Catherine Luria, a graduate student in marine biology was recently featured in Nature for her participation in an international study on how changes in sea-ice coverage and blooms of phytoplankton affect bacterial diversity from season to season. This collaboration, the Palmer Antarctica Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project, is located on the western coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Luria will travel to Antarctica this month and several more times over the course of her studies.

The Graduate School has updated its research and conference travel policies. The Joukowsky Summer Research Awards is a new program providing funding for scholarly activities outside of Brown during the summer months.

Aniruddha Maitra was awarded the Five College Fellowship for 2012-2013, one of only four graduate students to receive this annual residential fellowship. Maitra, a Modern Culture & Media student, is at Hampshire College working on his dissertation, "Narcissism and the Scene of Reading: Towards a Global Politics of Local Aesthetics".

Chemistry graduate student Jonghun Lee is lead author of a paper demonstrating how a newly developed chemical solution is used to create a thin, conductive film that reports the best transparency and conductivity performance to date. A conductive overlay in a touch-screen display or solar panel must be clear, inexpensive and easy to manufacture. Engineers use transparent thin films of indium tin oxide (ITO) for this purpose. In the new study, Lee, along with Shouheng Sun, professor of chemistry, and other researchers at Brown and ATMI Inc.