When Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis students clear off campus for spring break next week, not everyone will be headed for time in the sun, rest and relaxation. Beginning March 13, those participating in Alternative Spring Break will volunteer six hours per day on projects focused on environmentalism, animal conservation, systemic racism, rural education, HIV/AIDS, indigenous rights, mental health and interfaith social issues.

An alternative break experience can reveal unexpected lessons for many students, something first-year graduate student Matthew Greenwood found out firsthand during last October’s Fall Alternative Break.

Matthew Greenwood

Volunteering in Columbus, Ohio, through the program sponsored by Campus Center and Student Experiences within the Division of Student Affairs, Greenwood worked on an urban farming project. The project taught him about the value of reclaiming abandoned city lands for growing food crops. It also gave him the background to approach his nonprofit studies from a new perspective.

Greenwood is pursuing a graduate certificate in nonprofit management and plans to complete his Master of Public Affairs in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Hailing from Indianapolis’ west side in Speedway, he completed bachelor’s degrees in psychology and philosophy at IUPUI.

Greenwood, who plans to work in the nonprofit sector advocating for vulnerable populations, spoke with IU Communications after participating in the 2016 Fall Alternative Break program.

Q: Why did you decide to go on a Fall Alternative Break?

MG: I wanted to use the extra time that fall break afforded me to delve deeper into social issues and to volunteer that time for a good cause.

Q: What was the biggest lesson you brought back from this experience?

MG: To be honest, I’d not thought much about urban farming. I knew little about it and never thought it would have much of an impact. I learned a lot about the topic, including how transformative it could be in a troubled neighborhood. The experience was a real eye-opener.

Q: What was the most surprising thing you learned during Fall Alternative Break?

MG: Just how something as simple as an urban farm in empty lots could make such a difference to a neighborhood. Also, how much I personally enjoyed getting dirty, farming and picking tomatoes!

Urban farming

Q: How do you think your Fall Alternative Break experience will contribute to your studies and future profession?

MG: When it comes to sustainable neighborhoods, and any social issue, I need to remember to keep an open mind about solutions that are outside the box. Also that there is so much I don’t know, and to be receptive to ideas that I might have been skeptical about initially.

Q: Based on your status as a graduate student, what do you think you brought to the experience for other students on the trip?

MG: I was with a remarkable group of undergrads, all coming with their unique experiences and viewpoints. I felt like there was a lot of wisdom in the group, and they offered many profound insights from their perspectives. Despite being older, by far, than anyone else, I feel everyone contributed equally, and I learned more from them than they did from me. They were a great group, and I never felt out of place, despite the age difference between me and the rest of the Alternative Fall Breakers.

Q: What advice do you have for students going on next week’s Spring Alternative Break?

MG: Come with an open mind and a positive attitude. And, oh yeah — don’t expect to get much sleep!

Robin Janson, a clinical assistant professor in the school’s Department of Occupational Therapy, brings her research interest in 3-D applications into the classroom and what she calls her OT Maker Lab, where students learn how to use a 3-D printer to make an assistive device.

Robin Janson with Michaela O’Shaughnessey, a first year ​student in the MS in OT Program.

Janson says that 3-D technology will eventually give occupational therapists an incredible tool to design and manufacture adaptive equipment, assistive devices, therapeutic toys, therapeutic tools, anatomical models, orthotic components and more, from the comfort of their own offices.

She recently wrote about the potential advantages that 3-D can bring: “Consider, for example, a client with arthritis who lacks sufficient grip and pinch skills to successfully remove plastic caps from water bottles because of muscle weakness, joint instability and/or pain. A common approach to restoring independence in this activity is to recommend adaptive technology — for example, a bottle opener. When purchased from a large medical supply company, such a device can cost $13 to $40 — plus shipping and taxes — and take three to five business days to deliver. Alternatively, an assistive device called the “Plastic Cap Wrench” can be made in the clinic, using a desktop 3-D printer from a free online file, for a material cost of 25 cents in as little as 20 minutes.”

The current state of 3-D printing is challenging for occupational therapists to use in a clinic setting, Janson said: “It’s not super user-friendly yet.”

But it’s only a matter of time before the technology improves to the point where it is implemented widely, she said. When it does, Janson wants her students to be prepared to use it as occupational therapist practitioners.

Janson uses a 3-D printer as an instructional tool, printing upper-extremity skeletal models for students in a kinesiology course to take home and use as a study aid. The cost to print each model was less than $10, compared to purchasing one for as much as $100.

First-year IU MS in OT student Liz DeMoss (Class of 2018) shared with Janson that “Building the models helped me see the intricacies of the upper-extremity bones as well as how the bones all fit together. This in turn helped me better understand function and movement of the arm, which was very helpful when studying for kinesiology.”

Janson also uses it to teach anatomical concepts, noting there is one joint motion concept that in the past she was only able to show in photographs or illustrations. With a 3-D printer, she created a larger-sized bones and added ligaments created with latex rubber so students could see the joint in action and readily understand the concept.

3-D printing is also used to provide students with a body-powered prosthesis so they can personally experience how they function and thus be better prepared to train future clients on how to use the devices.

“3-D printing makes that affordable,” Janson said. “It allows me to create instructional devices or tools at a low cost.”

In the 2016 spring semester, Janson started providing students hands-on experience using a filament-based 3-D printer purchased by the Department of Occupational Therapy. In one course she teaches, Janson tasked students with finding an assistive device online that could be downloaded and 3-D printed.

The students schedule time in the OT Maker Lab. “They come in, and we walk through the process of downloading the digital design, setting up the print using printer-control software and then sending the print to the 3-D printer,” she said.

“I like students having a foundation with 3-D printing and a comfort level with the process so that when the time comes, they can be early adapters because they will already have the baseline knowledge.”

No other country in the world has embraced incarceration as much as the United States.

That’s a blunt truth — yet perhaps not an irreversible one, as a new exhibit coming to Indianapolis this spring will explore.

“States of Incarceration,” a traveling exhibit and website created by more than 500 students and others affected by imprisonment in 20 cities across the U.S., traces the roots of mass incarceration through communities’ stories and opens dialogue on what should come next. The exhibit is organized by The New School’s Humanities Action Lab, a coalition of universities, issue organizations and public spaces that collaborate to produce community-curated public humanities projects on key social issues.

In Indianapolis, students from the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis School of Liberal Arts museum studies program — with support from the IUPUI Arts and Humanities Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Indiana Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and several other local groups — will install the exhibit that will reside in the atrium of the Indianapolis Public Library’s Central Library downtown from April 13 to May 14.

“There’s an important story to tell in Central Indiana,” said Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, professor of anthropology and museum studies and director of the IUPUI Cultural Heritage Research Center. “The opportunity to have an exhibit like this in the atrium of the Central Library is a chance to engage people in the conversation.”

IUPUI students focused on the intersection of incarceration and mental illness for their portion of the exhibit. The city and state have been home to several important legal cases brought by the American Civil Liberties Union to try to improve the treatment of incarcerated citizens with mental illnesses. With help from the Indiana Medical History Museum and the National Alliance of Mental Illness Indiana, the students explored the question “Why are prisons the nation’s mental hospitals?” while looking at both the history of deinstitutionalization of state mental hospitals and the crisis of mental health treatment in today’s prisons and jails.

“An important starting place to imagine change is having conversations, not just in the legal field or the public health world, but in public spaces like the library that bring together people with a variety of perspectives and experiences with incarceration,” Kryder-Reid said. “It’s incredibly important for citizens to understand where we are and how we got here in order to imagine what would need to change for us to move to a de-incarcerated state or at least lower rates of incarceration.”

Before and during the exhibit’s run, several events will delve into different aspects of the issue. See below for more information or visit facebook.com/massinciupui.

March 18, 2 p.m.: Screening of the documentary “13th,” followed by a panel discussion, Central Library auditorium. This public screening by director Ava DuVernay will be followed by a panel discussion facilitated by Dr. Ivan Douglas Hicks with experts Dr. James Kilgore, Dr. Terri Jett, Dr. James Dix III, and Marshawn Wolley, director of community engagement and strategic initiatives and lecturer of public affairs in the IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs. Co-Sponsored with Circle City (IN) Chapter of The Links, Inc. Register here.

April 13, 6:30 p.m.: Inside Out with Lori Pompa: A public conversation about social change through transformative education, Central Library Riley Room. Pompa, founder of The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, an educational program that facilitates dialogue across difference, will lead a conversation with Inside Out instructors, students and graduates about innovative approaches to engaging a wide range of stakeholders committed to social justice. Participants will also have the opportunity to view the newly installed “States of Incarceration” exhibit.

April 10-May 14: Pages to Prisons book drive, collection boxes at the IUPUI University Library and “States of Incarceration” exhibit. Donors are asked to bring new or like-new books, which will be given to prisons for their libraries and educational programs. Particular needs include Spanish-language books, GED test-prep books, and high school-level textbooks for math and science, as well as mystery, adventure, Westerns, and sci-fi fiction. For a more detailed list, go online.

April 20, 6 p.m.: “States of Incarceration” exhibit opening reception and public conversation about mental health and incarceration, Central Library. Anne Parsons, department of history, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, will offer remarks on the intersection of the rise of mass incarceration with the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals. A panel moderated by Dr. Modupe Labode including Kenneth J. Falk (legal director, ACLU of Indiana) and Maurice Young (founder, Creative Change Project) will offer perspectives on the implications of these issues for Indianapolis.

April 21, 7 p.m.: “Voices of Incarceration: Spoken Word, Art & Dialogue,” Fletcher Place Arts and Books, 642 Virginia Ave. Spoken-word poetry and art combine to create a space for creative responses and thought-provoking conversations about mass incarceration and its impact on the community.

April 28, 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m.: Mental Health First Aid Certification, Cavanaugh Hall Room 411. This program is an eight-hour course that offers training and certification for those responding to persons affected by mental illness (similar to the traditional Red Cross First Aid training). Cost is $10. Register here.

April 29, 10 a.m.: Public conversation about re-entry, Central Library. This dialogue-based program brings together people with diverse perspectives and experiences to explore re-entry issues in Central Indiana. Reservations recommended, as space is limited.

The Dream Team captures the Golden Goggles. Team members are: Zachary Balda, Brandon Boyton, Nicholas Hubbard, Taylor Peavey and Adam Sussman.

There were the regular accessories of a scientist. White lab coat? Check. Rubber gloves? Check. And of course, goggles. Check.

Whoops of laughter? You bet!

After all, it was the School of Science at IUPUI’s Golden Goggles competition. The annual science games drew 150 students, faculty and staff Feb. 17 who engaged in physical and mental science-related challenges to win the coveted Golden Goggles.

Divided into teams that ranged from three to five players, the competitors faced a series of timed contests from scaling an obstacle course to team trivia in a tournament.

There was a “Riddle Me This” challenge that had to do with resources for science students, with teams advised “To Win this Golden Goggles test, answer these riddles before the rest!” a word scramble involving science words and science trivia, with questions spread across scientific fields.

There was a giant-sized “Operation” game to challenge players’ hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills. All members of a team had to collect as many pieces as possible within five minutes

Another challenge tested a team’s communication skills, with players tasked to build an exact replica of a geometric shape hidden in a box, using materials that were provided. The catch was only one member of a team was allowed to view the shape. That player had to provide guidance to other team members building the shape.

A Golden Goggles competitor grabs a balloon as part of the Mad Scientist challenge.

There was the Mad Scientist challenge too, in which players donned lab coats, goggles and gloves and then sprinted through an inflated obstacle course. While doing that, each member of a team grabbed a colored balloon. The balloons were used to build a water molecule, with balloons representing two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen.

At the end of the afternoon’s competition, the Dream Team had emerged victorious in its quest for the elusive Golden Goggles.

One student said the Golden Goggles help poke a hole in the stereotype that science is boring, saying, “This is fun!” Another student said the event allowed members of the School of Science family to put their studies’ away for an afternoon and come together to enjoy the day.

Sarah Marriage, a Baltimore, Maryland-based maker of fine furniture and other wooden objects, is visiting the Herron School of Art and Design on Monday, Feb. 27, as part of the Phillip Tennant Furniture Artisan Lecture Series. She’s a few weeks from opening “A Workshop of Our Own” in her hometown, a space where female furniture-makers can come together in a supportive environment. She talked with IU Communications about the new shop, baby rattles, how students can get started in the field, and today’s “disposable” furniture.

Q: What inspired you to found “A Workshop of Our Own”?

SM: When I worked in structural engineering, I was in a predominantly female firm, which was a cocoon — I didn’t realize how lucky I was. Then I went to wood school. With four women and 19 men, I didn’t feel a sense of being an “other,” but then I went out into the real world of fabricating furniture, where it’s so majority male.

Sarah Marriage

Culturally, we have this sense that people who work with wood are the working-man type, and there’s a stereotype and romance around this masculine thing, even in shops and cities. It’s uncommon to find a shop with more than one woman, if that. For students like those at Herron, it might be more than 50 percent women in these design programs, but in the real world, going to the lumberyard and bidding on jobs, you’re in a very small minority. Even for those who want women in the field, it’s the default; they just don’t expect you to be a woodworker, and they maybe don’t think you’re as legit. I founded “A Workshop of Our Own” to increase numbers and provide a place for women in the workforce who are discouraged and consider dropping out — to have a place they can go to say “it doesn’t have to be that way” — and for women who never would have gotten into it because they’re too intimidated by the sawmill environment.

Working in an all-women and gender-nonconforming environment actually removes the stigma of gender stereotype. So from the outside, we appear focused on gender, but inside the shop, we’re just woodworkers who aren’t having to deal with constantly being confronted by any gender stereotypes.

Q: Where does your inspiration come from?

SM: Sometimes there’s an element of technical difficulty that interests me, or if it’s something I haven’t done before, like using a technique and pushing it as far as I can imagine — that is exciting to me. As far as form, I think I get a lot of inspiration from history without particularly realizing it. I look at architecture a lot, how the piece isn’t just an object but is part of a physical experience of architecture — not necessarily designing for a particular room, but thinking about the piece being part of a larger whole.

I’ve also had a series of works in which I chose different artist friends of mine and designed a piece about them. Like a music stand called the fiddler mantis — that was very interesting and useful, and it gave me a structure to explore things.

Q: You have a “toy shop” on your website, including sold-out baby rattles. What’s the story behind those?

SM: That was a funny thing. A few years ago, I moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, and there was a holiday craft fair at the local town hall. I signed up for it and knew I needed to make a product; I couldn’t bring my $4,000 piece of furniture. So I just made a bunch of little products that I thought someone might buy at the holidays: spoons, martini stirrers, cutting boards — and these baby rattles. I had made them before for particular babies, a line of owl rattles that I could knock out in a few hours. Then they became popular on Instagram. I was getting orders and interest, started making other characters, and boom — I’m into rattle-making. I didn’t want to be a toymaker, but it was fine. I wanted to meet my neighbors, and it ended up being a way of creating a product.

It’s good to be able to have a repeatable product that is still kind of “you” and still unique, still interesting, a good design — but repeatable to where you know how much it costs and how much it will make. That’s a great tool to have in your pocket.

And I still get tons of baby photos, with my rattles in their mouths.

Q: Students at Herron in the furniture design program use the latest computer-assisted and 3-D modeling equipment available. Do you use those, or are you more old-school in drafting and building?

SM: Even though I went to architecture school in the late ’90s, we used AutoCAD and 3-D modeling, but I was also taught hand drafting. Some schools are going away from that, which is too bad. When I went into fine woodworking at College of the Redwoods, there were no computers, just one laptop in the front room. Using computers wasn’t discouraged; it just wasn’t part of the curriculum. Drawing in CAD was what I was comfortable with. But eventually I found just working without the computer to have its own benefit.

But the pendulum swung. I wasn’t using the computer at all, and now I’m bringing it back again. With the digital fab stuff, it’s valuable to be proficient so you can use it when you need it. Though you have to have a separate room for the computer, or the woodworking machines will destroy it.

Baby rattles proved popular for Sarah.

Q: It feels like we’re in a mass-production era of furniture, when giant stores like IKEA are setting our styles. Is that accurate?

SM: We’ve been in that world for a long time. What did we have before: JCPenney, Sears, Target? It’s fast fashion. People learn about designs through IKEA but also through HGTV, the internet, Pinterest. Things have been mass-produced for a long time; what’s more unique about right now is that they’re both mass-produced and disposable. There’s a sense that it’s more popular and acceptable to buy a whole house of furniture, throw it out in two years, and then buy another whole house of furniture. You’re constantly redesigning your space. I think that gives homeowners and people who don’t have creative jobs a creative outlet, but it also leads to furniture that doesn’t need to last. Stores like IKEA make furniture that doesn’t last, but it doesn’t need to last because you replace it all the time.

But as consumers grow, many are more interested in something that will stay put and be a little bit nicer. Which helps some of us.

Q: What advice do you give to students about thriving in furniture-making?

SM: I ask them questions about themselves. Why do they like the work? For some, the best way to get in the business is to go the cabinet-making route or into trade carpentry, maybe building kitchens, and you’re able to do furniture on the side. Others want to do more studio furniture. My main nugget of wisdom is to be aware of the trends, but don’t be a slave to trends. People can make a living and survive off of trends on Instagram and stuff, but I don’t think it would be a fulfilling life — not for me, anyway. Just be true to yourself, which is always good advice.

While you’re starting out, and perhaps your entire career, it’s important to diversify what you do and figure out a way of supporting yourself, whether it’s being a teaching artist or making kitchens or making toys — some version of multiple income streams so you’re able to have your artwork be independent of whether you can make your rent check.

Sarah Marriage is speaking at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 27, in the Basile Auditorium in the Herron School of Art and Design. For more information, visit the Herron website.

Called the Indy Community Development Network, the course is the first of its kind at IUPUI, giving students an introduction to many of the tools utilized in community development, said Marshawn Wolley, director of the school’s community engagement and strategic initiatives.

Marshawn Wolley

Students are learning  about:

• “People” and “place” community-development strategies and social policy issues including socioeconomic disparities, gentrification, and the role of social justice in thinking about communities

• How nonprofit and business leaders develop residential or commercial properties for areas of a city or neighborhood to improve affordability and make areas more attractive for further investment

• How local social entrepreneurs are collaborating with communities to wrestle with their most pressing challenges by designing programs or community initiatives to enhance the quality of life for residents

“The course is for students interested in social justice who are trying to figure out how to make that their career,” Wolley said. The course, which meets weekly in February, is open to SPEA students who have completed at least 60 hours of coursework.

SPEA students who participate in the class will be eligible to compete for one of three $5,000 PNC Community Development fellowships that will support a paid internship at an organization where they can have maximum impact on community-development initiatives in the city, according to Wolley.

The course was developed in response to community-development organizations and others who are interested in developing a talent pipeline of individuals who understand the unique aspects of community development in Indianapolis and recognize the complexities of Indianapolis’s neighborhoods through diversity and socioeconomic perspectives, Wolley said.

Students will meet with a range of city and community-development officials, including Emily Mack, director of the Department of Metropolitan Development; James Taylor, CEO of the John H. Boner Center; and Gary Hobbs, a prominent social entrepreneur and developer in Indianapolis.

If you’re on this page, you might already know that Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis offers more than 350 undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs.

Come this fall, there will be a few more.

Here’s a look at seven new academic programs from a variety of IUPUI schools:

Ph.D. in data science, School of Informatics and Computing:

This degree — the first of its kind in Indiana and in the Big Ten, and one of only a handful in the United States — leads to positions in academia as well as in industry. In fact, Glassdoor, a job and employment-recruiting website, ranks data scientist as the No. 1 job in America based on the number of job openings, salary, and overall job-satisfaction rating. According to Glassdoor, the median base salary for a data scientist is $116,840.

The field of data science involves collection, organization, management, and extraction of knowledge and insights from massive, complex, heterogeneous data sets commonly known as “big data.”

Ph.D. in American studies, School of Liberal Arts:

This nontraditional doctoral program looks to recruit students interested in exploring issues through a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on courses already being offered across the School of Liberal Arts. A doctoral internship of at least a year will help students translate their research into a variety of careers.

“The Ph.D. program in American studies at IUPUI does not tweak the traditional Ph.D. model, but rather builds an infrastructure for a collaborative and applied graduate school experience in order to close the distance between academia and the world that surrounds it,” said Raymond Haberski Jr., professor of history and director of American studies.

Graduate minor in communicating science, School of Liberal Arts Department of Communication Studies:

Scientists and health professionals today need to connect to and engage with the lay public, policymakers, funders, students, and professionals from other disciplines. As a result, they find the need to tailor their communication for a variety of audiences. This program — designed for future scientists, including researchers and practitioners, who find themselves increasingly responsible for public speaking and writing — will increase students’ career prospects, help them secure funding, and help them serve as effective teachers.

Students will have seven new academic programs to choose from in fall 2017.

“The courses will offer more than public speaking and writing tips,” said Krista Hoffmann-Longtin, assistant professor of communication studies in the School of Liberal Arts and assistant dean for faculty affairs and professional development in the School of Medicine. “Scientists will learn to improvise messages; to tell relevant stories; and to connect effectively with students, collaborators, and funders.”

Liberal arts and management certificate, School of Liberal Arts:

A 2013 study suggests that a liberal arts degree coupled with other skills can nearly double job prospects when those skills include marketing, business, data analysis, and management — just to name a few.

“This certificate offers a course of study from both liberal arts and business to better prepare the 21st-century liberal arts graduate to respond to the challenges of a more complex world,” said Kristy Sheeler, associate dean for academic programs in the School of Liberal Arts and a professor in the Department of Communication Studies. Contact Sheeler with questions about this new program.

Doctor of public health in global health leadership, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health:

The school already knows what some students in this new program will do when they graduate: They’ll become state health commissioners; ministers of health; program officers; and mid- to senior-level managers in government agencies, foundations, nonprofits, and nongovernmental organizations.

That’s based on experiences of a similar program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The person who helped design and lead that program is now at IUPUI: Sue Babich, associate dean of global health, director of the doctoral program in global health leadership, and professor of health policy and management.

The degree prepares students to be leaders who can address the world’s challenging and complex public health issues. The three-year degree is a distance program, with classes delivered in real time via internet video. Students meet face-to-face three times each year in years one and two, and they complete dissertations in year three.

Master of Science degree in product stewardship, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health:

The only academic degree available today designed to prepare students for leadership roles in the emerging field of product stewardship will train professionals to help businesses in a wide range of industrial fields navigate increasingly complex regulations as they advocate for the production of products in ways that ease regulatory compliance, minimize risks to people and the environment, and boost profitability.

The online 30 credit hour degree is expected to attract, among others, professionals who are already active in the product-stewardship field seeking formal training that will allow them to move up in their product-stewardship organizations and professionals from a wide range of other backgrounds, including environmental health, regulatory compliance, industrial hygiene, occupational health and safety, sustainability, product development, supply chain, and law.

Master of Arts in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), Department of English, School of Liberal Arts:

This 31 credit hour degree provides both a strong theoretical foundation and hands-on practical experience to prepare national and international graduate students to become effective teachers of English to adult learners who speak other native languages, both in the United States and abroad.

Working with IUPUI’s award-winning faculty, students will experience rich opportunities in teaching practica, including not only English for academic purposes, or EAP, but also English for Specific Purposes, or ESP — for example, academic, legal, business and medical English. The program features a unique curricular strength in second-language research, materials preparation, curriculum design and the use of technology in second-language learning.

“It is thrilling to be able to launch the Master of Arts in TESOL at IUPUI,” said Ulla Connor, director of the program. “This program is the culmination of TESOL and applied linguistics programming in the Department of English at IUPUI over the past 30 years. Our previous programs include the English for Academic Purposes Program for international students, which began in 1985; the International Center for Intercultural Communication, which started in 1998; and the Program for Intensive English that we began in 2015.”

As an assistant professor with the Department of Health Sciences in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at IUPUI, Comer is conducting research into a new way  for increasing empathy among physicians.

The need to do so has been identified by the IU School of Medicine and others within the health care profession.

Amber Comer

“You can be extremely bright, an excellent learner and an outstanding physician but absolutely lack empathy, which has implications for patient care, Comer says: “At the end of the day, a patient doesn’t really know if you are a great doctor. They just know if you were empathetic, if you were nice to them.”

Comer is collecting data for a study that has several components, including one in which she is evaluating how empathetic neurologists are when they speak with family members of patients who have experienced a traumatic stroke.

After observing the conversation, she interviews the doctor and the family members, asking the doctor if he or she believes they were using empathetic statements and the family members if they think the physician had been empathetic.

Comer has found that sometimes physicians think they are being extremely empathetic, but family members don’t feel the same way.

“We’re collecting information on what empathy looks like from the physician’s perspective and what it looks like from the patient’s perspective,” Comer said.

She and Sara Konrath, an assistant professor of philanthropic studies at IUPUI, will use that preliminary data to develop a text-messaging app that will be tested with third- and fourth-year medical students who are seeing patients in hospitals and clinics under the supervision of doctors. In an earlier study, Konrath developed a text-messaging app to increase empathy among young adults.

The medical students will receive texts, perhaps daily, that provide specific instructions on how to convey empathy, such as “Touch your patient on the arm on the way out of their room” or “Try smiling, and look the patient in the eye.”

“You might not be born an empathetic person, but you can convey empathy just by using empathetic statements or body language,” Comer said. Text messaging was chosen as a delivery method because physicians are already using their smartphones for a variety of purposes.

“The goal of the study is to see whether we can increase empathy through text-messaging reminders,” she said.

“The hope is that any physician who is trying to be more empathetic with their patients, trying to have a better connection with their patients, could benefit from using the app,” Comer said. “That is important because a lot of hospitals have gone to patient-satisfaction survey models where reimbursement for physicians is based in part on whether patients are satisfied with the physician’s performance.”

In the annals of Indiana crime, Nancy Clem has a singular place in history: first woman convicted of murder. She was believed to have been a loan shark and a Ponzi schemer (long before the term was invented), and her role in a double murder — and subsequent multiple trials — made her a celebrity criminal.

One hundred and fifty years later, she’s one of three inviting subjects for a museum exhibit.

“New Women of the Harrison Era,” a new exhibit running through Oct. 31 at the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site in Indianapolis, features Clem and two other women with connections to the former president. The exhibit was conceptualized by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis students in the School of Liberal Arts museum studies program, with the collection, compiling and displaying of artifacts by Katelyn Coyne, 2016 curatorial fellow and museum studies MA candidate.

It’s the first Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site “New Century Curator” exhibit, the result of a partnership with IUPUI.

Visitors can take a selfie with Frances Benjamin Johnston in a studio resembling what hers might have looked like.

“When the Presidential Site came to us with the idea to partner, it was an easy decision to get on board,” said Elee Wood, director of museum studies at the IUPUI School of Liberal Arts. “Our objective is to help grow a new generation of museum professionals through collaborative training and hands-on experience with innovative exhibit planning, curatorial research, education and collections, so this was a great opportunity to do just that.”

In addition to Clem (whose trials were handled by Harrison’s law firm), also spotlighted are Frances Benjamin Johnston, who pioneered the role of official White House photographer beginning with Harrison’s term; and Belva Lockwood, who ran against Harrison for the presidency in 1888 and became the first woman to receive votes for the nation’s highest office.

“This timely exhibit gives an important glimpse into that era,” said Charles Hyde, president and CEO of the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site. “It defies expectations for what women were doing at that time to assert their own rights. It’s surprising to see the common thread and how each story intertwines with Harrison’s at the dawn of the modern era.”

Another common thread, however, was a need to find proper major artifacts for each woman. That’s where Coyne earned her stripes as a first-time exhibit curator, partnering with Presidential Site staff, researching and working contacts to build a compelling exhibit from more than just photographs — all while heeding a budget.

“The largest challenge was the lack of 3-D objects related to the women,” Coyne said. “We wanted to bring that interactive element in, to figure out how to design some interactives that were low-impact and didn’t need a lot of upkeep, yet would still engage people.”

Visitors will be able to take a selfie alongside a portrait of Johnston in her studio, as it might have looked in the period. A promotional puzzle from 1888 featuring Harrison and presidential opponents such as Lockwood and Grover Cleveland has been reproduced and are available for guests to play with. As for Clem, Coyne called on colleagues at her workplace, the Indiana State Museum, to borrow a double-barreled shotgun from the 1860s, a pistol and a pair of ladies’ shoes similar to what Clem would have worn. Fun fact: She was connected to the murder scene by footprints.

For more information on the exhibit, visit the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site website.

Inspired by real events in Alexandria, Virginia, and based on diaries and letters of hospital staff, the series has the ring of authority. As one of four full-time advisors to “Mercy Street,” Schultz, a literary scholar and cultural historian who has spent nearly 30 years revealing the world of Civil War hospitals and medicine, contributes her extensive knowledge of that period to make it so.

“Mercy Street” is PBS’s first original drama in more than a decade. Nearly 6 million viewers watched the first season’s premiere a year ago.

The series’ producers invited Schultz to come to Richmond, Virginia, where “Mercy Street” hospital scenes are shot. She spent a week and a half last June watching scenes for the second season being filmed in an old girls school that serves as the show’s Mansion House Hospital.

She not only watched, but joined the cast as an extra for one scene.

Jane Schultz in period costume

If the scene isn’t cut, viewers will see Schultz for about 15 seconds in the background, talking to a patient in a wheelchair and then walking away from him.

While the scene is only seconds long, it took three hours for her to be dressed in a corset and hoop skirt and have her hair and makeup done.

Schultz plans to write about the insights that experience gave her into the position of women in the 19th century for the series’ blog. “It gave me a new insight by walking in their shoes, quite literally,” she said.

Schultz wrote six blog posts for the first season and will write six more for the second season. The first six posts are still on the PBS site.

The experience of being on a shooting set was “tremendously fun and interesting,” Schultz said. “I’m a literary scholar, and I’ve worked in many archives and libraries, but I’ve never worked in a place where there was cinematic shooting going on.

“I gained a new respect and fascination for how hard these folks work to put out a quality piece of drama. It just floored me to see the extent to which people focus on the details of production — from what sort of props are sitting in a hospital room to what the color of mud or blood needs to be in a particular situation.

“I was amazed at how much trouble all of the production staff go to, from the camera people to the people who dye the fabrics to look really old and worn to people who are managing wardrobe and hair and makeup and all of that.

“They spare no detail to make it look authentic, and the same thing happens with the script. We debate every nuance because they want it to look real,” Schultz said.

The task confronting “Mercy Street” is to interpret from written text what things looked like during that period. There are some photographs from that era, but the richest field of representation is what people wrote at the time or a few years later, Schultz said: “And from that you have to construct a visual world.”

In one scene, Schultz happened to notice that upper shelves in a room for patients were empty. She talked to the set designer, pointing out that the Civil War hospital would likely have filled the shelves with supplies because hospitals often didn’t have places to put them.

“There were no storerooms, so they had to use every available bit of space to store all the stuff they did have,” she said. “We worked it out, and the next day, there was stuff on those shelves.”

“To see them re-create this world and pay such close attention to making it seem that it’s really that Civil War place is quite wonderful and thrilling,” Schultz said.

UTeM rolled out the red carpet for the IUPUI delegation’s visit.

By Becky Wood, Assistant to the Chancellor for Communications:

UTeM students outside of the Chancellery Building greet the IUPUI delegation with a traditional Malaysian greeting.

Although business in the United States took David Russomanno, dean of the School of Engineering and Techology, back to the United States, the last day for the rest of the IUPUI delegation was truly remarkable. We traveled to the University Technical Malaysia Melaka, known as UTeM, and Chancellor Nasser Paydar was surprised and pleased to be greeted with his likeness at the campus gateway.

Following that first surprise, the delegation enjoyed a traditional greeting called silat and gamelan — martial arts and musical performances, respectively — presented by UTeM students with the support of staff.

Durian, the king of fruit.

Tan Sri Tajuddin, pro vice chancellor of Universiti Tenaga Nasional, and professor Datuk Dr. Shahrin Bin Sahib, vice chancellor of UTeM, greeted the delegation and shared regional history as well as an overview of the UTeM campus. The visit to UTeM was particularly special because Professor Datuk Dr. Shahrin graduated with honors from IUPUI in 1987 through the UTM/MUCIA program and served as student speaker during commencement exercises. A graduate of distinction, Datuk Dr. Shahrin is the youngest person ever to serve as vice chancellor of a polytechnic university in Malaysia.

Prompted by a conversation at lunch, upon their return to Kuala Lumpur, the group stopped at a tropical fruit stand for a culinary adventure. According to our UTeM hosts, a visit to Malaysia isn’t complete without sampling durian, the king of fruits. This pungent tropical fruit grows abundantly in Malaysia. The smell of durian distinguishes it from all other fruits. To some noses, it’s rotting garbage, to others blue cheese. The texture is soft custard.

For some, durian requires protective clothing.

Our advisors suggested we wear gloves before we touched it. Hmmm … we needed to wear gloves to pick up something we were putting in our mouths? That gave some delegation members pause.

After a debriefing session in Kuala Lumpur, delegation members prepared for their departures, though Paydar made a last-minute stop at Petronas Towers.

All told, the trip was very productive, creating positive lines for progress in IUPUI’s longstanding partnership with Malaysian universities.

With arms across their chests, the IUPUI delegation joins colleagues at the Ministry of Education Community College Division in signaling the ministry’s “soaring upward” goal.

By Becky Wood, Assistant to the Chancellor for Communications:

Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2017

Chancellor Paydar with Professor Datuk Dr. Asma Ismail, and Dato’ Sri Mohammed Shazalli Ramly.

Did a little rain in the afternoon dampen the spirits of the IUPUI delegation in Malaysia? Not one bit. From the morning at the Ministry of Education Community College Division to the afternoon with Datuk Professor Asma Ismail, vice chancellor at Universiti Sains Malaysia, to the evening with the Yong family, the IUPUI delegation took the rain in stride.

The first meeting took place at the Ministry of Education in Putrajaya. If you are trying to envision the city, imagine if Washington, D.C., had been built about 20 years ago, so you have buildings that reflect the dignity and solidity of those in D.C. but with modern twists. The meeting was a productive exchange of ideas about the future of IUPUI partnerships in Malaysia, with a specific focus on engineering and technology graduates and online education.

Chancellor Paydar has a chance to spend time with Wae Yong, another of his former students from Malaysia.

Later in the day, members of the delegation met with professor Datuk Asma. In addition to her position as vice chancellor of USM, she serves as president of the Malaysian National Academy of Sciences. Datuk Asma graduated from Indiana University in the 1980s, and in her role as vice chancellor, she is exploring opportunities for partnerships, including post-doc exchanges and collaborative programs in multiple disciplines.

At the start of the meeting, we were fortunate that Dato’ Sri Mohammed Shazalli Ramly happened to be in the same meeting location, and he joined us briefly for a quick chat. Shazalli graduated from IU in the 1980s as well, and now he serves as regional CEO (Southeast Asia region) with Axiata, one of Asia’s largest telecommunications groups.

A work of art on a plate at Fukuda Japanese restaurant.

This evening the IUPUI delegation hosted the Yong family at Fukuya Restaurant. Fukuya, which translates into “house of happiness,” lived up to its name. With breathtaking presentations, each dish deserved a pedestal and a prize spot in an exhibition of food.

After pausing to admire, we dug right in. The conversation was especially lively, ranging from the delicate process of making homemade rice wine to qualities of the best Cuban cigars to fuzzy logic. Punctuation marks throughout the evening: laughter from everyone at the table.

The Yong family joins members of the IUPUI delegation for an evening to thank the family for all that they have done and to congratulate the Yong children on their history as IUPUI Jaguars. Go Jags!

Monday evening found the IUPUI delegation to Malaysia at the beautiful Royale Chulan Hotel. A curving, wide marble staircase took us to the second floor where 25-30 alumni from IUPUI and IU Bloomington welcomed us to an incredible evening of memories, laughter and conversation. It was a little bit of the Hoosier state right here in Kuala Lumpur, and we were grateful to be embraced so warmly by the Malaysia Chapter of the IU Alumni Association.

We would like to extend our thanks to everyone who attended, but special thanks go to Roslan Shafei, president of the Malaysian Chapter of the IUAA, and to Mien Dee Yong, who did so much to make this evening a warm and inviting reminder of our alma mater.

Below are a few memories from the evening:

Mien Dee Yong and Roslan Shafei with Chancellor Paydar.

Roslan presents Chancellor Paydar with a gift on behalf of the Malaysian Chapter of the IUAA.

Guests enjoy chatting over dessert.

Dean Russomanno, Dr. Jafari and Chancellor Paydar pose with IUPUI Engineering and Technology alumni.

Monday, Jan. 16, 2016

Picture this: traffic at a standstill in one direction, and barely tapping the brakes going the other. This was the road to Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN) this morning, and the IUPUI delegation was traveling the right direction, barely needing the brakes on the way to UNITEN. When Chancellor Paydar first visited the campus in the mid 1990s, it had only one building. It appeared little changed on this visit. But the rest of the campus has unfolded like a beautiful flower. In fact, one colleague there mentioned that they had modeled the architecture on buildings at IUPUI

Dr. Kumaran Palanisamy, a former student of Chancellor Paydar, shares a laugh with the IUPUI delegation during the visit to UNITEN.

A surprise to some, this statement finds its roots in the partnership between UNITEN and IUPUI that dates back to UNITEN’s earliest days as a campus. IUPUI helped shape curriculum there, has hosted hundreds of UNITEN students over the years, and has advised on information technology infrastructure. In fact, Dr. Ali Jafari, who helped build the UNITEN’s first network infrastructure, said he knows where everything is hidden on their campus.

One of the highlights of the visit was an impromptu reunion between Chancellor Paydar and his former student Kumaran Palanisamy, who is now an associate professor and Director of the Institute of Sustainable Energy at UNITEN, similar to the Richard G. Lugar Center for Renewable Energy at IUPUI. The chancellor joked that he had brought some of Kumaran’s old tests to share and discuss.

In all seriousness, Dr. Palanisamy was very interested in the possibility of partnering with IUPUI on renewable energy research. In addition, graduate education, study abroad programs and something else very interesting were discussed as ways of extending and strengthening the partnership between our universities.

Izmir Radzi, an electrical power engineering major, sported IU Gear for Chancellor Paydar’s talk with students. We just need to get him some jag swag!

Just before lunch, Chancellor Paydar spoke to a lecture hall full of students about the importance of education. For their part, the students brought serious question to the discussion about transfer credit, this, that and the other. They also brought great enthusiasm for IUPUI and Indiana University.

This evening’s alumni event for both IUPUI and IU Bloomington promises to be a powerful combination of Jaguar and Hoosier spirit, both right at home here in Malaysia.

Members of the Yong family with the IUPUI delegation only moments after they exit from the 2+ mile tram ride up the mountain.

Post by Becky Wood, Assistant to the Chancellor for Communications:

Sunday, Jan. 15, 2017

After traveling for up to 33 hours and over 11,000 miles, the IUPUI delegation to Malaysia arrived in Kuala Lumpur to begin visits with Malaysian universities, IUPUI alumni and future Jaguars.

The goals:

• To strengthen existing partnerships and forge foundations for new ones
• To recognize the success of our outstanding IUPUI alumni in Malaysia

The Yong family prepared a remarkable meal for the IUPUI delegation at their home in the Genting Highlands.

Delegation members:

• Chancellor Nasser H. Paydar
• Dean David Russomanno, School of Engineering and Technology
• Assistant Vice Chancellor Gil Latz, Office of International Affairs
• Professor Ali Jafari, School of Engineering and Technology
• Tim Diemer, Director of International Services in the School of Engineering and Technology
• Becky Wood, Assistant to the Chancellor for Communications

The Yong family graciously hosted the delegation for afternoon brunch and an outing in the Genting Highlands. The Yong’s three children — Tzen Wae, Sien Wae and Mien Dee — all graduated from IUPUI. Tzen Wae and Sien Wae studied in the School of Engineering and Technology; Mien Dee studied finance in at Kelley Indy and went on for her master’s in management information systems at Kelley in Bloomington. Mien Dee shared her excitement about receiving an IU Tried and True mailing from the Alumni Association.

Mien Dee was so delighted with the IUPUI Tried and True stickers she received that she took a picture of them with her phone.

The day was filled with the incredible beauty of the Titiwangsa Mountains, including a tram ride into skies so clear that Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur about 32 miles to the southwest were visible.

Even with those wonders, nothing could surpass the hospitality of every member of the Yong family from Mr. and Mrs. Yong, who generously opened their lovely home to our group.

This evening the IUPUI delegation hosted a special dinner for Tan Sri Ahmed Tajuddin, Pro Vice Chancellor of Universiti Tenaga Nasional (UNITEN); Professor Datuk Dr. Shahrin Bin Sahib, Vice Chancellor and President of Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka and graduate of IUPUI; and Dato’ Shaari Md Nor, Director of the Tenaga Foundation, among other important guests.

Tomorrow, the IUPUI delegation will be visiting UNITEN and talking with Malaysian students there who will be coming to IUPUI to study engineering.

IUPUI delegation in Malaysia hosts dinner for special guests. Left to right are Ali Jafari; Dato’ Shaari Md Nor, Director of the Tenaga Foundation; Chancellor Nasser H. Paydar; Tan Sri Ahmed Tajuddin, Pro Vice Chancellor of Universiti Tenaga Nasional; Gil Latz; Professor Datuk Dr. Shahrin Bin Sahib, Vice Chancellor and President, Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka; and David Russomanno.

A study looking at deaths resulting from right-angle motor vehicle crashes shows the elderly are at an extreme survival disadvantage compared to their younger counterparts, said Timothy D. McFarlane, a visiting lecturer in epidemiology.

An earlier study of head-on collisions reached the same conclusion.

“Our findings suggest that, because of the growing elderly population, we will see an increase in the number of elderly deaths due to motor vehicle crashes,” McFarlane said.

According to McFarlane, the number of drivers who are 65 or older dying in motor vehicle crashes is expected to jump 44 percent between 2016 and 2030.

The jump reflects growing numbers of elderly people, not an increase in the rate at which elderly die in motor vehicle accidents.

Tim McFarlane

The reasons the elderly are at extreme risk compared to younger motorists are frailty and co-morbidity, McFarlane said: “If you end up in the hospital with a crush injury or traumatic brain injury and you also have diabetes and high blood pressure and are on blood thinners, you now have a long problem list.”

Although the number of motor vehicle crashes decreased dramatically during the 20th century as a result of technological innovations and other prevention measures, the number of crashes in recent years has remained about the same.

“There are 30,000 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and about three million injuries annually,” McFarlane said. “It is a pervasive public health problem.”

McFarlane says a new technological innovation could impact those numbers, particularly as they concern the elderly: autonomous vehicles.

McFarlane believes autonomous vehicles will do more to prevent elderly vehicle-crash fatalities than other innovations such as automatic braking and lane-departure and front-end-collision warnings.

“Those still rely on the driver to act,” he said. “They are not as good of an answer as are autonomous vehicles.”

“Human operators are responsible for an estimated 90 percent of all accidents,” McFarlane said. “So if you can remove the human operator, it’s logical to believe that you would be preventing a lot of the accidents.”

Jennifer Bute

Bute was one of about 40 researchers, patients and caregivers selected by the organization to serve for two years on its Outcomes Research Advisory Board.

She brought her expertise as an associate professor of communication studies to the post. She also brought the concerns of a mom of a 6-year-old boy who has a life-threatening allergy to peanuts and tree nuts.

She has the opportunity to work with other members of the advisory board to inform and help develop a patient-centered research agenda related to food allergy diagnosis, management strategies, therapeutic options and disparities in care among some minority populations.

There are 15 million Americans with food allergies, including those at risk for life-threatening anaphylaxis. This potentially deadly condition affects 1 in every 13 children in the United States.

Since being appointed to the board, Bute and fellow board members have been working to prioritize what they think are some of the most pressing research needs.

For Bute, two food allergy-related concerns head the list.

“The first is the diagnosis of a food allergy, which is confusing and frustrating,” she said. “The testing that currently exists for food allergies has a 50 to 60 percent false-positive rate, which means that people are often told they have food allergies they don’t have.”

When Bute’s son was first tested for food allergies, she and her husband were told that he was allergic to everything he had been tested for, including peanuts and tree nuts as well as milk, wheat, soy, corn and other foods.

“It was really only through my own research that I figured out it was not true,” Bute said. After the initial testing, the Butes found a food allergist who helped them understand what their son’s allergies really are.

The second frustration has to do with determining whether a particular product is safe to eat for a person with food allergies.

If a product contains one of the top eight allergens as an ingredient, regulations require that product’s label to identify that allergen, Bute said. But labeling regulations become confusing when it comes to cross-contamination.

“Say I want to buy a loaf of bread for my son, and that bread was processed in a manufacturing facility that also processes cookies that contain peanuts,” she said. “It’s possible that peanut residue could get into the bread even if the bread doesn’t have peanuts as an actual ingredient.

“But the manufacturer is not required to label for cross-contamination. That is voluntary. Some choose to label for cross-contamination; some don’t. And even when they do, the wording on the labeling is not regulated. A label may say ‘made in a facility with peanuts’ or ‘may contain peanuts’ or ‘processed on equipment that uses peanuts,’ but there is no standard definition for what each of the labels means.”

As she learns more about the state of food-allergy research, Bute says, she has become cautiously optimistic about the potential impact of research on food allergies.

She cited development of a patch that is worn on the skin that can, over time, help prevent a life-threatening reaction to an accidental exposure to peanuts.

“It doesn’t mean a person with an allergy to peanuts can eat peanuts or peanut butter, but it would mean if you accidentally took a bite of a cookie with a peanut in it, your reaction would not be life-threatening,” she said. “I think that’s promising.”

At the same time, she has become a little less hopeful about an improved diagnosis process after learning about the complexity of the human immune system. “I am still uncertain about how we can diagnose food allergies more accurately,” she said.

Before joining the advisory board, Bute said, she was definitely more pessimistic, especially about potential treatments.

“I now know more about what’s going on behind the scenes and have had the opportunity to meet some of the research scientists funded by FARE,” she explained. “I see how passionate those people are about addressing this issue, so it definitely gives me more hope. There are really smart, thoughtful people who are working on this problem, so I think there’s good reason to be more optimistic.”

The Indiana Bicentennial Torch traveled more than 3,000 miles as it completed a five-week journey across Indiana, leaving thousands of Hoosiers inspired by one of the major commemorative events of the state’s 2016 bicentennial celebration.

And for one week, Sari Swinehart, a School of Physical Education, Tourism and Event Management student at IUPUI, got to play a unique role in that inspirational odyssey.

Swinehart was one of six tourism and event management students who assisted with Torch Relay logistics. The assignment stemmed from a discussion between the school and the state’s tourism office about partnering for the bicentennial event. Five undergraduate students each spent a week traveling with the torch, while one graduate student spent all five weeks assisting with the Torch Relay logistics.

Swinehart joined the Torch Relay in Delaware County Sept. 27. She slid into the driver’s seat of the Torch Relay media car that transported Ball State University student videographers and photographers documenting the torch’s journey. Until she returned to Indianapolis Oct. 2, she would spend up to 12 hours a day behind the wheel, driving an average of 97 miles a day.

Sari Swinehart

Positioned immediately behind the state police cruiser that led the caravan, Swinehart was tasked with regulating the speed of the caravan to match that of the person or vehicle carrying the torch.

She would radio the state trooper to slow down or speed up to keep pace with the torchbearer located directly behind her vehicle. The torch was carried various ways, sometimes by individuals walking or running and other times in antique automobiles or on horseback, by horse and buggy or on a tractor — or even in a boat.

The Torch Relay was designed to allow Hoosiers to symbolically pass the torch, “connecting generations to IGNITE our future.”

Each day began with an opening ceremony, preceded by an early-morning informational meeting reviewing the day’s events. The day drew to a close in similar fashion, with an ending ceremony for the torch’s travels.

During the week Swinehart was with the torch, she traveled to 15 counties and ended her stint in Steuben County.

And something else occurred every day. Crowds of people came out to see the torch. “It was really cool to see a lot of people who were into it,” Swinehart said. “They though it was a great thing to come and see.”

The first night on the road ended in Jay County at a big festival featuring a hog roast.

“There were a ton of people at the festival,” Swinehart said. “That was probably the best night for me. It was awesome to see all those folks who wanted to be part of the bicentennial experience.

A scene from the Indiana Bicentennial Torch Relay.

“I loved it. I saw a lot of open land, a lot of cornfields. It was very beautiful, and I saw a lot of pretty places that I didn’t know existed. It made me appreciate the state a lot more, just all the beautiful land and the people too. Everyone in these counties was so nice and so sweet. They provided great hospitality. It was a big eye-opener, that’s for sure. I enjoyed it a lot.”

The experience also confirmed her career choice: event planning.

“I am thankful I was asked to do this,” Swinehart said. “It was good to see event planning from the inside, seeing the setting up and tearing down. It showed how much hard work and dedication goes into this.”

“I needed something like this. It showed me this is what I want to do and continue to do and I will work my way there,” she said.

Count Amanda Friesen, an assistant professor of political science in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, among those who wondered why working-class voters of modest means support billionaire Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.

After all, these supporters generally fared the worst in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. So what was the attraction to a man of wealth, privilege and a Wharton degree?

Friesen, in a recent interview and a blog post, turned to her research to explain why.

Her theory is: It’s not Trump’s wealth so much as the way he uses it.

Friesen and a colleague, Matthew Hibbing, recently published an article that explores the relationship between personal money attitudes and government spending.

Amanda Friesen

“You hear all the time the idea that government should be run like a business,” she said. “If I can balance my household budget, why can’t the government? I discovered people don’t seem to connect how they think about money with their belief about how government should think about money. In other words, there are frugal liberals and frugal conservatives.”

She also looked at questions related to how people feel about material things. Participants indicated the extent to which they agreed with statements such as “Buying things gives me a lot of pleasure” and answered whether they put more emphasis on material things “than most people I know.”

“Our research found if a person looks at material items — be they cars, houses, clothes, jewelry — as central to their sense of self, they are less in favor of distributing wealth through political policies favored by liberals,” Friesen said. “That suggests their attitude is “Because things are central to who I am, I don’t want to give up any more money in taxes, because I want to buy things.”

It’s been argued that lower-socioeconomic voters support policies, parties and candidates that benefit the wealthy because of a belief in the American dream and the hope that somehow they might make it too, she said.

Friesen suggested that theory could be taken one step further, wondering if Trump supporters, at a certain economic level and from a certain cultural background, would make exactly his choices, if they had the money.

“They do not aspire to hobnobbing over foie gras and a ’78 Margaux before the Met Gala; they want the penthouse suite at the MGM Grand.”

In other words, it’s not Trump’s wealth so much as the way he spends it, Friesen said. Trump largely shares his supporters’ tastes; the difference is that he has the money to act on those mutual desires.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis’ sustainability director and Butler University’s sustainability coordinator will stand shoulder-to-shoulder Oct. 10 at a conference in Baltimore, where they will make a high-stakes three-minute pitch for a food-composting proposal they hope will bring the two campuses $50,000.

The proposal would create a collaborative large-scale composting collection program between the two Indianapolis universities as a means to catalyze a citywide composting program.

The IUPUI-and-Butler proposal is one of 226 that were submitted to Kimberly-Clark Professional’s “Sustainable Campus Competition LIVE” grant competition for colleges and universities. The joint proposal was selected as one of three finalists for the $50,000 grant the company will award to the winner.

Oberlin College and the University of Washington are the other two finalists in the competition.

The winning proposal will be announced live at the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education conference. The announcement by a panel of judges will come after the three finalists present their ideas to 3,000 people in attendance at the conference

Proposals had to fit into at least one of five categories: energy reduction, waste reduction, food-waste reduction, water usage and climate change. The IUPUI-and-Butler proposal fits three categories: waste reduction, food-waste reduction and climate change.

When the competition was announced in July, AASHE Executive Director Meghan Fay Zahniser said: “We are proud to support this competition and the opportunity it provides higher education institutions that are eager to advance sustainability goals. A prize of $50,000 has the potential to make a long-standing impact toward the advancement of sustainability for one lucky college or university.”

Jessica Davis, director of the IUPUI Office of Sustainability, and McKenzie Beverage, sustainability coordinator with Butler University, couldn’t agree more.

Beverage and Davis not only view the $50,000 award as the means that will enable the two campuses to grow their food composting programs, but it will allow businesses and other organizations in Indianapolis to do the same.

The two sustainability experts not only view the $50,000 award as the means that will enable the two campuses to grow their food-composting programs, but as a way to allow businesses and other organizations in Indianapolis to do the same.

The uniqueness of their proposal lies in its collaborative nature and its ability to influence local and statewide policy. “We know of no other universities that have partnered to develop a compost hauling route to service both campus and community by creating demand for a service that does not yet exist,” Davis and Beverage said.

Butler piloted a composting program in 2015, composting 800 pounds of pre-consumer food waste weekly. IUPUI launched a dining-hall composting program this semester.

Both programs collect back-of-the-house food waste that comes from preparing food. And both programs are stuck, in terms of not being able to collect greater amounts of food waste or expand composting efforts to include leftover food from campus events or in dining halls.

The problem: There is no large-scale commercial compost hauling service in Indianapolis that could increase the amount of food waste collected at the campuses beyond the 800 pounds at week and do so at an affordable price. No business exists in that market, Davis said.

“Other organizations are stuck at the minimum level as well, and the rest of the food waste is going into trash,” Davis said. “It’s a problem for us and a problem for Indianapolis.”

That problem was recognized by the Indiana Food Scrap Initiative, formed in 2015 to address barriers to food-waste rescue and reuse in Indianapolis. The organization, which includes Butler University, IUPUI, industry stakeholders, government representatives and other organizations, identified the creation of shared composting collection routes as a high-priority opportunity.

“When the Butler and IUPUI sustainability offices saw this grant, we saw a great opportunity to solve a problem that not only IUPUI has, and Butler University has, but that is a citywide problem,” Davis said. “We decided to co-apply for the grant and use the funds to essentially subsidize the cost of a commercial hauling route until we can get enough partners on board to drive the costs down to the point where it is reasonable.”

“Hopefully, we will be coming back with a $50,000 check,” Davis said. “That’s when the real work begins.”

Carmen Luca Sugawara knew that she and her students would have a strong program for their stay in Zagreb, the first leg of their 18-day study-abroad course in Croatia. But what she did not know was the impact that adding the U.S. Embassy to her program would make to her students’ learning outcomes.

For the last five years, Luca Sugawara, an associate professor of social work at the Indiana University School of Social Work at IUPUI, has taken students to Croatia for her international service-learning course, Social Work Practice in Post-War Communities.

During previous learning-abroad experiences, she had hoped the students would have an opportunity to meet with the U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, but scheduling challenges had made it impossible. This year, however, the students managed to secure a visit at the embassy before traveling to Osijek, Croatia.

Luca Sugawara developed the course as a learning platform to give students a sense of what it’s like to work within a country that experienced an ethnic war and to serve a global community. While the students may never work abroad, being away from one’s cultural support, in a post-war environment, enables students to learn about themselves and the world in a way that no classroom environment can duplicate. She believed the embassy could offer an invaluable perspective to the students’ understanding of working abroad.

Although Luca Sugawara was excited about this new addition to the Croatia Study Abroad program, what she expected was a quick meet-and-greet and a tour of the embassy. Her hope was at best to have a chance to talk with the Chief of Mission while they were in the building.

“To my surprise, the visit was put together very thoroughly to welcome our students as well as to help us learn the type of work the U.S. Embassy does abroad, and more specifically to learn about its efforts to foster democracy in this country and the region,” Luca Sugawara said.

What’s more, they met with the ambassador, Juliet Vall Noyes. The meeting, which Luca Sugawara thought might be a five-minute greeting, turned into a 30-minute private conversation between Ambassador Noyes and the students.

The ambassador wanted to get to know the class and to hear their stories and learn why they were in Croatia. The students had an opportunity to ask her any question they wanted, from thoughts about women in leadership to her career path and other foreign-service inquiries.

Students in Social Work study-abroad program visit U.S. Embassy in Croatia

She listened to them, engaged them in conversations about local and global issues, and above all, challenged them to think about building their own dreams — dreams they might never have thought were attainable before they met with Ambassador Vall Noyes.

“It was truly an extraordinary, empowering experience for all of us,” Luca Sugawara said.

And that wasn’t the end of it. The students got to meet with key officers of the embassy and learn about their job responsibilities and careers in foreign service. For example, they met with the public affairs officer, who talked about his work, his concerns and focus, and his career.

“I think what was beautiful was that this individual gave our students an opportunity to hear about his career path and the choices he made to serve the U.S. abroad. His talk was very uplifting to our students,” Luca Sugawara said. “You could see the flickering light in our students’ eyes as they were beginning to shape new dreams.”

They also met with the head of the Marine Security Team at the embassy, who discussed his challenges in protecting and providing security for an embassy. Luca Sugawara said the security officer explained that his career in the foreign service was somewhat unexpected. “Between laughter and tears, we heard his story — a story of a challenging youth who found a path and a passion to serve his country. It was beyond inspiring,” she said.

When the students prepared to leave, the ambassador asked how many of them would be interested in taking the Foreign Service exam. More than half of them put up their hand.

“It (the visit) truly shaped our students’ dreams for a path they never thought of embarking on professionally,” Luca Sugawara said.

This embassy visit is a perfect example of the power of taking students far from their comfort zone, exposing them to many ways of learning and experiencing the world, Luca Sugawara said. “The meeting with the Embassy humbled us, empowered us to serve and work abroad, but above all reminded our students they are the makers of their own dreams.”

Over the last decade, the program has placed more than 500 sophomores and juniors in internships focused on health and life science fields, providing them with a critical asset when they seek employment upon graduation: experience.

Last year, 197 students applied to the program, which has funding to place 75 students into internships that begin in August and continue through the academic year. There are more than 60 internship sites available to the students.

While the program focuses on life and health sciences, students from 30 different majors have applied to the program. “We do have students who have a focus on writing or teaching. We take their majors and apply them to health and life science fields,” said Brandi Gilbert, director of the internship program.

The program was created as a retention and graduation initiative, Gilbert said.

Life-Health Sciences Internship Program

“IUPUI had a lot of great retention initiatives for first-year students, and there were senior-level initiatives and experiences like capstone projects to get students through their last year, but there was a real gap for second- and third-year students,” Gilbert said. “We were created to help keep students in school during their second and third years so they could get to senior-level experiences.”

In 2006, Simon Rhodes, who was then a faculty member in the School of Medicine, and Doug Lees, a faculty member in the School of Science, sought funding and support for a retention and graduation initiative to bridge that gap. They conceived of an internship program for second- and third-year students that would leverage IUPUI’s life and health science focus, providing opportunities for students to work with faculty and staff in the campus’s graduate and professional programs.

Since then, the Life-Health Sciences Internship Program has demonstrated amazing success in retaining students.

Nearly 97 percent of the 376 students who participated as interns from the fall of 2007 through the fall of 2014 remained in school one year after their internship. That compares to a 58.8 percent retention rate for a group of 470 students who did not participate as interns.

The success of the program doesn’t stop with retention.

“These internships serve to develop students as emerging professionals and help them gain entrance to graduate and professional programs or gain employment after graduation,” Gilbert said.

Employers are looking for experience from job applicants, Gilbert explained: “It’s not enough to just have a diploma. We know from surveys that employers really are looking for proven experience.”

“A key to our program is helping students see the connection between the hands-on work and what they’re learning in the classroom, and vice versa,” Gilbert said.

Caylin Billingsley, a biology major, was drawn to the program because it offered an internship that ties closely to her educational goals. “I knew this would help me with my dream of getting into medical school one day,” she said.

“I’m more of a hands-on learner to begin with,” said Billingsley, who will work in a lab conducting osteoporosis-related research. “There’s only so much you can learn from a book. By the end of my internship, I hope to acquire different skills and knowledge as I grow and learn each day.”

Reflecting on the internship he had last year, engineering major Kade Diallo said she was fortunate to have been matched with his mentor, Dr. Lyne Racette, in the IU School of Medicine’s Department of Ophthalmology.

“I honestly believe that it was the perfect match because I didn’t feel as if I was simply an intern but rather a part of the lab and its members,” Diallo said. “Not only that, but I also had the opportunity to earn a travel grant and fly to Seattle to present my research to the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology.”

Ruth Rodefeld turned around in her chair under the white tent on the lawn behind Ball Hall to watch students strolling through Ball Nurses Sunken Garden, just like she had done more than 50 years ago.

There were the brick walks, grassy areas and sparkling water spraying from a fountain. And there, in the middle of the fountain, was the bronze sculpture, “Eve.” On this day, Rodefeld and Eve were back in their rightful places.

Rodefeld, along with other IU School of Nursing alumni, faculty and staff as well as IU administrators including President Michael McRobbie, gathered on June 21 to rededicate Ball Nurses Sunken Garden, conceived in 1929 as a therapeutic green space with a convalescent park at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

The garden was designed by Olmsted Brothers, the firm founded by the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted. It was named in recognition of a $500,000 gift from brothers George and Frank Ball of Muncie for the construction of a home for the nurses of Riley Hospital.

The sculpture, “Eve,” was created in 1931 and nicknamed “Flo” by nursing students in honor of Florence Nightingale. It held a special place in their hearts as the garden became a setting for hijinks and healing, a place for nursing students to celebrate friendships and graduations.

The garden, however, faded over the years. Rodefeld and others launched a campaign to restore the campus treasure.

Rodefeld vividly recalls the sculpture from her student days.

Ruth Rodefeld, third from left in the front row, with other nursing alumni.

“I passed her every day going to the Student Union Building, which at that time was brand-new, and that’s where our meals were served,” she said. “It had a snack bar and a swimming pool. And sometimes, when we got off of our shift late, we would have to go to the snack bar to get a milkshake and a hamburger, which was kind of fun to do.”

“I do remember passing Flo daily as we went for meals, and we had some shenanigans around her. But we had to be very careful of what we did to let off steam,” she continued.

“I didn’t really have time to just sit in the garden, but every day I passed Flo, and it was like a message to me,” mused Rodefeld. “I think nurses in general have that same kind of beauty inside of them, to be able to take care of people. So there was a constant message when I went by, a feminine message. At that time, there were no males in our nursing class. It was all female. And we all sort of clung to each other and became friends. And we weathered the storms, with Flo’s help.”

Restored Ball Nurses Sunken Garden at IUPUI.

When Rodefeld graduated from Richmond Senior High School in the mid-1950s, she knew exactly what she wanted to do.

“I wanted to go to the best school in nursing in the state, and I decided that was Indiana University. It was a wise decision. I got accepted and came to an orientation in Ball Hall (where nursing students lived). I was probably in the next-to-last class of three-year students. As a physician explained it to me, we were special to them because we ran the hospital floors. Yes, we had books, and, yes, we had classes, but a lot of the three-year students were in the hospitals working daily and learning procedures.”

“When I first came to the school, I was pretty much in awe of everything, but as I look back, I remember the beauty of the Ball Hall living room and the garden behind the hall, with Flo, the flowing fountain around her and the landscaping. I knew it was a very special place. Now, I think about her and that she was the epitome of beauty and grace. And I think with that flowing water around her, it’s a great spot for people to go and take a few minutes off of their busy schedules. Today, in fact, I noticed a lot of people around the fountain.”

The Indiana University Natatorium will make sustainability history June 18 when it begins operating as a zero-waste athletic facility for the 2016 Olympic Diving Trials.

It  will be the first athletic facility in Indiana to achieve zero-waste goals and the first host of an Olympic event to have a zero-waste designation.

Being a zero-waste venue means that by weight, 90 percent of all waste must be recycled or composted. Only 10 percent may be disposed of as trash. In a typical trash can , about 75 percent of what has been thrown away is recyclable, while another 20 to 25 percent is compostable.

A number of athletic facilities, particularly at the collegiate level, have tried to reach zero waste, but many have fallen short. But staff at the IU Natatorium and the Office of Sustainability at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis are confident the initiative will succeed.

That confidence springs, in part, from the work done by a Herron School of Art and Design visual communication design class.

Led by assistant professor Pamela Napier, the students were asked, among other things, to design signage that would guide athletes, fans and others to use not only trash and recycle bins, but a third kind of bin that was added for the zero-waste initiative: compost bins.

The project was a natural fit for Napier’s class, which emphasizes community-engaged service learning for students.

“I am always looking for community partners, people who have a problem they need help with, and that gives my students real-world experience,” Napier said.

The students’ efforts began with intense research, including field research in which one student team went to the Indianapolis International Airport to watch people as they used trash and recycling stations to understand their habits and behaviors, Napier said.

“One of the things we’re really trying to instill in the students in our program is using people-centered design, which focuses on the active inclusion of users and stakeholders throughout the design process,” she said. “Rather than the students making assumptions, like “we need to have all visuals on the signage,” they engaged in a lot of generative and evaluative feedback to make sure what they were creating was appropriate.”

“One of the interesting things the students found was that there is a split second to capture people’s attention when they are standing at a trash or recycle station and thinking ‘what do I do with this?'” Napier said.

“The students’ challenge for the signage was to determine the best use of text versus visuals, whether the visual should be an image or an icon, and so on. I think they overcame that challenge and increased their understanding of what would be the best approach to increase people’s ability to make an appropriate decision,” Napier said.

The students engaged in extensive testing, such as trying variations of size and placement of signage and considering the general eye height of people as they approach the bins.

Menu developed for the zero waste initiative.

Students in Napier’s class were divided into five teams, three of which worked on the zero-waste initiative. One focused on signage, another on developing ways to communicate the initiative through menus at the IU Natatorium, and the third on creating an educational display about the natatorium and its recently completed $20 million renovation.

“The three teams worked closely to make sure that every element and every piece of language and information they used was consistent and cohesive,” Napier said.

When people look at a menu, for example, they will see an icon of a hamburger on the menu, and that icon is the color of the compost bin, Napier said. The wrapping the hamburger comes in will be the color of the recycle bin.

“The color correlations help people make an immediate connection when they order their food, and they receive additional instructions when they get to the bins,” she explained.

It’s a very strategic process the students go through, Napier said, to ensure they are as clear as possible in their visual communication and are considering people’s natural behaviors and habits.

Several artists, including Herron School of Art and Design faculty member Danielle Riede, have their work on display at an exhibit in Indianapolis that takes as its theme the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500.

The name of the show, “Asphaltum,” makes the connection between these two very different worlds: It is named for a component used both in pavement and in artists’ materials. In this case, Asphaltum is bringing together artists with work that expresses ideas related to auto racing and the Indianapolis 500.

One of the pieces you can see at the “Asphaltum” show.

The exhibit is at the Schwitzer Gallery on the second floor of the Circle City Industrial Complex, at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and 10th Street. The facility was constructed in the 1920s by Louis Schwitzer, winner of the first automobile race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the engineer behind the famous “Marmon Wasp” engine that propelled Ray Harroun to victory in the first Indy 500.

“Last year, I went to the Indy 500 for the first time and experienced the race,” said Riede, a painter/installation artist and an associate professor at Herron. “I was really blown away by the sheer speed of it, so much so that I almost felt like I was in a video game. It was just really shocking to me.”

“When I went, I really couldn’t believe it. I think maybe if you have grown up going to the race, maybe it wouldn’t feel so impactful, although I can’t presume to know how other people might feel about the race,” Riede said. “But it’s nearly impossible when you’re up so close to focus on the cars zooming by.”

The pieces Riede is showing are from her “Wingspan” series. Like the auto race, the pieces are about movement, but movement on a human scale. And in contrast to the video-game-like speeds of the race cars, the paintings are made quite slowly, she said.

Describing the paintings, Riede said the images have a lot to do with the scale of her own body to the frame of the canvas. “And the way I composed them is by coming up with a movement, so I don’t have a preconceived image,” she said.

The movements were inspired by a dancer Riede worked with last fall.

Another piece on display at the “Asphaltum” show.

“I begin with an intuitive movement off of the canvas and then record that same movement in paint. This gesture morphs as I move across the surface of the painting and an image unfolds.”

“In some way, my paintings look a little like the curve of a racetrack, but that’s not what I had in mind when I was making them,” she said. “So, to me, it’s more about the contrast of human scale or even the feasibility that someone could fly around the track so quickly in these amazing machines versus what your hands could do with an older tool, like a paintbrush.”

“I guess I sort of see my own body as a tool as well, for making these works,” she said. “What we can invent — these technological devices to propel us at different velocities versus what we can do on our own — is a really interesting point for me.”

Asphaltum will run through May 31.

Many of Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, such as “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” “I’ve Been to the Mountain Top” and the famous “I Have a Dream,” are defining moments in American history.

But in a twist of fate, the brilliant orator never delivered one speech he wrote specifically to mark a special night in history.

Ken Burns quotes the speech’s manuscript in the preview of his upcoming PBS documentary on Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play major-league baseball.

Next month, the baseball world will pay tribute to Robinson, observing April 15 as the annual Jackie Robinson Day. It was April 15, 1947, when Robinson made his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, now the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Jackie Robinson

PBS is scheduled to air Burns’ four-hour series “Jackie Robinson” April 11 and 12. In a YouTube video preview, Burns calls Robinson “the original civil rights pioneer” and then quotes King: “Jackie Robinson was a sit-inner before sit-ins, a freedom rider before freedom rides.”

King’s words are from a speech the civil rights activist was to give as the guest speaker at a dinner honoring Robinson on his induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Documents from the dinner are archived in the Jackie Robinson Papers at the Library of Congress.

It was July 20, 1962, and Robinson was being feted at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The guest list included 900 people; the menu featured prime rib, pont neuf potatoes, French string beans saute, frozen soufflé le Alaska, brandied cherries Jubilee flambe and petits fours.

The committee orchestrating the event was a who’s who — Harry Belafonte, Ralph Bunche, Howard Cosell, James Farmer, Joe Lewis, Adam Clayton Powell, A. Philip Randolph, Ed Sullivan, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young, to name a few.

A telegram expressed King’s apology for his absence: “An important turn of events in Albany, Ga. made it imperative for me to return here immediately.”

This Jackie Robinson comic book is up for auction on March 31, 2016, by Swann Auction Galleries. The lot page is available for viewing on the Swann website. Photo courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries.

King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council was part of an alliance calling for the end of all forms of segregation and discrimination in Albany. King would be arrested and jailed twice during protest activities in what became known as the Albany Movement.

Robinson visited Albany, Ga., in August 1962 and helped raise $50,000 to rebuild two churches that had been torched because members were involved in registering black residents to vote.

Robinson was no stranger to the public struggle for equality. He was court-martialed in 1944 for not going to the back of the bus on a military post — a decade before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a public bus.

IUPUI journalism professor Chris Lamb is the author of the 2004 book “Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training.”

Lamb wrote recently of Robinson’s experiences with racism as a professional athlete.

“Much has been written about Robinson’s first game in the major leagues for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947,” Lamb said. “Far less is known about the spring of 1946, when the ballplayer was competing for a spot on the Dodgers’ top farm club (the triple-A Montreal Royals.) Rarely has an athlete found himself under more pressure in such hostile conditions as Robinson did in Florida.”

Chris Lamb

Robinson’s first day in practice with the Royals was in Sanford, Fla., on March 17, 1946. Jack Roosevelt “Jackie” Robinson started that day at first base, ending 80 years of segregated baseball.

On the second day of practice, the Royals would flee the city when Sanford became literally a “sundown town” — at least for Robinson and pitcher John Wright, the only other African-American Royals player — when residents threatened mob violence if Robinson and Wright were not “out of town by nightfall.”

The team continued spring training in Daytona Beach, where they practiced at Kelly Field, located in the black section of town.

Robinson’s wife, Rachel, was in Florida with Jackie during that eventful training camp.

Rachel Robinson has carried on the fight for equal opportunity, including founding the Jackie Robinson Foundation, which addresses the achievement gap in higher education by providing multiyear scholarship awards and comprehensive mentoring services to minority students. Students in the program have a 98 percent college graduate rate. In addition, 30,000 people around the world annually benefit from the community service required of JRF Scholars.

Rachael Robinson and her daughter, Sharon, traveled to Cuba as guests of President Obama during his historic visit to that country a few days ago. The Robinsons were in the stands as the Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national team played ball.

That game took place in the same Estadio Latinoamericano (then called El Gran Stadium) where, 69 years ago, Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers held their 1947 spring training camp.

Soil has always been a presence in the life of Pierre-Andre Jacinthe, who recently took over the reins of the Center on Earth and Environmental Science at IUPUI.

It was the agricultural land around Arcahaie, the village in Haiti where he grew up, that gave the community and its residents a special identity. About 60 percent of the cropland surrounding the village was devoted to what the growers claimed were the tastiest plantains in Haiti.

Plantains and Arcahaie had been closely linked since the time of French colonization, said Jacinthe, an associate professor in the Department of Earth Sciences in the School of Science.

And with that came a reputation of sorts, he says: “If you go anywhere in Haiti and say you are from Arcahaie, they will say, ‘that’s a plantain guy.'”

Pierre-Andre Jacinthe

After finishing high school, Jacinthe knew he would go to university. But which school? He applied for admission to the schools of engineering and agronomy.

Jacinthe tried engineering for two months. When his application to the School of Agronomy was accepted, he was confronted with a choice. He turned to his mom for advice and was told to do what he believed was best for him.

Jacinthe decided to try agronomy. After the first week, he had his doubts but told himself, “I may like this school. Let me try again for another week. ” Four years later, he graduated among the top students of his class.

Soil has been at the center of his academic life ever since.

He attended graduate school in the U.S., earning a master’s at Ball State University in natural resources with a focus on soil chemistry and then a Ph.D. in agronomy with a focus on soil biochemistry at The Ohio State University.

“Even from my second year in college, I knew that my specialty would be soil,” Jacinthe said.

And it’s that specialty that Jacinthe believes serves him well in his role as director of the Center on Earth and Environmental Science.

“If you look at it, you realize the soil is connected to everything. It connects with the air we breathe in a number of ways, and most visibly it connects with the water we all drink every day,” Jacinthe said. “I could not have studied anything more appropriate to prepare for my work at CEES.”

Established by the Department of Earth Sciences in 1997, the urban environmental center has an applied environmental research emphasis that is important in bringing solutions to critical problems and gives CEES its uniqueness.

“I think our research focus on water quality in Central Indiana is well-placed because it is such an important issue,” Jacinthe said. “Most of our drinking water comes from surface sources in an area that is in transition between urban and agricultural areas. Most of things we are doing address that need.”

Jacinthe wants the center to build on its work and be recognized as the place for information on water quality in Central Indiana. “We’d like to be part of the conversation whenever anyone focuses on water quality.”

“Another part of the center that is essential — really important — is to do research, to see that research published and be available to the larger scientific community, and, most directly, to have research that has an impact in Indiana,” he said.

Education is also a key component of the center, including programs for elementary, middle and high school students.

One intriguing project is a collaboration between School of Science and School of Education students at IUPUI, Jacinthe said.

Scientists are often criticized for being poor communicators, while educators are often challenged by a lack of specific science knowledge. In the collaboration between the two schools, education students are helping the future scientists become better communicators, while the future scientists are helping education students deepen their knowledge of science.

Like with crops planted in the soil, “we have this cross-fertilization between science students and education students that hopefully will pay dividends in the future,” Jacinthe said.

Traveling to California to appear onstage with Lady Gaga during her performance at the 2016 Oscars isn’t a bad way for a college senior to spend a weekend.

And when you’re told not to worry about what to wear since the Academy would take care of your wardrobe, well, that’s enough to give any girl visions of Dior, Gucci or Stella McCartney.

But any dreams IUPUI student Kiratpreet Sandhu might have had of wearing a heavily embellished gown by Armani or a diamond necklace by Harry Winston gave way to the reality of wearing an orange top, jeans and a denim jacket — typical campus dress.

The 2016 Oscars

They wanted her group to dress like ordinary college students, Sandhu learned. Her bling for the evening were the words “Not Your Fault,” written on her right arm with a black Sharpie.

But how did Sandhu, a 21-year-old majoring in philanthropic studies and women’s/gender studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, come to share the stage with Gaga during the star’s powerful performance of “Til it Happens to You”?

If you haven’t heard, Sandhu was among the 50 survivors of sexual abuse who took to the stage during the last verse of the song, which was nominated for Best Original Song.

The piece was written by Gaga and Diane Warren for “Hunting Ground,” a CNN documentary about campus sexual assault and how universities across the United States handle it.

Lady Gaga and IUPUI senior and student-activist Kiratpreet Sandhu at 2016 Oscars.

Sandhu has served on the National Student Advisory Committee for the It’s On Us campaign since last fall. “It’s a campaign that aims to fundamentally shift the way college campuses think about campus sexual assault,” Sandhu said. “It’s on all of us to end campus sexual assault.”

After joining the national committee, Sandhu joined the student government at IUPUI to bring the initiative to the campus and to the Indianapolis community.

When It’s on Us called three days before the Oscars looking for survivors, Sandhu said “yes” to the invite.

While most on the stage that night were survivors of campus sexual assault, “I personally am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse,” Sandhu said. “The root causes of both things are very similar. The side effects of what we experience in the aftermath are very similar.”

“Gaga wanted all of us on that stage to be survivors to make a visual statement, to show the world that it’s way past time to take action on this issue.

Kirat’s arm carries empowering message at the Oscars.

“Nobody on that stage was just a survivor. They were all outspoken activists: survivors who had shared their stories, who had worked hard to make sure legislative changes were being pushed, that administrative changes were being pushed on their campuses.

“To me, it was such an inspiring group,” Sandhu said. “It was a moment of validation for all the times I had to fight to share my story and to face that backlash. It was so empowering.”

Sandhu was sexually abused  from age 5 to 7 by two cousins.

“They were only a few years older than me, but old enough to know better,” she said.

She was 14 or 15 before she could share it with her parents. Telling more and more people has been very difficult, even though no has ever thought she was lying.

“People know this goes on, but people are so used to sweeping it under the rug,” she said. “It was uncomfortable for them that I was bringing it up so boldly. That what I got ostracized for.”

Some family members still disapprove of her boldness.

“It’s been hard. Of course I wish everybody would have been open and supportive from the very beginning, and not just after I was on the Oscar stage, but unfortunately that is not how it happened,” Sandhu said.

Part of the struggle has been deciding to whom, when and how much to share, without making listeners uncomfortable.

“[But] in the last year or so, I have come to terms with the fact that if it makes people uncomfortable, I am doing it right,” Sandhu said. “Because even though it makes people uncomfortable, people need to talk about it. That’s the only we are going to change the culture, that we are going to change the root causes of why sexual assault and sexual abuse are so prevalent.

Kiratpreet Sandhu, left, and McKinney School of Law professor Jennifer Drobac on panel at IUPUI screening of “The Hunting Ground.”

Sandhu shared her experiences during a panel discussion held at IUPUI in November following a viewing of “The Hunting Ground” at McKinney School of Law. Afterward, parents asked how they should approach the topic with their children.

What is Sandhu’s call to action for parents?

“Be proactive, not reactive,” the survivor-activist said. “Most of all, start early. Teach children what consent looks like from a very, very young age. That’s when ‘toxic masculinity’ and other dangerous ideas start to develop.”

As the chief executive officer of Fifth Third Bancorp, Kabat did just that. His guiding hand and belief in his employees helped the corporation survive the darkest days of the Great Recession beginning in December 2007.

Kabat realized that a key to Fifth Third’s survival was keeping loyal staff on board. Despite concerns from board members and investors about the costs, he insisted on support for employee training programs, believing that it would not only help the company retain its best employees but improve operations as well. His plan worked.

Kevin Kabat

“My psychology training helped me remember the importance and the value of people,” Kabat said. “It’s the people that differentiate you from your competition.”

Graduates from the I/O psychology program take positions in organizations where they improve human resources practices and systems and build strong talent-management and professional-development programs.

As he prepares to step down as vice chairman and CEO of Cincinnati-based Fifth Third, Kabat is mindful of the difference the I/O master’s program made in his life. To show his gratitude, Kabat has established a fellowship at the School of Science that he hopes will inspire and positively influence the lives of future I/O graduate students.

“The relationships I had with the psychology faculty were pivotal,” Kabat said. “Their emphasis on quality and their confidence in me as a student gave me the analytical thinking, problem-solving, and innovative leadership tools that I applied to great use throughout my entire career.”

The Kabat Fellowship in Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Leadership will be awarded annually to a graduate student accepted into the I/O program and will fully fund the individual’s studies. The endowment supporting the fellowship will provide the student with a stipend as well as coverage of health care costs and university fees. Investments from the School of Science will cover the student’s full tuition.

According to Simon Rhodes, dean of the School of Science, the fellowship will also enhance the students’ profiles as they seek full-time employment or other graduate degrees as well as significantly enhance the I/O program’s ability to recruit outstanding students and further strengthen its offerings

Kabat entered the I/O program after graduating from Johns Hopkins University with a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science. At IUPUI, an employee-turnover project introduced him to the banking industry, and after graduation Kabat landed a job at Merchants National Bank in Indianapolis. He joined Old Kent Bank in 1982 and served in a variety of executive leadership roles, culminating with his appointment as vice chairman and president. When Old Kent was acquired by Fifth Third Bancorp in 2001, he continued in senior management positions and in 2007 was named chief executive officer

Charles Chu, a Yale University graduate, is the first recipient of the Kabat Fellowship. He plans to pursue a career in academic research with a specific focus on diversity initiatives and intergroup relations within organizations

Kabat said, “Knowing how much the financial support from scholarships meant to me and my family when I was a graduate student at IUPUI, I felt like the opportunity to create this fellowship was the most appropriate way for me to have an impact on student success.”

Another Black History Month has ended, and it’s time for me to take inventory of speeches attended, movies viewed and books read as part of my personal celebration of the occasion.

Mind you, I don’t limit my study of and musings over African-American contributions, achievements, struggles, etc. to the month of February. But I do use the month as an opportunity to tackle something out of the ordinary.

Folks back home would say that my attending the IUPUI Steward Speakers Series with Common as the guest speaker should rank No. 1 among experiences for Black History Month 2016.

It would be tempting to give top billing to a speech Common opened with a two-and-a-half-minute freestyle filled with local references:

” . . . I am always giving love to my people in the Nap . . . This time they say get some food from Kountry Kitchen . . . It’s all real, you can go chill, somewhere in Haughville. . . I am keeping the pace like my man Paul George. . . so you all can tape this, I came to Indianapolis to talk about greatness.”

Common headlines IUPUI Steward Speakers Series event.

It was refreshing to hear someone tell the truth about how he really felt about being nominated for five Grammys, striking out in the first four categories and being so sure of getting the last one that he was almost out of his seat before realizing his name wasn’t called.

But listening to Common inspire the youth in the audience with his admonition to find your passion, believe in your passion and live out your passion takes a back seat to the inspirational life stories of Robert Sadler and Vertus Hardiman. (How did I miss these two stories when they were news three years ago?)

“The Emancipation of Robert Sadler,” first printed in 1975 and then republished in 2012, is the story of the liberation of an African-American man who as a child was sold into slavery on a South Carolina plantation.

It’s the 20th-century setting that is the twist in the story, which I heard via radio.

“I want to remind the reader that the Emancipation Proclamation had been signed in 1863, and Robert Sadler was born in 1911. The story begins in 1966, when he was 5 years old,” said Marie Chapian, Hardiman’s co-author.

Sadler was 5 or 6 when he and two sisters were sold to a white plantation owner for $85. He would be tortured and beaten for years before he — unaware slavery was not the norm — mustered up the courage to walk off of the plantation at age 14.

Hardiman’s nightmare also began when he was 5 or 6 years old. The Hoosier native’s trauma would leave him with a hole in the head, literally.

Hardiman, who died in Pasadena, Calif., in 2007, was one of the group known as the Lyles Station Ten. Lyles Station was founded 1849 as Indiana’s first all-black frontier town. A restored community schoolhouse now serves as the town museum.

Vertus Hardiman: As a child in 1927, Hardiman – and 9 other African American children in Lyles Station, Ind., – was subjected to medical experiments involving exposure to massive amounts of radiation which left him with a severe physical deformity. Hardiman’s story is told in the documentary “Hole in the Head: A Life Revealed.” Photo Courtesy Smith Leonard Productions.

Hardiman and nine other Lyles Station children (eight male, one female) were severally irradiated in 1927 during a government medical experiment. Their parents had signed permission slips, having been led to think the children would be given a newly developed cure for a scalp fungus.

The “treatment” left Hardiman with a grotesquely deformed head, which he hid for decades under caps and wigs. He would finally share his secret with a fellow member of his church choir in Pasadena. His friend would produce a documentary about Hardiman and the others.

Narrated by actor Dennis Haysbert, the award-winning documentary “A Hole in the Head: A Life Revealed” http://www.holeinthehead.com/ was the subject of screenings on three Vincennes University campuses in 2012.

Both Hardiman and Sadler could have lived out their adult lives in a raging bitterness that anyone would understand. But neither did. Instead, each left the legacy of a man who survived and overcame undeserved hardships with the incredible strength of character they both attributed to a God who allowed them to live, and to forgive.

Great stories for Black History Month.

If you’re looking for something special to do in observance of Black History Month, you might want to put attending the IUPUI Steward Speakers Series Feb. 22 event on your 2016 bucket list.

The evening includes dinner and a lecture featuring Grammy-winning hip-hop artist and actor Common.

Tickets go on sale Feb. 15 at the IUPUI Jagtag office and are also available online .

In 2015 Common and John Legend took home an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Original Song for their collaboration on  “Glory,” the powerful anthem of the civil rights film “Selma.”

Common

The recently televised NAACP Image Awards featured a soul-stirring rendition of “Glory” by Alice Smith  as part of a tribute to Legend, recipient of the organization’s 2016 Presidential Award.

This year’s theme for Black History Month, set by the Association for the Study of African American History and Life, is “Hallowed Grounds: Sites of African American Memories.”

For 90 years, the Association for the Study of African American History, founded by Carter G. Woodson, has been at the forefront for advancing awareness of the contributions of people of African descent to the fabric of American life.

“You can’t tell the story of America without preserving and reflecting on the places were African Americans have made history,” said the statement about this year’s theme.

And few places are more hallowed in African American history than the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the flashpoint of the civil rights marches featured in “Selma.”

In the movie, Common plays the role of civil rights movement strategist James Bevel, a role he’ll no doubt discuss in his Indianapolis talk.

After Common, the 2015-16 Steward Speakers season will conclude with lectures by attorney Star Jones on March 7 at the IUPUI Campus Center and public intellectual Cornel West on April 8 at Ivy Tech Community College.

For the past three years, IUPUI has been the lead or title sponsor for the series, which promotes personal engagement with successful prominent leaders in order to “begin to pave a way for [Indianapolis] community members of all backgrounds to envision the possibilities of attaining their personal goals.”

In its 30 seasons, the series has hosted more than 100 notables, including many who would be on a black history Who’s Who roll call — General Colin Powell, Dr. Ben Carson, Tavis Smiley and Viola Davis, to name a few.

Woodson and the Association for the Study of African American History were the founders of Negro History Week, which grew into today’s observance of February as African American or Black History Month.

The intent was not to elevate the achievements of African Americans over that of other groups, nor to exclude recognition of others, but to right the wrongs of African American contributions being either totally ignored or ignorantly misrepresented.

Just as the establishment of Black History Month was not meant to exclude the recognition of others, it also was not meant to limit black history lessons to one month or one week of the year.

In fact, this year’s theme was set to tie in with the national celebration of the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service system. The National Park Service system acknowledges black history every day of the year at sites across the country, such as the Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument in Wilberforce, Ohio, and the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, both easy day trips from Indy.

One of my favorite black history spots is the Levi Coffin House in Foundation City, Ind.

Home to Levi Coffin, the “president” of the Underground Railroad, and his wife, Catharine, the Coffin House — called Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad — was a safe haven for hundreds of escaped slaves making their way to freedom in Canada.

While it is not in the National Park Service system, the Coffin House is a National Historic Landmark. Open to visitors June 1 to August 31, it is listed among the top 45 history sites in the nation.

And as part of Indiana’s bicentennial, the building next door to the Coffin House will open in December as the Levi Coffin House Interpretive Center, which the folks at the Smithsonian have named as one of 12 new museums in the world to visit this year.

A trip to the new center will be an easy thing to add to your bucket list.

The television series “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson” premiered this week. It was a reminder that it’s been 21 years since the day I sat in on O.J. Simpson’s trial for the murders of his second wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a restaurant employee named Ronald Goldman.

My, how time flies.

“It was nearly impossible to live in this society between June 12, 1994, the night of the murders, and October 2, 1995, the day the verdict was announced, and not be aware of events in the trial,” said IUPUI Professor Dennis Bingham. “It was like the proverbial car wreck: It was hard to look away. It was hard not to have an opinion.”

THE PEOPLE v. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY — Pictured: (l-r) Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark, Sterling K. Brown as Christopher Darden. CR: Ray Mickshaw/FX Networks

Bingham, professor of English and director of the film studies program in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, is penning a blog on the 10-episode FX series. At the time of the events, Bingham had been teaching at IUPUI for about three years.

My courtroom seat during that day in 1995 was next to that of Dominick Dunne, the writer and investigative journalist who was covering the trial for Vanity Fair.

At Dunne’s death in 2009, Dan Abrams talked about the friendship he developed with Dunne and others during the nine-month-long trial when reporters “day after day” took their assigned seats and “developed the sort of friendships you generally only develop in college living together day in and day out.”

I was not part of that circle.

At the time of the trial, I was a staff writer for one of three daily sister papers whose readership stretched across eastern Los Angeles County. Media outlets that had been assigned seats in the courtroom during the trial had to have that seat filled every day or lose the privilege, I was told. So when the reporter normally assigned to cover the trial had pressing duties in another part of the courthouse, my editor pulled me for duty in Judge Lance Allan Ito’s court.

In my newspaper days, I covered a number of stories that had more in-the-courtroom spunk than the Simpson murder trial, including one involving a family’s fight to keep a pot-bellied pig within a city’s limits. The pig had a booster club that showed up for proceedings.

Personally, I found the circus of hawkers gathered outside the Los Angeles court building during the trial more entertaining — and as IUPUI’s Bingham said in his first blog installation posted Feb. 1, chases on L.A. freeways are a common feature of newscasts in Los Angeles.

Dunne would go on to write a novel based on his experiences covering the trial.

I would go back to my desk to write about the limousine driver’s testimony as a front-page news story for the following day.

THE PEOPLE v. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY — Pictured: Cuba Gooding, Jr. as O.J. Simpson. CR: Michael Becker/FX Networks

After 20 years, what I remember most about that day at the O.J. Simpson trial is how anxious I was to make sure I didn’t nod off — a no-no Ito promised to reward with dismissal from the courtroom; how I wished the judge didn’t have a rule against chewing gum in the courtroom; the courthouse swagger of Johnnie Cochran; and oh — how good-looking O.J. was in person.

If you are interested in serious, intellectual reactions and analysis of the FX series as drama, you will want to follow Bingham’s blog on the School of Liberal Arts website. New installations of “His Just Deserts — or Ours” should appear within two days of each broadcast. Bingham, a biopic scholar, promises to offer his thoughts on the show as drama, as biography, and as history.

Bingham’s 2010 book titled “Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre” includes a chapter on “Ed Wood,” a 1994 film by “People v. O.J. Simpson” screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski.

“You’ve given the biopic genre the text it needs and deserves. You really seem to understand our work and what we were going for,” Karaszewski, who grew up in South Bend, Ind., reportedly said of Bingham’s work.

“The People vs. O.J. Simpson” holds court at 11 p.m. Tuesdays on FX.

When Jane Schultz, professor of English and medical humanities and director of literature in the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI, was asked to be a historical consultant for “Mercy Street,” a PBS Civil War medical drama series, she said she would think about it.

“I did so, for about three seconds,” Schultz said. “It seemed a wonderful way to bring the history of Civil War hospitals and medicine to a wider public.”

That was the same goal set by “Mercy Street” producer Lisa Wolfinger, who told the L.A. Daily News, “We just thought, ‘Let’s do something set in the Civil War from the vantage point of these doctors and volunteer nurses.’ Because it’s never been done. It’s never been told.”

Jane Schultz Photo: PBS

The first episode of “Mercy Street,” the first PBS original drama in more than 10 years, aired Jan. 17, drawing 3.3 million viewers. The series takes place in a luxury hotel that’s been turned into a Union hospital in Alexandria, Va.

Schultz has spent nearly 30 years revealing the world of Civil War hospitals and medicine.

Among her accomplishments:

• Co-editor of “Nursing History and Humanities,” a book series published at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.
• Author of “Women at the Front,” a study of gender and relief work in American Civil War military hospitals that was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize in 2005.
• Author of “This Birth Place of Souls,” an annotated edition of one of the last existing nursing diaries from the Civil War, published in 2010.

Currently she is engaged in two book projects: one on surgical culture in the Civil War (“Lead, Blood, and Ink”) and another titled “A Match Made in Hospital,” concerning the correspondence of a female hospital worker from Pennsylvania who fell in love with a surgeon in the Army of the Potomac.

It was this body of work that led Wolfinger to contact Schultz in February 2014 to ask that she be a “Mercy Street” consultant.

Scripts for each episode are sent to Schultz for review. She reads them carefully, offering comments about historical accuracy of medical interactions, even to the point of flagging language that 19th-century nurses and doctors would not have used.

When “Mercy Street” began filming in Richmond, Va. last spring, Schultz said, she got a rash of questions: Did hospitals have lobbies like the hotel in which the show is set? Who would have been there? Would doors have been guarded? Would the characters have gone outside to use latrines or used water closets?

A scene from the PBS series “Mercy Street. Photo: PBS

As the show’s writers began working last fall on scripts for a potential second season, Schultz was invited to L.A., but the fall semester was underway at IUPUI, so she had to decline.

Overall, Schultz said she was pleased with the historical accuracy of “Mercy Street.” Not everything is right, she said, noting, “they want to make it a drama that people will watch.”

One bow to the need for drama is showing nurses engaged in surgery, when that generally was not the case. It would have depended on where women were working and how desperate the situation was, Schultz said. Surgeons, she noted, would have used orderlies or male nurses to help with that grisly work.

Still, nurses in the North and the South dealt daily with horrors of war. In Mercy Street Revealed: A Blog, to which Schultz and other “Mercy Street” historical consultants contribute in partnership with PBS, she wrote, “Nurses on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line refer to the shock of entering military hospital space for the first time: Some encountered tubs of amputated body parts; others were nauseated by the smells of bodily effluvia.”

“Mercy Street” is based on events that hospital workers recorded in their diaries and letters, illuminating the complex negotiations of diverse constituencies that gathered to promote sick and wounded soldiers’ survival.

It’s those historical records and diaries that Schultz first encountered at the National Archives in the 1990s that launched her on what she described as her serious work of describing the experiences of these nurses.

More than 21,000 women in the Union alone provided hospital services, seven times as many as was estimated at an earlier time, Schultz said. And many wrote their experiences down because people in the 1860s realized they were passing through something transformational.

Few have known about this aspect of the Civil War, Schultz said: “At long last, the public can be witness to the fascinating and sometimes dramatic stories that circulated through the health and hospital quarters of the Civil War.”

From left, Joseph Hayes, Aaron Hart, Zeb Davenport, Jing “Claire” Zhao, Sandra Lemons, Sara Dickey traveled to China to visit Sun Yat-Sen University in December.

“It was a phenomenal trip, better than I imagined it would be,” said IUPUI Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Zeb Davenport.

He was referring to a late-December visit to Sun Yat-Sen University, IUPUI’s strategic university partner in Guangdong, China.

Coming from a student affairs professional known nationally for his expertise in creating out-of-classroom experiences that are culturally responsive and engaging for students, Davenport’s words say a lot about the trip’s success.

The vice chancellor visited China to both learn from and assist student affairs personnel at Sun Yat-Sen, a public university of about 22,000 undergraduate and 14,000 graduate students. The visit included time spent with Sun Yat-Sen student leaders as well.

IUPUI visitors are shown a scaled, panoramic model of the entire Zhuhai campus. Photo courtesy Aaron Hart.

IUPUI administrators Sara Dickey, Aaron Hart, Joseph Hayes and Sandra Lemons accompanied Davenport.

The trip was also a quick visit home for Zhao Jing, a visiting scholar from Sun Yat-Sen, who will be completing a yearlong assignment at IUPUI in February.

The consensus observation of the IUPUI campus leaders was that helping students outside the classroom is the same whether you are in America or halfway across the world.

“Other than obvious cultural differences, I found the students of SYSU to be very similar to the students of IUPUI,” Davenport said. “Students at SYSU are surprisingly very engaged. They are vocal and challenge the establishment more than I expected.”

Sun Yat-Sen’s food services got high marks from the IUPUI administrators.

Zeb Davenport. left, is shown with professor Yan Guangmei, vice president of SYSU.

“Having lived in China before, I can tell you that the cafeteria food is good old home-cooking, and there is a great deal of variety. It was also extremely cheap, even by Chinese standards,” said Lemons, director of international student services in the IUPUI Office of International Affairs. “It was wonderful.”

The high volume and number of students socializing and eating in the SYSU cafeteria impressed Hart, IUPUI’s director of housing and residence life.

“There were very few empty seats, and students were engaged in group conversations around the dining tables,” he said.

Therein lies something that American universities can learn from Sun Yat-Sen, according to Zhao.

“First, all students at SYSU must live on campus, so they are more involved, ” she said. “Second, there is not a student who leaves the university because of a problem with financial assistance.”

Aaron Hart, IUPUI director of housing and residence life, is shown outside a Sun Yat-Sen University student residence hall.

If he could, Davenport said, he would take SYSU’s philosophy of housing all students on campus and providing full financial assistance for those in need and put it into practice at IUPUI.

School spirit is alive and well at the Chinese campus, although it might appear otherwise to the uninformed.

“I did not see outward exhibitions of school pride like you might see at a U.S. university,” Lemons said. “But the students I had a chance to speak to seemed to exhibit a strong internal sense of pride about their school.”

Zhao said SYSU student leaders are well-versed in the significance of the school motto: “Study extensively, inquire accurately, reflect carefully, discriminate clearly, practice earnestly.”

Student leaders on both campus are “idealistic, looking toward a brighter future, determined, and under pressure to succeed,” Hayes, director of the IUPUI Campus Center, said.

Sun Yat-Sen student leaders at workshop facilitated by IUPUI administrators. Photo by Sandra Lemons.

SYSU is known for its student leadership program, which annually serves 100 students, providing resources such as special lectures, the opportunity to attend an overseas study trip and volunteer service trips, Zhao said.

This year’s program included a training session facilitated by the IUPUI visitors.

“The students we met were excellent,” said Dickey, IUPUI assistant director for residence life. “They have many similarities to our student leaders: They are committed to their academics, have a strong sense of their personal values, and want to make a difference on their campus. Their energy and enthusiasm made that day my favorite of the trip!”

With Christmas just days away, classes out until the New Year, and workplaces operating at holiday speed, let’s make this posting merry, short and bright. No heavy intellectual stuff to confuse minds already absorbed with last-minute shopping and trips to the post office.

Instead, let’s turn our attention to things that are grabbing the headlines: toys and movies. We can simplify that even more by focusing on hot cars and “Star Wars.”

And by hot cars, I mean life-size and pocket-size versions built by international car maker Mattel.

If you have done any shopping for children this season, you are well aware that since before Thanksgiving, The Force has been with us in terms of “Star Wars” licensed merchandise.

Star Wars Shadow Box

Back in 1977, “Star Wars” had its opening weekend in 43 theaters across the USA. Only one Indianapolis theater was included in that number, according to From Script to DVD.com writer Michael Coate.

Unlike 38 years ago, when that first (or fourth, depending upon your timeline) “Star Wars” adventure opened quietly as far as marketing fanfare, this latest episode, “The Force Awakens,” has blown in like a tornado in terms of the availability of licensed merchandise for sale.

Store shelves have been stocked, and consumers’ pockets emptied, by a plethora of items including 4-foot-tall Stormtrooper dolls, R2-D2 soup, Princess Leia T-shirts, Nixon watches, cereal-box droid viewers,  diecast vehicles and others.

The opening of the “Star Wars” movie has reawakened interest in the vehicle I most admire: Mattel’s life-size Darth Vader car, a tribute to the saga’s Jedi who turned to the dark side. The car was a crowd-pleaser at its first public appearance at Comic-Con 2014 in San Diego:

Mattel’s Hot Wheels Darth Vader vehicle

This week’s edition of “Jay Leno’s Garage” spotlighted the Darth Car, which Leno and the car’s builder, Billy Hammon, described as a “heavily modified C-6 Corvette.”

The car’s design picks up various elements from Vader’s helmet and lightsaber, and even has the sounds of his breathing — without coming across as dopey, its makers said.

The fully functioning car was built to celebrate Mattel’s collaboration with LucasFilms, said Mattel’s senior staff designer Bryan Benedict. The 2014 Mattel-Hot Wheels partnership that has now brought us such 1:64 vehicles as the First Order Stormtrooper, and character cars playing tribute to Chewbacca, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker and others.

Star Wars character diecast vehicles

“The Darth Vader car is a showpiece for the line,” Benedict said. “It makes the statement of what character cars are all about.”

The extensive lineup gives weight to Benedict’s words: “We are a real powerful force in the automotive world.”

Since its display at Comic-Con, the one-of-a-kind prototype vehicle has been around the world on display in places such as Germany and Mexico.

The Hot Wheels Collectors Nationals returns to Indianapolis April 6 to 10 at the Sheraton Hotel. Tickets are now on sale for the annual Nationals, which is the largest gathering of Hot Wheels collectors outside of California.

Perhaps The Force will be with us Hoosier toy-car-lovers, and the Darth Vader vehicle will show up for that event.

Have a Happy New Year!

Waiting to exhale.

That describes our nation collectively whenever news of yet another mass shooting sweeps with lightning speed from the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans about which Irving Berlin wrote.

We wait to exhale because until the details are in, we don’t know if the shooting in question means we are facing imminent attacks from foreign terrorists, a limited case of homegrown American extremism, or an incident of workplace violence in which the suspects and victims knew each other.

And after we eventually breathe a sigh of relief, we begin our on-again, off-again public debate about gun control in America.

Maybe our reluctance to breathe is tied to our ambivalence about expanding gun control and what that can or can’t do to cure our nation’s ills.

Campus Flag lowered to half-staff in honor of San Bernardino shooting victims.

Lawmakers who relayed their condolences regarding San Bernardino with “our prayers are with the victims …” were slammed and mocked by those who believe votes for tighter gun controls offer more hope for deliverance from the evil of gun violence than prayers to God or any higher power.

“God isn’t fixing this,” screamed the New York Daily News’ front page, which referred to the San Bernardino shooting victims as the “latest batch of innocent Americans,” and implied that certain lawmakers with NRA-backing are “cowards,” and labeled prayer-laced condolences as “meaningless platitudes.”

The San Bernardino shooting stirred up our collective memories of the Newtown school massacre, which occurred three years ago Dec. 14.

In July, a Pew Research Center poll of 2,002 adults found that 85 percent of Americans favored background checks for private gun sales and sales at gun shows. That poll showed little change from the 81 percent recorded in May 2013, practically in the wake of the Newtown school massacre.

But Pew polls show significant shifts in attitudes about gun ownership. In Dec. 2014, “nearly six-in-ten Americans (57 percent) say gun ownership does more to protect people from becoming victims of crime” compared to “the days after Newtown [when] a Dec. 2013 poll showed 48 percent said guns do more to protect people,” according to a Pew report.

Four decades ago, my then husband-to-be, a New York native, was surprised, to say the least, to see guns hanging on the wall above my younger brother’s bed. It raised questions about what kind of family he was marrying into.

Guns have played various roles in my life — most times for good, some not.

Recently, one family member armed with a long gun fired from 10 feet away to save a sister from a poisonous snakebite.

Years ago, a stranger armed with a long gun took the life of my 21-year-old brother in a surprise attack.

That assailant should not have been armed. State law at the time prohibited him from possessing a gun because he was on parole.

And therein lays one choke point in calls for stricter gun control. Laws made to curb gun violence are often ignored by those at whom they are aimed.

That is not to say that stricter laws should or shouldn’t be passed.

My brother’s talents to make the world a better place as a gifted poet and budding craftsman were lost. So are the gifts of those whose lives were cruelly taken Dec. 2.

We must find common ground to pass laws that will stop the flood of lives being cut short by so-called “needless” gunfire whether those lives are taken en masse or one at a time.

“I’d like to write a great peace song,” Irving Berlin told a reporter in 1938 as World War II was brewing, according to Performing Songwriter Enterprises’ account of the making of “God Bless America.”

Reworking lyrics he originally penned during World War I, Berlin crafted the song that Kate Smith turned into a national anthem during World War II and Celine Dion revived in the aftermath of 9/11.

The song’s intro lyrics, “as we raise our voices, in a solemn prayer,” leave no doubt that Berlin believed his vision of world peace required divine intervention.

As the nation’s flags fly at half-staff for the most-recent victims of mass violence, and as we contemplate more homeland gun control, would Berlin say we should think differently?

When Kung Fu Panda — one of the most successful animated franchises in the world — returns next year with a new comedy adventure, fans of DreamWorks Animation movies are likely to rush to theaters to see “Kung Fu Panda 3.”

But Mary Glumb won’t be among them. It’s not that she doesn’t think she’ll like “Kung Fu Panda 3.” It’s just that she’s already seen it — or most of it.

Mary Glumb

The sophomore computer graphics technology student in the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at IUPUI began a three-month internship Sept. 14 in Glendale, Calif., at DreamWorks Animation.

Assigned to the company’s marketing department, Glumb got to watch “Kung Fu Panda 3” as part of her job.

“It wasn’t finished yet,” she said. “I was watching the movie when it reached a part where nothing was moving, and I realized ‘this scene isn’t done being made yet.'”

While the internship began just two months ago, you could say it dates back 30 years to a diner in Chicago where Glumb’s mom was working. One of the other employees was a man who went on to become an executive producer at DreamWorks Animation.

When Glumb became interested in computer graphics about three years ago, her mom reached out to her friend from that dinner. He invited Glumb and her family to come to California, tour DreamWorks Animation and meet some of the people who work there.

“When we met him at DreamWorks, we got to go up to the second floor where all the executives are, which was exciting because no one is allowed up there,” Glumb said. “He talked about what jobs they have and what it’s like to work there. Before leaving, I met with the recruiting office and talked with them about the process for applying for an internship.”

While Glumb’s family connection likely helped, it only helped her gain consideration as a would-be intern. It took three applications (and rejections) before she was accepted on her fourth try.

Glumb says she entered the computer graphics technology program thinking she wanted to do something with animated movies, reflecting a passion for art, drawing, and creating comics and storyboards.

“In high school, I took a digital design class that really started everything,” she said. “Once I took that, I realized what I wanted to do. I wanted to do something with animated movies.”

On Sept. 14, Glumb joined 19 others beginning an internship at DreamWorks. After dealing with administrative details like email accounts and computer access, the new batch of interns saw the perks like free snack and coffee booths on every floor and the “lagoon,” a canal that runs through grassy areas of the campus.

The internship has been a valuable experience, Glumb says. “I think it’s important to be in the working world, to get to talk to bosses and other co-workers. I really haven’t done that before.”

She also plans to meet and connect with as many others at DreamWorks as she can before her internship ends in December.

Before she arrived at DreamWorks, Glumb says, she was set on using her computer graphics skills to work on movies as an animator.

“Now that I’m in the marketing section, I am leaning toward marketing,” she said. “I’ve found I really enjoy it. I never thought in a million years because I had never taken an interest in it. Now that I’m actually doing it, I enjoy it. Marketing is a good fit for me.”

Amos Brown’s passing has left a hole in the mind and soul of the city of Indianapolis.

“His intellect enabled Amos to speak with authority on a wide range of topics. He is literally irreplaceable,” said Vernon A. Williams, communication and engagement strategist in the IUPUI Office of Community Engagement.

This blog entry is dedicated to the memory of the longtime Indianapolis Recorder columnist and Indianapolis radio talk show host for WTLC-1310 The Light.

Amos Brown, Photo courtesy Indianapolis Recorder

The Northwestern University grad was visiting family in Chicago when he died last week from what is believed to have been a heart attack. According to a WTLC-1310 announcement, funeral services will take place at 11 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 14, at Light of the World Christian Church, 4646 N. Michigan Road. His family has invited the community to join them in a celebration of his life during a calling from noon to 6 p.m. Friday, Nov. 13, at Light of the World.

When Williams moved to Indianapolis from Gary 14 years ago, Brown was one of the first people he met. He was introduced by then-Indiana Black Expo President Charles Williams. Over the years, Vernon Williams was a guest on Brown’s radio shows numerous times and worked with the Indiana Broadcaster’s Hall of Famer to advance the Indianapolis Association of Black Journalists.

“Amos Brown is synonymous with Indianapolis,” Vernon Williams said. “His knowledge of the history, politics and social climate is only surpassed by his love for the community and compassion for people of this great city. Amos was outspoken and unafraid to fulfill a role of advocacy with uncompromising principles on what he believed to be right.”

“How do you replace someone like that?” IUPUI Public Relations Professor of Practice Bruce Hetrick said during a conversation about Brown’s passing.

Before he began teaching at IUPUI, Hetrick was founder, principal and CEO of Hetrick Communications, a leading Indianapolis-based public relations and advertising agency from 1994 to 2011.

For two decades, any time you went to buy advertising, Brown would ask, “Are you going to buy African-American media?” Hetrick said.

And if Brown found out that a public relations professional in the community sent a news release to The Indianapolis Star or the Indianapolis Business Journal but left out the Indianapolis Recorder, “He would crucify you,” Hetrick said. “And rightly so. He was a tireless advocate for the African-American community and its businesses.”

Then-IUPUI Chancellor Charles R. Bantz, left, and IU President Michael A. McRobbie talk with Amos Brown on AM 1310: The Light at Indiana Black Expo’s Summer Celebration on July 17 at the Indiana Convention Center.
Photo by James Brosher

Several years ago, Hetrick and Brown brought together members of the media, advertising and PR communities to collectively discuss how to get more African-Americans and Hispanics into a white-dominated profession.

“The collective opinion was that we needed to start in elementary school to instill habits of research, writing and curiosity — the kinds of qualities that set Amos Brown apart as a journalist and advocate,” Hetrick said.

His tenacity is no doubt what gained Brown the reputation reflected in the “Radio warrior” headline on a 2010 IBJ article written by Anthony Schoettle.  It’s an apropos image of Brown’s approach to advocacy journalism and pointed commentary.

“Amos prides his program on allowing listeners access to local and national leaders in an environment of civility and respect,” according to the “Afternoons With Amos” summary on the WTLC website. “Amos also helps listeners deal with bureaucratic red tape; resolve instances of racial insensitivity and advocates and challenges the community to be their best.”

When I first met Amos, he was hosting “The Amos Brown Show,” Indianapolis’ only daytime TV talk show, which ran from 1997 to 2005.

At the time of his death, “Afternoons With Amos” was a must for those interested in the Indianapolis community and the issues important to its people.

“Brown gained a reputation for tackling racial, political and socio-economic issues, and had little problem getting power brokers to come on his shows,” Schoettle wrote.

Brown was always a go-to-person when it came to sharing news about IUPUI.

On air and off, he was a strong supporter of the IUPUI Martin Luther King Jr. Dinner. He almost always interviewed the student organizers as an advance promo of the event and often interviewed the keynote speaker.

Amos Brown was host of the radio talk show ‘Afternoons with Amos.’ Photo courtesy AM1310.

On one occasion, Brown hosted his radio talk show live from a tent set up on what is now the Joseph T. Taylor Courtyard. On another, he broadcast live from a University Library conference room.

While some might have felt his manner was a little rough (especially politicians!), I always found him to be fair and objective, and I knew his direct and forceful manner held no tint of malice.

In the words of Shannon Williams, president of the Indianapolis Recorder: ” Our community has lost a great mind and a great man.”

Amos and his contributions will not be forgotten. May the community’s prayers and condolences bring his family comfort and peace at this time of sorrow.

If you are looking for some custom home game furniture, perhaps you should check out Herron School of Art and Design.

It has paid off for Brunswick two years in a row.

That’s Brunswick as in air hockey, foosball, putting greens, pool tables and table tennis tables.

It’s those last two — first pool tables and then table tennis — that will showcase the skills of Herron furniture design graduates.

Last year Brunswick Billiards challenged Herron students to reimagine the company’s iconic Gold Crown pool table — which debuted in 1961 — to appeal to modern tech-savvy consumers looking for clean lines and a way to reconnect with family in the home.

Grant Keeney with his table tennis designs

The winning, modernized design for the table that had starring roles in “The Color of Money” and “The Hustler” was the creation of Herron 2014 furniture design grad Colin Tury. His design is slated for production under the Brunswick name in 2017.

In April, Brunswick was back at Herron for seconds, holding a student competition for designs for future versions of its tables for the game I grew up calling Ping-Pong. (I also grew up calling that Indiana pastime of throwing bags in a hole “bean bag toss,” but what do I know?)

“Everyone grew up calling it Ping-Pong,” Grant Keeney assured me.

On the way out: The Gold Crown V model of Brunswick Billiards’ pool table, (shown) will be upstaged in 2017 with the unveiling of the Gold Crown VI model designed by Herron School of Arts alumnus Colin Tury. Image courtesy Brunswick Billiards.

Keeney, a 2015 Herron furniture design grad, took first place in the recent competition with two new concepts for table tennis tables. His prototype of the “Cl-1” table folds in half, has legs that fold up and has drawers for stowing the net, paddles and balls.

Again clean, modern lines ruled the day.

“These designs target millennials and everyone else,” Keeney said.

I’ve never seen a table tennis table with equipment drawers, so I asked Keeney about that design aspect.

Drawers aren’t typical unless you are looking at some high-end models, he said. Most often a unit for storage is sold separately.

But for this Herron designer, “it made sense” to use the underside of the table for storage, incorporating what is typically wasted space, Keeney said.

The designer and I have at least one thing in common: Neither of us excel at the game.

“I’m pretty terrible,” he said when I asked if he played table tennis, and whether that played a role in how he mentally prepared for the design task.

Given his playing level, he approached designing the table as if it were a piece of furniture more so than a game.

And taking a more aesthetic view of the task makes sense since there is only so much you can do given the standardized size of the tables.

Keeney is now a preparator/mount maker for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where he works with his hands and puts the same craftsmanship and design mentality into play that he used in furniture design at Herron. Recently he built metal support stands for the marionettes on display as part of the IMA’s current Gustave Baumann exhibit.

Colin Tury, winner of Brunswick pool table design competition

Both Tury and Keeney tackled their Brunswick design tasks under the tutelage of Cory Robinson, chair of the Department of Fine Arts at Herron, and Glen Fuller, a local industrial designer whom Robinson brought in.

“Cory Robinson and Glen Fuller were extremely helpful and went the extra mile to make sure we knew what we were doing,” Keeney said. The hands-on work involved in the project expanded students’ vocabulary in digital design and fabrication, he added.

Herron’s new Think It Make It Lab also proved invaluable in the project. Without it, “it would have been extremely hard to get everything accomplished,” Keeney said.

The new Think It Make It Lab at Herron will include equipment and projects like these and more (clockwise): Art work from Herron’s 2013 Undergraduate Student exhibition, printed with a 3-D printer; A Stratasys Objet 30 3-D printer; detail from a bench created by then Herron graduate student Vincent Edwards using a CNC router; an EZ Router CNC router. (images: Herron staff, Michelle Pemberton, Stratasys and EZ router)

Keeney was one of a few students involved in setting up the equipment in the lab, which expanded the school’s capability to educate students to work on concept design and prototyping using a variety of digital fabrication methods. The Think it Make it Lab includes 3-D printers, a 3-D scanner and a computer numeric control router, and is adjacent to a digital fabrication lab with laser cutters, plasma cutters and milling machines.

“We are so excited at the prospect of providing a collaborative environment for research and experimentation at the intersection of art, design, technology and culture,” Herron Dean Valerie Eickmeier said in a statement announcing the lab earlier this year. “Centers like this are common in Silicon Valley, but there are few housed in schools of art and design, and they are scarce in the Midwest.”

Another reason for Brunswick and others to keep coming back to Herron.

For more information about tapping into the talent at Herron School of Art and Design, contact Brad McKinney in the Basile Center for Art, Design and Public Life at (317) 278-9423 or basile@iupui.edu.

Original Barbie, picture taken at Children’s Museum 2010

My fondness for all things Barbie and a New York Times headline announcing a new talking version of the doll with the powers of artificial intelligence hooked me into writing this IUPUIntelligence post.

But my initial infatuation with the special effects of Hello Barbie dissipated as my understanding of the mechanics behind the magic grew. And then a “CSI: Cyber” episode airing days after the article sparked my security concerns.

So I am issuing this parental alert: Think twice about toy safety in this age of smartphones and Wi-Fi. A “live” Barbie might not suit younger children still learning what is real and what isn’t.

Both the original Barbara Millicent Roberts — Barbie’s full name — and the new Hello Barbie are creations by parents looking for a better girl’s toy. (I  couldn’t resist showing a few photos from my personal gallery of Barbie Pictures. Enjoy!)

Back in 1959, Barbie creator Ruth Handler wanted to give her young daughter a 3-D version of the teenage paper dolls she and her friends held dear. A creator of the ToyTalk technology that brings Hello Barbie to life was motivated by his 6-year-old daughter’s question, “Can I talk to my stuffed rabbit on Skype?”

Barbie and Ken broke up in 2004. The pair are shown on Valentine’s Day 2011 when they announced they were officially back together.

Hello Barbie, with pre-orders ringing up at $74.99, can chat with a human playmate, recalling information from past conversations.

But there’s no artificial intelligence at work here, says IUPUI informatics professor Karl MacDorman, who has published more than 100 papers on human-computer interaction, robotics, machine learning and cognitive science.

Hello Barbie is what MacDorman and his colleagues call a personified robot. She gives the appearance of intelligence thanks to her advertised 8,000 lines of scripted dialogue at the command of 21st-century technology.

Gone are the hidden record players and pull springs that gave “life” to the talking toys of yesterday. In their place are Wi-Fi, speech-recognition software and the cloud.

A young Hello Barbie operator presses a belt button activating a microphone to record the child’s question. That question is sent to the cloud via the home Wi-Fi system, where it is stored, and an appropriate scripted response in a human voice is downloaded at the speed of a normal conversation.

The breadth and depth of the possible conversations have stirred up public concerns about privacy, security and freedom from advertising.

Barbie, Ken and Skipper at the Carter’s Toy Museum Collection, 2012.

“My main concern with this technology is the vast amount of information that Mattel will be collecting from children about their lives that can be used for future marketing or other purposes,” MacDorman said.

George Orwell was concerned about the government’s intrusion into people’s lives when he wrote the novel 1984, but what was unforeseen and would have been considered appalling in the year 1984, the data collection by multinational corporations to maximize their profits, is now the new normal, MacDorman said.

“What was then unthinkable — big corporations knowing much about us and keeping that data in the cloud — has become the new acceptable,” he said.

An informatics guest lecturer introduced by MacDorman presented film documentation of a study of human-computer interaction in which a child objected to a personified robot being told to stop playing a game before completing his turn and go to a closet. The robot called the action unfair, and the child, apparently trying to right a wrong and appease the machine, suggested that the robot continue playing.

Barbie in her Corvette-inspired outfit would have been the hit at the June “Granddaddy of Corvette Shows” at the IMS.

In the mentioned CSI: Cyber episode, titled “Why-Fi,” a criminal hacks into a family’s Wi-Fi and takes control over a Hello Barbie-like doll named Marla. Marla asks her 6-year-old playmate to leave a window open so that Marla can go outside to play while the family is away from home. The doll also requests a tour of the home, particularly the father’s room, where valuables are kept. The child complies on both accounts, providing a point of entry and the location of loot for a burglar. Thus the doll becomes the inside man for a home burglary that turns into a homicide.

Of course, Mattel has reportedly built in security and privacy controls for the new Ms. Roberts, but as always, parents need to take safeguards to ensure that child’s play remains innocent.

I do appreciate Mattel’s efforts to assuage age-old concerns that comparisons to Barbie can contribute to a negative self-image among young girls who want to be her.

What’s the doll to say if a real child asks Barbie, “Do you think I’m pretty?”

Mattel’s scripted response is akin to Viola Davis’ line in “The Help”: “You is kind, you is smart, you is important.”

Or as Hello Barbie should say, “Yes, you are pretty, but you are also smart, talented and funny.”

Count competitiveness among the qualities that distinguish James Hill, an associate professor of computer and information science at IUPUI.

It was competitiveness that helped motivate the self-described jock.

“Growing up, I played sports,” Hill said. “During the summer, I played baseball; when baseball was over, I played football; and when football was over, I played basketball.” He excelled in track and field: He is a three-time All-American and was ranked as the top long jumper for his age at 14. At 15 and 16, he placed among the top eight long jumpers in the U.S. When he competed in a Tennessee state high school track-and-field championship meet, he did so well in five events he could have placed third if he had entered himself as a team.

And it was that spirit of competitiveness that inspired him as he pursued a Ph.D. in computer science, which led to him becoming one of the youngest African-Americans to become a tenured professor in computer science at a research university in the United States.

Hill gained that distinction in August, when his tenure appointment in the School of Science took effect. At the time, he was 33 years and 5 months old. Because of differences in complex university systems, it is challenging to say absolutely who is the youngest African-American to attain that position, but all indications are that Hill is among the youngest two or three.

James Hill

The first notion that he could set a new mark as a Ph.D. in computer science came when he applied to several graduate programs, including the one at Duke University. When he toured the program at Duke, he was told that if he received a Ph.D. in computer science, he would be the first African-American to do so at that university.

He chose to go to Vanderbilt University, and the thought that he might become the youngest African-American to receive a Ph.D. from that institution came up as he was about to receive his doctorate in 2009.

It turned out he was at least the second to do so at Vanderbilt, but checking further, he discovered he was the ninth-youngest African-American in the country to obtain that degree from any university. In some cases, there were only weeks or months in age separating the degree-holders.

“Once I found that out, I realized I could be the youngest to become tenured,” Hill said. “My nature is that if I do it, I do it to the best of my ability. I thought, ‘I can get it; let’s make it happen.'”

Hill, who joined the School of Science faculty in 2009, credited the Department of Computer and Information Science and its dean for supporting his tenure effort. Bart Ng, a former dean of the school, had personally recruited Hill to come to IUPUI.

While it was satisfying to become one of the youngest African-American tenured computer science professors, Hill said, its importance lies with the example it offers others, showing them “if I could do it, so could they.”

“A Ph.D. in computer science is also important because it helps folks see there are more academic and career possibilities out there than what is always pushed at you,” he said. “When I started as an undergraduate, I didn’t even know there was a Ph.D. in computer science.”

‘Intersections’

It’s ArtPrize time, and once again IUPUI’s Herron School of Art and Design is represented among the artists whose works fuel the annual international show that offers the world’s largest purse for an art competition.

ArtPrize Seven, running through Oct. 11, is expected to draw 400,000 to 500,000 people to Grand Rapids, Mich., to view more than 1,500 pieces of art displayed at 160 venues across three square miles of the city.

Last year, Herron professor Anila Quayyum Agha made history, earning a record $300,000 by winning the 2014 ArtPrize Public Vote Grand Prize and earning a tie vote for the Juried Grand Prize.

Agha’s “Intersections” entry — a large, laser-cut wooden cube that hangs from a ceiling and is lit from inside with one lightbulb, casting intricate shadows on walls and the floor — wowed both the jury and the thousands of art lovers who submitted ballots for the $200,000 public prize. It was the first time both the public and the jury agreed on their grand prize choices.

This year, “Intersections” is back at ArtPrize 2015, albeit in a new-and-improved form: an exact replica made of steel.

‘Minimalist Division’ by Copy Culture. Onsite at ArtPrize Seven. Photo credit: https://www.facebook.com/copyculturestudio?_rdr=p

And a new cube, created by Herron 2013 graduates Taryn Cassella and Anna Martinez (the artistic dynamic duo known as “Copy Culture”), is in the mix of paintings, drawings, photography, sculpture, location-tied installations and other creations vying for this year’s prizes.

Copy Culture’s installation at Grand Rapids’ Sixth Street Bridge Park is titled “Minimalist Division.”  Viewers wait in a line that weaves through rows of stanchions before stepping inside a mirrored cube.

“The experience inside the cube is a reflection of real life and the recent past,” Cassella and Martinez said in their artist’s statement. “As artists, we (Copy Culture) want to gauge the reaction participants will have to anticlimactic art.”

Copy Culture. Photo source, http://www.artprize.org/copy-culture.

Cassella and Martinez secured their place in ArtPrize Seven back in June during a five-minute pitch before a team of five judges at ArtPrize Pitch Night Indianapolis, held in conjunction with the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

The ArtPrize Pitch Night program, started in 2013, helps an artist from the host area place a project in the Grand Rapids show. Pitch Nights were held in Indianapolis, Durham and Minneapolis this year.

A crowdfunding project on Kickstarter pulled in 35 backers who pledged $1,564 to help Copy Culture bring the “Minimalist Division” project to life.

Copy Culture’s Facebook page follows the creation of the artwork.

“Copy Culture’s submission to ArtPrize is a perfect illustration of the wealth of talent that continues to come out of Herron School of Art and Design. Anna and Taryn have all the skills necessary to apply their creative thinking to a multitude of endeavors, including this highly competitive exhibition,” said Herron dean Valarie Eickmeier.

“Anila’s win last year not only gave the world an inspiring and iconic work, it also gave Herron students a great role model,” the dean said.

Anila Quayyum Agha

For Agha, life has been a whirlwind since “Intersections” won the prestigious competition a year ago.

Her original box has been out on tour, with bookings at museums in Dallas and Houston. The steel replica now at ArtPrize Seven is one of five scheduled to be produced and authorized by Agha, according to an Mlive.com article.

This year’s steel version of Agha’s cube was installed at the ArtPrize headquarters building in a space constructed to re-create the museum venue the wooden version occupied in 2014.

And the steel version is proving to be as popular as its predecessor.

“We love it,” said one Grand Rapids woman who viewed the work during the show’s preview and opening days. Her husband recalled spending more than 30 minutes observing the piece at last year’s event, according to Mlive.com.

The top 20 ArtPrize Seven entries will be announced Sunday, Oct. 4, and the grand prize winners will be announced Oct. 9.

Good luck, Copy Culture!

Sign in IU School of Liberal Arts dean’s office.

This week marks the 11th anniversary of the day set aside as “a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks, and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the ever-mysterious ellipsis.”

Each Sept. 24 is National Punctuation Day, and this year the annual writing contest established by the day’s founder has ties to Indiana. And IUPUI has the perfect place to celebrate.

“We’re not doing an essay this year,” said Jeff Rubin, aka Punctuation Man. “We’re doing an homage to David Letterman, and we are going to have people do a Top 10 list. The question is: What are the top 10 ways proper punctuation has affected your life?”

The Letterman tribute is in recognition of the retirement of the Indiana native Rubin considers “one of America’s greatest comedians and talk-show hosts.”

Rubin is accepting Top 10 lists through Oct. 31 at Jeff@NationalPunctuationDay.com for any of you who want to get in on the chance to win some “punctuation goodies.”

The prizes for the best list will come from a selection of T-shirts, latte mugs, greeting cards and punctuation posters bearing unique designs with slogans such as “a semicolon is not a surgical procedure” and “an ellipsis is not when the moon moves in front of the sun.”

The overworked ellipsis is Jennifer Price Mahoney’s pet punctuation peeve. Mahoney is an associate director of IUPUI’s University Writing Center, part of the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI.

“Ellipses indicate that something has been left out, and as a reader, I want to know what are you not telling me,” Mahoney said.

The center, with locations on the fourth floor of Cavanaugh Hall and in University Library, has about 4,500 visits each fall and another 3,800 each spring, according to Mahoney.

Jennifer Price Mahoney

Writing Center staff are available to assist IUPUI students who need help tweaking a draft as well as those with a writing assignment who don’t have a draft and have no idea where to start, Mahoney said.

When it comes to using those commas and semicolons, good punctuation is transparent, Mahoney said. Good punctuation makes the meaning clearer, but you don’t notice it when it is properly applied, she said.

If Rubin’s observations are reflective of national trends, students aren’t alone in their need for help with punctuation.

“Have you read a newspaper lately?” Rubin said when I asked him about the importance for including a National Punctuation Day among the official holidays featured in Chase’s Calendar of Events.

Rubin used to sit at his kitchen table, red marker in hand, and mark up typos, misspellings and improper punctuation in newspapers and other publications.

When he finished with the reading material at hand, “It looked like I had popped a vein and bled all over it,” Rubin said.

It was a delightful surprise when I told him I worked for Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and he countered with “Oh, IUPUI.”

Punctuation Spire, artist William Crutchfield

His familiarity with the campus stems from visits to Indianapolis years ago as a member of the statistics crew for events held by the organization now known as USA Track and Field.

Rubin sent me an advance announcement of the Letterman contest, and I sent him a picture of the Punctuation Spire, the towering sculpture in the atrium of the IUPUI Campus Center.

Punctuation Spire, by Herron School of Art and Design grad and former faculty member William Crutchfield, soars 28 feet high and weighs 3,000 pounds. The typewriter-inspired art features about a dozen basic symbols, including an apostrophe and a period, sandwiched between a question mark base and an exclamation point at the top.

Gifted to Herron, located on the IUPUI campus, in 2005 and installed in the Campus Center in 2010, the steel, aluminum and wood ode to punctuation is a fitting place to celebrate National Punctuation Day, if anyone chooses.

(For more about National Punctuation Day, see the video.)

The career of Indiana University School of Nursing Dean Robin Newhouse has been marked by purpose and serendipity, a combination that brought her to Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

“In some ways my trajectory here has been somewhat unexpected, but it is clear that it’s not,” said Newhouse, who became dean of the IU School of Nursing on July 1. “What appears to be serendipity really has been very purposeful and absolutely right.

Robin Newhouse

She had not been thinking of leaving Maryland, where she and her husband had lived their entire lives, nor their home, which was a part of her grandfather’s farm where she and her husband, Frank, had lived since 1979. She also hadn’t thought of leaving the University of Maryland, where she had spent eight years, the last four as a professor and chair of the nursing school’s Department of Organizational Systems and Adult Health.

“It was one of those things,” Newhouse said. “I was not looking for a dean position, but a colleague I consult with asked if I would consider it. Being selected as a candidate for the job was an honor.”

When she visited the nursing school, Newhouse said she was struck by what she saw.

“The quality of the faculty and staff is very high, with world-class researchers, teachers and leaders who are well-known for their impact and scholarship,” Newhouse said. But the character of the individuals who comprise the school impressed her most of all, she said. “They are good people.”

The fact that she entered the field of nursing is a bit serendipitous too.

She was studying to be a teacher. But those plans changed after the experiences she had as a candy striper and as a nursing assistant in the emergency room at a local hospital.

“The nurses I saw were pretty incredible,” she said. “They were so impressive, the way they advocated and cared for patients, and made me realize that they were the glue that held acute care services together. They changed people’s lives on a daily basis.”

Newhouse, enrolled in community college, switched to a two-year nursing program. That program allowed her to become a licensed practical nurse at the end of the first year. She then worked for a year as a licensed practical nurse in a physician’s office while she completed the second year.

As a registered nurse, Newhouse quickly moved through nursing ranks as she became a charge nurse, served as supervisor of ambulatory services and opened a surgery center.

As she began shouldering additional responsibilities for patients as well as budgets for hospital services, Newhouse turned to higher education to help prepare her for the work ahead.

Over the years, she returned to the University of Maryland campuses three times, receiving a Bachelor of Science in nursing, a master’s in general administration, with a major in health care, and a Master of Science and a Ph.D. from the School of Nursing.

When she finished her doctorate, Newhouse became a nurse researcher at Johns Hopkins Hospital and an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing.

During the five years at Johns Hopkins, she led the development of the nursing evidence-based practice model that is now used internationally. Moving to Johns Hopkins also meant that she would be teaching for the first time.

“I loved teaching,” she said. “That was a surprise since I was so grounded in enhancing the translation of evidence to clinical practice.”

Newhouse left Johns Hopkins for the University of Maryland, where she spent the first four years as an assistant dean of the newly implemented Doctor of Nursing Practice program.

When Newhouse was selected as dean of the IU School of Nursing, then-IUPUI executive vice chancellor Nasser Paydar said, “Dr. Newhouse’s expertise, leadership and international recognition in research will be critically important as our campus and university advance our strategic goals for catalyzing research and accelerating innovation and discovery.”

In 2014, Newhouse was inducted into the International Nurse Researcher Hall of Fame. Created in 2010, the Hall of Fame is one of Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing’s International Awards for Nursing Excellence. The award recognizes nurse researchers who have achieved significant and sustained broad national or international recognition for their work, and whose research has had an impact on the profession and the people it serves.

Having become dean of the IU School of Nursing, Newhouse looks ahead toward the next decade.

“My goal is to accelerate the impact of nurses through education, research, service and practice in collaborative relationships with patients, health systems, stakeholders and interprofessional colleagues,” she said

Before coming to IUPUI, she had already begun to see her career entering a phase that had less to do with her individual work and more to do with enhancing the work of others on behalf of patients and the nursing profession. “That’s why this position made perfect sense.

A new book detailing teen novels that feature characters with autism will help libraries select books that help young readers understand the disorder and foster acceptance, says one of the three authors, an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

“Autism in Young Adult Novels: An Annotated Bibliography,” co-authored by IUPUI’s Rachel Applegate and Marilyn Irwin.

“Autism in Young Adult Novels: An Annotated Bibliography” identifies novels published between 1968 and 2013 that have autism content and evaluates how the lives of characters with autism are portrayed, said Rachel Applegate, chair of the Department of Library and Information Science in the School of Informatics and Computing.

“This is a book that focuses on the autism spectrum, and there hasn’t been anything like it before,” she said

The target audience for the book is librarians who will be able to use it to select high-quality, engaging novels that positively and accurately portray autism and use those works to educate young adults about the disorder, Applegate said.

Awareness of autism has grown significantly, but teens often don’t know much about it, the authors said. With greater awareness and understanding comes greater acceptance, they said.

A second author is Marilyn Irwin, a retired IUPUI library and information science associate professor who began work on the book in 2010. Her research interests focused on literature for youth and disabilities. The third author is Annette Y. Goldsmith, a lecturer in the University of Washington Information School.

In the first section of the book, the authors analyze how characters with autism spectrum disorder are presented. They ask questions such as:

• Where do they live and go to school?
• Do they have friends?
• Were they bullied?
• Do they have good relationships with their family?
• How are they treated by others?
• Were the experiences in the book true to life?

This discussion is followed by a comprehensive bibliography.

The three authors read nearly 400 novels to write the book. They found the books through keyword searches in publishers’ catalogs, including Amazon’s, and asked for suggestions through librarian listservs.

“It was an eye-opening experience,” Applegate said. “As a whole, the novels contained a surprisingly small number of stereotypes, and the characters tend to have a better life than often occurs in real life.”

One novel was written by a young man with autism, Applegate said. “One thing I remember from that book is that every adult talking to the child character who had autism seemed to be shouting, screaming at the child. I wondered if that’s what people with autism perceive day to day, that people are shouting at them, because they are very sensitive to things like noise.”

My family reunion is just a few days away.

Perhaps you are like me and look forward to such an occasion with a little bit of apprehension. Family get-togethers have the potential for making memories worthy of a Hallmark movie — or an episode of “Cops.”

One of the great things about working on a university campus is that you have access to outstanding professional minds who can shed practical insight on numerous life situations.

So I turned to the campus professionals at Counseling and Psychological Services — commonly known as CAPS — for some words of advice. Staff psychologist Kory Carey and CAPS Director Julia Lash graciously offered their words of wisdom.

Remember the purpose and set reasonable expectations, Lash said.

“Dictionary.com defines reunion as ‘a gathering of relatives, friends or associates at regular intervals or after separation.’ The purpose of the reunion is to ‘gather,’ touch base, catch up, not to cultivate deep, intimate relationships,” the CAPS director said. “Your reunion will NOT look like a Hallmark card. Remember, those cards are snapshots — not in real time.”

Julia Lash, Director, CAPS

“Expect to enjoy conversations with some, and not with others,” Lash said. “Know that some people will enjoy their day, and others will not. That is not a failure; that is reality!”

Both Lash and Carey addressed my questions about handling landmine conversations such as comments about your weight or political views.

Their advice: Know whom you can talk to about what.

“Know your own limits,” Carey said. If you know that you may get “overheated” talking with a particular person about a certain topic, “take care of how you allow that person to engage you,” Carey said.

“The cousin that has been on the opposite side from you on all political and social issues for the past decade is not likely to have seen the light.”

Korey Carey,  Staff Psychologist, CAPS

If you are able to connect with a like-minded relative, share your thoughts. Otherwise, nod your acknowledgement and step away from a potentially volatile conversation, Lash said.

As for unsolicited remarks about your weight, while they most likely will put you on the defensive, don’t return tit for tat.

Try saying something like “Wow, that was pretty blunt!” to casually alert the other person to his or her rudeness and to set a boundary that will get you your respect.

And how do you handle mad dashes for the final piece of pecan pie? Or the scramble to make sure you get a piece of Aunt Mae’s pound cake?

In Carey’s case, the family prize is an aunt’s honeybun cake — a delightful yellow cake with cinnamon, nuts and plenty of sugary glaze.

“At our last family gathering, someone actually tried to hide the entire cake,” Carey said.

Her advice: “Choose your battles wisely. … Is this something I want to get into an argument over, or is it a piece of food that I can have in another setting.” And if it is a case of equity and fairness, don’t be afraid to tell someone that they have already had one slice.

For many families, drinks at the typical family gathering are stronger than soft drinks or double-strength Kool-Aid (one of my favorites).

Kory Carey’s Aunt Brenda’s Honey Bun Cake

Carey and Lash sounded a warning: avoid excessive alcohol/substances.

“Among other things, alcohol lowers our inhibitions and ability to make quick judgment calls,” Lash said. “Making good decisions about what we say and do may prevent a difficult situation from becoming traumatic.”

Everyone has seen YouTube videos of alcohol-fueled fights at family gatherings, even weddings.

In some families, an esteemed member may have the verbal or physical clout to calm warring factions. If you aren’t that person, stay out of the fray, and under no circumstances should you try to be a physical referee, Carey said.

“Refrain from physical confrontations,” Carey said. If dire circumstances erupt, allow police or family relatives with law enforcement background to handle the situation.

Take a break when needed: Give yourself permission to take a break during the day. Step outside, go to the restroom or check on something in your car. If you feel tense or overwhelmed, give yourself a chance to de-stress — take a few deep breaths — and when you are ready to leave, go home.

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, have fun, both professionals said.

Don’t take things too seriously. Go into the reunion with the expectation of having fun and enjoying the moment!

IUPUI first lady-select Niloo Paydar grabbed my attention and admiration during our first chat when I learned of her behind-the-scenes role in a critically acclaimed exhibit — one of my favorites — at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Nasser and Niloo Paydar at an IMA opening.

We were strangers engaged in small talk during the 2013 IUPUI Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Dinner when Paydar shared that she was the IMA curator for “Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt.”

It had been seven years since that awesome exhibit of dozens of magnificent original quilts crafted by the women of Gee’s Bend, Ala., had hung on IMA’s walls, but the thrill of experiencing those works still lingered.

Paydar’s words in a 2006 IMA press release captured their essence perfectly:

“The women of Gee’s Bend have transformed the quilt, a necessity, into a work of art, using patterns that reveal their distinctive styles and innovative designs,” Niloo Paydar, IMA’s curator of textile and fashion arts, said. “With their bright colors, bold patterns, and the unexpected variations in the compositions, Gee’s Bend quilts are considered outstanding examples of contemporary American art.”

The Gee’s Bend exhibit at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2006. Niloo Paydar curated this exhibit. Photo courtesy of IMA.

On Aug. 16, Paydar begins her work as first lady when her husband, Nasser Paydar, IUPUI executive vice chancellor and former chancellor of IU East, takes the helm as IUPUI chancellor.

“I’ve had the opportunity to experience life as a campus leader’s spouse,” Niloo Paydar said. “However, I realize in this new role, I will have many more opportunities to spend time at IUPUI to interact with students and meet members of the community.”

May those “many more opportunities” add to the beauty of the outstanding work of art known as the IUPUI campus.

Here’s a short Q&A interview as a starter:

IUPUIntelligence: Tell me something that you would like people to know about your personal and/or family life. And then talk about your professional life over the past decade and whether you plan to continue with that or make some changes as your spouse becomes chancellor.

Niloo Paydar (left) and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright at the opening of “Read My Pins,” the exhibition of jewelry from Albright’s personal collection, at the IMA in 2010. Photo courtesy of IMA.

Paydar: Nasser and I met while students at Syracuse University and have been married for 36 years. We have two sons, both of whom are in college. We moved to Indianapolis in 1985, and Indy is our home; we love the city and our community. I have been working at the Indianapolis Museum of Art as curator of textiles and fashion arts since 1986. I love my job and intend to continue at the IMA.  Additionally, of course, I am eager to support IUPUI alongside my husband.

IUPUIntelligence: Are there any specific responsibilities or situations that you are really looking forward to handling as a higher-ed first lady?

Paydar: I look forward to helping any way I can to promote IUPUI students’ success. IUPUI is a great asset to our community and a very comprehensive campus. Given that most of IUPUI’s graduates remain in Central Indiana, the campus is a significant driver for economic development and our community’s quality of life. The success of IUPUI students is vital to our community.

IUPUIntelligence: What will provide the most fun in your new role?

The Paydars (right) at the July 7, 2015, open house held in their honor.

Paydar: I’m very excited about this opportunity! Through Nasser’s 30 years as an IUPUI faculty member and, more recently, a campus leader, I have had the opportunity to meet many faculty and staff on campus. In my new role, I look forward to meeting with many more people and groups, and especially interacting with IUPUI students.

IUPUIntelligence: If you could ask the outgoing first lady for advice that would help you make the transition easier, what would you like to ask?

Paydar: I truly admire Sandra Petronio for her numerous accomplishments and for her outstanding service as IUPUI first lady. I look forward to any advice she has for me as I prepare to support the campus and the chancellor in the years ahead.

The saying that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer only tells part of the story.

The rich, or those who live in a community with greater access to health-promoting and health-protecting resources and opportunities, also have a greater life expectancy, according to “Worlds Apart: Gaps in Life Expectancy in the Indianapolis Metro Area.”

The report — produced by the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in partnership with The Polis Center at IUPUI — looks at the life expectancies of residents in 11 Central Indiana counties as well as smaller geographic areas within those counties.

Among those smaller areas are two ZIP codes, one in Carmel and the other just south of Monument Circle in Indianapolis. The two ZIP codes are just 28 miles from each other, but they are a world apart in terms of life expectancy.

Those living in the Carmel ZIP code have a life expectancy of 83.7 years, compared to 69.4 years for those living in the inner-city ZIP code.

A life expectancy gap is not unique to those two ZIP codes. Consistent with patterns noted in other U.S. cities, there is a cluster of low life expectancy in the ZIP codes of the urban core, while areas of high life expectancy form a ring around that core along the suburban transitions from the city.

The report’s calculations of life expectancy at birth are based upon the record of deaths and corresponding population size in a given county or ZIP code during the five-year period from 2009 to 2013.

According to the report, when certain communities have shorter life expectancy, it does not simply mean that older members lose a few years at the end of life. Some residents die much too young – perhaps in infancy, or in early adulthood, or from the effects of chronic diseases being played out decades too soon. These premature deaths have a larger influence on a community’s life expectancy than do deaths at older ages.

What the numbers show is how where you live can affect your health, said Tess Weathers, a faculty member in the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health’s Social and Behavioral Sciences department and the lead researcher on the project. “That life expectancy number tells us something about the place, the conditions of everyday living in those communities that makes things different.

“Suddenly, you realize that a very small distance can make a big difference in the trajectory of a person’s life,” Weathers said. “And then you have to ask yourself why is that? And what can we do about it? We hope this report starts a conversation and brings diverse voices together to look for answers to the questions. A gap of this size should not exist in the heartland of America.”

While life expectancy is partly based on someone’s life choices, such as diet and smoking, and on genetics, this study also shows just how much the community plays a part, she said.

About 25 percent of the health of a population is attributed to genes, biology and health behaviors, and roughly 75 percent of population health is attributed to upstream “social determinants of health,” referring to “greater access to health-promoting and health-protecting resources and opportunities,” according to the report.

In many places, meeting fundamental human needs is difficult because of economic and social disadvantage, Weathers said.

“Accessing resources that many of us take for granted — such as quality child care and quality education, safe and affordable housing, a secure job with decent pay, air and soil free of toxic pollutants, and a place to play, shop or socialize with neighbors without fear of crime and discrimination — is extremely difficult in some communities,” she said. “All of these differences in opportunity contribute to variations in the number of years certain populations can expect to live.”

Sandra Petronio, Chancellor Charles R. Bantz and family dog Arabella.

Soon IUPUI will be under new leadership. Chancellor Charles R. Bantz will pass the baton to Chancellor Nasser Paydar in mid-August.

As a communications specialist, I had the honor of being backstage at the inauguration of Chancellor Bantz and his wife, IUPUI first lady Sandra Petronio. It would be my baptism into the world of the pomp and circumstance that comes along with such Indiana University occasions.

My memories of that event focus on the dynamics of interactions among the extended Bantz family as they proudly celebrated the accomplishment of one of their own, while recognizing the tremendous responsibility inherent in the mantle Bantz was accepting.

Over the years, I have also had the privilege of attending the annual AO Building Holiday Party, hosted by Bantz and Petronio (and first dog Arabella) at Cedar Crest — the “White House,” so to speak, for IUPUI chancellors. It was a social event I always looked forward to attending.

Sandra Petronio at IUPUI Ice Cream Social.

With Cedar Crest under renovation, the Tobias House has been home for the Bantz/Petronio duo during their last few years at the helm of the state’s urban research university. With the approaching changing of the guard has come the organized chaos that is called moving as the family prepares to return to “civilian” academic life.

They have been “packing and unpacking nonstop,” Dr. Petronio said in one of the emails we exchanged in pursuit of this post. Despite those demands, she graciously agreed to set aside time — and energy — to address my questions about her time as first lady.

Here, in her own words, are those reflections:

I came to IUPUI as a faculty* member and in partnership with my husband, Chancellor Bantz. It was exciting to consider all the possibilities and, though I had experienced a few mid-level administrative roles in the academy, I looked forward to learning more about how the highest level of administration guided the growth and development of a campus. 

Chancellor Bantz and Petronio cheer on the Jaguars.

One of the most memorable aspects of this new adventure was to discover a community devoted to IUPUI. In my experience, this was unprecedented. The people of Indianapolis and Indiana in general have committed much time and effort in all different ways, making both the Chancellor’s role and mine, as First Lady, an enjoyable endeavor. We found wonderful friends and appreciate the ability we had to work with them making the campus what it is today.

Further, I was and continue to be impressed by the students on this campus. They actively endeavor to use their experience to achieve goals they have set for themselves, motivating us to strive to do more for them. The same can be said of the faculty, Deans, and the Chancellor’s administrative team in their commitment to this extraordinary campus.

Sandra Petronio

I am also very grateful for the opportunity to make a specific contribution to the faculty and students by working with the Chancellor to develop the focus on translating research into practice. It was clear that the IUPUI campus was a translational institution, but giving structure to the existing research programs under the rubric of translational science shifted the definition of the research enterprise occurring at IUPUI. This initiative, now a center, has been successful in celebrating and encouraging faculty to engage in translational research across the disciplines, strengthening, not only the knowledge base, but also producing research that improves lives in meaningful ways.

This has been an extraordinary experience and I feel grateful that I had the opportunity to make contributions to this exceptional campus. I am delighted to turn this role over to First Lady Niloo Paydar. Knowing the skills and perspective of First Lady Paydar, I am sure that she will find her path, making important and meaningful contributions that will carrying the campus forward. (Reflections of Serving IUPUI as First Lady (2003-2015),  Sandra Petronio)

*Sandra Petronio is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies and a senor affiliate faculty in the Charles W. Fairbanks Center of Medical Ethics, IUPUI.

Her first book took 30 years, but Katrina Patterson already has a second book in mind.

Patterson is the Bachelor of Social Work student services secretary and recorder in the Indiana University School of Social Work administrative offices at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, where she has worked for more than 20 years.

Her first book, “Ralph’s Journey to Babyland: A place for the night,” was published this year and is available on Amazon. The book tells the story of Ralph, a 10-year-old boy who is playing with his dog Sonic and loses track of time. Before he knows it, Ralph is lost and then walks through a cloud. What happens next is Ralph’s amazing discovery of a world of babies and the casual, free, candy-filled lives they live.

She got the idea for the book in 1985, while she was in high school. Patterson had completed an English assignment by writing a children’s book. She kept it, knowing that one day she wanted to do something more with it.

Katrina Patterson

Then life came along. Patterson got married and had a daughter and then had twins. She took the book out and read it to her children. She even talked to her brother-in-law about illustrating the book, but nothing came of it.

After a colleague at the School of Social Work came out with a children’s book last year about making right and wrong decisions, Patterson mentioned that she had written a book, too. “I explained I had it for years and wrote it when I was in high school. I kind of laughed it off.” Her friend, Carolyn Gentle-Genitty, asked to see it.

Gentle-Genitty made a few changes and suggested that Patterson illustrate the book herself. What’s more, as Gentle-Genitty had just completed publishing her book, she had the answer to Patterson’s most basic question: how to get it into print.

The book, which is available on Amazon, earned the following review: “Very well written and my grandson loves it.”

Patterson already has a second book in mind. It will be about one of her children and the struggles he has being a twin but the only one with attention deficit disorder.

When she recently asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, Patterson thought he might say a zookeeper because he had mentioned that once before.

This time, though, he paused and thought about it before saying, “I think I’ll just be me.” His answer provided the title for her upcoming book.

Let me say what everyone thinks when they first encounter all those orange-striped barriers blocking two left lanes of New York Street through campus.

What the heck!?

OK, maybe what they are saying isn’t quite that tame, but you get my drift.

What are those barricades? How long will they be in the way? When will we get back to four lanes of New York from White River Parkway to West Street?

Let’s make one thing clear: There is no going back to four eastbound lanes. (Keeping this in mind could help prevent head-on collisions when the final orange New York Street barriers come down next year.)

Construction junction: New York Street and University Boulevard.

And depending upon your perspective, travel along the street is going to get a little worse before it goes from good to better.

How so?

This announcement was in my email Wednesday: “The New York Street entrance to Lot #63 (Lansing Street and New York) will be closed starting on Monday, July 20, 2015. Parking Services will have signage in place to help make faculty, staff, students and visitors aware of the entrance closing.”

That message followed this one from the day before: “Work is progressing, but only at the pace that weather will allow. In order to help expedite and gain efficiencies in the work, the New York Street entrance to Lot #58 will close early this week.

“The good news is that the Lot #54 will be closed only until about July 27. … You will be able to enter and exit Lot #58 off of Patterson St.”

Now, in case you have been away from campus or the city this summer and have no idea what is going on, check your emails from around June 24:

“The City project to convert New York Street from one-way to two-way traffic is ramping up!!

“Lane restrictions are in place on New York Street.

“We should expect the permanent closure of Beauty Avenue and Patterson Drive at New York Street to take place this week.”

So there you have it: New York Street is on its way to becoming a two-way thoroughfare. (Michigan Street is scheduled for the same transformation, but that’s a blog for another day.)

But don’t fret over IUPUI using budget funds for the reconfiguration.

“The city is paying for all the New York Street improvements,” said Niraj S. Patel, senior construction manager for Campus Facilities Services. The improvements are being financed by the Indianapolis Downtown tax-increment-financing fund.

Patel is coordinating the New York Street project activities as they affect campus operations.

Phase one of the New York Street restructure, now underway, includes the construction of a 8-foot-wide bike trail adjacent to the north side of New York Street, a new entrance to Parking Lot 63, and the complete closure of the New York Street entrances to Beauty Avenue and Patterson Street.

The western portion of New York Street that will be converted to two-way traffic over the next year.

This phase also includes construction of new center medians on the eastern end of the street, and the widening of New York in front of the IU Robert H. McKinney School of Law.

The New York and Michigan street reshaping is part of IUPUI’s Master Plan and offers multiple benefits, according to an Inside IUPUI article by Ric Burrous.

According to the article, which includes a helpful FAQ section, those benefits include:

• Improvements to vehicle and pedestrian safety
• Facilitated traffic movement
• Increased travel options for drivers, transit and cyclists
• Creation of a sense of place on campus

Despite some delays due to inclement weather, the work on the north side of New York Street is on schedule to be completed by Aug. 10.

After that, the work will move to the south side of the street, before moving into the third phase that includes improvements to the intersections at West Street on the eastern edge of campus and the west side of the bridge at White River Parkway on the west side of campus.

“Once that is complete, (the city) will open the street to two-way traffic,” Patel said.

According to Patel, the city’s contractor said that traffic along the construction zone is moving about as well as could be expected.

In the meantime, what’s the word from Patel?

“Drive safely. As always, be aware,” he said.

‘Mother’s Helper’

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life,” Pablo Picasso reportedly said.

A 16-foot highchair and a trail of brown ants are my favorite campus dust busters.

Perhaps your daily routine could stand a little dusting off. Let me prescribe a walking tour of the public sculptures on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus.

First stop should be that stone pyramid with a seasonal water flow. Wood Fountain — south of University Library along New York Street — is first and foremost a work of art.

The pyramid designers, Singh Associates, added the water function so it could also serve as a fountain. Singh is also the artist behind the geyser-like McKinney Fountain on the IU Bloomington campus.

Wood Fountain, completed in 1995, is one of 29 listed public sculptures on the IUPUI campus; others include the Chihuly DNA Tower at the IU School of Medicine and Punctuation Spire in the Campus Center. Some pieces are on loan, but many are owned by IU.

Chihuly DNA Tower

Sherry Rouse has been the curator of campus art for Indiana University for 16 years. She is responsible for the care and auditing of non-museum art on all seven IU-administered campuses, and she also chairs the campus art committee on each campus.

“(Each) committee is there to review large purchases and or gifts of public art for appropriateness, safety and preservation, and a number of other issues,” Rouse said. “I need to have the guidance of the local campuses to make good decisions, and they can use my expertise to make good decisions.

“Everywhere the eye rests it should see something of beauty,” said IU President Herman B Wells, according to the tagline Rouse uses on her email signature.

“Something of beauty” could easily describe her favorite item in the IUPUI public art collection.

“I am a big fan of the Chihuly, as I got to watch the installation, which was quite something,” Rouse said. The Chihuly DNA Tower is in the Morris Mills Atrium of the VanNuys Medical Science Building.

David Bowen’s ‘Procession of Ants’

In 2009, IUPUI graduate museum studies students compiled a list of IUPUI’s public art on Wikipedia. While the list isn’t complete — some new sculptures have been added, others no longer are on view — the list is a good start for planning a tour.

Rouse offered this suggestion for how students, faculty and staff can really benefit from having access to the fantastic art on the IU campuses: “Open those eyes and really look at things,” she said.

One of my favorite campus artworks was featured in an @IUPUI tweet July 7.

“Procession of Ants” by David Bowen is in the flower bed on the north side of Taylor Hall. It is a trail of 15 steel ants that stretches over about 20 feet as they travel from east to west and up a wall.

As I mentioned earlier, my other favorite is “Mother’s Helper,” the 16-foot stainless-steel highchair at the west entrance to the Joseph T. Taylor Hall.

The chair’s rockers straddle a large Latin cross on which a bronze infant and dictionary sit.

‘Mother’s Helper’ Base

According to artist Derek Chalfant, a Herron sculpture and furniture/woodworking grad, “the highchair represents nutrients needed for life; the rocker symbolizes rest and (nurturing); the baby with its head on the dictionary represents knowledge; and the cross is a symbol of spirituality — all ingredients needed for human growth.”

And a great piece for a great university!

Need another reason to get off that couch and be physically active? You may be more likely to develop chronic pain if you don’t.

An Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis researcher is studying the relationship between physical activity/fitness and the prevention or reduction of chronic pain among adults as they age. Such research could have a wide impact, given that as many as 100 million adults in the U.S. suffer from chronic pain.

Kelly Naugle, an assistant professor in the Department of Kinesiology in the IU School of Physical Education and Tourism Management, is studying systems in the body that reduce pain or amplify it.

Many people with chronic pain have dysfunctional pain inhibitory and facilitatory systems that actually lead to the amplification of pain, Naugle said. The risk of developing chronic pain increases as we get older, because — as with everything else — age takes a toll on the pain inhibitory and facilitatory system.

While nothing can be done about aging, a growing body of evidence suggests that exercise may be a viable means to prevent chronic pain and reduce symptoms among those who have chronic pain.

Naugle said that her previous study, in which people self-reported their physical activity, provided evidence that physical activity is related to pain modulatory function, a potential mechanism underlying multiple pain conditions. The study showed that physical activity may have a protective effect against the decline in pain modulatory capacity seen in older adults and those with chronic pain.

If that hypothesis, the next step would be to take people who don’t have a good pain inhibitory capacity or have a central nervous system that is sensitized to pain, and have them participate in an exercise intervention.

“So the first step is to verify there is a relationship with a cross sectional study and then do a longitudinal study designed to determine whether an exercise intervention can improve the pain modulatory function,” she said.

Assuming that physical activity and being fit help reduce or prevent chronic pain, there still is no guarantee that an individual won’t have pain. But that individual may be able to decrease her risk of developing chronic pain, Naugle said.

Naugle expects to complete the physical activity-pain study next year.

At first it was one car – white – behind me as I drove east on Crawfordsville Road headed to work Friday morning.

Soon I spotted two more vehicles from the famous Chevy family in the left lane – and then two more.

Then it hit me when I saw the line of Corvettes – make that parade of Corvettes — waiting to turn into the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at the 16th Street gate.

Must be a “Vette” show in town, I thought to myself.

Not just any show, I learned, but the show called the granddaddy of all shows, considered by some as the nation’s most prestigious and longest running all-Corvette show, according to local media coverage.

For the first time ever The Bloomington Gold Corvettes USA Show takes over the Indianapolis Speedway this weekend.

Great photos from the show hit Twitter, including a collage from Melanie Shaughnessy.

Photo via Twitter @MelAnn51

The Corvette holds a special place in American automobile history.

“The Corvette is the iconic American borne and bred sports car, and that is the heart of its popularity,” said IUPUI associate professor Pete Hylton, director of the motorsports engineering program at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

The Corvette show will hold a special place in at least one couple’s history as the site of their engagement.

My first encounters with the American obsession with the Corvette came during college. My alma mater had a Vette Club. As far as cars go, its members, including my sociology professor, dominated homecoming parades.

The Bloomington show takes to the Marion and Hendricks counties streets for a road tour http://www.visithendrickscounty.com/blog/post/2015/18/1-000-Corvettes-Coming-to-Hendricks-County/16170/ at 6 p.m. Saturday, June 27 when more than 1,000 Corvettes will travel from the IMS to U.S. 40, to Cartersburg Road and to the square in Danville before ending the ride at Metropolis Mall in Plainfield. There the cars will be on public display.

Hundreds if not thousands, including this blogger, were in Plainfield several years ago when another Corvette road tour made an Indiana stop.

As part of a 50th anniversary road trip originating at The National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green, Ky., that show featured at least one Corvette from every year, but one, of the car’s production. All were on display at Griot’s Garage for spectators to get up close and personal. It was a great time.

Proposal on Victory Circle
Photo via Twitter @CorvetteBlogger

A quick stop at the Corvette Museum as a break during a trip to Tennessee offered a great time too. I particularly loved the Corvette nursery where some of the “babies” were waiting for their “parents” to take delivery of them.

Unfortunately I don’t own a Corvette, unless you count the ones in my collection of Hot Wheels, Johnny Lightnings, M2Machines, etc.

My most recent addition to my collection is the Hot Wheels Star Wars Darth Vadar car. You can find it, along with its R2-D2, Chewbacca, Yoda, Luke Skywalker, Darth Maul, and Han Solo counterparts in local Walmarts, Meiers, KMarts.

Mattel introduced the toy car last year during the 2014 San Diego Comic Con show, along with a full-size working model. The toy 1:64 version in its light-saber case sold for $40 at Comic Con.

Car and Driver had a run-down: http://blog.caranddriver.com/the-darth-car-12-things-you-need-to-know-about-hot-wheels-life-size-150-mph-darth-vader-car/

The real-life or 1:1 version wasn’t up for sale. That car has a 526 hp Chevy LS3V-8 under the hood and was built on the body of a Corvette C5, the model used to pace the Indy 500 in 1998, 2002 and 2004.

Word is plans are in the works for the IMS, with Hendricks County as a partner, to hose the Bloomington Gold show for several years to come – another reason to rename Indy the motorsports capital of the world.

Barry Rosenthal’s ‘Found in nature’
Source: Things Organized Neatly

I got that “why didn’t I think of that?” feeling when I first browsed Austin Radcliffe’s Webby Award-winning website.

Radcliffe, a 2012 Herron School of Art and Design graduate, creates and curates images of everyday stuff for the website “Things Organized Neatly.”

My first thought — or assumption — was that the genius images must be rooted in what I called AOCD — artistic obsessive compulsive disorder — for lack of any known, real terminology.

More than one image reminded me of how a relative tackled dishwashing.

First, all the dirty glasses, spoons, forks, knives, plates, bowls, pots and pans were laid out in military parade formation across the kitchen countertops. Then they were marched one group at a time into the sink for washing.

Totally inefficient. Certainly not a thing of beauty to be photographed and shared.

Things Organized Neatly Feb. 26, 2014 post: ‘Car’ – a disassembled 1980s Mitsubishi Colt.

Boy was I short-sighted.

Since his days as a Herron junior, Radcliffe has posted hundreds of photos of ordinary objects just as neatly organized as those unwashed dishes. At a New York gala last month he received the 2015 People’s Voice Webby Award in the personal blog/website category.

“Do you arrange all your own compositions, or do you also look for neat compositions by other artists?” I asked in an email interview.

“Images on my blog come from artists, mainly photographers, all over the world,” Radcliffe said. “I have featured approximately one photo every day for the last five years, so I couldn’t have done it all myself. The site has become a documentation of the trend/style of organizing things neatly.”

Brooke Shanesy for Brush Factory – Neatly Organized

Did he say a trend? A style?

Yep. Apparently Radcliffe is not the only artist with a penchant for order.

“Are you as neat as this in your everyday life?” I asked, still thinking his artistic pursuits had to be tied to a Felix Unger or Adrian Monk personality.

“My apartment is not as tidy as most people (would) think, though I am acutely aware of neatness in design and image,” Radcliffe said. “There are a lot of scientific applications such as archaeology and geology which interest me. Artists like Tom Sachs and Mark Dion opened me up to these relationships to art.

Googling “Dion” and “Sachs” led me to Neatly Art Magazine.

“From Wunderkammern to modern forms of artistic compulsion,” proclaimed the subtitle. Hey, does that imply that my assumption of a tie to compulsive behavior was understandable?

“Follow me on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/neatlyart/neatly-art/” the magazine begged.

Award show host actor and comedian Hannibal Buress shown with Webby awards.

So I did and found a whole world of the art of neatly organized things.

There was Derick Melander’s tree trunk wearing 25 different colored belts and his interlocked rings of white sneakers and work boots, just to name two.

And there was that 1955 photo of a young boy and a girl standing among shelves of dozens of doll heads at the Ideal Toy Company in Long Island.

(Hmm, maybe I can find a use for those dozen identical Barbie dolls that I purchased new for less than two bucks each.)

Austin Radcliffe’s ‘Springs Organized Neatly’ – Radcliffe made this photograph with the talented Brooke Shanesy to promote and share his excitement about winning a Webby.

Having a well-known blog (350,000 Tumblr followers) has opened doors for Radcliffe.

“It is very exciting to be recognized by such a prestigious Internet award, for a blog project I started while at Herron. And the Webby people actually asked me to participate this year; I didn’t apply on my own, “Radcliffe said. “The awards ceremony was surreal and definitely memorable. I don’t know exactly what it will lead to, though I have already gotten a few new emails from creative agencies who want to work together.”

 The successful IUPUI alumnus literally put some springs into his art in response to winning one of the coiled-spring-shaped Webby Awards.

 “One of my latest images is ‘Springs Organized Neatly,” which I created specifically in celebration of my Webby Award,” said Radcliffe, who shot the award-inspired photo in collaboration with Brooke Shanesy.

Fans of the HBO TV series “Game of Thrones” (and the books on which the series is based) know you can’t take a stroll through Westeros without tripping over a knight, a sellsword or a black-cloaked Ranger of the Night’s Watch. But when it comes to protection from harm, what many citizens of the fictional Seven Kingdoms really need these days is an epidemiologist.

It seems the mysterious and deadly greyscale, an infectious disease that leaves its victims’ flesh stiff and dead, has returned. The skin of those afflicted becomes cracked and turns an ominous mottled black and grey color before becoming stone-like to the touch. And that means that White Walkers, dragons and would-be kings with itchy sword fingers aren’t the only things citizens need to fear.

What is greyscale? How is it spread? What are the control measures? And most importantly — especially for a certain disgraced former advisor to the Mother of Dragons — is there a cure? These are all questions that have taken on new urgency in the current season.

Whether in Westeros or places a bit closer to home, two questions are always asked with the emergence of any “new” disease: “What is this?” and “Am I at risk?” From the Black Death that killed as much as half the population of Europe during the 14th century to last year’s Ebola outbreak, our history is full of “plagues and poxes” that emerge, wreak havoc and cause panic.

When it comes to managing outbreaks of greyscale in Westeros, the response has been a bit, shall we say, unrefined. The most common way to prevent greyscale from spreading is to cut off any body part showing signs of the disease, but this treatment is not always effective. Here in the real world, we have a secret weapon that the characters in “Game of Thrones” don’t have: epidemiologists.

Epidemiologists are disease detectives who use their knowledge of science and their training in public health principles to answer the “who, what, where, when, how and why” of any disease.

If a modern-day epidemiologist were to appear in Westeros, what might they do to combat greyscale? Tom Duszynski, a faculty member in the Department of Epidemiology at the IU Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, has a few ideas.

“With an infectious disease, time is of the essence,” Duszynski said. “One of the most important first steps an epidemiologist takes is to accurately and quickly define the specific characteristics of any newly discovered disease. Many diseases have similar symptoms, so it is critical that those responding to an outbreak have criteria by which to determine what is really a case of the disease and what isn’t.

“One of the challenges with last year’s Ebola outbreak was that it occurred at the height of flu season. Both illnesses are marked by high fevers and lethargy in their early stages. It was important for caregivers and first responders to know the difference between the two so they could take appropriate steps.

“With greyscale, I’d want to know what marks a true case of the disease so nobody is dragging out an ax if they get a bit of psoriasis on their leg.”

Duszynski notes that casting a wide net helps to identify as many cases of the disease as possible.

“My case definition may be something like, ‘any previously healthy individual who developed greying and flaking skin that has hardened over the past six months,’” he said. “Discoloration of the skin can be caused by a lot things, including poor blood flow. Flaky, scaly skin can be symptoms of a bad sunburn or eczema. So I’m going to catch all these in my case definition net. I can throw out those that aren’t truly greyscale later. As I catch more and more cases in my net — and exclude those that aren’t true cases — I can refine my definition to capture only true cases.”

According to Duszynski, the next steps are to determine how a disease is transmitted and what its reservoir is. The reservoir — where the disease lurks before being transmitted — could be a person, animal, plant, body of water or particular environment, such as a cave.

“Each disease has a portal of entry, which is how it gets into the human body, as well as portals of exit,” he said. “The portals of exit are important to know, because if the disease is transmitted person-to-person, you would want to know how it leaves the body. Maybe there is an intermediate host, such as a mosquito, that can pick up the infectious agent from the reservoir and transfer it to a susceptible person. If I know these things, I can begin to prevent infection, which is the ultimate goal.”

If greyscale is spread from person to person, Duszynski says he would want to implement isolation and quarantine.

“These are two very distinct terms used in public health,” he said. “They are often confused, but they have different meanings. Isolation is what people are placed in when they have the disease — they are acutely ill and they are infectious, meaning they are able to transmit the infection to another person. We would isolate those people to prevent them from spreading the disease and keep them in isolation until they are no longer infectious.

“I would put people in quarantine if they have been exposed to the disease but haven’t yet developed signs or symptoms; and they would remain in quarantine for the maximum incubation period, which is the maximum amount of time that has occurred between when someone was exposed to the disease and when they developed the disease. So if an infectious person were in a room with 10 other people, I would put the one person with the disease in isolation and the other 10 in quarantine.”

Armed with the knowledge of what a case of greyscale is, how it is spread and what its incubation period is, an epidemiologist could achieve the ultimate goal of prevention.

“This is exactly what public health does with any disease,” Duszynski said. “Disease prevention requires the implementation of control measures to prevent the spread of disease. The control measure could be as simple as hand washing, or something as complex as developing a vaccine. The biggest challenge is getting people to implement the control measure.”

When asked if he would be eager to address the greyscale outbreak himself, Duszynski chuckles. “I suspect it would be quite a challenge to eradicate or contain greyscale. Effective public health practice depends on modern science to help identify infectious agents, and Westeros doesn’t appear to have laboratories that are up to the task.

“An epidemiologist in Westeros would also have to contend with the local population’s belief in mystical forces. That was a challenge for early public health practitioners in the real world, as well. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that the germ theory started to combat the belief that disease was spread by supernatural forces or ‘bad air.’ Finally, I think I would need a better communication system than sending a raven to get the word out about prevention and containment protocols.”

Looks like fans will have to wait and see whether greyscale will add to the legendary body count of “Game of Thrones,” or whether some of Duszynski’s ideas find their way into an upcoming episode and save the day.

It’s been a long time coming, but on Saturday, the 1955 Crispus Attucks High School state championship boys basketball team will finally get its public due.

For the first time in the 500 Festival Parade’s 58-year history, it will make a planned stop on Monument Circle. Twenty-first-century technology will allow the world to witness the sights and sounds as members of the Attucks team get the on-the-Circle celebration they were denied following their historic 1955 win.

Traditionally the Indiana champs would parade through downtown Indianapolis on a city fire truck and then party on the Circle. But Jim Crow and his relatives — Racism and Ignorance — had other plans for the Attucks team.

Greatest champs, but no parade for Attucks team: Indianapolis Recorder, March 26, 1955.
From Indianapolis Recorder Digital Collection, IUPUI University Library

After one trip around the monument, a police escort ushered the victory parade into a black neighborhood park for their party.

Now, 60 years later, the team has been designated the 2015 IPL 500 Festival Parade grand marshals.

It is much too late to assuage any disappointment, sadness or even anger that the Attucks teens had to swallow as they were denied the traditional honor awarded state champs. But perhaps the fact that today’s 24-hour Internet news cycle, smartphones and YouTube will give people around the nation front-row seats to this weekend’s celebration might, for those boys long since turned men, cast aside any lingering dregs of that bitter drink.

About 300,000 spectators are expected to line the streets for the parade. Another million will watch on TV, locally via WTHR or nationally on NBC Sports Networks.

Ten members of that winning Attucks team and two cheerleaders are scheduled to participate in the parade. Their coach, the late Ray Crowe, will be there in the hearts and minds of those who say he played a pivotal role in their journey from boys to men.

Recorder picks Attucks to go all the way: Indianapolis Recorder, Feb. 19, 1955.
From Indianapolis Recorder Digital Collection, IUPUI University Library

Crowe didn’t just prepare them to be champions on the court; he prepared them to win at life, team members said at ‘A Championship Tribute’ at IUPUI last month.

Basketball Hall of Fame member Oscar Robertson and other members of the 1955 team were speakers at the tribute, which included the dedication of new IUPUI outdoor basketball courts and a panel discussion on the team’s life and times in segregated Indianapolis.

If you didn’t attend, and you’ve since visited the outdoor site, you are probably wondering where the plaque is that honors the Lockefield Gardens Dustbowl, a community playground court where Robertson and others played years ago.

If you had a seat under the packed tent, or stood in the grass to witness the dedication, you’re privy to the fact that IUPUI and its community partners are putting more time into crafting just the right words for the historical marker.

Better to take the time to get the words right, tribute organizer Tralicia Powell told the audience.

The snafu surrounding the Martin Luther King Jr. monument in D.C. is a case in point.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, Washington, D.C.
Photographer, Diane Brown

The majestic King statue no longer bears the “I was a drum major for justice, peace, righteousness” as shown in the picture accompanying this writing.

The quote was taken out of context and “makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit,” said the now-deceased Maya Angelou in a Washington Post interview.

Additional striations have replaced the contested words on the King monument. That process was cheaper and safer for maintaining the structural integrity of the sculpture, said its creator, Lei Yixin.

Once the community group working on the IUPUI Dustbowl marker agrees on the plaque’s wording, they’ll forward the text up the appropriate administrative chain for university approval and the marker will go up.

I’m quite sure it won’t take 60 years.

More than miles separate the U.S. and Ecuador when it comes to health conditions in the two countries. Still, Karen Klutzke says she will draw on her experiences in that South American country when she begins her career as a physician assistant later this year.

Klutzke will be among the first students to graduate in August from the Master of Physician Assistant Studies program in the Indiana University School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

Students spend 15 months of the 27-month-long academic program in the classroom and the remainder in clinical rotations, some of which can be chosen as electives. For an elective, Klutzke joined an international service trip March 6 to 14 that was organized by Timmy Global Health, an Indianapolis-based nonprofit that expands access to health care and empowers students and volunteers to tackle today’s most pressing global health challenges.

It had been Klutzke’s long-held dream to participate in an international service trip, but something always had always kept her from going.

“I’ve grown up and lived in Indiana my entire life,” said Klutzke, who raised a family and formerly worked as an art director for a nonprofit organization. “I wanted to get a change of perspective, see more of the world, learn more about other cultures and put it in a more of a global perspective.

“When Timmy Global Health representatives came and spoke to students in the physician assistant program, their vision — that all people should have access to quality health care — woke in me a desire to serve internationally, to help impact global health care disparities, and to be a part of something bigger than myself,” she said.

The trip Klutzke chose was to Chontapunta, Ecuador. There, the volunteers traveled to a different village each day to set up a clinic site, five sites total over the course of the trip. Each of the villages consisted of 20 to 50 families. Some of the villages had electricity and clean water; some did not.

Klutzke worked under the supervision of a doctor, helped out in the pharmacy and triage areas, hauled boxes and did anything else that needed to be done.

Karen Klutzke, far left, counts and bags vitamins at the end of the day to pass out at the next day’s clinic.

“I saw many cases of parasitic infections, upper-respiratory infections, overuse injuries and osteoarthritis,” Klutzke said. “One woman who came to our clinic was septic, and although we were able to arrange immediate transportation to a hospital for her, the hospital was still over four hours away.

“I don’t think you could go to Ecuador and not be affected,” Klutzke said. “The thing I took away from the trip is an awareness of health disparities that exist between the U.S. and how people in a lot of other places in the world live. There is a strong need to address those issues and improve people’s quality of life.”

Although Indianapolis and its surrounding areas are far from being as poor as Chontapunta, health disparity exists here as well, Klutzke said. “My experience in Ecuador has inspired me to not only continue to serve internationally, but to also take a more active role in local community medicine. I hope to make a difference both globally and locally, one patient at a time.”

Children in Chicago, 1949 Credit: Charles W. Cushman Collection: Indiana University Archives, Bloomington, Indiana.

Forget diamonds and pearls.

Give me a string of digital library collections.

Publications, photographs and cultural heritage artifacts preserved and protected in the digital collections of libraries, museums and archives of Indiana University campuses and like-minded institutions are as priceless as well-cut, colorless, flawless diamonds.

And exploring online digital riches can be as intoxicating as going to an upscale jewelry retailer.

Children at confectionary cart, Chicago, 1949
Credit: Charles W. Cushman Collection: Indiana University Archives, Bloomington, Indiana.

Digital collections offer unprecedented opportunities to learn about and put to use knowledge and creative activity from around the world. They also provide varied views of life in other times and places.

For example, perusing the IU Archives’ Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection provides heart-stirring looks at children in Chicago, Mexico and other places during the 1940s and 1950s.

Basketball history junkies can replay 1955 game nights by flipping through pages of NBA great Oscar Robinson’s personal high school scrapbooks in IUPUI University Library’s Crispus Attucks Museum digital collection.

Oscar Robinson’s high school scrapbook. University Library, Crispus Attucks Museum Digital Collection.

Or a trip down memory lane could include a glimpse of 1955 fashions at Brownsburg High School courtesy of the student whose letterman jacket is part of the Indiana Memory collection now online at the Digital Public Library of America.

The DPLA offers open online access to more than 10 million items through its 1,600-plus partnerships with national-caliber content providers such as the HathiTrust and the Library of Congress, plus a network of member archives, museums, cultural heritage centers and libraries such as the IUPUI University Library and libraries on the IU Bloomington campus.

During DPLA’s second national convention in Indianapolis in mid-April, co-hosted by the IUPUI library, the nonprofit announced that 50,000 items from Indiana Memory, including the Brownsburg jacket, postcards and “unique and compelling documents from Indiana’s rich history,” are now among DPLA’s offerings.

A diehard fan of “Perry Mason,” “Mission Impossible” and “CSI,” I chuckled when a quick browse of the Indiana collection turned up 55 items related to the 1850s crime-fighting Horse Thief Detective Association.

Lower Merion Society for the Detection and Prosecution of Horse Thieves and the Recovery of Stolen Horses Badge, Indiana Memory collection, DPLA.

I spied a booklet on the articles of association and bylaws of the Foster Horse Thief Detective Company, a journal of the National Horse Thief Detective Association’s first annual meeting, and a red, white and blue patch for the Lower Merion Society for the Detection and Prosecution of Horse Thieves and the Recovery of Stolen Horses.

Recently the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a $275,000 grant to the Archives of Traditional Music at IU Bloomington to fund digitization of recordings currently on wax cylinders. Those cylinders document texts, songs and performance styles from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, representing 60 countries and every continent except Antarctica.

The NEH also awarded IU Bloomington’s Black Film Center/Archive a $150,000 grant to produce a new finding aid for its collection of personal and professional records of Richard E. Norman, a pioneer in the development of films for African-American audiences featuring all black casts.

‘Black Gold’ movie poster. Richard E. Norman Collection, IU Black Film Center/Archive

You can learn more about the music and film industry digitalization projects from the IU news release by George Vlahakis.

The rare and original available online include pictures of 22 defendants in the 1839 Amistad mutiny trial. An 18-year-old made the pencil sketches of the African men as they awaited trial facing charges of rebellion after killing the captain and cook on a slave ship.

Herron alumnus Hale Woodruff’s Amistad murals are stunning, but encountering the Yale Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library sketches and seeing faces of real men and boys of the Amistad, including one or two who resemble my relatives, was startling.

Hey, another reason to skip the trip to the jewelry store: Precious gems with ties to a family tree could be waiting for discovery in a digital library.

Little girls at Mammoth, Arizona, 1940
Credit: Charles W. Cushman Collection: Indiana University Archives, Bloomington, Indiana.

A T-shirt sold at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis boasts, tongue in cheek, that IUPUI is undefeated in football since 1969.

The joke is that IUPUI, founded in 1969, has never fielded a football team. But that may change this coming academic year, if the IUPUI Robotics Club has its way.

The club intends to double the number of robotic football players it now has to eight, meeting the required number of players to field an eight-member team in what might be called an intercollegiate robot football league.

The IUPUI Robotics Club took its four robot football players to South Bend on March 29 to play in the Robot Football Combine at Notre Dame. The Jaguars were pitted against teams from the campuses of the University of Notre Dame, Valparaiso University and Purdue University.

As it is on actual football fields, Notre Dame has been a leading contender when it comes to robot football. Two years ago, Notre Dame’s robot football team played in what is believed to be the first intercollegiate robot football game, beating Ohio Northern University.

Anna Glumb, who is studying electrical engineering at the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology at IUPUI and is president of the IUPUI Robotics Club, said the Jaguar robots competed in several skills tests during the combine.

One of the tests was for speed and another for accuracy: The team’s quarterback had to throw passes to a robot receiver at designated spots on a playing field. A third test involved a robot pushing a weight across a line, while a fourth test determined the agility of a robot to maneuver through a cone course.

The IUPUI robots’ best performance was on the accuracy test, placing third.

Glumb said the robots, about the size of a large computer printer on wheels, are powered by a 12-volt battery and controlled by the same kind of device used for radio-controlled cars. The playing field is an indoor court. The ball is the size of souvenir-sized footballs. Sensors determine when the robots have been hit or tackled.

In addition to the quarterback, other skill players are a kicker, who has to send the ball up to 90 feet downfield, and the center, who has to be able to hand off the ball.

“The team has to build the robots from scratch, with the exception of one part that is provided, to certain dimensions and with designated materials,” Glumb said.

“I think it’s really cool,” Glumb said of working with the robot football players. “This provides an actual experience rather than an experience in a lab.”

Glumb said football won’t be the club’s only activity in the coming academic year.

The club plans to build a robot Jaguar that could be used for promotional purposes. It’s also considering working with a drone. Since the club uses a 3-D printer to make parts, it will be researching those devices as well.

Beauty is only skin deep, but it affects our lives across a large variety of economic dimensions, according to noted economist Daniel S. Hamermesh.

Hamermesh’s “Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful,” published by Princeton University Press in 2011, is the first book to seriously measure the advantages of physical beauty.

On a scale of 1 to 5 — a subjective ranking of the “homely” to the “strikingly attractive,” to use the author’s preferred terms — those in the top third can expect to earn about $200,000 more over their lifetimes than those in the bottom seventh, according to Hamermesh, who will lecture at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis this month.

As the Martin C. Spechler Economics Speaker Series lecturer, Hamermesh will present “Beauty Pays” at 7 p.m. Monday, April 20, in Room 450C of the IUPUI Campus Center, 420 University Blvd.

‘Beauty Pays’

Hamermesh’s “Beauty Pays” “demonstrates how society favors the beautiful and how better-looking people experience startling but undeniable benefits in all aspects of life,” said the Amazon review of the book.

Hamermesh “shows that the attractive are more likely to be employed, work more productively and profitably, receive more substantial pay, obtain loan approvals, negotiate loans with better terms, and have more handsome and highly educated spouses. Hamermesh explains why this happens and what it means for the beautiful — and the not-so-beautiful — among us.”

What led Hamermesh — a professor of economics at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the Sue Killam Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Texas, Austin — to study how and how much beauty pays?

“It’s a great economic question,” Hamermesh said in a phone interview. It was his wife who suggested it was time he wrote a book based on the plethora of professional articles he has written on the topic. The book is a “popularization and synthesis of those articles,” the author said.

What makes a person beautiful? While symmetry of facial features plays a great role, a totally objective definition is somewhat illusive, according to Hamermesh. “It’s like porn: I can’t describe it, but I know it when I see it,” he said.

‘Beauty Pays’ author Daniel Hamermesh

Based on the evidence, Hamermesh said that in addition to being more likely to earn better pay, the attractive among us are also more likely to have more handsome and highly educated spouses. For example, attractive women may have husbands who earn 10 percent more than their more common-looking co-workers.

And the findings about how beauty pays seem to hold across racial and ethnic lines, although the gender correlations are a little more blurred.

People tend to react more strongly to a bad-looking woman than to a bad-looking man, Hamermesh said. That must be why more actors with pronounced wrinkles, gray hair and round stomachs apparently get more on-screen work than actresses with the same.

Hamermesh discusses the plight of the aesthetically challenged in the book chapter he titled “Legal Protection for the Ugly.”

“Beauty is very hard to change,” he said. On logical grounds, why shouldn’t ugly people have affirmative action rights?”

On the other hand, that’s a political issue that no one is willing to set aside economic resources to address, the economist admits.

The Martin C. Spechler lecture is sponsored by the Department of Economics in the IU School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI. For more information on the lecture and to RSVP, contact econ@iupui.edu.

Visitor parking is available for a fee in the Vermont Street Garage.

A map and directions are available online.

Protestors marched outside. It was organized chaos inside. Security was heavy, with police dogs and heavily armed Secret Service agents. There were long lines. And IUPUI student Tami Cornelius loved every minute of it.

In fact, Cornelius hopes to repeat her experiences at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference in Washington, D.C., where she served as a volunteer in March. The conference, held annually to help shape U.S. policy and strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship, drew 16,000 people, throngs of protestors and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who spoke at the conference the day before his controversial speech to Congress on March 3.

Cornelius, a student in the IU School of Physical Education and Tourism Management at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, had sought out the experience of working at the large conference held in the seventh-largest convention center in the U.S.

The full-time student and mom of a middle-schooler, Cornelius had been in the events industry about five years before coming to IUPUI to complete a degree. “I knew I was doing exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I was in the right room.”

Seeking opportunities to gain experience, Cornelius kept close tabs on the school’s listserv that passes along volunteer and internship opportunities. When a notice about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference came along, she quickly applied for one of 250 slots for college students who were given a $325 stipend.

Cornelius and four other IUPUI tourism, conventions and event management students were accepted for volunteer posts. As best as they could tell, IUPUI was the only university from which all of the applicants who applied were accepted, a fact they attributed to the school’s leadership development class, which shows students how to create a professional presence.

Tami Cornelius at AIPAC Conference

“That made us feel honored,” Cornelius said.

The group of students traveled to Washington the Friday before the conference and spent the next day in training. Cornelius was assigned as an usher in the main auditorium, a post that placed her close to the hall’s center stage, allowing her to watch the address by Netanyahu.

Cornelius and the other volunteers arrived at the convention center about 4:30 a.m. on the day the Israeli prime minister spoke. They headed back to their hotel rooms 18 hours later.

“There was a lot of security that was very intimidating,” she said. “While there were long lines; there was a lot of energy because everyone knew the prime minister was going to be there. Everyone was excited. When Netanyahu came onto the stage, all 16,000 seats were filled for the first time.”

Even with the long hours, the experience was worth it, Cornelius said. “They brought us in as volunteers, but they gave us real experience. They didn’t have us picking up trash or making copies. We worked right beside senior conference volunteers.”

She came away with a number of lessons learned. “You definitely need a team and need help. You need multiple people around you, especially to bounce ideas off of for troubleshooting. I also learned that if you come with plan A, you also need a plan B, C and D.”

By experiencing a large event firsthand, Cornelius said it enhances what she’s learning in the classroom. “You get to watch it all come together. It may sound confusing in a book, but when you are able to see what works, it goes right along with the textbook.”

IUPUI lecturer C. Thomas Lewis was hard at work April 2, turning the street under a railroad overpass near the site of this weekend’s NCAA Men’s Final Four into an immersive disco environment.

When he and student volunteers assisting him were done, 351 disco balls were suspended from the 360-foot overpass, representing the number of Division I colleges. Theatrical lights bounced off the mirrored surfaces, creating points of light sparkling overhead. A fog machine and a DJ playing disco tunes during peak pedestrian times over the weekend will complete the atmosphere.

“Should be a fabulous party,” said Lewis, a media arts and science lecturer in the IU School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. “So I hope people come down.”

The overpass is on South Capitol Avenue in Indianapolis, running between Lucas Oil Stadium, where the basketball games will be played, and Georgia Street. About 70,000 visitors are expected in that area.

Lewis came up with the idea for the disco balls after being approached by the city’s Cultural Infusion Committee. That committee was seeking ideas on behalf of the NCAA, which wanted something done to make the overpass space attractive.

Lewis said normally he would have wanted to imagine and propose a video-mapping installation, but a high-tech solution was out of the question because of the environment, time, money and projection logistics.

With the installation of the low-tech disco balls, Lewis said two things were important to him: that it was kinetic and that it was immersive.

“Staying Alive,” anyone?

This is the second of a two-part series: Part 1

IUPUI Chancellor Emeritus Gerald L. Bepko and other FBI agents working the 1966 March Against Fear were responsible for identifying Ku Klux Klan members and other troublemakers or would-be assassins, deflecting any violence, and providing daily and hourly reports via teletype to keep President Lyndon B. Johnson advised of march conditions.

Except for the attack on Meredith, the marchers experienced relatively little overt violence during the walk that ended with an estimated 16,000 African American and several hundred white marchers at the statehouse in Jackson, Miss. The march was successful in terms of community organizing and registering thousands to vote.

According to the Milwaukee Journal, “the lack of real violence was probably due to armed Mississippi Highway Patrol officers who assisted city and county law enforcement officers along the way.”

Small-town law enforcement officers reflected the attitudes of their town fathers and local merchants and reacted to the presence of feds such as the FBI agents as “the north invading the south again,” Bepko said.

NOW: Chancellor Emeritus and IU Robert H. McKinney School of Law Professor Gerald L. Bepko

The locals “who knew we were FBI were not particularly friendly, but the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol included many officers who had studied at the FBI National Academy, which was an honor for them and created considerable mutual respect,” the IU McKinney professor said.

As a 24-year-old law school graduate with two years left on the draft, Bepko decided to join the FBI in 1965 rather than work in national security or in the military.

He thought the work would be a great opportunity for public service and would have pleased his father. He also had “just seen the first of the James Bond movies, which made everyone want to be a secret agent.”

Bepko, who had spent his first 24 years in Chicago, was sent to Mississippi after four months of FBI training in Washington, D.C., and Quantico, Va.

“I was a bit uncertain about going to the deep south about which I knew little other than news stories,” he said. “Most of those stories were about racism and cruelty, so I was ready for the worst.”

That was in September 1965, and the murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney– the true story behind the movie “Mississippi Burning” — had been solved.

FBI Letter of Commendation to Gerald L. Bepko for “exemplary services” during the 1966 March against Fear. (Photo courtesy of Gerald L. Bepko)

“One of the key leaders of the gang of racist thugs who killed Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner showed up again in another celebrated case on which I did some work,” Bepko said.

That case was the murder of Vernon Dahmer, an NAACP leader and store owner who died of injuries sustained when members of the Ku Klux Klan firebombed his Hattiesburg, Miss., home in response to Dahmer’s voter registration efforts. It would be five trials and three decades before the ring leader was found guilty.

“I think that fellow agent Alan Kornblum developed evidence that contributed to the successful prosecution of Sam Bowers,” Bepko said.

What did he think about working on Mississippi civil rights cases when he had asked to be assigned to New York or San Francisco?

“After I got down there and I saw what was going on … I saw the cruelty in Mississippi. I had seen it in the media, but it never had as much of an impact on me as it did when I saw it firsthand. It was something that made me happy I was doing the work I was doing,” Bepko said.

Will he write a book about his Mississippi FBI experiences?

“I’ve thought about it as a project in retirement and began to gather research materials, but other things have intervened. … I still teach a class at the McKinney School of Law, and I’m a member of the Indiana Commission for Higher Education and a member of the board and chair of the Governance Committee at the Riley Children’s Foundation.”

Bepko, who as mentioned, was nearly killed on an FBI surveillance when reassigned to New York, said he never feared for his life while in Mississippi.

“It turned out that there were greater dangers that awaited in New York,” the former agent said.

The 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches got me thinking about bits and pieces of conversations regarding IUPUI Chancellor Emeritus Gerald L. Bepko  having once been a G-man.

For more than decade I’ve wanted a legitimate opening to question the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law professor about the details, which I knew had something to do with the civil rights movement.

To my surprise and delight, googling his name recently justified requesting an interview for this blog entry.

“What would people find most surprising about you?” a Chicago-Kent College of Law writer had asked Bepko, in a bio posted two years ago when the school designated Bepko as one of 125 “Alumni of Distinction.”

“People would find most surprising that I was an FBI agent for nearly four years, serving my first year in Mississippi at the peak of civil rights activity and the enforcement of new laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 …” the chancellor emeritus replied. “For the following three years I served in New Jersey and New York, where I was nearly killed on an FBI surveillance.”

THEN: FBI Special Agent Gerald L. Bepko, left front, on the last day of the 220-mile Memphis to Jackson, Miss. March Against Fear in June 1966. (Photo courtesy of Gerald Bepko).

I had prepared questions about the Selma marches and the civil rights workers whose murders were the basis for the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

Chancellor Bepko politely redirected our conversion.

“The biggest (single) case on which I was involved was the Meredith March in June 1966. I was assigned the day of the shooting and stayed with the march until it ended in Jackson (Miss.) 18 days later,” Bepko said.

He was referring to the march started by James Meredith, who set out June 5, 1966, to walk the 220 miles from Memphis, Tenn., to Jackson, Miss., on what some say at first was to be a solo civil rights trek.

Meredith, a Mississippi native, had gained national attention four years earlier when he became the first African American to study at Ole Miss. He won that right in a court case with the then future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as his attorney. National guardsmen were called out to quell the violence of those angered by Meredith’s enrollment.

Meredith was in his second year of law school at Columbia University when he started his Memphis-to-Jackson march. According to a 1966 UPI story, Meredith’s goal was to dispel his own fears about living in his native state as well as to urge African Americans to register to vote.

“He wanted to go back to Mississippi and show the people of Mississippi, both white and black, that there was nothing to fear. It was going to be a march against fear,” Bepko said.

Most people understood that to mean that African Americans in Mississippi had nothing to fear when they went to register to vote or to claim any other civil rights because laws were enacted to protect them from the sorts of things that may have happened in Selma, he explained.

“On the second day of his march, he was shot with a shotgun by a deranged hardware store employee from Memphis (Aubrey James Norvell),” Bepko said.

Hospitalized with serious injuries, Meredith encouraged others to take up his cause. People from around the globe responded. From as few as 50 to as many as 400 to 500 people joined the march on a typical day, with the numbers reaching the thousands during the final days.

“All of the civil rights leaders of that era came to the march: Martin Luther King Jr., Hosea Williams from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Floyd McKissick (Congress on Racial Equality), Stokely Carmichael (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) … any other person that was prominent in that era in the civil rights movement was on the march for at least some of the time,” Bepko said.

“For 16 days or so, (the march) had the world’s attention,” said Bepko, who was on duty virtually around the clock during the march, walking almost all the way, and receiving a letter of commendation for that assignment.

Meredith would recuperate and rejoin the march on its final two days.

This is the first of a two-part series.  Part 2 will post March 31.

If you didn’t attend the Taylor Symposium this year, or if you want to relive that exhilarating experience, your laptop can take you back.

Thanks to the on-demand video services of Indianapolis Channel 16 Government Access Television, the 26th Joseph T. Taylor Symposium is available for viewing as a three-part series in MP4 video format.

Simply click the blue on-demand button, enter “Joseph Taylor Symposium “in the Search Archives box, then pick from one of three selections from 2015.

Be prepared to go to church, mosque, and/or temple.

This year’s theme was “Encountering Religions Through Performance.” Presented by the School of Liberal Arts under the leadership of the Department of Religious Studies, the event allowed attendees to experience how various religious groups approach “worship and also inform understanding, teaching and celebrating through song, dance and performance,” Dean Bill Blomquist said in his welcome.

The symposium opened with “Feeling the Spirit,” an educational mini-concert by the Light of the World Gospel Ensemble under the direction of music and media minister John Ray.

Light of the World Gospel Ensemble performs at 2015 Taylor Symposium at IUPUI.

In another setting, the presentation would have scored a chorus of “Amens” from one community guest who exclaimed instead, “What a way to start the day!”

The symposium, a signature campus event, honors Joseph T. Taylor, a founding father of the IUPUI campus.

Taylor was known for his dedication to building community and understanding through public discourse. He would have been thoroughly delighted by the mild give-and-take between Ray and moderator Joseph Tucker Edmonds, assistant professor of Africana studies and religious studies. The discourse offered glimpses of the communication gap that often must be bridged in order for academicians and regular folks to reach common ground.

“How do you understand your sacred responsibility as it relates to the text and tradition of Christianity,” Edmonds asked.

“Can you say that again?” Ray replied.

“How do you understand your … to simplify, what is the difference between you being an entertainer and (you being) a minister? Edmonds said.

Ray offered an example: Beyonce’s rendition of Thomas Dorsey’s “Precious Lord” at the recent Grammys.

“Go home and watch Beyonce do that song, and then go and google Mahalia Jackson singing the same song and you will understand what I am talking about,” Ray said.

Songs performed traced the history of gospel music from Dorsey’s classic, to Edwin Hawkins’ 1960s arrangement of “Oh Happy Day” — which Ray says is still No. 1 in Sweden — to Kirk Franklin’s hip-hop “Stomp” and beyond.

Then the spotlight turned to first-year IU School of Medicine student Mohamad Saltagi.

Mohamad Saltagi

In “Hearing Allah’s Presence,” Saltagi shares how the wisdom found through memorizing and chanting the Quran has motivated him to pursue justice, kindness and mercy.

“The Quran is meant to be chanted … chanting the Quran brings it to life,” said Saltagi, who delivered selected passages in both English and Arabic.

Saltagi has memorized the Quran — all 600 pages of the text in its original Arabic.

It took a lot of persistence, helped by 90-minute classes four times a week during high school, but memorizing new verses wasn’t the hard part.

“Keeping the old pages in your memory and continuing to review what you already know is the challenge,” Saltagi said.

Whether you binge-watch the entire symposium or take breaks between viewing sessions, don’t miss this opportunity, as Blomquist said, to “share the beauty and the passion” of Indianapolis’ religious diversity.

IU Communications Specialist

If Jessica Gonzalez Contreras had given an acceptance speech like they do for the Oscars, she knows who she would have thanked when she received a national health award.

Contreras credits her educational experiences at the Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis for her Breakthrough Leaders in Nursing Award, created by the Future of Nursing: Campaign for Action, a joint initiative of AARP and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Jessica Gonzalez Contreras receives award

The Indianapolis public health nurse is among the first 10 recipients of the award recognizing nurses who make “extraordinary efforts to improve the health and lives of people in her community.” The award celebrates nurse leadership and the importance nurses’ efforts to improve health and health care.

Contreras, who graduated in May 2014 with a Master of Public Health, points to two educational experiences in particular: a three-week trip to Beijing and a monthlong trip to South Africa.

“Those two experiences gave me a better understanding of other cultures, the importance of diversity, and they really showed me how other countries are dealing with issues in their health care systems,” she said. “It inspired me to kind of think outside of the box as a nurse.”

One question she’s heard a lot: What is it like getting a Master of Public Health as a nurse?

“I always describe it as phenomenal,” Contreras said. “It really made me become a better nurse and gave me a better understanding of how to work with other health professionals. In order to be a successful future leader, you have to have a good understanding of that.”

Contreras was raised by teenage parents in a Texas family of migrant workers, who told her that the best way to another life was college. While she was in high school, her grandfather was diagnosed with cancer; watching the nurses who cared for him inspired her to become a nurse.

Knowing that the costs were prohibitive for her family, she worked to earn top grades and qualify for scholarships.

“I have come full circle,” said Contreras, who provides in-home care to first-time, low-income mothers through the Nurse Family Partnership of Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana. “I am helping people who need it most while also recruiting a future generation of nurses to become leaders.”

Contreras volunteers with the Indiana Action Coalition to diversity the state’s nursing workforce. In that role she also speaks to high school minority students interested in becoming health care professionals and is mentoring several nursing students. She is also an active member of the IU Latino Alumni Association, working to recruit the next generation of leaders.

IU Communications Specialist

IUPUI sports management student Jessica Bennett looked surprised when a stranger handed her a long-stemmed rose in a glass vase Feb. 25. But this wasn’t a belated Valentine or an episode of “The Bachelor.” It was in honor of her nomination for a ROSE Award from Visit Indy.

Bennett was sitting in the office of David Pierce, an assistant professor in sports management, at the time. Pierce, who nominated her for the award, had asked Bennett to come to his office on the pretense of discussing her plans for the future so he and others — including IU School of Physical Education and Tourism Management Dean Jay Gladden — could watch the surprise presentation.

Bennett’s future plans now include a gala dinner March 18 at the Indiana Roof Ballroom, when she and 102 other ROSE Award nominees will be recognized as “service champions who go beyond the expectation of their job descriptions and leave lasting impressions that bring true meaning to the phrase ‘Hoosier hospitality.’”

Pierce was clearly pleased that such a remarkable student was going to be honored. Simply put, he says, Bennett has made a significant impact on the school and the sport management program specifically.

In nominating her for the award, Pierce wrote, “Jessica Bennett has established the benchmark that we will expect from students in the School of Physical Education and Tourism Management in the future. Her service to the university in form of PETM Student Council president, Sport Management Club vice president, operations assistant for IUPUI athletics and intern at the Conference and Events Center has been foundational to establishing a culture of commitment and success for these organizations.”

Pierce also cited Bennett’s commitment, passion, leadership and ability to raise the level of expectation and achievement of other students.

Pierce said that ability was evident when Bennett was recruited to help train 30 physical education and tourism management students to help during the 500 Festival mini-marathon. On race day, the students had been assigned to work alongside employees from a company; but a labor dispute within the company prevented those employees from volunteering that day. Bennett took charge of the situation and developed a new plan so the student volunteers could cover the water stations the students had been assigned to serve with the missing business employees.

As a result, the 500 Festival honored the students with an award for their service, which the school proudly displays in its offices. “This award serves as a reminder to other students that IUPUI PETM students can achieve at a level of excellence recognized by professionals in our field,” Pierce said.

When Roberta Tisdul, convention services manager with Visit Indy, presented Bennett with her rose, she told Bennett she was among a very select group. She represented the cream of the crop.

“Facing just as many life circumstances as other students, Jessica refuses to let anything impede her progress towards building her personal brand defined by leadership, commitment and excellence,” Pierce said.

Jessica Bennett receives her rose for the ROSE award