Grad News Forum

Students across Graduate Studies have a lot of things to look forward to this spring. The newest edition of the MALS Journal is one of them.

During the last week of classes, Katie Moritz and Jamaal Downey, MALS students and the editors of the Journal, will release their second, and final, journal of the academic year.

From left – Mortiz, Downey, Tiernan and Paige.

“It’s lots of long nights – lot’s of coffee cups on the floor of my car,” Moritz said, “but it’s worth it.”

The Journal has taken on a new life of late. For years, it had been published under the title the MALS Quarterly, and was a newsletter-style printing. Last year’s editor, Erin O’Flaherty, shrunk the publication’s size and demanded new rigor for its submissions. O’Flaherty helped give the Journal (still called the Quarterly at the time) a new sense of prestige.

“We want to be sure Erin gets a ton of credit,” Downey said. “She revolutionized the publication. We started from such a great place, and just tried to realize the final pieces of that vision.”

So Moritz and Downey made some final changes to complete the revitalization of the publication. First, they decided that the Journal should be issued twice a year, instead of once a quarter, to improve competition for space in its pages. And, with the help of MALS Director Wole O., they secured an ISSN number from the Library of Congress, taking the publication to a whole new level.

The result?

“We had over one hundred submissions this time around,” Moritz said. “We turned away so many amazing pieces. But we’re left with a great publication.”

That publication will feature eight poems, two short stories, four nonfiction pieces, one oral history piece, and four photographs, drawn from current MALS students and alumni of the program. The work is drawn from all of the tracks the MALS program offers – the general track and the Cultural Studies, Globalization Studies, and Creative Writing tracks (Moritz and Downey are on the general track).

“The program sometimes feels so abstract at times, because students are all over the place, and everyone has different interests,” Moritz said. “But there is a strain of commonality in all these pieces. I realized that everyone here is concerned with making something better. There’s a strong flavor of social justice in our community. It’s idealistic, but it’s wonderful.”

Downey agreed. “From the submissions we read, one thing is clear. MALS is a group of strong, independent thinkers. My role as editor helped me to see these common threads.”

“And,” he added, “my writing and editing skills improved dramatically.”

These are all things that the next editors – Henry Paige (MALS – General Track) and Erin Tiernan (MALS – Cultural Studies) – have to look forward to.

“We are extremely excited for the opportunity to build upon the great work continued by Katie and Jamaal,” Tiernan said. “As next year’s editors, we hope to increase the visibility of both the MALS Program and the Journal.”

For MALS students, the Journal will find its way into their office mailboxes. For anyone else interested in a copy, Moritz and Downey encourage stopping by the MALS office on the first floor of Wentworth to pick one up.

Teague Enterprises TE-10 smoking system equipped with two exposure chambers.

Recently, Yuan Liu and Sadik Antwi-Boampong of the Department of Chemistry published a paper entitled “Detection of Secondhand Cigarette Smoke via Nicotine Using Conductive Polymer Films” in collaboration with their advisor, Joseph J. BelBruno, Mardi A. Crane-Godreau of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, and Susanne E. Tanski of the Department of Pediatrics and the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Norris Cotton Cancer Center. The paper, published in Nicotine and Tobacco Research, described a sensor that the group had developed that detects levels of secondhand and even thirdhand smoke.

In the sensor, a polyaniline polymer is coated onto a chrome and nickel electrode grid, creating a conductive layer. The polymer is then protonated with acid, which then interacts with nicotine (a base), and resistance is measured across the sensor. Measurements are taken in a smoking machine, where cigarettes are spun and smoked, and the smoke is then shuttled into the exposure chamber, where the sensor is located. After each round of secondhand smoke exposure, the sensor is regenerated with purges of fresh air. The sensor is so sensitive that it even picks up levels of thirdhand smoke (smoke that has been absorbed onto surfaces such as walls, furniture, clothing, etc.).

Liu, Antwi-Boampong, and their collaborators have developed this sensor and its program interface to be used for commercial purposes to test levels of second and thirdhand smoke in homes, especially where children live. The sensor is innovative because it measures data in real-time, as compared to other sensors, which can only analyze data after full collection.

Molly Croteau, also a PhD student in the Department of Chemistry, recently sat down with Antwi-Boampong to learn more about this innovative project.

Molly Croteau (MC): How did you and Liu come to work on this project?

Sadik Antwi-Boampong (SA): This is Liu’s thesis research, and I assisted him. Our advisor, Professor BelBruno, had the idea to build this sensor.

MC: How long have you been working on this project?

SA: We’ve been researching this sensor for about three and a half years.

MC: Three and a half years is a long time—the public only sees the results. What were some of the biggest obstacles to overcome?

SA: We invested a considerable amount of time in material selection and sensor design because we wanted a simple but effective device. Once we had chosen a polymer, we then had to optimize it to provide maximum efficiency. We also had to choose a substrate and electrodes that would work well as the sensor platform. We actually started with a glass substrate, but ultimately decided against it because of its fragility and difficulty in machining. In the end, we switched to a silicon substrate with a chromium-nickel interdigitated electrode grid fabricated using conventional lithography. We also had to figure out the best solvent and optimal film thickness for the sensor layer. Thus, in our materials approach for this work, the design and selection of materials posed some challenges.

MC: The paper mentions that this sensor measured 0.75 ppb nicotine for 2 cigarettes smoked, and 1.11 ppb for 3 cigarettes smoked. What is the safe value for nicotine exposure?

SA: The median lethal dose for nicotine is about 30 mg, and as you would expect, systemic exposure to minute levels of nicotine through secondhand smoke aerosol can have serious effects on an individual. Therefore, we are really happy that our sensor is sensitive enough to measure in the ppb range.

MC: How would the user regenerate the sensor?

SA: A jet of air can fully regenerate the sensor for multiple uses.

MC: The system is relatively inexpensive—the sensor/chip costs about $30, and the computer costs anywhere from $25 to $300. In addition, the sensor can be regenerated for multiple uses. How else is your system better than what is already out there for secondhand smoke detection?

SA: In addition to being considerably cheaper, our sensor is significantly more sensitive and user-friendly than the traditional sensors already on the market. Our sensor measures data in real-time and gives that information right away to the user. Detection systems out there now only collect the data, and then it needs to be analyzed by experts and sent back to the user. Our sensor would allow the user to see right away the levels of secondhand smoke that they are being exposed to.

MC: This project involved a lot of components and different areas of research. Have you collaborated with anyone?

SA: Oh, yes. Professor Mardi Crane-Godreau works with us in our smoking chamber experiments at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Dr. Susanne Tanski is a pediatrician, who will be working with us to collect data from her patients who have parents who are smokers. We also collaborated with the Thayer School of Engineering on our early glass sensor fabrication and lithography work, the Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility in Remsen on obtaining microscopic images of our sensors, the Computer Science Department on coding the program for the sensor, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy on the circuitry of the sensor. This project was very cross-disciplinary.

MC: What are your future plans for this project?

SA: Right now we are currently enhancing the sensor for selectivity and sensitivity. We are looking into different sensor layer architectures and actively exploring different ways we can make the sensor better. Also, we are looking into detecting levels of cotinine, which is what nicotine is converted to in your body. We have partnered with Professor Crane-Godreau to conduct new experiments to qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate the sensor’s efficacy.

MC: It sounds like you are really on your way to helping people quickly monitor secondhand smoke levels.

SA: We are! In addition, I am also working on a sensor that can detect levels of formaldehyde, a ubiquitous molecule that leaches from construction materials and many household products. It has recently been determined that formaldehyde causes a variety of cancers, including myeloid leukemia, so that is the motivation for the project. There are no affordable sensor systems now that can effectively and selectively detect formaldehyde, so I am hoping to use a simple materials chemistry approach to construct a sensor that can sense formaldehyde vapor in real-time.

To read more about Liu and Antwi-Boampong’s research, see the Dartmouth Now.

by Molly Croteau

For Princeton University professor and former US State Department official, Anne-Marie Slaughter, it has been a busy year. Her manifesto chronicling the struggle of today’s professional women attempting to achieve work-life balance, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All” (July 2012), quickly became the Atlantic’s most viewed article of all time (The Colbert Report interview, July 16, 2012). Professor Slaughter’s article is credited, along with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandburg’s Lean In, with reinvigorating the debate about gender equality in the new millennium.

On April 3^rd, the same day she was announced as president of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy think tank, Professor Slaughter spoke to a standing room only crowd at the Tuck School of Business. Her lecture was a part of the Leading Voices in Higher Education series, which developed out of strategic planning efforts early last year, with the goal of bringing leading scholars and authors to Dartmouth.

For the first half of her talk, Professor Slaughter presented the range of reactions she has received for her Atlantic piece. Not surprisingly, they generally group into two major categories: positive, in the form of gratitude for addressing the challenges that career women face, and negative, broadly that she is “setting back the women’s movement” and “reversing what we have gained.” A third reaction category that Professor Slaughter discussed is that which she receives from men, specifically, from fathers. Either these men are disheartened to see their high-achieving daughters start to struggle with work-life balance, or, they are young men saying that due to social stigma and societal pressures, “men can’t have it all either.” For example, if a woman leaves work early to care for a child, it is expected. However, if a man leaves, he is perceived as not committed to the job, and is “not really a guy.”

Over half of all people receiving bachelor’s degrees in the United States today are women. Overall, the numbers are similar for those earning advanced degrees. Despite these advances, women remain under-represented in high-ranking jobs. For example, according to Professor Slaughter, there are only 21 female CEOs amongst the Fortune 500 companies. Furthermore, the number of women leaving the workforce after having a second child is the same today as it was 20 years ago. Knowing and understanding the challenges is only a part of the battle. In the second half of her lecture, Professor Slaughter addressed how we might continue to strive toward true gender equality moving forward. Her mantra centered around three major things: paid leave, good day care, and flextime.

In addition, Professor Slaughter stressed the importance of valuing breadwinners and caregivers, as well as individual time spent in each capacity. Our society was designed with the notion that one person, typically the woman, would be the caregiver, and one, typically the man, would be the breadwinner. However, with 70% of woman in the workforce, that model no longer applies. Professor Slaughter suggests that instead of dividing roles by gender, couples should instead consider additional factors, such as which partner earns a higher salary, has a career they can leave and more easily return to, works with a more understanding employer, etc.

Professor Slaughter addressed the importance of giving men, as well as women, more options, and told the audience that if taking time out to start a family, “don’t drop out, defer.” She acknowledged that some careers are more amenable to this than others, but said it is important to “stay in the game” in some capacity during any time away. Finally, she ended her lecture with two thoughts. First, that her work, and management, style has always been that “Family comes first. If family comes first, work does not come second. Life comes together.” And second, that as a society, we all need to slow down, stressing the importance of nourishing our souls, whether that be with family or something else, as we move along in our careers.

The academic lifestyle was discussed in detail during the question session following the lecture. Professor Slaughter emphasized that the academic life affords a level of flexibility in time management that is not easily accessible to all careers. Her husband is also a professor at Princeton University. When specifically asked, she said that the best time for career women to have kids is 30-35 years old, one of her reasons being that an “independent me” is a good idea before bringing people into the world. If not possible, she suggested that freezing eggs is an alternative, since fertility issues can be devastating.

Furthermore, academic institutions are beginning to make changes. For example, Princeton University automatically awards both men and women an extra year on the tenure clock after the birth of a child. However, as a current graduate student myself, it is hard to imagine that the demands of a functioning scientific research lab—advising graduate students and post-doctoral researchers, writing grant renewals, teaching, publishing manuscripts, etc.—could easily pause for any stretch of time. This idea gets back to the core of Professor Slaughter’s lecture, which is that gender equality and work-life balance issues are bigger than individual institutions. Overall, we need to create more affordable, flexible day care options, redesign the workplace, include men in all discussions, and value caregiving as a society. Only then, can we truly begin to have it all.

You can find Professor Slaughter’s Leading Voices in Higher Education lecture online.

by Jeanine Amacher

Like the rest of the world, Matthew Sturdevant, MALS ’08, was shocked and horrified when he first learned of the mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., on December 14, 2012. But then he had to go to work and cover the unfolding tragedy for the Hartford Courant, Connecticut’s largest daily newspaper.

A Courant staff writer since 2009 and a reporter for nearly 15 years, Sturdevant says, “Nothing could have prepared me for the mass murder of children. Many people feel the pain is still very raw. It’s harrowing and haunting, and yet it’s also uplifting to have seen a global outpouring of kindness in response to the tragedy.”

On April 15, Sturdevant was one of a team of Courant staffers recognized by the Pulitzer Prize committee. Runners-up to the Denver Post in the category of breaking news reporting, the Hartford Courant staff was cited “for its complete and sensitive coverage of the shooting massacre at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 children and 6 adults, using digital tools as well as traditional reporting to tell the story quickly while portraying the stunned community’s grief.”

Sturdevant credits the Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) faculty with helping him “expand my writing abilities,” and thus enabling him to convey such difficult news in an insightful way. He cites Professors Thomas Powers (a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist), Barbara S. Kreiger, and Sydney Lea as “hugely influential,” and says he chose a MALS nonfiction creative writing concentration over a journalism master’s program because he “wanted to broaden my learning and steep in the two years of a liberal arts education that Dartmouth provides.”

For the full article go to Dartmouth Now.

Photo courtesy of Matthew Sturdevant

“Imagine a world where scholarship lives in the streets not just in the stacks,” said Jeffrey Schnapp in a lecture on March 7^th. A romance languages and literature professor at Harvard University, Schnapp discussed how the digital humanities provides new methods for humanistic inquiry and for sharing scholarly knowledge.

Schnapp, who taught in Dartmouth’s French and Italian Department from 1983 to 1985, collaborated with the Dartmouth Dante Project, an effort to cull Dante criticism into a single database. Schnapp is now the director of Harvard’s metaLab, a research and teaching unit at Harvard University that focuses on exploring and expanding the borders of networked culture in the arts and humanities.

A recent metaLab project enables audiences to visualize the dissemination of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations across time, space, and languages. Schnapp explained that integrating digital media into one’s work does not need to affect the rigor and precision proper to scholarship. Digital media allows scholars to “build big pictures out of research questions,” which in turn, makes the relevance and value of their scholarship more visible to the world beyond the borders of their discipline and of academia. 

In 2012, Schnapp, along with leading experts from University of California, Los Angeles and Art Center College of Design, co-wrote and published Digital_Humanities. The book argues that the digital humanities has the potential to revitalize the liberal arts and discusses different methods it offers for humanistic inquiry such as visualization, data mining, critical curation, and geospatial analysis.

metaLab recently helped design and implement the Reischauer Institute’s Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters, which records the events of the 2011 tsunami and its aftermath. This archive encourages a wider range of participation than digital copies of print records. It is also unlike the traditional archive, which is often in a library vault and can only be accessed by a few. Public citizens can upload materials, such as photos, and it contains a record of people’s reactions to the events in the moment they happened. While enabling average citizens to contribute to the recording of history, the archives also involve the experts, such as historians.

metaLab is also involved in work on multimedia library collections. The Zeega project is a multimedia platform that allows people to create interactive stories through collecting, mixing, and curating film, photography, text, and audio.

Books will still exist but they need other mediums to complement them, argued Schnapp, explaining that the way we take in knowledge has changed, so the humanities needs to change the way it conveys its knowledge.

by Shirley Anghel

photo by Jin Lee

The Graduate Forum would like to congratulate Morgan Thompson on her recent publication in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, Volume 20, Issue 1. Thompson, who defended her dissertation this fall in biochemistry, collaborated on the article with Ernest Heimsath, Timothy Gauvin, and Professor Henry Higgs, all of the Department of Biochemistry, and Dean Jon Kull of both the Department of Biochemistry and the Department of Chemistry.

At Dartmouth, Thompson conducted research on proteins related to cell structure. She used a technique called X-ray crystallography to generate images of protein structures that are too small to see with even the most powerful microscope. Specifically, Thompson was interested in interactions between actin and formins, two proteins involved in facilitating cell movement. Actin molecules combine to form rigid filaments that give shape to cells, and formin molecules interact with actin to control actin filament growth.

In their recent article, Thompson and her collaborators investigated how formins promote actin filament elongation. Their work represents only the second example of a formin bound to actin visualized through crystallography, and the structure they modeled was probably closer to the way the proteins interact in nature than what has previously been observed. The process of crystallizing proteins to create structural images can cause them to act in ways that they would not naturally, explains Thompson, so it can be complicated to get images of physiological interactions. Research on the interaction of these proteins is significant because it increases our understanding of how cells change shape to move throughout the body, which is important for understanding various diseases, such as cancer.

One of Thompson’s main interests while at Dartmouth was in teaching, both undergraduates and younger students. She was a teaching assistant for four terms, for which she won the Graduate Teaching Award. Thompson also taught science to sixth graders in Enfield, New Hampshire, as part of a National Science Foundation Graduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics in K-12 Education (GK-12) fellowship. In addition, Thompson led labs in several local fourth grade classrooms on the importance of hand washing, after her mother, a local fourth grade teacher, asked for her help in explaining germs to her students.

Thompson found spending time in the classroom especially rewarding—she recalls the thank you notes that she received from students after she had visited their classes. “One student even wrote me that it was the best day of his life!” she recalls. While she found her work in the lab very interesting, it was this time working with students and witnessing their developing interest in science that Thompson found particularly meaningful. She also feels that it is extremely important for Dartmouth, an institution with such a variety of resources, to contribute to the surrounding community.

As a result of her experiences, Thompson decided to pursue a career in teaching. She now works as a high school teacher at the Pingry School in New Jersey, where she teaches biology to students in ninth and tenth grade and a course in molecular biology methods to eleventh and twelfth graders. She enjoys her job, and, in particular, is excited that she can teach complex molecular methods to her students. Thompson notes that the methods she is teaching her juniors and seniors are “the same ones I used in my lab at Dartmouth.”

Thompson feels that her experiences as a graduate student at Dartmouth prepared her well for her new position in that she was able to develop her teaching skills as well as work on her research. She is grateful to the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) for the teaching support that they provided, as well as to her advisor, Dean Kull, who always encouraged her in all of her teaching and outreach endeavors. Having her dissertation work published in Nature is a satisfying culmination to her graduate career, and Thompson is eager to continue working with students to encourage others to be excited about science.

by Elizabeth Molina-Markham

For a “Talk of the Town” piece, The New Yorker spoke with Professor Donald E. Pease about Theodor Geisel, Class of 1925, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss, and how Seuss’ story The Zax provides a parable about political stalemate that has relevance to the federal government’s current budgetary situation.

Check out the Dartmouth Now coverage. A subscription is needed to read the full story, published in the March 18, 2013, issue of The New Yorker.

Graduate Studies wants to congratulate Ernest Heimsath on his new position at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Ernest recently defended his dissertation in biochemistry in December, under the guidance of Professor Henry Higgs. He will be moving down to Bethesda, Maryland, in March to work as a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Bechara Kachar in the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), focusing on the functioning of auditory cells.

Ernest grew up in both Texas and Virginia and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), where he was supported by the NIGMS-funded Minority Biomedical Research Support (MBRS) program. While a junior at UTSA, he participated in the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) program—now the Academic Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (ASURE) program—at Dartmouth. He enjoyed working in the Department of Biological Sciences that summer and appreciated the friendly, open-door policy of Dartmouth faculty. Ernest notes that he chose Dartmouth for graduate school partly as a result of this positive experience, as well as out of a desire to get to know a new area of the country.

While at Dartmouth, Ernest’s research has focused on polymerization of the protein, actin, which is the basis for many cellular structures. In particular, actin helps form filopodia, which are protrusions some cells use to sense their environment and help them migrate throughout the body. In a recent article published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Volume 287, Issue 5, Ernest examined a particular type of formin, which are proteins that regulate actin polymerization. He discovered that one formin in particular, called FMNL3, has unique effects on actin dynamics, which help to explain its role in assembling filopodia.

Ernest met Dr. Kachar in 2011 at the American Society for Cell Biology annual meeting, after being inspired by his work on sensory neurons in the inner ear, which was recently featured in Cell Picture Show. Ernest’s work at the NIDCD will relate to his previous research in that these neurons contain structures called stereocilia, which share much of the same actin-based architecture as filopodia, although they can be orders of magnitude larger and also more stable. Once formed during development, stereocilia last throughout your entire life and do not regenerate. As stereocilia are directly responsible for hearing, and dysfunctions in many of the components within them are attributed to hearing disorders, Ernest is excited about the clinical relevancy of the work he will be doing.

Ernest observes that his experience in Professor Higgs’ lab has prepared him well for this next career move. He says that he will miss the sense of community in the lab, as well as the unique Dartmouth environment. Dartmouth professors, explains Ernest, are “approachable,” and “faculty really care about developing grad students.” They are “down-to-earth” and open to being corrected, which is conducive to productive learning and research. Overall, Ernest is very satisfied with his graduate experience and looking forward to getting to know another new area of the country as a postdoc.

We wish him the best in his new position!

by Elizabeth Molina-Markham

For almost a year now Rebecca Munsterer, a 2005 graduate of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program, has been publishing a novel, The Stonehouse Caper, online, one page at a time.

Publishing fiction serially is not a new idea. Charles Dickens released all his novels in installments, often in weekly or monthly magazines. Munsterer studied Dickens and other Victorian era writers as an English major at Colby College, where she focused on creative writing. After earning her certification to teach high school English at Colby, Munsterer wanted to continue her education as well as work on her writing. She sought a curriculum broader in scope than what is normally available in traditional Master of Fine Arts programs and chose MALS at Dartmouth.

About her experience in the MALS program, Munsterer says she especially enjoyed the small workshop-style classes and an opportunity to experiment with a variety of genres: journalism, creative non-fiction, and screenwriting. For her thesis, she wrote five thirty-minute screenplays, comprising On Campus: Creative Non-Fictitious Television for the College Bound Audience.

“Learning to write well also makes you a better reader,” she observes, “and the critical reading skills I developed in the program have been particularly useful in my work in the Admissions Office.” Hired part-time to read applications while still a MALS student, Munsterer is senior associate director of the Office of Admissions at Dartmouth, reading an average of one hundred and sixty undergraduate applications a week in the busy season. During other parts of the year she recruits prospective students in New Jersey, Florida, and abroad.

After completing the MALS program, Munsterer wanted to experiment with composing fiction online and searched the web to see who was working in this domain. “There were blogs to follow and some people who were posting via email, but I didn’t find anyone who was writing serially online.” She believed in the idea enough to put up her own money to create a logo and website, and subsequently launched Novel Nibble, with a goal “to promote literacy and entertainment—one page at a time.”

Initially, she thought an important element of her experiment would be interactivity that would allow readers to provide feedback and ideas—to “take a nibble.” She quickly found that readers just wanted an escape and were not necessarily interested in getting actively involved in helping to develop the story. She also discovered that readers were really interested in her and the writing process. “They want to know how I discipline myself to write every day, how I motivate myself, things like that. I quickly learned that there are a lot of people out there who want to write a book.”

After exactly one year, The Stonehouse Caper will end with the final installment coming on March 23. Noting some of the limitations of her publishing style, Munsterer says, “I don’t think the format is exactly what my readers want.” But what began as an experiment has been a huge success, with more than 15,000 visits to the website since it was launched and a host of loyal followers. The best thing that has happened is that it has led to a book deal.

In April 2012, Munsterer attended a media panel at the Greener Ventures Entrepreneurship Conference at the Tuck School of Business, at which she met Carey Albertine, co-founder of In This Together Media. Albertine began to follow Munsterer’s online novel and, subsequently, hired her to write a book. “They wanted a book about Christmas with strong female characters,” Munsterer says—so she wrote Mrs. Claus and The School of Christmas Spirit. Published in November 2012, the book sold well and for one week was the number one children’s holiday book.

About the future, Munsterer says the online experiment will continue as A Nibble a Day in which she will publish her stories, poems, and reflections in daily installments of less than five hundred words. But the big news is that the Christmas book was so successful that In This Together Media has asked Munsterer to write a second holiday book. Stay tuned!

by Michael Beahan

Dartmouth 2012 digital musics grads Alexander Dupuis, Alison Mattek, and David Kant, outside Hallgarten Hall after defending their theses.

Greetings from Hallgarten Hall!

In 2012, our graduate students continued to present their research here and abroad. Jessica Thompson has shown that hemodynamic brain activity collected during music listening can predict lists of descriptive labels. She has presented this work at several conferences, including the Cognitively Based Music Information Retrieval (CogMIR) workshop, the conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), and the Machine Learning and Interpretation in Neuroimaging (MLINI) workshop at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference. In December, Phillip Hermans presented a paper on goal-based music compositions in Lucca, Italy, at the 15th Generative Art Conference (GA2012). There were installations, paper sessions, live performances, lively discussion, and “lots of great Tuscan food.” In addition to live performance, Carlos Dominguez has been working on a soundtrack for the 1928 silent film, Beggars of Life, to be performed live alongside the film on February 2, 2013, at Dartmouth in conjunction with the Department of Film & Media Studies.

We are most delighted to welcome winter and spring term visiting professor, Dr. Tara Rodgers, a University of Maryland assistant professor of Women’s Studies, a distinguished faculty fellow in Digital Cultures & Creativity, and an affiliate faculty of American Studies and Musicology & Ethnomusicology. She is also the coordinator of the Women’s Studies Multimedia Studio and was a Canada-US Fulbright Scholar (2006-2007) and a visiting faculty in sound at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004-2005). Her book, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, received the 2011 Pauline Alderman Book Award for outstanding scholarship on women in music from the International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM). Rodgers’ current project is a feminist history of synthesized sound.

Professor Spencer Topel began 2013 in Copenhagen for a winter 2013 Danish International Visiting Artist (DIVA) residency to collaborate on a performance and sound installation series with the acclaimed Figura Ensemble. Digital musics faculty, Professor Larry Polansky and Professor Kui Dong, along with Professor Christian Wolff (former faculty), released a CD on Henceforth Records.

Professor Spencer Topel collaborated with studio art Professor Soo Sunny Park at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts to create this mesmerizing light-based sculpture and soundscape entitled Capturing Resonance.

In fall 2012, Nathan Davis, director of the Performance Laboratory in Contemporary Music, appeared as a concerto soloist with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ludovic Morlot, giving the world premiere of Dai Fujikura’s concerto, “Mina.”  As a percussionist in the International Contemporary Ensemble, he also performed at the Wiener Konzerthaus in Vienna, inaugurated a new hall in Sonoma with John Adams, and premiered a new work by John Zorn in Berlin.  Also an active composer, Davis wrote music for Morningside Lights (commissioned by Columbia University’s Miller Theatre) and performed it in New York City, together with Dartmouth Contemporary Music Lab graduate students Ryan Maguire, Phillip Hermans, and Carlos Dominguez. Davis was also awarded a 2012 commission by the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University and a recording grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.

In January, Andrew Sarroff, technical director of the Bregman Music and Audio Research Studio (BMARS) received funding from the Neukom Institute for Computational Science for Dartmouth to host the two-day Northeast Music Informatics Special Interest Group (NEMESIG) 2012. Dozens of music information researchers attended and presented, and Frank Russo of Ryerson University in Toronto was the keynote speaker.

Alumni notes:

Paul Osetinsky is the chief technology officer of his new web company, Treatings, where he handles all of the coding. Treatings is a professional networking platform that makes it easy to propose informational meetings with people in local coffee shops and bars.

Beau Sievers’ (PhD student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences) recent study about the uniquely human capacity to feel emotion through music was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study found our cognitive connection to music may have evolved from an older skill, the ability to glean emotion from motion. People will choose the same combination of spatiotemporal features—a certain speed, rhythm, and smoothness—whether pairing a particular emotion with a melody or with a cartoon animation. But most surprising, the results held true in people from two starkly different cultures: a rural village in Cambodia and a college campus in New England.

Bruno Ruviaro has just started a new job as assistant professor of music at Santa Clara University in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he is in charge of developing a new electronic music program and also teaching composition and music theory. Starting in the spring of 2013, he will be directing the newly-formed Santa Clara University Laptop Orchestra.

Christian Jaksjø works as a trombonist in the Frankfurt Radio Jazz Orchestra in Germany, as well as serving as the chief editor of Lydskrift, a Norwegian periodical on art music. Recent compositions include a work for ring modulated electromechanically amplified piano and electronic sound, commissioned by the pianist Ellen Ugelvik and released on her recent CD, Serynade (catalog number, ACD5061).

Iroro Orife is a staff engineer at Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco, working on perceptual audio codecs and audio processing for mobile devices, while continuing to run his label, de’fchild productions, releasing underground dub, techno, and experimental vibes on 12-inch vinyl with parity in the online spaces.

In fall 2012, Tae Hong Park started his new, tenured post as associate professor at New York University. He also received the 2012 Regional International Computer Music Association (ICMA) Award at the 2012 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) and survived Hurricane Sandy in New York City this year, after surviving Hurricane Katrina at Tulane University in New Orleans in 2005!

by Rebecca Fawcett