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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