Biologist Sonenshine Gets Prestigious Medal and Reason to Reflect about a Mentor

Daniel Sonenshine, Old Dominion University professor emeritus and eminent scholar of biological sciences, had a special reason to reflect on his career after being awarded one of the highest honors in his field of ticks and tick-borne diseases (Quest, Vol. 4, Issue 2).

In many ways, Sonenshine traces his rise to prominence in acarology—the study of ticks and mites—to his introduction almost exactly 50 years ago to Harry Hoogstraal, widely considered to be the 20th century’s pre-eminent authority on ticks and tick-borne diseases. “I was a graduate student at the University of Maryland and he was a giant in my area of research, an icon, my idol,” said the 75-year-old professor. At the time, Hoogstraal was eight years into what would become an almost 30-year term as head of the Department of Medical Zoology at the U.S. Naval Medical Research Unit No. 3 in Cairo, Egypt.

At that first meeting, the two of them spent only a brief time together discussing tick research, but Hoogstraal apparently came away impressed. “Sometime later, I began to hear that he was recommending me (for a faculty position) to various universities, and I thought this was a gracious thing for him to take the time to do.” Later, after Sonenshine joined the Old Dominion faculty in 1961, Hoogstraal visited him and they did field work together related to Rocky Mountain spotted fever research. Still later, Hoogstraal invited Sonenshine to Egypt for a research collaboration and they were regular correspondents until the elder scientist died of cancer in 1986.

“Working with a person who is one of the great leaders of modern science can be humbling, but also exhilarating,” Sonenshine said. “You learn you can play in this game, but that you have to get better. I found that I had a lot farther to go than I thought. I learned what true excellence is, and I was inspired.”

The ODU emeritus professor has attained excellence himself as a scientist, and evidence of that came during the awards ceremony of the 57th annual meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) on Dec. 7, 2008, in New Orleans. The recipient of the society’s prestigious Hoogstraal Medal for outstanding lifelong service internationally in medical entomology was Daniel Sonenshine, Old Dominion University.

Back in Norfolk a few days later, Sonenshine dug a satin-lined box out of his canvas tote and opened it carefully to reveal the Hoogstraal Medal. “It’s good to be recognized by your peers,” he said. The recognition reflects Sonenshine’s unique contributions to the ASTMH mission to promote global health through the prevention and control of vector-borne infectious diseases and other diseases that disproportionately afflict the global poor.

The Hoogstraal Medal is not presented every year, just when an exceptional candidate is nominated. Since its inaugural presentation by ASTMH in 1987, only 16 scientists have won it. Other recipients have been from universities such as Harvard, U.C. Berkeley, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, Illinois, Maryland, U.C. Davis, and the universities of London and Liverpool.

Day’s Minority Mentoring in Wetland Science Gets New Funding

A Society of Wetland Scientists (SWS) minority undergraduate mentoring program that Old Dominion University ecologist Frank Day (Quest, Vol. 7, Issue 2) has directed for the past four years has won a second round of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Day was the principal investigator for a grant titled “Undergraduate Mentoring in Wetland Science With a Focus on Underrepresented Groups” that served 21 students from 2003-07. The latest grant, which he also leads, is worth almost $60,000 and will continue the mentoring program through 2011.

The program provides travel and other expenses enabling undergraduates to attend the SWS annual meeting and be exposed to graduate degree programs and career possibilities in wetland science. Eligible students are African American, Hispanic, Latino, Native American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander or persons with disabilities.

In 2002, during Day’s term as president of the SWS, he delivered an address calling for action to increase racial and cultural diversity within the organization. “We are composed of a dynamic mix of academics and government and private-sector scientists and practitioners,” he told the membership. “However, a quick look around at SWS meetings and other professional ecology activities reveals very low racial and cultural diversity in our memberships. I do not believe this is a result of willful omission, but I do think more can be done to be more inclusive with regard to underrepresented groups.”

The call to action led to the launch of a SWS Human Diversity Committee and the successful bid for the initial NSF grant.

Asari, Vision Lab Busy with Inventions

The U.S. Patent Office awarded another patent late last year to Vijayan Asari, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Vision Lab at Old Dominion University, for a video-enhancement technology that helps to define images in low-lighting conditions and can be used in numerous security and military applications (Quest, Vol. 7, Issue 2).

The patented technology, titled “Visibility Improvement in Color Video Stream,” is the outcome of one of the research activities by Asari and Li Tao, who was an ODU graduate student at the Vision Lab when the application was filed in 2005. Tao graduated in 2006 with a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering and currently is a senior scientist at Samsung Technologies in Irvine, Calif.

This latest patent, which was awarded on Sept. 23, comes just five months after Asari was awarded a patent titled “Color Image Characterization, Enhancement and Balancing” together with Ming-Jung Seow, a former graduate student in the Vision Lab. Seow graduated in 2006 with a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering and currently works as a senior scientist at Behavioral Recognition Systems (BRS) Labs in Houston.

The visibility improvement in color video stream technology is based on an integrated, neighborhood-dependent, nonlinear approach for the enhancement of color images captured in various environments, such as extremely low lighting, fog or locations that are underwater.

Innovations produced by the Vision Lab can be useful for defense and homeland security applications, such as night-time surveillance and object recognition in low-lighting conditions. In addition to image- and video-enhancement technologies, Vision Lab is currently conducting homeland security and defense-related research projects involving robotics and other technologies. Brief descriptions of the research projects are at the laboratory Web site: http://eng.odu.edu/visionlab.

ODU’s Vision Lab and Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics learned in the fall of 2008 that they are getting $1.6 million from Department of Defense’s 2009 fiscal year budget appropriation to study new ways for the U.S. military to minimize casualties and deal with them more successfully when they do occur.

Journal Award Notes Laroussi’s Leadership in Cold Plasma Research

A paper about the germ-killing potential of cold plasmas authored by Mounir Laroussi of the Old Dominion University engineering faculty (Quest, Vol. 3, Issue 2, and Vol. 9, Issue 2) has been selected by the New Journal of Physics (NJP) as one of the most significant articles it published during the last decade.

The paper, “Plasma Interaction with Microbes,” which was published in 2003, was included in a special collection of article summaries commemorating the 10th anniversary of the journal. NJP debuted in 1998 as a publication of the Institute of Physics and the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft.

In this paper, Laroussi and his co-authors demonstrated a correlation between electrostatic forces caused by charging effects in a plasma and experimentally observed morphological changes in bacterial cells. After its publication, this paper became one of the most downloaded papers and was added to the “select” list of the Institute of Physics.

Laroussi, ODU associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the university’s Laser and Plasma Engineering Institute (LPEI), has been a pioneering researcher in cold plasmas and in biological applications of plasmas. The plasma pencil, a hand-held device like a miniature light-saber that Laroussi introduced in 2005, was the subject of news reports in National Geographic and numerous other publications around the world.

ODU’s Biodiesel Dune Buggy

The dune buggy that was zipping around the Old Dominion University campus in the fall of 2008 represented one more victory for the university’s pilot project for converting algae into biodiesel fuel.

Patrick Hatcher, the Batten Endowed Chair in Physical Sciences at ODU and executive director of the Virginia Coastal Energy Research Consortium (VCERC) (Quest, Vol. 10, Issue 2), got one of the first rides in the new, white buggy that was built by Jes Sprouse, the Prince George County entrepreneur who assisted ODU in creating a one-acre algae pond and biodiesel conversion facility about 70 miles west of Norfolk.

Sprouse ordered an Italian-made, 10-horsepower diesel engine and a transmission from a Web site, and then designed and built the buggy to showcase the biodiesel fuel being produced by ODU and VCERC researchers. Gov. Timothy Kaine helped formally open the facility in September.

Dual Awards for Peery’s Latest Work of Fiction

“What the Thunder Said,” the latest novel by Janet Peery (Quest, Vol. 6, Issue 1), university professor of English and creative writing at Old Dominion University, has won the 2008 WILLA Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction and the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction.

“In ‘What the Thunder Said,’ the language and structure of the novel appear effortless,” the Library of Virginia contest judges stated. “The narrative voice is authentic and evocative of the Depression during the dust bowl years and Peery’s prose is beautifully lyrical.”

The WILLA Literary Award honors the best in literature published each year, featuring women’s stories set in the West. Women Writing the West (WWW), a non-profit association of writers and other professionals writing and promoting the Women’s West, underwrites and presents the nationally recognized award annually. The award is named in honor of Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather, one of the country’s foremost novelists.

Described as a novella and stories set in the Dust Bowl of 1930s Oklahoma, the book tracks the wayward progress of sisters Mackie and Etta Spoon, who leave home to forge their own separate paths, each setting off in search of a new life, and each finding a fate different than she expected. Through shifting perspectives, voices and characters, Peery follows the sisters, their children and those whose stories intersect with theirs as they range across the high plains of the West in the decades after the Great Depression.

A National Book Award finalist, Peery has received National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, the Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award, citations in “The Best American Short Stories,” several Pushcart Prizes and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award.

Another Bionanotechnology Achievement for Xu Group

Members of the research group of Old Dominion University scientist X. Nancy Xu (Quest, Vol. 10, Issue 1) reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) in November 2008 that they have created extraordinarily tiny silver nanoparticles for use as biosensors to study molecular-level functions of a protein that mediates biological functions affecting human health.

The findings bolster the Xu group’s fundamental work aimed at fighting human diseases, including cancer. “Photostable Single-Molecule Nanoparticle Optical Biosensors for Real-Time Sensing of Single Cytokine Molecules and Their Binding Reactions” was written by Xu, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and by postdoctoral researcher Tao Huang and graduate student Prakash Nallathamby. JACS is the flagship journal of the American Chemical Society.

“This study represents a major advance in preparing photo-stable noble metal dots for imaging and sensing of low and high concentrations of proteins of interest and probing their interactions at the single molecule resolution, which has not yet been reported previously,” Xu said.

Hoffmann’s New Book About Women Journalists in Vietnam
More than a decade ago, Joyce Hoffmann, Old Dominion University professor of journalism (Quest, Vol. 2, Issue 1), read a book about news reporters who covered the Vietnam War and she wondered, “Where are the women?” She has answered that question now with her book, “On Their Own: Women Journalists and the American Experience in Vietnam,” which arrived in bookstores in July 2008.

The 400-page hardback book from Da Capo Press includes rich detail not only about the women writers and photographers who worked as reporters in Vietnam, but also about the 1960s-era political and cultural climates in the United States, in Vietnam and in American newsrooms.

Hoffmann says she took on the project, for which she conducted more than 100 interviews, after preliminary discussions with two of the best known Vietnam War reporters, David Halberstam, author of “The Best and the Brightest,” and Frances FitzGerald, author of “Fire in the Lake.” The author said both discussions were significant “not only for the information I learned from them, but also—and perhaps even more importantly at that stage—for the way they validated my sense that there was an important story in the achievements of women who reported on the war.”

In addition to FitzGerald, women who reported in Vietnam and who Hoffmann includes in her overview include Gloria Emerson, Kate Webb, Dickey Chapelle and Beverly Deepe.

Joshi, Laroussi Elected IEEE Fellows

Old Dominion University faculty members Ravindra Joshi and Mounir Laroussi (Quest, Vol. 9, Issue 2), whose research has helped to advance bioelectrics and biomedical applications of cold plasmas, have been elected as Fellows of the international Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

A citation from the IEEE board of directors said Joshi’s elevation to Fellow was for his contributions in “bioelectrics and simulation of cellular responses to pulsed power excitation.”
Laroussi received the honor for contributions to “biomedical applications of low-temperature, atmospheric-pressure plasmas.”

The men, both of whom are professors of electrical and computer engineering in the Frank Batten College of Engineering and Technology, join Karl Schoenbach, the Batten Endowed Chair in Bioelectric Engineering, as ODU faculty members holding the prestigious title. According to the IEEE, “The grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in the profession and shall be conferred only by invitation of the board of directors upon a person of outstanding and extraordinary qualifications and experience in IEEE-designated fields, and who has made important individual contributions to one or more of these fields.”

Joshi was named a University Professor at ODU in 2007. Laroussi directs the university’s Laser and Plasma Engineering Institute.

Porter is Leading Red-Light Running Researcher

An article headlined “Red Light Running” in the August 2008 issue of Ladies Home Journal features the research and advocacy work of Bryan Porter, associate professor of psychology at Old Dominion University (Quest, Vol. 4, Issue 2).

Porter is an expert on the psychological underpinnings of various dangerous and bad driving habits. But in recent years it has been his red-light running research and his appeals for automatic-camera enforcement at dangerous intersections that have made him a go-to source for media around the world. He chaired the 4th International Conference on Traffic and Transport Psychology held in Washington, D.C., Aug. 31-Sept. 4, 2008.

The Ladies Home Journal article, written by Kelly King Alexander, recounts several accidents in the United States in recent years in which red-light runners killed innocent people. According to the Federal Highway Administration, red-light running is responsible for 100,000 crashes a year in this country, 950 deaths and 90,000 injuries. It is the leading cause of fatal crashes in metropolitan areas.