At Brown

Chaplain’s Office offers new service

The Chaplain’s Office sponsors a weekly community gathering of consolation and hope on Friday from 12:30-1 p.m. in Manning Chapel. The gathering is intended as a time of silent reflection to “grieve for friends we have lost, remember friends and family members who are serving in our military, and continue to hope for peace in the face of war.”

Awards and Honors

Evelyn Hu-DeHart, director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and professor of history, will receive an honorary degree from the University of Notre Dame at its commencement May 18.

Maury A. Bromsen received the President’s Medal from Brown University on March 12 in recognition of his lifetime dedication to collecting and preserving historic books and manuscripts relating to the history of North and South America. The ceremony was held in the John Carter Brown Library.

The President’s Medal is the highest honor a Brown president may bestow and honors a person who has achieved distinction in a particular field, including education, scholarship, public service, the arts or philanthropy.

Named honorary curator and bibliographer of Latin Americana at the John Carter Brown Library in 1996, Bromsen, of Boston, has since donated to the library his collection of portraits, iconography and manuscripts relating to the famed Liberator of South America, Simón Bolívar. It is the only collection of its kind outside South America.

Bromsen is widely recognized for his broad knowledge of the history of printing and publishing in colonial Spanish America, and, in particular, for his mastery of the lives and accomplishments of the great bibliographers of that time.

The President’s Medal has been awarded six times since its origination in 1994. Previous recipients include Nuala Pell, wife of retired U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell; Artemis A.W. Joukowsky, chancellor emeritus of the University, and H. Anthony Ittleson, a member of the Brown Corporation, leaders of a previous capital campaign; Theodore R. Sizer, education reformer and former University Professor; Alan Shawn Feinstein, philanthropist; Carl Haffenreffer, philanthropist.

Laboratory physicist Dean Hudek was elected chair of the Committee on Apparatus of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT). This is the nationwide professional organization devoted to the teaching of physics. Hudek and his staff provide physics exhibitions for local school children, and have been recognized for overhauling and upgrading the physics demonstration facility and the instructional labs in physics and astronomy at Brown.

Fayneese Miller, associate professor of education and human development, has been named to the Bradley Hospital Board of Trustees and Bradley Hospital Foundation Board of Trustees. Bradley Hospital, in East Providence, is a psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents and is affiliated with the Medical School.

Brown in the News

From the New York Times of March 7: The Choices Education Program was featured in an article headlined “Schools seek balance as students join war debate.”

“High demand for ways to teach about the conflict has already created a cottage industry in Iraq-related curriculums,” the article noted. “One of the most popular is ‘Teaching with the News: Crisis with Iraq,’ an Internet outline (www.choices.edu) of policy choices on Iraq that has framed debates in some 4,000 American schools in recent weeks, said Susan Graseck, a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute whose staff wrote the curriculum last fall as the conflict built momentum.

“‘We try to provide tools that can help students analyze current history,’ Dr. Graseck said. ‘That can bring it alive.’”

From the Los Angeles Times of March 3: John DiGiovanna, M.D., a Brown professor of dermatology, was interviewed for an article about an experimental lotion derived from a yeast enzyme. “‘This drug potentially has great promise and could be used as a prevenive for skin cancer,’ DiGiovanna told the Times, which went on to describe the lotion as having the potential to “work like a ‘morning-after’ cream, repairing mutant cells before they turn cancerous.”

National Public Radio, Feb 28: Anne Fausto-Sterling, professor of biology and women's studies, was interviewed for a story on “All Things Considered” that explored the 50th anniversary of the elucidation of the DNA structure.

Brown faculty are often quoted in the media. For regular online updates, go to Brown in the News.