Kudos

Recognition for Dartmouth faculty, staff and students

Elliot Fisher, professor of medicine and community and family medicine, was recently elected to the Institute of Medicine (IOM). The IOM was established in 1970 by the National Academy of the Sciences as an honorific and advisory organization and is recognized as a national resource for independent, scientifically informed analysis and recommendations on issues related to human health. Fisher was recognized for his research documenting how U.S. regions with higher medical spending do not provide better quality health care or achieve better long-term health outcomes. He is also the founding director and now senior associate of the VA Outcomes Group, part of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in White River Junction, Vt.

The work of Lorenza Viola, associate professor of physics and astronomy and Lea Santos, a research associate in the department, was spotlighted in the October 13 issue of Physical Review Letters. Their paper, "Enhanced Convergence and Robust Performance of Randomized Dynamical Decoupling," unveils a new way to control the dynamics of quantum systems. Until recently, this has mainly been accomplished by "kicking" the system with periodic trains of control pulses. In this paper, the application of such pulses is deliberately randomized. The authors found that, somewhat counterintuitively, randomized control schemes offer superior convergence and stability over their purely deterministic counterparts.

In honor of Ross Virginia, professor of environmental studies, and adjunct professor of biological sciences and earth sciences, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names has named a valley in Antarctica Virginia Valley. The Board's committee on Antarctic names named one of the McMurdo Dry Valleys (located at latitude 77 29 south, longitude 160 56 east) after Virginia in recognition of his extensive work on the National Science Foundation's McMurdo Dry Valley Long-Term Ecological Research Program, which he has been involved in since 1989. Virginia is an ecosystem ecologist interested in human influence on biogeochemical cycles. He directs the Dickey Center's Institute for Arctic Studies and teaches courses including Ecological Agriculture and From Pole to Pole: Environmental Issues of the Earth's Cold Regions.

Hannah Murnen '06, Augusta Niles '07, Nathan Sigworth '07, and Deborah Sperling '06, were recently honored with a 2006 Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics magazine for their invention, the Gyrobike, which employs a new stabilizing system to replace training wheels. To help children learn to ride, the team placed a flywheel inside the bicycle's front wheel. The spinning flywheel makes the wheel resist tipping because of the phenomenon known as gyroscopic precession. The Gyrobike's award is one of only 10 Breakthrough Awards presented annually by Popular Mechanics.

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