Grad News Forum

In 2010, the TDI program welcomed the addition of Jessica Johnson and JoAnna Luiso as Alumni Relations Manager and Career Services Manager working in the Center for Education.

Jessica received her Masters’ degrees in education at the University of Vermont and in project management from Villanova. As Alumni Relations Manager, she will work towards cultivating and maintaining an active alumni community while designing and implementing programs to facilitate connections between alumni, faculty, and current students. Jessica will also manage and organize the TDI Center for Education’s activities and events, and plan continuing education activities for alumni.

JoAnna Luiso received her Master of Science degree in conflict analysis and dispute resolution at Nova Southeastern University in Florida. As Career Services Manager, she will support TDI students and alumni in their career development in the health-care field. JoAnna will provide professional development and communication seminars based on developing job search skills and actively develop relationships with employers with positions appropriate for TDI graduates.

Jessica and JoAnna look forward to unveiling the new TDI Student and Alumni website in the new year, as well as serving the growing population of TDI students and graduates as they seek to fulfill TDI’s mission to improve the US healthcare system.

by Jessica Johnson
pictured Jessica Johnson (left), JoAnna Luiso (right)

“Replace the word ‘problem’ with the word ‘opportunity’ in all your thoughts.”

- Matthew Keith Groves

In looking back at the Graduate Forum newsletters from the past several years, they are all similar—the year has been great, our faculty received grant funding, we graduated students and were rewarded with recruiting more—and this remains true for 2010. The year promised to be eventful and it did not disappoint. As the institution continued to maneuver through a significant period of restructuring and change, we found ourselves seizing the opportunity to positively embrace these challenges rather than allowing them to weigh down our productivity. As we did last year and the year before that, the Department of Genetics continues to perform above expectations.

Our faculty continues to attract new funding despite the competition. Our graduate program continues to enjoy growth and success, having six students successfully defend their theses and inviting seven new students to join genetics labs. The department continues to expand as more technicians and postdocs are hired to support both new and ongoing research projects.

The fact is we will enjoy having the opportunity to build upon another successful year in the Department of Genetics.

by Cheryl Bush

This year was quite eventful for the Department of Earth Sciences.  We were shocked by the untimely death of James Scott.  James’ PhD student Derek Smith is now working with Marilyn Fogel at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. We graduated six students in the last year—one PhD and five MS’s—and welcomed nine new graduate students.  The graduated students are now working in the industry or studying for higher degrees at other universities.

Brian Dade recently replaced Carl Renshaw as chair of the department.  Carl is the Principal Investigator on a $2.5 million NSF grant that will fund an educational outreach program, in which Dartmouth graduate students will educate local middle school students in science, technology, engineering and math.

Bob Hawley’s glaciology group has grown considerably this year.  In addition to a new Post Doc (Eric Lutz), there are two new graduate students: Thomas Overly (PhD, IGERT Fellow) and Blaine Morriss (MS).  Thus far, Bob’s group has garnered over $1 million in external support.  Last summer, Bob, Gifford Wong (PhD, IGERT Fellow), and Zoe Courville (UNH Post Doc) traveled to Summit Camp, Greenland, to procure a 100m ice core as well as conduct several snowpit studies.  This summer, the glaciology group will be working on six concurrent, externally-funded projects, which will take six Dartmouth grad students and faculty to Greenland this summer to undertake three independent field campaigns.  Gifford, who recently returned from an austral summer abroad, also participated in drilling the longest American ice core (3331 meters!) while working on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide Ice Core Project.

Meredith Kelly’s research group is comprised of four graduate students who use exposure age dating and lake sediment records to understand past climate changes.  Meredith was recently awarded an NSF Paleo Perspectives on Climate Change grant to study the mechanisms of climate change in the southern tropical and mid-latitude Andes during the Holocene.  Justin Stroup (PhD) and Sam Beal (PhD) organized and led a research expedition to map glacial geology, collect boulder samples, and obtain lake sediment cores near Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru. Laura Levy (PhD, IGERT fellow) conducted a successful field season to East Greenland in September, and she has since been analyzing boulder samples and lake sediment cores. Tom Baker (MS) will travel to Thunder Bay, Ontario this spring to collect boulder samples that he will use to study the eastward drainage of glacial Lake Agassiz.

Xiahong Feng’s stable isotope group admitted two PhD students, Alex Lauder and Ben Kopec, under the IGERT program.  The group is using stable isotopes of precipitation to study the impact of sea-ice change on both ocean-surface evaporation and land precipitation in the Arctic under the newly-launched Isotopic Investigation of Sea Ice and Precipitation in the Arctic Climate System (iisPACS) project, jointly led by Professors Feng and Posmentier, of Dartmouth College, and Jeff Burkhart, of the Norwegian Institute for Air Research.  Alex and Ben will travel to Greenland this summer through the NSF-sponsored IGERT fellowship program.  They will measure the isotopic composition of vapor over diverse bodies of water and sample lake water for later isotopic analysis.  Thirty degrees further west, Kelly Everhart is planning to finish her Masters project, which characterizes the extent to which sea ice modifies the isotopic composition of precipitation landing on the North Slope of Alaska, early this summer.

Mukul Sharma’s radiogenic isotope lab group admitted two new PhD students, Hannah Hallock and Kelly Landau.  Two old hands in the lab, Tim Blazina, MS, and Yingzhe Wu, MS, will be presenting their work in the AGU fall meeting.  Tim has done extensive field work on New Zealand’s North Island where he is studying chemical weathering.  Yingzhe has been studying the origin of the magnetic spherules at the Younger Dryas boundary, a period of intense climate change that coincided with the disappearance of the Clovis people and mega-fauna of North America.

The fluvial geomorphology group, under the auspices of Carl Renshaw, Brian Dade and Frank Magilligan, admitted one new student, Eirik Buraas.  He will investigate the effect of dams on New England rivers.  John Gartner, a third-year PhD student, was recently awarded two grants.  The NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant will help support his research on dam removal and sediment transport, and a National Center for Airborne Laser Altimetry Seed Grant allows repeat LiDAR data at one dam removal. This spring, Nathan Hamm will defend his dissertation on fine sediment dynamics in stream beds.

In other news, Jennifer Bailard just finished another successful field season in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.  Rachel Neurath is nearing completion of her MS thesis on soil carbon cycling in harvested and old growth forests, and Jie Yang is gearing up for his PhD on heavy metal contamination.

By John Gartner, Sam Beal, Kelly Everhart, Gifford Wong, and Mukul Sharma.

Photo: Dartmouth graduate students Gifford Wong (PhD, Earth Sciences), Lauren Culler (PhD, EEB) and Simone Whitecloud (PhD, EEB) during their IGERT trip to Greenland.

The Ecology and Evolutionary Biology program (EEB) has had another successful year. We now have 24 students – our largest number ever – enrolled this fall.  We received strong rankings from the National Research Council, and many of our current students hold nationally recognized fellowships, including: National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows Carissa Aoki and Vivek Venkataraman; GAANN Fellow Alex Shanku; and IGERT Fellows Julia Bradley-Cook, Lauren Culler, Sam Fey, Nina Lany, Marcus Welker, and Simone Whitecloud.  In addition, Ramsa Chavez-Ulloa, Zak Gezon, and Vivek Venkataraman have been awarded outside grants to support their research.

In alumni news, Tom Morrison successfully defended his PhD in September 2010 and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wyoming.  Erik Stange has joined the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, while Jim Kellner and Darren Ward are assistant professors at the University of Maryland at College Park and Humboldt State University, respectively.  Alice Shumate was promoted to Associate Professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University.  Rich Hofstetter was featured in The Atlantic and on Public Radio International, and Jay Lennon was quoted in the New York Times.

By Kathryn Cottingham  and Matt Ayres

Alison Mattek

Greetings from the digital musics department! This year has been marked by significant academic accomplishments, as well as cutting-edge, electro-acoustic research. Program Director Michael Casey ’92, presented his research at the Bregman Music and Audio Research Studio at ISMIR in Utrecht, the Stanford University hearing Seminar, Google Research in Mountainview CA, and Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. He continues to develop both OMRAS2 music information tools, and his own MIR scripting language, pyMARSB. More information is available on his website, www.music.dartmouth.edu/~bmars.

Recently, Technology Director Spencer Topel was the co-curator of the Alternative Events concert at ICMC 2010, which included a performance by the Voxare Quartet. In 2011, Topel’s music will be featured by the MATA Interval Series and in Fresh Ink, a broadcast hosted by the Society for New Music. Joshua Hudelson ’11 is conducting ethnographic research on a community of Americans who use recording and transmission technologies to communicate with the spirits of the dead. He is also developing software tools for tracking, sonifying, and manipulating typing patterns as compositional material.

Alexander Wroten ’11 is developing three video games and plans on examining their intrinsic musicality.

Alexander Dupuis ’12 had his audiovisual improvisation piece “/Ramus /” performed at ICMC 2010 at Stony Brook University, and premiered “/Tree of Aeons /” at the Pixilerations festival in Providence, RI, in October.

David Kant ’12 had a solo show at The Incubator Arts Project in NY, where he also collaborated with composer Yoon Ji Lee at The Stone.

Alison Mattek ’12 recently published her paper, Revisiting Cagean Composition Methodology with a Modern Computational Implementation at NIME 2010 in Sydney, Australia.

The department’s graduate students recently started a band called Gravies and the Main Dish Sauce, and had their inaugural performance in November. Also, the bassoon quintet Dark In the Song premiered “Soon to be Replaced” in Columbia, SC.

Michael Chinen ’09 is in Berlin, working on sonification projects with a group called the Institute for Algorhythmics. The group looks at algorithms, signals, and computer architecture and tries to enunciate the similarities in musical compositions. Visit the group’s website at www.algorhythmics.com/en/ for audio samples. Chinen continues his work on Audacity and FFMpeg, and presented his work at the Google Summer of Code 2010.

Travis Garrison ’06 is pursuing a PhD in Music Composition with a cognate in Historical Musicology from the University of Florida. His compositions were recently performed in France and across the United States at both conferences and festivals including ICMC, SEAMUS, and the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival.

Bruno Ruviaro ’04 is currently working as a doctoral scholar at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Recent compositions include a work for the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, and a trio that performed at the Darmstadt Festival in Germany.

Iroro Orife ’01 is working as a Senior Audio Engineer on Apple’s Final Cut Pro and is running his record label “de’fchild.” For more information, visit the label’s website at http://soundcloud.com/defchild.

Tae Hong Park ’00 recently received tenure at Tulane University, was elected President of ICMA, and is also an editor of SEAMUS.

Colby Leider ’98 was hired as the Director of the Music Engineering Program at the University of Miami. He is currently researching long-term acoustical/meteorological interactions in the Florida everglades.

Ko Umezaki ’93 works in the University of California Irvine’s Music Department in the Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology area. Umezaki produced Huun Huur Tu’s October release of  “Ancestors Call on World Village,” performs with the Silk Road Ensemble, works with the string quartet Brooklyn Rider, and composes with Joe Gramley. Most of his compositions feature Japanese shakuhachi flutes and mobile electronic devices.

Ray Guillette ’92 lives in Berkeley, CA, and is developing an interactive audio-biofeedback environment for the treatment of traumatic-stress conditions.

Alison Mattek

Alison Mattek

by Rebecca Fawcett

Photo: Alison Mattek, a current digital musics graduate student, works in the Bregman Music Audio Research Studio at Dartmouth.

Sam Fey, a graduate student in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) program, has been awarded the Journal of Plankton Research’s 2010 David Cushing Prize for his paper “Zooplankton Grazing of Gloeotrichia echinulata and Associated Life History Consequences.” The annual prize, given to a career scientist aged 35 or younger, honors the best paper published in the journal the previous year.

For more info go to Dartmouth Now

Dartmouth is holding its 25th Annual Neuroscience Day on Friday, February 11 from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. The event provides an opportunity to meet Dartmouth’s neuroscientists and learn more about the research studies they conduct. Dartmouth’s faculty, postdoctoral researchers, house staff, graduate, and undergraduate students are presenting their studies in a poster session in the morning and oral presentations in the afternoon, and awards will be given to undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral presentations.

For more info go to Dartmouth Now

This year, five biochemistry graduate students received PhDs at Dartmouth’s 2010 Commencement: Sarah L. Thompson and Swapna Kollu of the Compton lab; Katrina Bogan of the Brenner lab, Andres Lorente of the Barlowe lab, and Christopher Hickey of the Wickner lab,  One student, Sankhamala (Mala) Chakraborti of the Speck lab, received an MS degree. Since June, three additional students have completed their PhD requirements and will matriculate at the 2011 Commencement. Recently, MD/PhD program students Polina Shindiapina and Liya Roudaia had the privilege of juggling medical school classes with the completion of their theses; both are currently in their third year at Dartmouth Medical School. Patrick Cushing completed his PhD requirements in November and is currently working as a postdoctoral research associate in the Madden lab. Sarah begins her postdoc with Stephen Taylor at England’s University of Manchester in January, and Swapna is a Research Fellow in the lab of Andrew Brack at Harvard and Mass General Hospital. Katrina Bogan has a postdoc appointment in Michael Welsh’s lab in the Department of Internal Medicine and in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. In addition to her stressful thesis defense preparation, Katie and Seth Brown squeezed in a wedding and honeymoon just a few weeks before her February defense. Andres Lorente and his wife Alexis were reunited in November by his postdoc at UT Southwestern, where Alexis is a medical student. Chris Hickey, his wife Athena Nomikos MS ’09, and daughter Maria are settled in the New Haven area, where Chris is a postdoc at Yale with Mark Hochstrasser. Mala was accepted and began her work as a general management student at the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden.

Joining the biochemistry program this year were six students fresh from their first-year rotations: AJ Bonilla of Pletneva lab, Jessica Day of Kull lab, Pinar Gurel of Higgs lab, Chris Laucius of Compton lab, Anda Zhang of Myers lab, and Ashley Zurawel of Supattapone lab. They’re doing a wonderful job of mentoring the new first-year students, and it feels as if they’ve been here for years.

Excellence prevails in biochemistry. This past spring, two more biochemists were awarded the E. Lucile Smith Award for Excellence in Biochemistry for their work accomplished in 2009. They were research associate S. Christopher Stroupe and graduate student Christopher M. Hickey, both of whom were members of the Wickner research group. Chris Stroupe left in September for a faculty position at the University of Virginia, and as noted above, Chris Hickey is now at Yale. All in all, it was a good year to be a Chris in the Wickner lab.

Our faculty members continue to be recognized for their excellence in administration, research, and teaching. Duane Compton was recently appointed to the new position of Senior Associate Dean for Research at the Dartmouth Medical School. One of his most important initiatives will be to implement and chair a new Biomedical Research Council that will guide the strategic direction for research here at the medical school. Also, thanks to the support from a P30 award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences last year, we are pleased to introduce our newest faculty member, James B. Moseley. Jamie earned his PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from Brandeis University and was a postdoctoral fellow with Paul Nurse at Rockefeller University. He arrived in August and already has two students doing research rotations in his lab for the winter term. The first-year DMS medical students also selected Dean Madden to receive The Distinguished Small Group Leader Award for his work in their biochemistry class.

Finally, we also recognize the excellence of Supattapone lab research associate Nate Deleault, whom the Alberta Prion Research Institute recognized with its International Young Researcher Award. The international jury selected Nate’s PNAS paper Formation of Native Prions from Minimal Components in Vitro as having the most innovative findings and anticipated future impact in the field of prion and prion-like protein misfolding science.

by Kathie Savage

In 2010, five PhD students and one MS student matriculated from Dartmouth’s chemistry department. Jian Yuan received the Hannah Croasdale Award, an honor bestowed by the department annually to the PhD recipient who best exemplifies the qualities of a scholar. In addition, the department received two college-wide awards: Tim Chapp won the Filene Teaching Award, and Nick Tito was one of the three winners at the Graduate Student Poster Session. Also, this fall, five new graduate students joined the department.

President Barack Obama awarded the National Medal of Science to Marye Anne Fox, who received her PhD from Dartmouth in chemistry; she currently serves as chancellor of UC San Diego. While at Dartmouth, Chancellor Fox worked mostly under Dave Lemal. In a recent interview, Fox cited Lemal’s support and influence, stating that, “It was David Lemal who said, ‘She has possibilities.’” Chancellor Fox joins our late colleague, Walter Stockmayer, in receiving the National Medal of Science.

The department continues to conduct strong research; this academic year, many graduate students are presenting their research at such national meetings as the Gordon Research Conferences. Kate Pletneva was awarded an NSF CAREER award to support her research in protein dynamics, while Professor Ivan Aprahamian recently traveled to Washington, DC with his student to participate in the US Science and Engineering Festival. Also, Xin Su was chosen as a CAS Student Information Exchange Program scholar.

by John Winn