Category: Education

The University of Vermont Board of Trustees has elected Ron Lumbra as its new chair, and Cindy Barnhart will serve as vice chair.

“I am very thankful for the opportunity to serve as chair,” Lumbra said. “This is certainly an exciting time at UVM, and in higher education. I see plenty of challenges ahead, but I also feel confident that UVM is well positioned to capitalize on the opportunities that will allow us to continue to thrive in the years to come. This university has given so much to me and I am committed to continue to give back as much as I can for the benefit of current and future UVM students.”

Lumbra was elected to a six-year term on the University of Vermont Board of Trustees by the self-perpetuating trustees in March of 2014. This past December he was re-elected to fill the remaining two years of former Board Chair David Daigle’s term, who stepped down from the Board at the end of February.

Lumbra is managing partner of Heidrick & Struggles’ Center of Excellence, and a partner in the CEO & Board Practice based in New York. He was previously managing partner of the firm’s Americas region. He has more than 20 years of executive search consulting experience, and an extensive track record of recruiting board directors and chief executive officers to a broad variety of clients.

Born and raised in Vermont, in St. Albans and Montgomery respectively, Lumbra completed his undergraduate studies at UVM, and earned a master of business administration degree from Harvard University.

In addition to Lumbra’s election as chair at a special meeting on March 2, the Board also established the Sustainability Work Group. The group will advise the Board on rapidly changing circumstances around sustainable investment, and it will provide perspective to the Board on fossil fuel divestment. The group will be led by gubernatorial trustee Carolyn Dwyer. The rest of the members are: Student trustee David Gringeri; legislative trustees Carol Ode and Shap Smith; gubernatorial trustee Ed Pagano; self-perpetuating trustees Briar Alpert, Robert Brennan and Jodi Goldstein; and President Suresh Garimella. Vice President for Finance & Treasurer Richard Cate will serve as liaison to the work group.

The Board also welcomed two new trustees who began their terms on March 1:

• Berke Tinaz, a PhD student, class of 2022, studying plant biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, succeeds Sidney Hilker, who completed her term on Feb. 29. Berke was appointed by the Associate Directors for the Appointment of Student Trustees, Inc. for a 2-year term ending Feb. 28, 2022.
• John Dineen was elected by the self-perpetuating board for a six-year term ending Feb. 28, 2026, filling the seat vacated by Ron Lumbra who completed his first term of service on Feb. 29, 2020.

And the following trustees have been re-elected:

• Don McCree was re-elected by the self-perpetuating board for a second six-year term ending Feb. 28, 2026. 
• Cindy Barnhart was re-elected by the self-perpetuating board for a second six-year term ending Feb. 28, 2026.

Legislative trustee Curt McCormack was re-elected as Board secretary for another one-year term. All Board officer appointments are for one year.

Source: UVM News

University of Vermont Provost and Senior Vice President Patricia Prelock today announced the appointment of Leslie V. Parise, Ph.D., as dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS).

Parise has built a long and successful career at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), where she rose through the ranks from assistant to full professor. For the past decade, Parise has served as the chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, which currently ranks fifth in the United States for National Institutes of Health-funded biochemistry departments.

“Dr. Parise is a strong proponent of translating research to benefit society,” said Prelock. “She impressed the search committee with her understanding of the importance of UVM’s land-grant mission, and the critical role CALS—and UVM Extension—have played in advancing this mission. She has a track record of working with faculty to promote inventions, patenting, and licensing agreements. And her entrepreneurial mindset resonates with the innovative spirit so central to our UVM community. I have no doubt that Dr. Parise will be an exceptional leader and member of our community.”

President Garimella said of her appointment, ““We are delighted that Dr. Leslie Parise is joining the University of Vermont as dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She brings an impressive skillset to the university: great prowess in basic and translational research, longtime success promoting entrepreneurship and technology transfer, a commitment to student success, and a proven track record as a leader. We very much look forward to welcoming her to the UVM community.”

Parise said she is honored to join the UVM community. “CALS and UVM Extension play an incredibly important role in demonstrating the power of UVM’s land-grant mission,” she said. “I look forward to meeting and working closely with the world-class faculty, staff and students of UVM, along with residents of Vermont. Finding ways to further engage our constituents to strategically maximize the educational, research and service missions of CALS, and to increase its visibility across the state and beyond will be among my priorities. I look forward to further positioning CALS as a microcosm for positive global impact.”

Widely recognized for cardiovascular and cancer research, Parise’s work has been continuously funded, including more than $14.5M from the NIH. She is also a strong advocate for faculty and student advancement. As department chair at UNC, she worked with faculty, students and postdoctoral fellows to reinvigorate programs through a range of approaches including enhanced internal communication and planning, and increased mentoring.

Parise helped faculty maintain and grow funding through partnerships across campus and with neighboring institutions to facilitate greater investment from foundations and government agencies such the Keck Foundation, American Heart Association, National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She also facilitated partnerships with neighboring institutions to stimulate investment in a highly transformative technology for solving molecular structures called cryo-electron microscopy.

In 2017, Parise was elected Chair of the Faculty at UNC-CH, a role she held until May 2019. In this capacity, she represented all 3,800 faculty of the UNC-CH campus, interacting closely with the chancellor, provost, deans and faculty from within the university, as well as UNC’s Board of Trustees, system president, and a faculty assembly from across the state’s 17-campus system. She has worked closely on issues ranging from curriculum changes, to budget models, to advancing diversity.

Parise will join UVM on May 15.

Source: UVM News

Schoolchildren know that the age of a tree can be measured by counting the number of rings in a stump. But rings in especially old trees contain data that can’t be measured so easily. For example, stands of old growth forest contain centuries worth of temperature data that can be a key to completing the picture of how the climate has changed over the past several centuries.

Shelly Rayback of UVM’s geography department, and two colleagues, Grant Harley of the University of Idaho and Justin Maxwell of Indiana University, are using a three-year $360,000 National Science Foundation grant to unlock this data and reconstruct summer air temperature in the Eastern United States.

“Our colleagues have been able to reconstruct moisture availability in this region, but no one has been able to reconstruct temperature on a large scale across the eastern United States,” says Rayback, principal investigator for the grant. “This has been a thorn in our side, because while we have fairly dependable temperature data recorded over the past 120 years or so, we don’t have a clear picture of what the temperature has been like over the past 300-500 years.”

The team of researchers will use blue light intensity methods applied to tree ring samples of several temperature-sensitive tree species from North Carolina to maritime Eastern Canada, like the red spruce. A simple flatbed scanner can extract the blue light data to create a deeper paleolithic temperature record.

“We know average temperatures are rising, but what we’re trying to answer, in a longer-term context is, are the temperatures we’re experiencing today somewhat higher than the past, or a lot higher than the past? We’re guessing the latter is true, but we need the data to support that hypothesis.” 

Rayback says the data will be relevant not only to understanding temperature trends in the Northeast, but can also contribute to our understanding of broader climatic trends in the Northern Hemisphere. The data could also contribute to developing better general circulation models (GCMS) that scientists use to predict climate in the future.

Grant Harley is assistant professor of geography at the University of Idaho. Justin Maxwell is associate professor of geography at Indiana University. Rayback is associate professor of geography at UVM.

Source: UVM News

On February 1, before tip-off of the Catamount women’s basketball home game versus UAlbany, Director of Athletics Jeff Schulman ’89 G’03 shared landmark news: the largest gift ever made exclusively to a UVM women’s athletics program would permanently endow the Elizabeth F. Mayer ’93 and Paul J. Mayer, M.D. Women’s Basketball Head Coach at the University of Vermont.

“We would like to thank these beautiful and wonderful student-athletes for using both their basketball and academic skills,” said Betty Mayer as the news was released. “Their drive for perfection and their special individual personalities working together as a team are evident. They share that personal relationship with us, their fans, and the young people who look up to them as role models.”

This next step for women’s basketball was years in the making, tracing to pioneering varsity athletes, the strides of Title IX in the early 1970s. Fittingly, the announcement of the gift was coupled with a broader celebration of girls and women in sports.

Considering Catamount women’s basketball, in particular, the breakout teams of the early nineties are foundational. Across the 1991/’92 season coach Cathy Inglese’s Catamounts piled up a 29-0 record in the regular season and earned a first-ever trip to the NCAA Tournament. Incredibly, the next season’s team repeated that undefeated regular season run.

“Looking back, we had such a level of trust and respect for each other that it became a transformative experience. Maybe it’s a comfort level, maybe it’s a defining-who-you-are level, but we have been through so much together that you feel you can just call each other up and it’s still like you are sisters,” Jen Niebling ’93 reflected in 2011 on the twentieth anniversary of the win streak.

Inglese, who passed away last year due to a traumatic brain injury suffered in a fall, also reminisced in 2011 on her thoughts competing in that first NCAA Tournament: “Win or lose, look at what we have accomplished. All these people are getting such joy and pleasure out of watching our team. We changed the attitude of what women athletes could do.”

Changed the attitude and fundamentally redefined what Catamount women’s basketball could do. Inglese’s coaching tree would keep it rolling, as assistants Pam Borton and Keith Cieplicki each led the program, setting the stage for outstanding teams and players to follow: 1997-98, America East regular season champions; 1999-2000, America East regular season and conference tournament champions, earning a trip to the NCAA Tournament; 2001-02, America East regular season champions, WNIT Tournament; 2008/09 and 2009/10, back to back NCAA Tournament bids.
 
Dr. Karalyn Church, a major force on the Catamount teams at the turn of the century, recalls the conference championship victory over Maine: “I remember the feeling when I realized that all systems were a go, every single player on the team was in full form and I knew we were going to crush them. Patrick Gym was packed, my teammates were on fire and I felt like I had the front row seat on a fully loaded locomotive.”

Ten years later, May Kotsopolous ’10 would be among the players helping lift the program to another first, a victory in the NCAA Tournament, with an upset of seventh-seeded Wisconsin. She was among more than twenty former Catamount women’s basketball players, a sisterhood across eras, who returned for the celebration of the new endowment and women’s athletics.

Betty and Paul Mayer’s love for UVM women’s basketball team began during the years when Kotsopolous and teammates such as Courtnay Pilypaitis ’10, Alissa Sheftic ’10, and Sofia Iwobi ’10 flourished playing for Coach Sharon Dawley. The bond would strengthen, as Dawley’s successor, Lori Gear McBride, introduced having players mingle with fans after games. “It is there we began to appreciate how really special these ladies really are, each with unique skill sets and aspirations,” Paul Mayer said.

A major health crisis in late 2016 left Betty Mayer unable to manage the Patrick bleachers. But, with sideline seats in front of the band, the Mayers were in the gym for a men’s basketball game. When the Catamount women’s team, watching the game from the bleachers, spotted Betty, they came down and rallied for a group hug. “That expression of love and concern was the ‘penicillin’ that facilitated Betty’s recovery and made us consider how we could give back to this program,” Paul Mayer said.

Second-year Head Women’s Basketball Coach Alisa Kresge becomes the first-ever women’s coach at UVM to hold an endowed position and also the first in the history of the America East conference. With their gift, the Mayers have added UVM to a short list of universities with endowed women’s basketball coaches that includes Stanford, Notre Dame, Cornell, Dartmouth, Drake, and the University of Miami.

The Cats defeated UAlbany by double digits on February 1, another big moment in a big day for UVM women’s basketball and another signal of a bright path ahead for the program. “As I look at our starting five who are playing today, I see flashes of that great team of 2008-2010,” Paul Mayer said. “We felt more was needed as a thank you to this team and the ones that will follow.”

Andy Gardiner G’75 contributed to this article.

Source: UVM News

Sisyphus is perhaps best known in Greek mythology for being condemned to an eternity spent rolling a boulder uphill, just to watch it roll back down and repeat the process. His punishment has inspired work from painters, artists and writers through centuries depicting the strength it takes Sisyphus to, quite literally, carry on with the task. But among philosophers, Sisyphus is perhaps best recognized as a symbol of the absurd condition, hinged on humanity’s greatest question: What is the meaning of life?

It’s this question that acclaimed poet and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Vermont Major Jackson contends with in his latest collection of poetry, “The Absurd Man,” published by W.W. Norton. Invoking Sisyphus’s struggle for happiness and even contentment, Jackson’s lyrical collection follows a speaker through poems and moments fraught with instability and whimsy, relationships stumbling on shaky ground and periods of life at its highest and lowest. Shifting between several personas, the speaker heroically contemplates love and loss, navigates a changing world and family dynamics, and reflects on past mistakes and redemption.

In a nod to French philosopher Albert Camus, who famously penned the absurdist essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Jackson’s new title implicates the speaker in his poems as “the absurd man,” who bravely grapples with his own Sisyphean task to understand his journey on earth, his condition of unknowability. “Where Camus lands is that, despite the absurdity of existence — despite Sisyphus pushing the boulder only for it to fall back down the hill and having to push it again — Camus writes we have to imagine that Sisyphus is happy and accepting of the irrational continuity of hardship and struggle. And, in fact, it is that very predicament that bonds us as human beings,” Jackson explains.

Like Camus, Jackson offers a glimmer of hope in “The Absurd Man” as poems reveal the speaker is anchored to his world through his capacity as a son, father, husband, friend and colleague. “I’m trying to assert that all life possesses worth, and its significance is most evident when we consider our relationships with other human beings — family, friends, co-workers, strangers —how we tend to each other, how we carry each other’s memories, how we bring solace to one another, how we laugh together through tears,” he says.

And in the fractured world in which we live today, Jackson argues that caring for others is becoming increasingly important — and so is the need for poetry. Comparing Sisyphus’s boulder to today’s prescribed sequence of daily routines and various forms of escape: “That particular cycle, as Camus says, is the very kind of life that does not necessarily invite reflection and authenticity.”

But just as the speaker in “The Absurd Man” is able to slip from the condition of unknowability by finding meaning in life’s relationships, the writer behind the poems — Major Jackson — slips from the absurd condition of life by connecting with others and the world through language.

“For me, writing poems is my way of leading an authentic life, a means to penetrate the void. So much of life feels tragically scripted, and making art is a way of disrupting the mundane and habituated cycles in life,” he says.

For instance, unexpected inspiration for poems in “The Absurd Man” struck Jackson in nature, surrounded by forests and trees; in his imagination, creatively building alternative worlds; and even in the simple way two sounds or words had come together. But don’t be fooled; depending on the day, writing poetry can be as challenging for Jackson as pushing the boulder was for Sisyphus—even after five books and a lifetime as a poet.

Source: UVM News

Interacting contagious diseases like influenza and pneumonia follow the same complex spreading patterns as social trends. This new finding, published in the journal Nature Physics, could lead to better tracking and intervention when multiple diseases spread through a population at the same time.

“The interplay of diseases is the norm rather than the exception,” says Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, a complexity scientist at the University of Vermont who co-led the new research. “And yet when we model them, it’s almost always one disease in isolation.”

When disease modelers map an epidemic like coronavirus, Ebola, or the flu, they traditionally treat them as isolated pathogens. Under these so-called “simple” dynamics, it’s generally accepted that the forecasted size of the epidemic will be proportional to the rate of transmission.

But according to Hébert-Dufresne, professor of computer science at the University of Vermont, and his co-authors, Samuel Scarpino at Northeastern University, and Jean-Gabriel Young at the University of Michigan, the presence of even one more contagion in the population can dramatically shift the dynamics from simple to complex. Once this shift occurs, microscopic changes in the transmission rate trigger macroscopic jumps in the expected epidemic size—a spreading pattern that social scientists have observed in the adoption of innovative technologies, slang, and other contagious social behaviors.

Star Wars and sneezing

The researchers first began to compare biological contagions and social contagions in 2015 at the Santa Fe Institute, a transdisciplinary research center where Hébert-Dufresne was modeling how social trends propagate through reinforcement. The classic example of social reinforcement, according to Hébert-Dufresne, is “the phenomenon through which ten friends telling you to go see the new Star Wars movie is different from one friend telling you the same thing ten times.”

Like multiple friends reinforcing a social behavior, the presence of multiple diseases makes an infection more contagious than it would be on its own. Biological diseases can reinforce each other through symptoms, as in the case of a sneezing virus that helps to spread a second infection like pneumonia. Or, one disease can weaken the host’s immune system, making the population more susceptible to a second, third, or additional contagion.

When diseases reinforce each other, they rapidly accelerate through the population, then fizzle out as they run out of new hosts. According to the researchers’ model, the same super-exponential pattern characterizes the spread of social trends, like viral videos, which are widely shared and then cease to be relevant after a critical mass of people have viewed them.

Dengue and antivaxxers

A second important finding is that the same complex patterns that arise for interacting diseases also arise when a biological contagion interacts with a social contagion, as in the example of a virus spreading in conjunction with an anti-vaccination campaign. The paper details a 2005 Dengue outbreak in Puerto Rico, and Hébert-Dufresne cites an additional example of a 2017 Dengue outbreak in Puerto Rico where failure to accurately account for the interplay of Dengue strains reduced the effectiveness of a Dengue vaccine. This in turn sparked an anti-vaccination movement—a social epidemic—that ultimately led to the resurgence of measles—a second biological epidemic. It’s a classic example of real-world complexity, where unintended consequences emerge from many interacting phenomena.

Although it is fascinating to observe a universal spreading pattern across complex social and biological systems, Hébert-Dufresne notes that it also presents a unique challenge. “Looking at the data alone, we could observe this complex pattern and not know whether a deadly epidemic was being reinforced by a virus, or by a social phenomenon, or some combination.”

“We hope this will open the door for more exciting models that capture the dynamics of multiple contagions,” says Hébert-Dufresne, a member of UVM’s Complex Systems Center. “Our work shows that it is time for the disease modeling community to move beyond looking at contagions individually.”

And the new study may shed light on the spread of coronavirus. “When making predictions, such as for the current coronavirus outbreak occurring in a flu season, it becomes important to know which cases have multiple infections and which patients are in the hospital with flu—but scared because of coronavirus,” Hébert-Dufresne says. “The interactions can be biological or social in nature, but they all matter.”

Source: UVM News

University of Vermont English professor Emily Bernard has won the prestigious Christopher Isherwood Prize for autobiographical prose in the Los Angeles Times’ 2020 Book Prizes competition for her 2019 book, “Black Is the Body.”

The panel of judges awarding her the prize said, “With deceptively simple and luminous prose, Emily Bernard invites us to inhabit her life as she poses perilous questions seemingly as simple as ‘when is a doll just a doll,’ and pushes ever deeper refusing easy solutions. This is a beautiful, important collection of essays.”

The Los Angeles Times announced that Bernard had won the Isherwood Prize this week. She will accept it in Los Angeles on April 17 with winners in other categories.

The Los Angeles Times award is just the latest accolade for “Black Is the Body.”  Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, named it one of her 10 favorite books of 2019. It’s also slide #1 in Kirkus Reviews’ list of Best Books of 2019 to Fight Racism and Xenophobia. And notices in In Style, Publishers Weekly and Entertainment Today were among the many positive reviews the book has received.

Bernard is a professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UVM and was recently named the Julian Lindsay Green & Gold Professor of English.

See Emily Bernard read from “Black Is the Body” here.

Source: UVM News

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Vice Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has announced new federal funding for research on the region’s forest ecosystem and economy. The Northeastern States Research Cooperative (NSRC), first created by Leahy in the 1998 Farm Bill, received $2 million in the fiscal year 2020 appropriations bill for research on the Northern Forest and its 26 million acres of working landscape. 

“The forest-based economy has underpinned rural communities in Vermont and across the region for generations,” Senator Leahy said. “But securing its future requires sustained investments in ecosystem health, sustainable management, and innovative products. I’m proud to have authored the legislation to create this initiative and to have been able to secure funding to continue its critical research in 2020.  The future of our landscape depends on it.” 

“We greatly appreciate Senator Leahy’s continued support, and applaud the vision which has made him such a powerful voice for the State of Vermont, and a strong advocate for higher education,” said Suresh Garimella, president of the University of Vermont, which plays a leading role in the NSRC. “UVM’s research and educational strengths are underscored by our land grant mission, and we remain committed to being of service to our state.” 

Since its creation in the 1998 Farm Bill, the NSRC has supported cross-disciplinary, collaborative research among the U.S. Forest Service and universities across the Northern Forest states, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and New York. Focusing on the ecological, economic, and cultural challenges facing the forest, NSRC has awarded more than 300 competitive research grants totaling more than $23 million.  

The NSRC had not received federal funding since 2016, however, until Leahy secured $2 million for its reestablishment in the fiscal year 2020 negotiations. The revitalized program will seek input from business, industry, agency, and community leaders to define a research agenda that will support and improve the health of the Northern Forest environment and economy. The expectation is that new projects will begin by early 2021.

Source: UVM News