May 8, 2008
Etc: Campus news & notes
HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU: Babak Parviz, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, can now visit one of his creations at the London Science Museum. Parviz used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. The museum promotes it this way:
“Mere mortals could soon enjoy superhuman vision, thanks to a breakthrough in building the world’s first electronic contact lens. Wearers would see digital information superimposed on their regular view of the world. Antenna [a gallery in the museum] explores the eye-watering applications.”
RISING STAR: Daniel Chiu, a UW chemistry professor, has been named the 2008 recipient of the National Fresenius Award, presented to a young scientist who has received national recognition in research, teaching or administration. The award is sponsored by Phi Lambda Upsilon, the National Honorary Chemical Society.
Chiu was honored for developing powerful new physical methods for exploring complex biological processes at the level of single cells and single molecules. He also uses laser-based single-cell surgery as a means of doing nanoscale bioanalysis within a cell.
STELLAR SCIENTIST: The Astronomical Society of the Pacific has named Anjum Mukadam, a UW postdoctoral fellow in astronomy, as the winner of the 2008 Robert J. Trumpler Award for an outstanding recent doctoral thesis.
Mukadam, the UW’s Hubble Space Telescope postdoctoral fellow, received her doctorate at the University of Texas in 2004. She helped to build Argos, a fast time-series photometer used to gather data on a variety of objects, including pulsating stars, mass transferring binary stars and extrasolar planets that pass in front of their parent stars. Mukadam uses a technique called stellar seismology to study the insides of white dwarf stars, similar to using earthquakes to study the inside of Earth, and her work has doubled the number of known pulsating white dwarfs. The award will be presented June 3 in St. Louis.
FOCUS ON AFRICA: Nancy Farwell, associate professor in the School of Social Work and chair of the African Studies Program in the Jackson School of International Studies, has been named a Fulbright Scholar for 2008-2009. Her one-year combined award for research and lecturing will enable her to continue research for her book, titled Toward a Global Perspective in Social Work: Making a Difference in Kenyan Communities as well as to give invited lectures in Kenya. The book, co-authored with two colleagues at the University of Nairobi, examines local knowledge production with respect to social work practice in Kenya, and its intersection with Western perspectives and increasingly globalized views of development. Farwell will be affiliated with the University of Nairobi.
Farwell has also received a Graduate Faculty International Travel Award from The Graduate School for presentation of her paper “Promoting Social Justice Through Community-Based Learning in Social Work Courses” at the 34th Biannual Congress of the International Association of Schools of Social Work Conference: “Transcending Global-Local Divides: Challenges for Social Work Education and Practice” in Durban, South Africa.
TV STARS: The Dalai Lama was a hit on UWTV. The team at the on-campus television production facility coordinated with event organizers to deliver six simultaneous live webcasts and live broadcasts during the spiritual leader’s five-day visit from April 11 to 15, and the results were impressive.
During the Dalai Lama’s convocation ceremony, UWTV experienced a 10-fold increase in the number of unique daily visitors to its site. The site logged 35,000 unique visits to event-specific Web pages during the visit as a whole. Following the live broadcast, all programs were immediately made available to watch on demand at www.uwtv.org. Already, these unedited archived videos have been replayed more than 10,000 times.
UWTV is currently creating edited versions of all six programs. These will be rebroadcast on UWTV this month, and available via webstream, podcast and on demand at www.uwtv.org.
