Advanced PhD students are invited to apply to participate in a Dissertation Writing Retreat, to be held January 13-17, 2020. The retreat provides quiet space, community, writing tips and support and structured writing time. Space is limited. Charles Carroll, Interim Program Manager of the Writing Center, will lead this retreat, which pools the resources and support of the Graduate School, Sheridan Center and Libraries. Learn more.

Christopher Jotischky-Hull, a PhD student in Classics, was awarded the Modern Greek Studies Association Victor Papacosma Essay Prize for his essay entitled, The Crowning of the Lyre: Andréas Kálvos and the Appropriation of Pindaric Imagery in Nineteenth-Century Greek Diasporic Poetics. Given to the best graduate student essay on a Greek subject, the Prize is awarded on a biennial schedule to coincide with the MGSA Symposium. Read more.

In enabling Ph.D. program leaders to drop the requirement to submit test scores, the Graduate School looks to attract talented, high-achieving students from an increasingly diverse pool of candidates. “The future success of graduate education at Brown depends on the diverse, innovative and intellectually independent candidates we admit and the varied skill sets they bring to their disciplines,” said Dean of the Graduate School Andrew G. Campbell. “By removing the Graduate School’s GRE requirement and allowing programs to decide whether to require the exam, we will broaden the talent pool of students who apply to and have access to graduate education at Brown.” Read more.

A new study finds that the muscles in bats’ wings operate at a significantly lower temperature than their bodies, especially during flight. Past research suggests that in most other creatures, including humans, muscles involved in exercise become warmer in response to movement. But the small muscles of a bat’s wing are uniquely vulnerable to heat loss during flight, as they’re covered by only a thin layer of skin — and warming them up would be inefficient from the standpoint of energy use.

“We tend to assume that warm-blooded animals are warm all the time,” said doctoral student Andrea Rummel, who authored the study alongside Brown biologists Sharon Swartz and Richard Marsh. “But this research shows that warm-blooded animals have a lot more variation in body temperature than we expected. That has implications for how animals are moving around, including humans.” Read more.