At Brown

HIV Vaccine Awareness Day

Brown faculty, students and staff will host several activities as part of the annual HIV Vaccine Awareness Day Friday, May 16. The events are designed to increase awareness of the need for an HIV vaccine worldwide. From 9 a.m. to noon, the Brown TB/HIV Research Lab at 200 Chestnut St. will hold an open house. From 1 to 4 p.m., several researchers in the Brown University AIDS Program will speak about their work as part of a series of talks at Providence City Hall. That evening, the GAIA Vaccine Foundation, started by Professor Anne DeGroot, M.D., to finance global access to an HIV vaccine, will host a fundraiser at Rue De L'Espoir, 99 Hope St., to raise money for HIV vaccine research and development. For more information about the day’s events, contact Stephanie Howie at The Miriam Hospital, 793-4714, or showie@lifespan.org.

Awards and Honors

Several students received awards for posters presented on Public Health Research Day April 24.

Kirsten Spalding ’04, best poster by an undergraduate, for “Public Health Surveillance of Fatal Child Maltreatment in Rhode Island.” Spalding studied ways to improve how to estimate the prevalence of child maltreatment that resulted in fatalities.

Jill Nealey-Moore, best graduate poster, for “Sexual Risk-Taking of Men Released from Prison. Her work used a calendar-based research method to identify when a variety of behaviors occur that might place the respondent and his partner at risk for HIV and other STD infections. The research indicated that such behaviors are likely to occur very soon after release from prison, supporting the observation that prison-based educational programs, focused on risk reduction, provided a unique opportunity to intervene with men before their release from incarceration. Nealey-Moore is a research fellow in psychiatry and human behavior.

Meg Bourbonniere, second prize in the graduate category, for “Rehospitalization Among Elders Surgically Treated for Colorectal Cancer.” She is a postdoctoral research fellow in community health.

Carolyn Rabin, third prize in the graduate category, for “Physical Activity Among Breast Cancer Survivors: Regular Exercisers vs. Participants in a PA Intervention.” Rabin is a research fellow in psychiatry.

Harold Ward is among the 15 finalists for the 2003 Thomas Ehrlich Faculty Award for Service Learning, presented by Campus Compact. More than 140 nominations were submitted. The winners are Janet Eyler of Vanderbilt University and Dwight Giles, University of Massachusetts, Boston. The annual award recognizes and honors faculty members who have helped integrate community or public service into the curriculum, and for their efforts to institutionalize service-learning.

The following Brown-affiliated individuals received citations for presentations made at the annual meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine last March:

• “Dietary Variety and Weight Loss Maintenance in the National Weight Control Registry.” Hollie Raynor, Rena Wing, Suzanne Phelan

• “Coloring the Lines: Using Qualitative Data to Enhance Quantitative Findings – The Case of Microbicide Acceptability.” Kate Morrow, Theresa Costello, Rochelle Rosen

• “Does Flexibility or Consistency in Eating Patterns Promote Long-Term Weight Control?” Amy Gorin, Rena Wing, James Hill

• “Moving Forward: A Randomized Trial of a Home-Based Physical Activity Program for Breast Cancer Patients.” Bernardine Pinto, Joseph Trunzo, Carolyn Rabin, Bess Marcus

• “Effects of Intensive E-Mail Counseling in an Internet Behavioral Weight Loss Program for Adults.” Deborah Tate, Rena Wing, Elizabeth Jackvony, Pamela Coward, Hillary Sylvia

• “Which Psychological Variables Independently Predict the Specific Aspects of Cardiac Rehabilitation Outcomes?” Biing-Jiun Shen, Kristin Musto, Charles McCreary

• “The Breast Impact of Treatment Scale: The Assessment of Body Image Distress for Breast Cancer Patients.” Georita Frierson, Barbara Andersen

• “Physical Activity Among Breast Cancer Survivors: Regular Exercisers vs. Participants in a PA Intervention.” Carolyn Rabin, Bernardine Pinto, Georita Frierson

People

Bess Marcus and Beth Lewis served as guest authors of the March 2003 Research Digest of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports (PCPFS). The council helps promote, encourage and motivate Americans to become physically active and participate in sports. Marcus is professor of psychiatry and human behavior and director of physical activity research for The Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine. Lewis is a research fellow in psychiatry and human behavior.

Brown in the News

Science magazine of April 11: "Planetary scientists poring over the latest data returned by Mars-orbiting spacecraft have reached a startling conclusion,” Richard A. Kerr reports in an article headlined “Iceball Mars?”“ Half the Red Planet appears to have been encrusted with ice in the relatively recent past. …This icy coating would not have been the first to cover large areas of Mars, according to new climate modeling reported last month at a workshop [held March 15-15 in Houston by Brown and the V. I. Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, [Moscow].

“Mars has a tendency to wobble back and forth on its axis, and the new modeling suggests that this instability would have triggered a succession of ice ages throughout the planet's history. The tilting would have shifted polar climes to lower latitudes, vaporizing the polar ice caps and layering dirty ice toward the equator. That would help explain much geology that has puzzled researchers for as long as 30 years: swaths of ‘softened’ martian terrain that look like they're made of ice cream scooped on a hot day, slopes that ooze like wet paint dripping down a wall, and even the enigmatic gullies where water seems to have flowed on a frozen planet.

“These data mesh neatly with the view from the Mars Global Surveyor, laid out at the workshop by researchers from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island – including James Head, John Mustard, Mikhail Kreslavsky and Ralph Milliken. The spacecraft's Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) provides images of isolated, narrow strips of the planet's surface at the highest resolution ever, resolving features that measure as small as a couple of meters. Kreslavsky reported that poleward of about 60-degrees latitude, wherever the camera looks, the surface seems smooth when viewed at low resolution; it looks as if meters of heavy snow lie upon the land.”

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