Faculty Colleagues Research Articles

Cardiac Neuroanatomy and Chronotropic Modulation of the Adult Giant Danio Heart

Studies in non‐mammalian models species have contributed significantly to our understanding of the biology and the nature of innervation in the heart. The giant danio (D. malabaricus) is a teleost fish species closely related to zebrafish, that is also capable of heart regeneration. We previously described the development and maturation of the giant danio (GD) heart. However, little is known about its innervation. We hypothesized that the pattern of innervation in the GD heart is anatomically and physiologically complex, and that the heart is responsive to physiological modulation similar to that seen in cyprinid fish and mammals. Using various neuronal markers and electron microcopy, we described the presence, distribution, and nature of nerves in the GD heart. Our study shows first that fine intrinsic cardiac nerve fibers are present throughout the heart chambers. Second, nerve soma and ganglia are highly concentrated at nerve plexuses located near the sinoatrial (SA) and atrioventricular (AV) junctions. However, the volume density of axonal processes_ projecting from ganglia located over the ventral aorta_ is highest over the corpus of the bulbus arteriosus. Third, using an ex vivo GD heart preparation, we found that the GD heart responded to both adrenergic and cholinergic agonists, in a manner that mirrors mammalian and teleost hearts. Taken together, our studies show that the GD heart displays complex patterns of innervation, and conserved cardiac physiological responses, and strongly suggest that the GD could be used as a viable model for investigating cardiac biology.Support or Funding Information• NIH R15 HD084262‐01, Martha C. Rieth Faculty Fellowship, Buehler Family Foundation

Introduction to Special Issue: Trust in Doubt: Consuming in a Post-Truth World

Introduction to Special Issue: Trust in Doubt: Consuming in a Post-Truth World

Transitioning back to faculty roles after being a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Nurse Faculty Scholar: Challenges and opportunities.

There is a dearth of literature describing factors supporting a successful transition from a career-development fellowship to resumption of the full complement of faculty roles. Because little is known about the transition back to the full faculty role, a subset of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Nurse Faculty Scholars (NFS) was interviewed to evaluate the self-identified challenges and opportunities that the scholars faced and factors contributing to their success when they reassumed the full faculty role. A subset of scholars from cohorts beginning the RWJF NFS program between 2008 and 2012 (n=10) was interviewed by members of the NFS National Advisory Committee. NFSs identified challenges and opportunities faced as they transitioned to their faculty roles following completion of the career development fellowship as well as the character of support received from individuals in their organizational influencing the experience of the faculty transition. Evaluation outcomes include recommendations for transition planning for home institutions, colleagues and fellows. NFSs identified transition challenges including managing multiple responsibilities and increased teaching demands coupled with loss of protected time and funding for scholarly work. Opportunities for career advancement were influenced by effective mentorship, institutional supports including advocacy and allocation of time and responsibilities consistent with continued research productivity. Issues contributing to a more difficult transition included non-supportive relationships among administrators and colleagues and newly assigned responsibilities that detracted from success in meeting expectations for tenure and promotion. Effective transition from fellow to faculty included plans for continued mentorship and stakeholder engagement of administration, mentors and faculty colleagues. Effective transition from fellow to the full complement of the faculty role benefits both the home institution and scholar. Positive outcomes may be contingent on scholar support and organizational investment during the transition period.

Abstract P5-05-05: Suppression of FOXM1 activities and breast cancer growth in vitro and in vivo by a new class of compounds

Abstract The transcription factor FOXM1 is up-regulated and overexpressed in aggressive, therapy-resistant forms of hormone receptor-positive and triple negative breast cancers, and is associated with less good patient survival. FOXM1 signaling is also a key driver in many other cancers. Here, we identify a new class of compounds effective in suppressing FOXM1 activity in breast cancers, and displaying good potency for antitumor efficacy. The compounds bind directly to FOXM1 and alter its proteolytic sensitivity, reduce the cellular level of FOXM1 protein by a proteasome-dependent process, and suppress breast cancer cell proliferation and cell cycle progression and increase apoptosis. RNA-seq and gene set enrichment analyses indicate that the compounds decrease expression of FOXM1-regulated genes and suppress gene ontologies under FOXM1 regulation. Several compounds have favorable pharmacokinetic properties and show good tumor suppression in preclinical breast tumor models. These compounds may be suitable for further clinical evaluation in targeting aggressive breast cancers driven by FOXM1. (Supported by Breast Cancer Research Foundation grant (BCRF-083 to BSK), The Julius and Mary Landfield Cancer Research Fund (to BSK), NIH grant R01 DK015556 (to JAK), NIH T32 GM070421 Fellowship (to VSG), Bankhead-Coley Foundation grant 09BW04 (to DEA), USDA award ILLU-698-909 and National Center for Supercomputing Applications Faculty Fellowship (to ZME), and UIUC Environmental Toxicology Scholarship (to BPS)). Citation Format: Benita S. Katzenellenbogen, Yvonne Ziegler, Mary J Laws, Valeria S. Guillen, SungHoon Kim, Parama Dey, Brandi P. Smith, Ping Gong, Noah Bindman, Yuechao Zhao, Kathryn Carlson, Mayuri A. Yasuda, Divya Singh, Zhong Li, Dorraya El-Ashry, Zeynep Madak-Erdogan, John A. Katzenellenbogen. Suppression of FOXM1 activities and breast cancer growth in vitro and in vivo by a new class of compounds [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2019 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2019 Dec 10-14; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2020;80(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P5-05-05.

Shifting Organizational Cultures: Developing Leaders in Humanistic Interprofessional Education

Organizational cultures significantly influence faculty and clinician well-being, trainees’ professional identity formation, and the care of patients and families. The ability of interprofessional healthcare teams to work collaboratively is important for safe, high quality, relationship-centered care. A multi-site project, Faculty Development for the Interprofessional Teaching of Humanism,* was initiated to create a national curriculum in humanism and professionalism designed to train interprofessional education (IPE) faculty leaders. Boston Children’s Hospital / Harvard Medical School (BCH/HMS) is the first pediatric site selected to design and implement this curriculum. Our objectives were to: 1) develop a national curriculum in humanism and professionalism for IPE faculty leaders; 2) adapt the curriculum for pediatrics; and 3) create and sustain a faculty fellowship for IPE leaders at BCH/HMS that promotes humanistic values in organizational culture and learning and care environments. We designed and implemented the curriculum at nine national sites. Topics focus on collaboration, communication, and relationships and include: highly functioning teams; advanced team formation; patients’ perspectives; empathy; well-being, resilience, renewal; diversity & inclusion; appreciative inquiry; values; IPE and others. To achieve sustainability at BCH/HMS, we created a unique Faculty Fellowship for Leaders in Humanistic Interprofessional Education. To increase impact, we recruited co-sponsors from departments across BCH. Fellows participate in 1½-hour, twice-monthly small-group sessions for 8 months and design and implement a group project. Twenty-one faculty applied. The first cohort included 11 faculty representing medicine, social work, nursing, and psychology. The Faculty Fellowship provides opportunities for IPE faculty leaders to enhance teaching skills, collaboration, relationships, reflective capacities, and role modeling in humanism and professionalism, and to work together to foster humanistic values within organizational culture. *Supported by a multi-institutional grant from the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation (Dr. Branch as national PI; Dr. Rider as site PI)

The Diffusion of Faculty Development: A Faculty Fellows Program

The Diffusion of Faculty Development: A Faculty Fellows Program

Faculty writing retreats in the library: Creative approaches to relationship building

At William & Mary (W&M) Libraries, we often feel this way, and we hear from our teaching faculty colleagues that they feel the same. But can this common challenge present a unique opportunity? Can we, as a library, fill this need and accomplish our goals of building relationships and connections with faculty? We determined that we can. As we consider time-intensive library events, partnerships, and outreach, we have learned that focusing on high-impact relationship-building opportunities is the best way to spend our time.

Economic Incentives and the Quality of Return Migrant Scholars: The Impact of China's Thousand Young Talents Program

We study the effect of the Thousand Young Talents Program (TYTP) on the academic quality of return migrant scientists to China. Using a unique dataset of the top Chinese mathematics departments' new hires, we find that the program leads to considerable increases in measures of their educational background and research productivity. The effects are concentrated in the elite C9 league, where the proportion of hires who received PhD degrees from top-50 overseas mathematics departments increased nearly four times after the initiation of the program. The data also reveal large and statistically significant increases in weighted pre-hire publications and weighted citations to pre-hire publications under the program. However, it appears that research output of previously hired faculty members declined after the introduction of TYTP hires, suggesting minimal or even negative impact of TYTP on faculty colleagues' academic achievements.

It's Still about Relevance: The Founding of a Humanities Collaborative as a Confident Response to the Humanities Crisis

This article details the creation of a humanities collaborative in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Portland as an active response to counteract the so-called humanities crisis. Beginning as a low-budget endeavor in 2016, the Humanities Collaborative focused in its first two years on gathering interest and participation from faculty colleagues by hosting lunch discussions throughout the semester and a writing retreat in the spring. Collaborating across disciplines and departments resulted in a reinvigorated engagement with the humanities. In 2019–20 the CAS Humanities Collaborative hosted a campus-wide public humanities project focusing on the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States that includes a student-faculty fellowship program, the Public Research Fellows. The success of the Humanities Collaborative allowed the founders to attract internal funding and to apply for external funding to support the Public Research Fellows programming.

It’s Still about Relevance: The Founding of a Humanities Collaborative as a Confident Response to the Humanities Crisis

This article details the creation of a humanities collaborative in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Portland as an active response to counteract the so-called humanities crisis. Beginning as a low-budget endeavor in 2016, the Humanities Collaborative focused in its first two years on gathering interest and participation from faculty colleagues by hosting lunch discussions throughout the semester and a writing retreat in the spring. Collaborating across disciplines and departments resulted in a reinvigorated engagement with the humanities. In 2019–20 the CAS Humanities Collaborative hosted a campus-wide public humanities project focusing on the centennial of women’s suffrage in the United States that includes a student-faculty fellowship program, the Public Research Fellows. The success of the Humanities Collaborative allowed the founders to attract internal funding and to apply for external funding to support the Public Research Fellows programming.

The Necessity of Research Practice

The Necessity of Research Practice

An imprecise path to precision medicine.

Xiling Shen is the Hawkins Family Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and director of the Woo Center for Big Data and Precision Health at Duke University. He is a National Science Foundation early-career awardee, chair of the National Cancer Institute’s Patient-Derived Models of Cancer consortium and an Israeli faculty fellow.

Voice and Memory in the Poetic Imagination: Nduka Otiono in Conversation with Chinua Achebe, Brenda Marie Osbey, and Gabriel Okara

Voice and Memory in the Poetic Imagination: Nduka Otiono in Conversation with Chinua Achebe, Brenda Marie Osbey, and Gabriel Okara Nduka Otiono Introduction It all began with the news of Dr. Gabriel Okara’s visit to Boston to spend some time with his son, clinical psychologist Dr. Ebi Okara, and his family. My acquaintance with the great poet in Nigeria before my relocation to Canada in 2006 ensured that the news reached me through the grapevine. It was one of those spillovers of the privileges of a writer, literary journalist, and national secretary of Nigeria’s writers’ guild, the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). Hence, despite the personal nature of the visit, word of the great writer’s visit to the US somehow got around to me in Providence, Rhode Island. The presence of Dr. Okara so close to Brown University, where I was then a postdoctoral fellow and senior research assistant to Professor Chinua Achebe, sounded like a midday angelus bell calling the faithful to prayer. I hearkened to the call, further spurred by the example of Achebe’s celebrated conversation with James Baldwin (Randall-Tsuruta 210–21). I connected with Ebi to verify the senior Okara’s visit and to determine the length of his stay. I also enquired whether he would be available for a special literary evening at Brown. Encouraged by Ebi’s positive response, I met with Professor Achebe and mooted the idea of a [End Page 215] joint literary evening between him and Dr. Okara. Professor Achebe’s enthusiastic embrace of the proposal could not be more contagious and encouraging. He told me it was an historic opportunity and a marvellous coincidence. He stressed that he had not shared a stage with Dr. Okara for as long as he could remember, and that he had hoped for such an opportunity. The urgency of the event need not be overemphasized: these were two globally celebrated African writers in their twilight years—Dr. Okara was 90, and Professor Achebe was 81. Armed with Achebe’s endorsement, I met with the then-Chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Brown, Professor Corey D.B. Walker. He was ecstatic over the news, and swung into action to facilitate the historic literary evening. He invited the award-winning Poet Laureate of the state of Louisiana, Brenda Marie Osbey, who was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Africana Studies at Churchill House, to join as the third guest writer for the evening. We decided to host the event as part of the Department’s Conversations in Africana Writing Series with the theme “Voice and Memory in the Poetic Imagination.” The event was held at the George Houston Bass Performance Arts Space in Churchill House, the home of the Department of Africana Studies. As Walker told the mixed audience—made up of students, academics, and guests from the community—in his introductory remarks, the event was curated to build on the Department’s tradition: The Faculty of Africana Studies at Brown University has a rich tradition of counting among its members some of the world’s great writers, from the late Haitian writer and critic Rene Depestre and playwright Adrienne Kennedy to Ama Ata Aidoo and George Lamming, to our current faculty colleagues Chinua Achebe, Brenda Marie Osbey, and John Edgar Wideman. This distinction represents one of the unique features about the discipline of Africana Studies in its ongoing pursuit to create new knowledge borne out of the continual intellectual exchange between creative writers, artists and scholars. Walker further emphasized that “Conversations in Africana Writing is our department’s forum for hosting some of the world’s great literary artists, speaking about the significant questions, issues and concerns of the complex and demanding art of writing.” He underscored that “it is this conversational aspect that makes these encounters such unique occasions” and cited Gabriel Okara’s insightful declaration that “[s]poken words are living things like cocoa-beans packed with life. And like the cocoa-beans they grow and give life […] They will enter some insides, remain there and grow like the corn blooming on the alluvial soil at the riverside” (The Voice 110). The literary dialogue of that evening...

The Exhibition Hello, Dear Enemy! and the Power of Collaboration

The Exhibition Hello, Dear Enemy!and the Power of Collaboration Elliott Schreiber (bio) In the summer of 2016, on a research fellowship at the International Youth Library (IYL) in Munich, Germany, I was fortunate to see the IYL's exhibition Hello, Dear Enemy! Picture Books for Peace and Humanity. By then, Germany had taken in over a million refugees, many from war zones in Syria and Afghanistan. Munich had opened its doors to tens of thousands of asylum seekers. But shrill, nationalist voices in Europe, including in Germany, as well as in the UnitedStates, were calling for these doors to be closed.By contrast, the sixty picturebooks collected in the exhibit, together with the forty graphically stunning posters and banners, cast a humane light on the plight of civilians in conflict zones around the world as well as on wrenching experiences of displacement. I inquired into the possibility of bringing the exhibit to my home institution, Vassar College, a private liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York. I learned that I was not the first representative from a US institution to express such an interest: the director of Worlds of Words (University of Arizona) as well as the HumanRights Institute at the University of Connecticut had also reached out to the IYL. The ensuing partnership between our institutions and the IYL laid the groundwork for a US tour of Hello, Dear Enemy! that began in fall 2017 and recently concluded. Click for larger view View full resolution The origins of this exhibit, in 1998, were based on the awareness that the effects of war, hostility, destruction, and suffering impact all people and children, whether directly as victims of conflict or indirectly as those within countries to which those affected escape. Likewise, the predominance of these topics in the media and in political and social discussions prompts inquisitive minds to question. At the International Youth Library, the belief is that picturebooks dealing with conflict and escape can "provoke reflection and inspire dialogue that sensitizes readers to processes of exclusion and invites them jointly to reflect on the foundations for a peaceful future" (Raabe 57). Thus, in 1998 a collection of books on peace and tolerance was sent to the IBBY Congress in New Delhi, which led to the creation a few years later of the exhibition Hello [End Page 89] Dear Enemy! Picture Books for Peace and Tolerance. The fall of 2014, amidst global crises bringing the topic of refugees and borders to the forefront, found the curators at the International Youth Library updating the exhibit in terms of content, staging design, and a name change: Hello, Dear Enemy! Picture Books for Peace and Humanity. Sixty picturebooks published mainly in the last fifteen years are divided into four themes: "the concrete experiences of war and escape; the causes of war and violence; xenophobia and prejudice; and peace utopias" (Raabe 57). Click for larger view View full resolution Each of the institutions involved in the US tour of this exhibition invested a great deal of time and energy to ensure that it achieved maximum visibility and impact. When Vassar hosted Hello, Dear Enemy! during our spring semester of 2018, we found that the key to achieving this goal was to bring to the local level the kind of collaborative work that we had already begun at a national and international level. At Vassar, I had two principal partners: Tracey Holland, a fellow faculty member with expertise in the area of the human rights of children and the faculty director of the Vassar College Urban Education Initiative, and Thomas Pacio, the director of Vassar's Creative Arts across the Disciplines (CAAD), which provided the financial resources (through the generous support of the Helen Forster Novy 1928 Fund) as well as crucial logistical support. Working closely with other colleagues, we displayed the exhibit at Vassar and two other local venues, and we devised a semester-long course for Vassar students that was structured around the exhibition. Within the framework of our course, we also hosted a celebrated team of artists and conducted significant outreach to seven Poughkeepsie-area schools. Click for larger view View full resolution The principal goal of our course was to...

The Hoisington Tape: An Oral History of E. B. Titchener’s Last Years at Cornell (1921-1927)

Abstract L. B. Hoisington (1883-1970) was a graduate student and then faculty colleague of E. B. Titchener (1867-1927) at Cornell University. In 1965, Hoisington gave a tape-recorded oral history interview conducted by Dr. Joseph “Bob” Ray (1924-2007), then professor of clinical psychology at Texas Tech University. Hoisington and Ray were formerly together as faculty and graduate student, respectively, at the University of Oklahoma. The interview focused on Hoisington’s memories and reflections about Titchener. The purpose of this report is to present to students and scholars of the history of psychology an overview of the contents of that candid, refreshingly personal interview. This report is not meant to be a detailed critical analysis of Hoisington’s recollections, although much of the substance and tenor of his remarks are corroborated in the scholarly record. A transcript of the 1-hr, 12-min interview is available as supplemental material (Marshall, 2019; https://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/ajp/media/hoisington_tape/).

Rock Engineering: Where is the Laboratory?

This paper is based on an invited lecture presented at the ARMA (ARMA-American Rock Mechanics Association) 2018 Rock Mechanics/Geomechanics Symposium, Seattle, WA. June 17–20, 2018. At the time of the invitation, the author was preparing an “Appendices” to a book (Sikora (2018) Charles Fairhurst—The Long Shadow published (via Amazon) by Itasca Consulting Group) to be published by Itasca Consulting Group—but page limitations required that the “Appendices” be eliminated. The invitation from ARMA provided an ideal opportunity to present the essence of the notes to professional colleagues. This paper attempts to expand on the presentation in Seattle. At the International Society for Rock Mechanics (ISRM) in 1962, Dr. Muller emphasized the central importance of large-scale discontinuities and anisotropy in rock engineering, and the need to establish a discipline distinct from the continuum fields of elasticity and plasticity. With the benefit of over 50 years of hindsight, it is clear that both elasticity and plasticity are important in rock mechanics—but discontinuities, especially on the scale of engineering projects, can be critical. Having been involved with the development of rock mechanics at the University of Minnesota since the late 1950s; with Professor Cundall as a faculty colleague since 1972; and with the founding of Itasca Consulting Group in 1981, the topic of discontinuities in rock has been a prominent long-standing concern to the ‘Minnesota group’. Theoretical developments in mechanics are often stimulated by experimental observations in classical ‘bench-scale’ laboratories. Thus, elasticity theory was stimulated by Hooke’s experiments (1678) and plasticity by Tresca’s experiments (1864). Even if it was possible to construct a laboratory to test ‘specimens’ of a rock mass on a scale sufficient to include large discontinuities, separation from the rock mass would remove in situ forces from the specimen, resulting in unknown changes to the specimen. What are the options to establish the constitutive behavior of the rock mass? Where is the laboratory? This paper discusses past attempts to answer this question and suggests a direction for the future.Rock in situ is unlike any other material encountered in engineering. Typically, it will vary in age from several hundreds of millions to as much as a few billions of years. Rocks of different composition and mechanical properties are often adjacent to each other. Subject to changing tectonic forces and gravity over this period, the rock mass is mechanically complex, and usually contains systems of fractures and mechanical interfaces, varying from grain boundaries to tectonic plate boundaries. Within this range, discontinuities comparable in size to the dimensions of engineering projects in rock are of particular concern to designers. The International Society for Rock Mechanics [Recently re-named International Society for Rock Mechanics and Rock Engineering. The acronym (ISRM) has been retained] was formed in 1962 to focus attention on the need to develop mechanic-based design procedures to give due consideration to such discontinuities. The paper reflects on approaches taken to address this concern in the almost 6 decades since formation of ISRM. Early efforts concentrated on testing of large physical models in a laboratory, plus a variety of efforts to incorporate discrete discontinuities into continuum mechanics. Particular attention is given to the development of the Discrete Element Method (DEM), introduced by Cundall (Proc Symp Int’l Soc Rock Mech 2:129–132, 1971). Examples of the application of DEM to practical design problems and conclusions drawn from them are discussed. In some cases, results show important differences with the current procedures and empirical rules. Although most of the examples shown are drawn from mining, references are made to applications in other engineering fields, especially Civil Engineering and recent developments in Enhanced Geothermal Systems. Currently, the principal limitation to widespread application of DEM to rock engineering design problems is computational speed. This problem is one faced in many scientific and engineering disciplines, so it is anticipated that solutions will be developed in the coming several years. In the meantime, simpler representations of discrete fracture systems are used to develop valuable general insights to inform practical designs. Recent leadership by the US Department of Energy in rock mechanics research through FORGE and SubTER [Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE); Subsurface Science, Technology, Engineering, and R&D Crosscut (SubTER).] offers hope that the importance of subsurface engineering to the US is being recognized. A problem, mentioned recently by Hoek (2018) that needs to be addressed in the United States is that of developing an engineering workforce capable of applying analytical and numerical techniques sensibly to design in rock.

OLA-Simple: A software-guided HIV-1 drug resistance test for low-resource laboratories.

BackgroundHIV drug resistance (HIVDR) testing can assist clinicians in selecting treatments. However, high complexity and cost of genotyping assays limit routine testing in settings where HIVDR prevalence has reached high levels.MethodsThe oligonucleotide ligation assay (OLA)-Simple kit was developed for detection of HIVDR against first-line non-nucleoside/nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors and validated on 672 codons (168 specimens) from subtypes A, B, C, D, and AE. The kit uses dry reagents to facilitate assay setup, lateral flow devices for visual HIVDR detections, and in-house software with an interface for guiding users and analyzing results.FindingsHIVDR analysis of specimens by OLA-Simple compared to Sanger sequencing revealed 99.6 ± 0.3% specificity and 98.2 ± 0.9% sensitivity, and compared to high-sensitivity assays, 99.6 ± 0.6% specificity and 86.2 ± 2.5% sensitivity, with 2.6 ± 0.9% indeterminate results. OLA-Simple was performed more rapidly compared to Sanger sequencing (<4 h vs. 35–72 h). Forty-one untrained volunteers blindly tested two specimens each with 96.8 ± 0.8% accuracy.InterpretationOLA-Simple compares favorably with HIVDR genotyping by Sanger and sensitive comparators. Instructional software enabled inexperienced, first-time users to perform the assay with high accuracy. The reduced complexity, cost, and training requirements of OLA-Simple could improve access to HIVDR testing in low-resource settings and potentially allow same-day selection of appropriate antiretroviral therapy.FundUSA National Institutes of Health R01; the Clinical and Retrovirology Research Core and the Molecular Profiling and Computational Biology Core of the UW CFAR; Seattle Children's Research Institute; UW Holloman Innovation Challenge Award; Pilcher Faculty Fellowship.

Reaching all learners through their phones and universal design for learning

To help make educational materials and practices inclusive and useful for all learners, this review article provides the history of the universal design for learning (UDL) framework by defining it in its educational context and by showing how it has been adopted in K-12 and higher education institutions across North America. It reframes UDL as a strategy for reaching adult learners on their mobile devices, and radically reflects on how faculty members and course designers can adopt UDL in order to create learning interactions that provide students with more time for study and practice in their busy days. To this end, the author argues that we should broaden our course-access-design focus away from learners with disabilities and toward a larger ease-of-use/general-inclusion framework. Going through this article, we will be able to help our faculty colleagues to incorporate UDL elements into their courses, design/retrofit existing course components using UDL principles, and expand our institution’s use of UDL elements beyond the legally required minimum. This article posits diversity in its most inclusive form: instead of relying solely on providing accommodation services to learners with disabilities – which is most often a last-minute, ad-hoc, reactive process – adopting UDL as part of an institution’s culture of course design, teaching practices, and support services allows all learners to benefit, regardless of their place on the ability spectrum.

Richard P. Van Duyne, plasmonics pioneer

Prof. Richard P. Van Duyne (Fig. 1), a National Academy of Sciences member who played a pivotal role in starting the field of plasmonics and promoting nanoscience, died on July 28, 2019, at the age of 73. Rick’s prominence as a great intellect and visionary is apparent by his tremendous academic success, including a host of academic awards, an impressive publication record, and generations of mentees working to live up to the potential he saw in them. While being elected to the National Academy of Sciences was Rick’s most coveted recognition, he was proud of all of the recognition he achieved in his long career, including an h-index of 125 and rising, the Earle K. Plyler Prize in Molecular Spectroscopy from the American Physical Society, the Charles N. Reilly Award from the Society for Electroanalytical Chemistry, and a 2017 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship. Fig. 1. Rick Van Duyne was proud to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Image courtesy of Northwestern University. Rick’s primary contributions to science all stem from his interest in molecular plasmonics, which deals with the interactions of molecules with nanomaterials that support a surface plasmon resonance. Rick entered this field in the early 1970s with training in electrochemistry, and proved himself an early adopter in a number of creative endeavors, including applications in glucose sensing, food safety, art conservation, single-molecule detection, and photocatalysis. As a physical and analytical chemist, Rick’s primary contributions include a number of fundamental insights on the mechanism and applications of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS), the development of nanoplasmonic substrates via nanosphere lithography, and extensions of molecular plasmonics into biosensing and submolecular resolution imaging. Rick’s journey with surface-enhanced spectroscopy began pretenure when he read a newly published paper in 1974. In that paper (1), “Raman spectra of pyridine adsorbed at a silver electrode,” … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: chaynes{at}umn.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

A reflective note: AJOM Inaugural Junior Faculty Fellowship

ABSTRACTIn recognizing the persistent publishing challenge among African-based scholars, the African Academy of Management (AFAM) and the Africa Journal of Management (AJOM) joined forces to explore various alternatives to address the challenge. The creation of the Junior Faculty Fellowship is the outcome of that collaboration that seeks to build academic relationships between institutions and Faculty. This paper captures the reflections of the inaugural Fellow, Dr. Juliana Mulaa Namada. As we follow her journey between 2017 and 2019, we learn about relationship building. She shares details of her participation at the Academy of Management (AOM) conference in Chicago, Ill., her engagement with colleagues at the host institution, the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and the opportunities to test her skills in writing and publishing. In doing so, we learn of the benefits and challenges of a truly global Fellowship whose value extends beyond the immediate mentor-mentee relationship.