Around the College
This article was originally published in the November 2004 issue of CLASnotes.
Tucker’s National Health Care Solution
Cristina Beato, left, meets with Carolyn Tucker,
right, and her research group.
Cristina Beato, the Acting Assistant Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, visited campus on October 20 to award Psychology Professor Carolyn M. Tucker an additional $286,539 extension to a grant from the Agency for Health Care and Research Quality she first received in 2000. Beato met with Tucker and the graduate students on her behavioral medicine research team to learn more about their work on cultural sensitivity in the health care system. “I try to go around the country and find what I consider to be the best practices and solutions for the nation,” Beato told Tucker in the one-hour meeting.
The next phase of Tucker’s research involves implementing an intervention plan to improve the cultural sensitivity of health care providers by altering the physical environment of clinics, training health care professionals, and teaching patients to respectfully obtain culturally sensitive heath care.
Education Specialist Joins Academic Advising Staff
Kim Fugate is a new advisor for the Academic Advising
Center. She holds an education specialist degree from UF and is a PhD
candidate in mental health counseling, specializing in crisis intervention.
Before arriving at UF in 1998, she served as a resident director for
Semester at Sea, an adjunct writing instructor at Santa Fe Community
College, and an area coordinator for Appalachian State University and
Murray State University.
At UF, Fugate has served in several graduate positions while attending school full-time, including hall director and leader/scholar program coordinator for Trusler Hall, crisis intervention consultant for the Department of Housing, and teaching assistant for counselor education courses. She also has completed internships with the UF Career Resource Center and the Student Mental Health Care Center.
CLAS Dean’s Office Welcomes New Support Staff
Rebecca Dukes has joined the administrative staff of the CLAS dean’s
office. She comes to CLAS from the College of Medicine, where she has
held positions in the chairman’s office of the Department of Psychiatry
and the chief’s office in the Urology Division.
She will be handling various projects for the dean’s office, including teacher evaluations, scholarship processing, annual administrative evaluations, elections, data gathering and reporting, academic activity reports, instructor workload reports, non-academic activity reports, class rolls, and Grade-a-Gator. She will also be assisting Associate Dean Jim Mueller on space assignments and physical plant projects.
Department News
Chemistry
Adam Veige has received a $50,000 New Faculty Award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Incorporated. He is one of nine professors nationwide to receive the honor. Established in 1946 by chemist, inventor and businessman Camille Dreyfus as a memorial to his brother and fellow chemist, Henry, the foundation’s purpose is to advance the science of chemistry, chemical engineering and related sciences. Veige was chosen based on his proposed research program, which aims to exploit structural, electronic and reactivity tenets to design reactive early transition metal complexes for the purpose of small molecule activation and catalysis.
Criminology, Law and Society
Paul Magnarella received the Distinguished Service and Leadership Award from the president of the Association of Third World Studies at its annual meeting in October.
Germanic and Slavic Studies
Nora M. Alter presented a paper, “Bringing Back Aesthetics and its Implications,” at the German Studies Association’s annual conference held in Washington, DC in early October. Eric Kligerman also presented a paper at the conference titled, “Ethics is an Optics: Anxiety and the Gaze in Resnais and Celan.” During a chairs meeting at the conference, Will Hasty made a presentation on UF’s nascent Institute for the Online Study of German Language and Culture and its web-based German studies courses.
Franz Futterknecht recently made a presentation on UF’s web-based German studies courses at the 7th International Colloquium on International Engineering Education, held in Rhode Island.
Christina Overstreet presented the paper, “Effects of Question-Glossing in Online Reading and Look-up Behavior” at the 2004 University of Hawaii National Foreign Language Resource Center summer symposium.
Mathematic
James K. Brooks recently received an award from the London Mathematical Society, which included support for a lecture tour on his research on von Neumann algebras and abstract stochastic processes. He gave lectures at the University of London, Christ Church College, The Mathematics Institute and Reading University.
A research workshop conducted in March 2004 by students of the mathematics department has been reported prominently in the October 2004 issue of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics News. A special grant of $9,000 from the National Science Foundation enabled the UF chapter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) to host student participants from as far away as Korea and India. Topics discussed at the conference included optimization, imaging science, homogenization and finite element methods. The workshop was organized by graduate students Jungha An, Beyza Aslan, Weihong Guo, Feng Huang, Shu Jen Huang, Sukanya Krishnaswamy, Arun Krishnaswamy, Adnan Sabuwala, and Hongchao Zhang. The faculty advisors were Yunmei Chen, Jay Gopalakrishnan, William Hager and Shari Moskow. The conference was the first organized by the UF SIAM chapter.
Physics
Dwight Adams has received the 2005 Keithley Award from the American Physical Society. The award recognizes physicists who have played an important role in the development of measurement techniques or equipment that has had an impact on the physics community. Adams was recognized for his development of the capacitive pressure transducer, and for its application to the helium melting pressure thermometry and other scientific uses. He will receive $5,000 and a certificate citing his contributions, both of which will be presented at the 2005 APS meeting in March.
Psychology
Lise Abrams was selected as one of the three recipients of the 2004 Women in Cognitive Science Mentorship Award from Women in Cognitive Science, an affiliate of the Psychonomic Society. The awards are designed to encourage established scientists, both male and female, to develop the research and publication skills of female students in cognitive science. Up to three awards are given each year to scientists who have demonstrated sustained, effective mentorship of female students and who also have served as a research advisor or supervisor to one or more female students during the academic year immediately preceding the nomination.
Religion
Mario Poceski has received a Center for East Asian Studies Fellowship in Chinese Studies at Stanford University for 2004–2005. At Stanford, he will be working on a book that explores the attitudes toward morality and monasticism within the Chan school of late medieval Chinese Buddhism. He will return to UF in the fall of 2005.
Romance Languages and Literatures
Professor of Spanish Shifra Armon has received a grant for her project, “Fray Antonio de Guevara: A Wake-Up Call to Courtiers,” from the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport’s Program for Cultural Cooperation. She will conduct research in Madrid at the National Library of Spain.
Women’s Studies and Gender Research
Angel Kwolek-Folland has been selected as a J. William Fulbright Senior Specialist candidate, which will allow her to work with college and university departments outside the US on research and program development and curricular transformation. Senior specialists lead seminars, give lectures and hold workshops at host institutions.
Photos:
Jane Dominguez (Tucker, Dukes)
Jeremy Clark (Fugate)