Kuhn Wins ODU Research Award

Sebastian Kuhn, professor and eminent scholar of physics (Quest, Vol. 9, Issue 2), was named the winner of Old Dominion University’s 2008 Faculty Research Achievement Award at the fifth annual Research Expo held April 9, 2008, at the Ted Constant Convocation Center.

Kuhn is a nuclear physicist who conducts experiments at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News. His work on the spin—or angular momentum—composition of the proton and neutron has had an important influence on our understanding of matter.

At Jefferson Lab, Kuhn has led collaborations of close to 150 physicists from 35 institutions, and the experiments have produced data of unprecedented accuracy. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007 “for his leadership on measurements of the nucleon structure functions, in particular in the non-perturbative and valence region.”

Gail Dodge, chair of ODU’s Department of Physics and a nuclear experimentalist herself, said Kuhn was instrumental in developing the scientific motivation for the proposed $310 million upgrade of the continuous electron accelerator at Jefferson Lab. 

“Sebastian’s work has led to a significant improvement in our understanding of the distribution of quarks inside protons and neutrons,” Dodge added. “He is an outstanding physicist and a wonderful colleague. We are thrilled that his work has been honored by ODU in this way.”

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.

Second Edition of Kersey’s Award-Winning CD-ROM Released
The second edition of the award-winning “The 101’s: A Guide to Positive Discipline,” a multimedia/interactive program produced by Katharine Kersey (Quest, Vol. 8, Issue 2) and Old Dominion University’s Office of Academic Technology Services, has been released.

Based on research by Kersey, professor of early childhood education and former chair of ODU’s Department of Early Childhood, Speech-Language Pathology and Special Education, the guide is a user-friendly training tool offering solutions to child care providers, teachers and parents to help children become happier, better equipped to settle differences peaceably and more self-directed.

The original CD-ROM set, which showed the “101’s” used with children 8 weeks to 6 years of age, came out in 2004 and has since had a wide distribution. The winner of a 2005 Videographer Award, a Bronze Telly Award and the Aegis Video & Film Production Award (Training and Education), it has been translated into Chinese and a Spanish language version is forthcoming. The new guide focuses on children ages 5 to 12.

Available in CD-ROM for individual use, and DVD and VHS formats for groups, the second edition of the “101’s” costs $40, compared to the $250 price tag for other training programs offered to schools to help train teachers in classroom management. The sets can be purchased online at www.dl.odu.edu/101s.

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.

American Accounting Association Elects Bagranoff as President

Nancy Bagranoff, dean of Old Dominion University’s College of Business and Public Administration, has been elected president of the American Accounting Association (AAA). Bagranoff will serve as president-elect for one year and become president in 2009.
The AAA, founded in 1916, has more than 8,000 members worldwide, most of whom are accounting academics.

As president, Bagranoff will become a national spokesperson on accounting research and education. She will chair the organization’s Executive Committee and Council, which includes a vice president of practice, typically a managing partner of a “Big Four” accounting firm. She also will preside over the AAA’s annual meeting of more than 2,500 attendees and will be responsible for the meeting’s technical program.

Bagranoff’s election as AAA president brings international attention to ODU’s College of Business and Public Administration.

“Nancy is an outstanding leader who is able to bridge the academic community and accounting profession,” says Candy Duncan, mid-Atlantic area managing partner - audit for KPMG. “Nancy takes over leadership of this organization at an exciting time for the industry and offers the right blend of skills to be a big success.”

Bagranoff will officially assume the duties of president-elect at the AAA’s annual meeting in August 2008 in Anaheim, Calif.

New Book by Yetiv Examines U.S. Policy in Persian Gulf
Steve A. Yetiv, professor of political science at Old Dominion University (Quest, Vol. 6, Issue 1), is the author of “The Absence of Grand Strategy: The United States in the Persian Gulf, 1972-2005,” which was published in early 2008 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Yetiv, who has traveled widely in the Middle East and is a frequent media commentator on the region, argues in the book that the distinguishing feature of the United States’ experience in the Gulf has been the absence of a grand strategy. He gives examples of how the U.S. government has employed shifting, improvised and reactive policies that were responses to unanticipated and unpredictable events and threats.

In a review, Patrick James, director of the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California, wrote: “This book makes an original contribution and is a welcome relief from much of the polemical writing on the subject of American foreign policy. The scholarship is excellent. It will be essential reading for those in securities studies and international relations.”

Yetiv also is the author of “Explaining Foreign Policy: U.S. Decisionmaking and the Persian Gulf War,” also published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Mellon Foundation Invests in Nelson’s Research

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has invested $25,000 in computer science research being done at Old Dominion University to improve access to Web pages that are related to each other.

Michael Nelson, assistant professor of computer science (Quest, Vol. 10, Issue 1), will apply the grant to his work on the international Open Archives Initiative-Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE). He is on the technical committee of the project and co-editor of specifications that will result from OAI-ORE.

The grant will support the development of prototype applications to test the coherence and utility of the emerging protocol for the reuse and exchange of digital objects. OAI-ORE is providing specifications for “resource maps,” which define aggregations of Web resources. The maps allow Web crawlers to understand what is in and out of aggregations such as scholarly e-prints, photo packages in Flickr, blog entries and the like.

“My research group is interested in digital preservation,” Nelson said. “Understanding the boundary of an aggregation of Web resources will help us quantitatively evaluate preservation of such things as university classes and blogs.”

As an ODU faculty member since 2002, Nelson has won more than $2.5 million in research support from the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Library of Congress and the Mellon Foundation. His project, “self-preserving digital objects,” is supported by more than $500,000 from the NSF’s Early Career Development program.