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Brown and D’Abate Elementary School

A partnership beyond the classroom

For 12 years, Brown University has partnered with William D’Abate Elementary School in Providence’s Olneyville neighborhood to bring after-school programming, in-class tutoring, and summer camps to students there. While the programs are a learning experience for everyone involved, the hope is that some lessons will have effects that last long after graduation. (Distributed May 9, 2012)   Read the story
2012 Doctoral Theses

Brian Reggiannini figures out who’s talking

Real-time tracking of who’s talking: With the right algorithms and signal processing software, an array of button-size microphones placed around the perimeter of a room can identify, follow, and record each of several people as they move about, interrupt each other, and converse.
If computers could become ‘smart’ enough to recognize who is talking, that could allow them to produce real-time transcripts of meetings, courtroom proceedings, debates, and other important events. In the dissertation that will allow him to receive his Ph.D. at Commencement this year, Brian Reggiannini found a way to advance the state of the art for voice- and speaker-recognition. (Distributed May 14, 2012)

Feeding tubes may worsen pressure ulcer risk

In the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers report that despite the conventional wisdom that feeding tubes help dementia patients resist pressure ulcers, feeding tubes actually are associated with an increased risk of ulcers developing. The tubes also don’t promote healing. (Distributed May 14, 2012)

Five-limbed brittle stars move bilaterally, like people

Why bother with turns or pivots?: The brittle star doesn’t turn as most animals do. It simply designates another of its five limbs as its new front and continues moving forward.
Brittle stars and people have something in common: They move in fundamentally similar ways. Though not bilaterally symmetrical like humans and many other animals, brittle stars have come up with a mechanism to choose any of its five limbs to direct its movement on the seabed. It’s as if each arm can be the creature's front, capable of locomotion and charting direction. Results appear in the Journal of Experimental Biology. (Distributed May 10, 2012)
120 years and counting

Alumnae return for Women’s Leadership Conference

Celebrating 120 years of women at Brown: Alumnae (from left) Perri Lane Katzman ’14, Elaine Regan Dray ’53, and Jane Dray Katzman ’81 heard presentations from the humorous to the very serious. “Being a woman,” said keynote speaker Cecile Richards about health care, “is no longer a preexisting condition in America.”
Brown alumnae returned to campus May 4-5 for the Women’s Leadership Conference, “120 Years of Women at Brown.” Charlotte Bruce Harvey, Class of 1978 and managing editor of the Brown Alumni Magazine, attended and sent this report. (Distributed May 11, 2012)
Opening June 9 at the Bell Gallery

Rolemodelplaytime explores identity in play

Kent Rogowski, Bears 45  (2006)C-print, 16 x 20 inches
Opening June 9, 2012, at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, rolemodelplaytime is an imaginative exhibition featuring works in a variety of media that explore the way we create lasting identity through play. Rolemodelplaytime includes works by Hannah Barrett, Caleb Cole, Jane Maxwell, Randy Regier, Kent Rogowski, and TRIIIBE. (Distributed May 8, 2012)

Brown Science Prep engages local students

Yes, actually, it is rocket science: Emi Escobar, a junior at E-Cubed Academy, explains how potassium nitrate and powdered sugar can power a small rocket.
Every Saturday morning Brown undergraduate volunteers and local high school students gather for fun, education, and sharing their love of science. The mutual enthusiasm of the high schoolers and their slightly older mentors shined through at an end-of-semester science fair on campus May 5. (Distributed May 7, 2012)
2012 Doctoral Theses

Daniel Block and the ‘feel of not to feel it’

Daniel Block: “One of the many ways Romanticism remains contemporary is in our desire for evocative history.”
The History Channel and other outlets insist that knowing about the past is not enough: It must come alive and we must feel it. But are our emotions and sentiments a reliable guide to historical understanding? Daniel Block finds that Wordsworth, Keats, and other British Romantic writers may have something new to offer about the use and value of our affective experience. (Distributed May 4, 2012)

Single nanomaterial yields many laser colors

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser: Colloidal quantum dots — nanocrystals — can produce lasers of many colors. Cuong Dang manipulates a green beam that pumps the nanocrystals with energy, in this case producing red laser light.
Engineers at Brown University and QD Vision Inc. have created nanoscale single crystals that can produce the red, green, or blue laser light needed in digital displays. The size determines color, but all the pyramid-shaped quantum dots are made the same way of the same elements. In experiments, light amplification required much less power than previous attempts at the technology. The team’s prototypes are the first lasers of their kind. (Distributed April 29, 2012)
2012 Doctoral Theses

Julie Hunter and the beat of a different drum

Where better to learn the art and significance of drumming?: A drummer herself, Julie Hunter did much of her thesis research in Ghana, using the rise of women drummers as a lens to study historical, social, cultural and gender-role change.
Cultural taboos have long kept Ghanaian women away from drumming. But two significant political movements began to break down those barriers in the last 60 years, bringing women into the musical fold. It is that shift — and its political, social, and cultural implications — that Julie Hunter studied to earn her Ph.D. this spring. (Distributed April 23, 2012)
2012 Doctoral Theses

Matthew Heard calms fear of invasive plants

Along the coasts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, ecologist Matthew Heard, who earns his Ph.D. this spring, has found that native and exotic plant species have managed to strike a delicate but sustained balance. It is time, he says, for people to stop thinking of new species as necessarily bad. (Distributed April 16, 2012)
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