

A release issued by the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR) explains:

“When their 5-year-old son, DYLAN, is diagnosed with a rare and fatal brain tumor and given just six months to live, DANAH AND JOHN JEWETT become determined to fight the deadly disease, called Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG). When their son’s life is tragically cut short, they donate Dylan’s tumor to research at Stanford University School of Medicine. This generous gift has helped scientists create the first-ever mouse model of DIPG. The DIPG mouse model is now shedding light on this devastating disease and helping scientists discover new treatments and a potential cure to help other children. This episode was filmed on location at Stanford University School of Medicine.”

In the trailer, posted on the SCOPE blog, the Jewetts share their story and discuss their decision to donate Dylan’s brain tumor after he died.

Dylan’s Gift is nominated under the Emmy’s Informational/Instructional-Program/Special category. It is part of a TV series titled Bench to Bedside, which is produced by FBR Media. The awards will be presented at a ceremony in San Francisco in June.

—LIA STEAKLEY, Stanford School of Medicine

Innovation from many corners: 2013-14 U.S. and international Knight Fellows selected

May 7th, 2013

Twelve U.S. journalists and innovators have been awarded John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships for the 2013-14 academic year. They were chosen from among 100 applicants.

Next year's domestic Knight Journalism Fellows

“This group of U.S. Knight Fellows is easily the most diversified ever, with fellows coming from daily newspapers, online publications, tech companies and even an academic institution,” said JAMES BETTINGER, director of the Knight Fellowships Program. “This wide range of backgrounds and specialties reflects the variety and depth of expertise and commitment that journalism needs right now.”

The domestic fellows will join eight international fellowswho were selected last month. The program champions innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership in journalism by helping the fellows pursue their ideas to improve the quality of news and information reaching the public. Fellows also participate fully in the intellectual life of the university, through academic classes, lectures, symposiums and individual research.

The 2013-14 international Knight Fellows

The 2013-14 fellows will explore proposals that touch on many aspects of journalism: improving accuracy in reporting on Islam, raising the profile of indigenous perspectives on the news, engaging citizens in local food coverage, helping the public better understand data visualization and getting news quickly to communities hit by disaster. They also will be developing tools to help journalists create high-quality animated editorial cartoons, blog live on mobile platforms, gain relevant coding and data skills and better connect with “millennials” and the changing U.S. demographic.

The international fellows were selected from among 216 applicants. They will be researching a range of ideas to improve journalism, from bringing news to Pakistan’s tribal areas and fostering innovation in China and East Africa to training female reporters in Afghanistan and strengthening press freedoms in Myanmar.

To find out more about the 2013-14 fellows and their projects, visit the Knight Fellowships website.

Senior Maya Kornberg awarded Shultz Fellowship

May 3rd, 2013

Thomas L. Friedman, Maya Kornberg and George Shultz

While thousands of Stanford students earn scholarships and have the opportunity to study abroad, for senior MAYA KORNBERG, the awarding of her fellowship to study in Israel this summer was anything but ordinary. “This is an only-at-Stanford kind of morning,” said RABBI SERENA EISENBERG, executive director of Hillel at Stanford. Or as New York Times columnist and author THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN said, “Not many people get a fellowship handed to them by two former secretaries of state.” Not to mention a best-selling author.

Condoleezza Rice and Maya Kornberg

At a breakfast gathering at Hillel Thursday morning, Kornberg was awarded the George and Charlotte Shultz Fellowship for Modern Israel Studies from former U.S. Secretary of State CONDOLEEZZA RICE. Rice, also a professor of political science and business at Stanford, happened to teach Kornberg in her undergraduate foreign policy seminar winter quarter. Kornberg also received accolades from the namesake of the fellowship, GEORGE SHULTZ, also a former U.S. secretary of state. And Friedman, who established the fellowship in honor of Shultz on the occasion of Shultz’s 90th birthday two years ago, also joined in bestowing the honor.

“This fellowship is an example of what Stanford does best,” Rice said. “Great research universities bring together people from the entire academic spectrum, from 18-year-old freshmen to Nobel laureates, and put them together to instill in all of us a desire to search for the truth.” Despite her many commitments, Rice said she did not hesitate when asked to serve on the Shultz Fellowship review committee: “Anything with George’s name, I pay attention. George is emblematic of a great public servant, and he is also a university person, deeply involved with students. And Tom Friedman, he has helped us see inside this complicated region more clearly than any author or scholar I know.”

Rice, Shultz and Friedman all noted that a visit to Israel is essential for any scholar working to understand the Middle East. Friedman said he established the fellowship in recognition of Shultz’s “tireless efforts to broker Middle East peace,” and that the honor is available to any Stanford student interested in studying Israel or the Arab-Israeli peace process. The Shultzes then added to the fellowship, as did philanthropists LAURA LAUDER and JIM KOSHLAND. (Because of university restrictions on funding research opportunities in Israel while the State Department maintains a travel advisory there, the fellowship fund was established at Hillel at Stanford, which administers the award.)

Last year, the first fellowship was awarded to EMILY WARREN, a joint JD-economics PhD candidate, who used the time to study how Israel’s defense investments in the late 1980s resulted in a tech boom in the early 1990s.

Kornberg, a graduating senior majoring in international relations, intends to use her fellowship to examine Israeli political parties’ campaigns in elections between 1967 and 2013, investigating the platforms and rhetoric on issues relating to the peace process, such as territorial division, the status of Jerusalem and rights of return.

“What I have appreciated most about my Stanford experience is that they just keep throwing these amazing opportunities at you all the time,” said Kornberg, who is the daughter and granddaughter of two Nobel laureates, ROGER KORNBERG and the late ARTHUR KORNBERG. Her proud mother, who was toting a camera Thursday morning, is YAHLI LORCH, associate professor of structural biology.

Maya Kornberg plans to pursue a graduate degree in public policy at Columbia University. But when she returns from Israel, she has a date to meet with Rice, Shultz and Friedman to share what she learned.

—LISA LAPIN

Alumna Sharon Olds wins Pulitzer for poetry

April 23rd, 2013

 

(AP Photo/Jim Cole)

SHARON OLDS won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry April 15 for Stag’s Leap. The book has been called an unflinching response to the collapse of her marriage of 32 years, a mix of grief and confusion that shows in the collection’s namesake poem:

“When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up.  Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.”

Olds, who graduated from Stanford in 1964, teaches at New York University and is former poet laureate of New York. She penned most of Stag’s Leap in the late 1990s, in the years after her divorce. “I wrote these poems the way I always write, which is immediately,” she told the Concord Monitor. “Only then do I have the feeling that is so full in me that it feels the need to spill over into an expression of itself.”

But she held off publishing these poems for more than a decade, promising her grown children she’d allow time for the changes to absorb. She said she never imagined the kind of reception that lay in store for them.

“It was beyond unexpected,” she told the Huffington Post. “There are things we think won’t happen to us – that are outside our picture of ourselves.”

(AP Photo/Alfred A. Knopf, Michael Lionstar)

Stag’s Leap is her 12th collection. Her first, Satan Says, was published in 1980, when she was 37, a delayed start she attributes to earlier resistance from male editors. Her first submitted poem to a magazine got a reception hardly imaginable today. “They told me: ‘This is a literary magazine. If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies’ Home Journal. The true subjects of poetry are … male subjects, not your children,’” Olds told The Guardian.

Olds has won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Prior to the Pulitzer, Stag’s Leap won the T.S. Eliot Prize for the best collection of verse published in Britain and Ireland in 2012.

In awarding that prize, CAROL ANN DUFFY, chair of the judging panel, said: “This was the book of her career. There is a grace and chivalry in her grief that marks her out as being a world-class poet.”

—SAM SCOTT, Stanford magazine

 

Stanford ingenuity on display at 2013 Cool Product Expo

April 22nd, 2013

Earlier this month, hundreds of people attended the Cool Product Expo, hosted annually by the Graduate School of Business (GSB). The event, held at the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, showcased more than 40 companies and products at the cutting edge of technology and design.

“We selected these based on outstanding innovation in either technology, manufacturing or design,” said first-year MBA student DANIEL CHEN, one of six GSB students who organized the event. Chen and his classmates anticipate that these products, from foldable kayaks to electric skateboards to telepresence robots, are items that will top wish lists in 2013.

There were several clever gizmos from startups founded by Stanford students, graduates or faculty.

Boosted Boardsoffers the world’s lightest electric vehicle, a battery-powered skateboard that was born on campus by co-founders

JOHN ULMEN, SANJAY DASTOOR and MATTHEW TRAN. The battery-powered motor takes the board up to 20 mph and runs about 6 miles on a single charge. Regenerative brakes top off the battery as you go, or the plug-in battery recharges in about an hour. Supported in part by a strong KickStarter campaign, the company will ship out the first production boards in the coming months.

Another electric vehicle startup, Faraday Bicycles, was founded by Stanford grad ADAM VOLLMER. While working at IDEO, Vollmer began designing the vintage European courier-style electric bike as a way to attract people to commuting by bicycle. Vollmer refined the design with the help of ANDREW TAYLOR, a graduate of Stanford’s product design program and the company’s lead mechanical engineer. The plug-in bicycle provides 20 miles of pedal-assisted power, making climbing even San Francisco’s hills a breeze.

The booth for Instacube, a photo-sharing device from a company co-founded by BILL BURNETT, the executive director of the Stanford Design Program and a consulting assistant professor, and Stanford grad ANDY BUTLER, also drew a large crowd. The digital picture frame-like device displays a customizable photostream of content uploaded to various social networks by you or your friends. The touchscreen frame has potential outside of the home, too: Chef JAMIE OLIVER will soon be deploying the device on tabletops in his restaurants to serve as a sort of “digital sommelier” to help diners pair foods and wines.

Here’s a quick snapshot of other companies with strong ties to Stanford that were on hand at this year’s Cool Product Expo.

Freebord, another skateboard company, offers boards with wheels attached to swiveling axles, allowing for smooth free-ride steering.

Revolights has developed futuristic lighting solutions for bicycle wheels to make riders more visible at night, and to make bikes look incredibly cool.

Motrr offers a rotating platform designed to make video-conferencing with iPhones a smoother experience.

Clean Bottle, the company that launched a sports water bottle that opens on both ends for easier scrubbing, showed off the latest addition to its lineup, an aluminum bottle called The Square.

Artiphany shared a new augmented reality greeting card that can be programmed with personalized messages.

Radian, by Alpine Labs, is an iPhone- and Android-enabled tripod attachment that makes time-lapse photography a cinch.

Stealth HD presented a system that stitches together video from multiple cameras into a seamless high-resolution panoramic video.

Sifteo demonstrated its tiny intelligent videogame cubes, which have been a hit among the gaming community.

Tegu showcased the company’s children’s wooden building blocks, which are made from sustainable materials and snap together with magnets.

First Night, Twelfth Night

April 19th, 2013

Earlier this week the Stanford community commemorated the 75th anniversary of Memorial Auditorium with a performance in Pigott Theater of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which was the first-night production on August 20, 1937, in what was then called Memorial Hall.

We can thank the plumbers for bringing Twelfth Night back to MemAud. To quote from the evening’s program, “it was ‘a very midsummer madness’ that led to the discovery of a cache of materials relating to the initial staging of the play right here on these boards.”

Plumbers working in the auditorium discovered two boxes tucked away in an unused tunnel in the building. The boxes contained set and lighting designs, crew schedules, memos regarding the management of the building, purchase orders and watercolor renderings as well as a program for the inaugural production of Twelfth Night.

The accidental time capsule inspired production manager ROSS WILLIAMS and former chair ALICE RAYNER and other staff and faculty at the Department of Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) to bring the Bard’s comedy back for an anniversary performance.

A.C.T.’s Master of Fine Arts Class of 2014, under the director of DOMENIQUE LOZANO, presented the “Will on Wheels” production of the play to a sold-out crowd. It was the students’ last performance of the play, and they were delighted with the Pigott stage, which they called warm and acoustically enveloping, and the crowd, which they said got more of the humor than the middle and high school students they’ve been performing for as part of A.C.T.’s education outreach program. “We got laughs where we’ve never had them before,” said NEMUNA CEESAY, who played Maria.

Guests attending the after-party gala in the prop shop were treated to sumptuous nibbles and beverages while surrounded by sets and mementos from previous productions.

There was an airplane overhead from Threepenny Opera, a dramatic black-and-white drop from Skin of Our Teeth and a portrait designed to look like TAPS lecturer JEFFREY BIHR from Restoration Comedy presiding over the festivities.

Vintage film footage from 1937 (digitized by University Archivist DANIEL HARTWIG) of players rehearsing Twelfth Night on the Frost Amphitheater slope, sepia-toned images of Memorial Auditorium when it appeared to stand alone in a field and photographs from other productions over the years projected on a large screen reminded the revelers of the rich history of MemAud.

TAPS department chair JENNIFER DEVERE BRODY, who organized the event, said of the celebration, “This is just the beginning of more to come in the years ahead.”

—ROBIN WANDER

Expert advice on talking to kids about violence

April 16th, 2013

Victor Carrion

Ubiquitous news reports of incidents like yesterday’s explosions at the Boston Marathon and the Newtown, Conn., shootings in December present a challenge for parents.

VICTOR CARRION, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital  (LPCH) who has conducted extensive research on childhood trauma, says honest, age-appropriate communication with children is one of the most important elements of helping youngsters handle news of traumatic events.

In the following Q&A reprinted from the LPCH website, Carrion offers several suggestions for parents to help their kids process difficult news.

What are the potential short-term psychological effects on school-age children hearing or seeing information about these events?

The short-term effects include children becoming concerned about their safety or the safety of their family. In addition, children who are closer in terms of proximity to the event will be at increased risk for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. However, because the images in the media are now so prevalent, the psychological effect on the child can be the same as if the child were at the scene of the incident. We must protect children by limiting their exposure to these images.

What about the long-term psychological impacts?

For some children—if they are not treated via an assessment and psychosocial therapy—their academic and social life will be impacted. Difficulty paying attention, managing emotional responses and problems with memory are common symptoms children may experience.

What are some of the early warning signs of childhood trauma for parents to look out for?

Irritability, a greater susceptibility to crying, and difficulty with sleep are among the symptoms that should raise a red flag if they persist longer than a month. Younger children may become clingier and experience nightmares and distressing or bad dreams. Children may regress in some behaviors—such as bedwetting or sucking their thumb—and you may hear them complaining more about a stomachache or headache.

What is your recommendation for parents on how to talk to their children about disturbing events and images they witness or hear about?

Encourage discussion with your children, but do not force it. Let them know that it’s OK to be fearful or angry or sad. It’s also very important to give the message, “You are protected. You are safe.” In the event you notice warning signs in your children’s behavior, I would recommend taking them to their pediatrician or mental health specialist to obtain a consultation.

Learn more about Victor Carrion, MD, and his research interests.

 

 

Stanford anthropologist’s book on sickle cell in Africa gets top honors

April 5th, 2013

DUANA FULLWILEY, associate professor of anthropology at Stanford, has won the Amaury Talbot Prize for most valuable work of African anthropology for her first book, The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa. The prize is given annually by the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Fullwiley, a medical anthropologist, joined the Stanford faculty from Harvard last year. Her book examines how scientists, doctors and others have dealt with sickle cell anemia in Senegal.

In reviewing the book, Anthropological Quarterly said Fullwiley produced “an extraordinary work that incorporates the insights of anthropology as well as science and technology studies of genetics and race. It is also exceptional in its multi-sited focus on Senegal and France, since many similar studies of genetics have tended to focus on the US and Europe.”

—BROOKE DONALD

 

 

Senior Alyssa Wisdom: Resilient every step of the way

April 2nd, 2013

Excerpted from the Athletics website.

Alyssa Wisdom, now a senior, competing in May 2011 in the Payton Jordan Invitational at the Cobb Track and Angell Field. Photo credit: Richard C. Ersted

Academics and athletics are cornerstones of the Stanford experience. But equally important to some scholar-athletes is a resource sometimes overlooked: Stanford Hospital. It’s what helped sell ALYSSA WISDOM and may have saved her life.

A senior from Coral Springs, Fla., Wisdom suffered from hypertension and a heart condition growing up and was easily fatigued. She saw dozens of doctors, but wasn’t properly diagnosed until she arrived at Stanford in 2010 to compete on the track and field team.

An accomplished sprinter, Wisdom came to the Farm seeking track success and answers to her health problems and found both.

As a freshman in 2010, Wisdom finished fourth in the 100 and seventh in the 200 in the Big Meet. But it would be the last time she sprinted for the Cardinal. Doctors diagnosed her with a rare condition called congenital hypertrophic cardiac myopathy, and said the strenuous training could lead to a stroke or heart attack.

“It was hard because freshman year you are going through so many changes,” she said. “To get everything thrown at me at once … it was a lot to deal with. I actually didn’t know where to start. My life had just fallen apart.”

So Wisdom did what she has always done: leaned on her mother, Yvet, a registered nurse, and older brother, George, for guidance and support.

As a senior in high school, Wisdom threw the shot put at the district meet—just to score points for her team—and wound up leading her team to victory with a winning toss of 32-3½. She had no plans to throw in college until doctors told her to stop sprinting.

“What I lack in size, I make up for in strength because I am very, very strong,” she laughed. “I may not have the size of other shot putters, but I’ve got the muscles.”

With encouragement and instruction from the Cardinal coaching staff, Wisdom improved quickly and won the shot put at the Big Meet in 2011 with an outdoor season-best throw of 48-3½. She also placed fourth in the hammer throw.

Last year, she recorded the fifth-best indoor showing in school history by putting the shot 50-8¾ in the MPSF Championships. During the outdoor season, Wisdom placed third in the Pac-12 Championships at 51-6½.

Continuing to refine her technique, she produced a personal-best 55-8¼ at the 2013 MPSF Indoors and qualified for her first NCAA Championships.

“Obviously, she is very gifted strength-wise, very explosive and very quick,” said MICHELLE EISENREICH, associate head coach and throws coach at Stanford. “I think the other thing that’s impressive is just her ability to focus in and make technical adjustments and changes. She’s really become a good student of the event.”

That’s not surprising considering Wisdom earned Pac-12 All-Academic second-team honors last year and was named to the USTFCCA All-Academic team. Wisdom is majoring in psychology and minoring in Italian.

“My concentration is mind, culture and society, which is multi-culturalism,” she said. “I’m doing lab research on how being from different backgrounds can be a positive thing.”

Wisdom, who will return to Stanford next year to complete a co-terminal degree in psychology and has one year of eligibility remaining, is making the most of her experience. She started working in a homeless shelter in Florida during grade school and returns every summer. Through Stanford, Wisdom has volunteered in Italy and India, the latter a two-month service for female abandonment through the Haas Center for Public Service.

“I love this institution,” said Wisdom. “I’ve gotten to explore all of my interests, and the resources at this school are unsurpassed. That’s the reason I’ve been able to go abroad and expand my research past the confines of my country’s borders. I’m pretty sure when I leave Stanford, I’m going to pursue a career in the nonprofit sector.”

It’s hard to imagine any scholar-athlete who appreciates Stanford more than Wisdom. She has given back as much as she has taken, proving resilient every step of the way.

“Sometimes you take an ideal path to get to your ultimate goal, and sometimes it’s very hard to see that things will work out in the end,” said Wisdom. “But they do.”

Read the full story by MARK SOLTAU on the Stanford Athletics website.

 

 

 

Hoover exhibit on China wins exhibition award

March 26th, 2013

A Stanford exhibition marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese republic is being honored by the Association of College Research Libraries (ACRL).

“A Century of Change: China 1911-2011,” which closed last year, included photographs, posters, letters, memorabilia and audiovisual materials from the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, where the exhibition was held.

The exhibition is one of four recipients of the 2013 Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab American Book Prices Current Exhibitions Award. The awards are given out by the ACRL Rare Books and Manuscripts Section.

The award recognizes outstanding printed exhibition catalogs and guides and electronic exhibitions produced by North America and Caribbean institutions.

Certificates will be presented to the winners and the recipient of an honorable mention in June.

The exhibition closed in February 2012, but its catalog, images and text are still available to view online.

—BROOKE DONALD