Attend the Chinese Studies Lecture Series, held by Taiwan Academy and co-organized by the East Asian Library of USC, this Friday, November 9th, 2012 from 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm. The speaker, professor Mei-hwa Yang, will give a lecture entitled “Voyage of Discovery : Scholarly Electronic Resources on Sinology” on Chow Tse-Tsung. The lecture will take place on the USC UPC campus in the Memorial Seminar Room (DML 110C) in the East Asian Library.
Elena Ferri began asking big scientific questions at an early age. Growing up in Novara, Italy, Elena was wondering how the human body works long before it was time to head to university to discover the answers. Now, years and degrees later, Elena is the recipient of the prestigious Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) Chateaubriand Fellowship.
Awarded by the Office for Science and Technology (OST) of the Embassy of France in the United States, the Chateaubriand Fellowship encourages collaborations, joint projects, and partnerships between the United States and France by providing funding for doctoral students at American universities who wish to perform research in a French laboratory as part of their Ph.D. studies.
Elena’s career began at the University of Milan, where she earned Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Industrial Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry and Management, respectively. After completing her coursework, Elena worked in a university lab for a year, where she fell in love with research.
“I love science,” Elena said. “Chemistry allows me to answer the biology questions I’ve had since childhood… As a researcher, I get to solve a few [of those] little problems every day.”
To continue her studies and research, Elena joined the USC Chemistry Ph.D. program and the lab of Dr. Charles McKenna, professor of chemistry and Vice Dean for Natural Sciences in USC Dornsife.
Dr. McKenna laid the groundwork for Elena’s current project when he formed a partnership with scientists at the Institut de Biologie Structurale Jean-Pierre Ebel (IBS) and the Institut Albert Bonnoit of Grenoble, France, for which he was awarded a Partner University Fund (PUF) grant in 2010. This collaboration brings together scientists of both countries, including student researchers, such as Elena. The Prime Minister of France recently recognized Dr. McKenna’s scientific accomplishments and collaborations with French scientists and institutions by naming him a Chevalier, or Knight, of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques (Order of Academic Palms), one of France’s oldest and most prestigious civic honors.
Elena has now also made a name for herself with the Chateaubriand Fellowship. She is the lead chemist on the PUF grant-funded joint project. For the past year and a half, she has researched bromodomains, proteins that are able to recognize particular modifications of chromatin (part of the cell nucleus). Bromodomains are involved in cancer, viral infection and inflammatory diseases. For this reason, the team’s research has great implications for the future of medicine and the development of drugs to treat harmful diseases. “Our project aims at designing potent and selective inhibitors of bromodomains, utilizing our expertise in molecular modeling and organic synthesis and our collaborators’ expertise in structural biology and biochemistry,” Elena says of the collaboration.
This December, Elena will travel to the Institut de Biologie Structurale in Grenoble, France, to test and continue her work alongside the partnering French biologists in the lab of Dr. Carlo Petrosa, the project’s primary French collaborator. Other partners in the project are Saadi Khochbin and Mary Callanan of the University of Grenoble, and Jerome Govin of the Center for Atomic Energy. The team is working on epigenetics, or cell memory, which is a hot area of research. Elena is honored to be researching the same question as so many masters in the field.
As well as being eager to continue her research, Elena is excited to live in Grenoble, a city of scientists. Home to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), a university, and numerous institutes and research facilities, Grenoble attracts scientists from around the world. Elena looks forward to spending nine months in Grenoble’s vibrant scientific community.
Elena will enter the fourth year of her doctoral studies upon returning to USC in August. She hopes to continue her career as a research scientist upon graduation.
http://news.usc.edu/#!/article/43432/doctoral-student-earns-stem-fellowship/
“Til Our Next Disagreement Do Us Part – Working Effectively with Friends or Frenemies.”
A panel on finding collaborators and making your academic collaborations work.
Date: Tuesday, November 6
Time: 11:30am – 1:00pm
Location: TCC 227
Please rsvp at: www.usc.edu/esvp (code: idiploma2). Lunch will be served.
Marientina Gotsis, MFA
USC School of Cinematic Arts – Interactive Media Division
Director/Co-founder, Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center
Marientina Gotsis is a research assistant professor in the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the director of the Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center (CM&BHC), an organized research unit between the School of Cinematic Arts and the Keck School of Medicine. CM&BHC works to increase public awareness of critical issues in mental health and behavioral science and to provide hands-on creativity-based educational opportunities for health researchers and practitioners. Gotsis, who comes from a broad background in arts, design and engineering with special interest in medicine, public health and health behavior, leads a team that has developed several innovative applications using games for health behavior change. Gotsis has extensive experience collaborating across disciplines; she is project director and co-principal investigator on Wellness Partners, an intergenerational pilot project for health games research funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation through a collaboration with the Keck School of Medicine, the School of Social Work and the USC Center for Work & Family Life. Additional projects include: a collaboration with UCLA’s Center for Autism Research and Treatment (CART) and University of Washington’s Autism Center to evaluate a novel game controller and game for social skills training in children; an NIH-funded pilot at the Keck School of Medicine to develop stereoscopic transmedia to communicate basic concepts about vision to children; and a concept prototyping project for games and interactives to explain complex issues about the science of early childhood development to policymakers and the public in collaboration with the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University and USC’s Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute.
Manuel Pastor
USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences – Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity
Director, Program for Environmental and Regional Equity
Co-director, Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration
Dr. Manuel Pastor is Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity in Dornsife and serves as the director of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity, housed in the USC Center for Sustainable Cities, and as co-director of the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration. Pastor’s research has generally focused on issues of the economic, environmental and social conditions facing low-income urban communities – and the social movements seeking to change those realities. His most recent book, Just Growth: Inclusion and Prosperity in America’s Metropolitan Regions, co-authored with Chris Benner (Routledge 2012), argues that growth and equity can and should be linked, offering a new path for a U.S. economy seeking to recover from economic crisis and distributional distress. In honor of his work, the Liberty Hill Foundation presented Pastor with the 2012 Wally Marks Changemaker Award, which honors an outstanding individual whose work in the community illustrates Martin Luther King Jr.’s insight that while “the arc of history is long, it bends toward justice.” Dr. Pastor has received fellowships from the Danforth, Guggenheim, and Kellogg foundations and grants from the Irvine Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the California Environmental Protection Agency, the W.T. Grant Foundation, the California Endowment, the California Air Resources Board, and many others.
Terence Sanger
Viterbi School of Engineering – Biomedical Engineering
Keck School of Medicine – Neurology
Director, USC Pediatric Movement Disorders Center
Academic Director, HTE@USC
As the academic director of USC’s HTE@USC, an interdisciplinary educational program for medical and engineering students, Dr. Terry Sanger brings his background in engineering and medicine to the challenge of fostering effective collaborations between the two fields. Dr. Sanger holds appointments in Biomedical Engineering, Neurology, and Biokinesiology, and he is also the director of the Pediatric Movement Disorders Clinic at Childrens Hospital of Los Angeles. His laboratory research focuses on understanding the origins of pediatric movement disorders from both a biological and a computational perspective. Dr. Sanger coordinates the Childhood Motor Study Group (CMSG) and the NIH Taskforce on Childhood Motor Disorders, and he is principal investigator on several research studies at USC. At CHLA, Dr. Sanger works with specialists from Rehabilitation, Surgery, Neurosurgery and other specialty areas. His training includes background in Child Neurology, Electrical Engineering, Signal Processing, Control Theory, Machine Learning, and Computational Neuroscience.
Melora Sundt
Rossier School of Education – Clinical Education
Vice Dean for Academic Programs, Rossier School of Education
Dr. Melora Sundt is Vice Dean for Academic Programs and Professor of Clinical Education at Rossier. In this capacity, she oversees the degree programs, admissions and student services, and through the Associate Dean supervises program directors. Dr. Sundt specializes in the areas of online learning and instruction, creativity and innovation in higher education, diversity issues, and violence prevention on college campuses. Dr. Sundt chaired the design teams that created the MAT@USC program and the Global Executive EdD. Dr. Sundt also teaches in the master’s, MAT, Global Executive EdD and on-campus EdD programs. She recently concluded a 10 year, US Dept of Justice-funded campus violence prevention program, and has conducted evaluations of nationally and internationally based educational partnerships and programs for federal agencies and foundations such as the Corporation for National Service, USAID, FIPSE, NEH and the Kauffman Foundation. Her other work has addressed sexual harassment in the academy, gender bias in the middle school classroom, sexual assault on campus, hate speech codes, and academic integrity.
The USC Graduate School’s Diversity Outreach and Academic Professional Development Programs are sponsoring the final Panel of the Fall 2012 Semester: Letisha Wyatt (Advanced Doctoral Candidate, Pharmacology), Dr. Kelly Kent (Postdoctoral Research Associate), Dr. Kristan Venegas (Faculty Member in Higher Education), Dr. Andrea Armani (Faculty Member in Chemical Engineering) entitled, “Women in the Academy: Experiences and Strategies for Success” Thursday, November 8th at 3:30 p.m. in MHP 101 on the University Park Campus. This Panel provides participants with the opportunity to discuss their experiences with the panelists as well as share insights and strategies about establishing yourself as an aspiring faculty member and researcher. This presentation is focused on the experiences of women scholars but all doctoral students regardless of gender, discipline, methodological orientation, or dissertation stage are welcome.
No reservations are necessary for this presentation. You can find MHP 101 by using the USC Interactive Campus Map: http://web-app.usc.edu/maps/#upc/
If you have any questions, please email uscapdev@usce.edu
Candy Hwang, a second-year doctoral candidate in chemistry and National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research fellow, has presented her research in an offbeat manner this fall.
Hwang entered “Creating the Future,” a multimedia competition that challenges NSF fellows to express how their research may shape the future. A 90-second video created by Hwang and her team offers an animated representation of research on nitrogen.
Calling upon others at USC, she worked with a team that included students from the John C. Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the USC Thornton School of Music.
Despite the invaluable technical help of her team, Hwang faced the obstacle of how best to represent and explain her work.
“It was very difficult to explain my research in understandable terms,” she said. In fact, the team spent two months writing and editing the storyboards for the project.
However, the long process and hard work was worth the wait.
“I got to explain science, which is such a difficult thing to do,” Hwang said. “Teaching is my favorite thing. This video was an outlet for that.”
A panel of NSF judges will select the winner from the 14 finalists, but the public also has an opportunity to vote for a People’s Choice Award.
To cast a vote in the competition, visit http://grf2012.skild.com/skild2/grf2012/viewEntryDetail.action?pid=40359
Laura Cechanowicz (editor), Simón Wilches Castro (designer/animator), Louis Morton (designer/animator) and Anna Drubich (music) provided expertise for the video. Professor Charles McKenna of the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences is Candy’s faculty adviser.
The USC Graduate School’s Diversity Outreach and Academic Professional Development Programs want to reminder you about the final 3 Seminars and 1 Panel remaining for the Fall 2012 Semester. The offerings are as follows:
Seminars
Writing the Job Market Package: Cover Letters & Personal Statements (Wed, 10/31, 3 – 5 p.m.)
Writing the Job Market Package: Differentiating between the CV & Résumé (Wed, 11/7, 3 – 5 p.m.)
University Research Protocols & Conducting Ethical Research (Wed, 11/14, 3 – 5 p.m.)
Panel
Women in the Academy: Experiences and Strategies for Success (Thurs, 11/8, 3:30 p.m. – 5 p.m.)
There are spaces still available for the Seminars and Panel. If you are interested in attending any of the remaining Seminars or the Panel, please contact the Academic Professional Development program via email at uscapdev@usc.edu
The USC Graduate School’s Diversity Outreach and Academic Professional Development Programs are sponsoring a Panel with Dr. Jody Agius Vallejo (Sociology), Dr. Jan Ahmed (Earth Science), and Dr. Marcela Cuellar (Postdoctoral Research Associate) entitled, “Pressures to Publish in the Academy: Perspectives and Advice from Post-Docs and Faculty Members” Thursday, October 25th at 3:30 p.m. in SGM 124 on the University Park Campus. This Panel draws on a wealth of experiences and knowledge to provide insights and strategies related to the need to publish as an aspiring faculty member and researcher. This presentation is applicable to all doctoral students regardless of discipline, methodological orientation, or stage of your dissertation process.
No reservations are necessary for this presentation. You can find SGM 124 by using the USC Interactive Campus Map: http://web-app.usc.edu/maps/#upc/
If you have any questions, please email uscapdev@usce.edu
Congratulations to the following Ph.D. candidates in Psychology who earned external fellowships:
Join us Monday, October 22, 2012 from 12:15pm to 2:00pm in VKC102 to learn helpful tips for applying to the NSF. Lunch is provided. Please RSVP to gradfllw@usc.edu.
