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Living Robots Create Global Media Splash

New creatures, called “xenobots” were designed on a supercomputer at the University of Vermont by professor of computer science Joshua Bongard and his graduate student Sam Kriegman.

Then biologists at Tufts University took the UVM designs and assembled them out of frog cells. The result was “a new class of artifact,” says Bongard, “a living, programmable organism”—that led to a scientific study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on January 13.

And the other result was an avalanche of global media attention. Many hundreds (maybe thousands) of stories were published—from Boston to Beijing.

One of the biggest stories, “Meet the xenobot: world’s first living, self-healing robots created from frog stem cells,” was published out of CNN’s international desk in Hong Kong and picked by TV stations around the country. This led to a broadcast appearance by UVM’s Josh Bongard as a guest on Fredricka Whitfield’s Sunday interview show. After the interview, CNN featured a photo of a xenobot on its Instagram feed. It has 95,551 likes.

The BBC World Service also served up their expert interview work in a conversation with Bongard about computer-designed organisms.

Science Friday, the widely syndicated program aired by radio stations across the country, invited Josh Bongard to be their guest in a wide-ranging conversation with host Ira Flatow. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced an inviting nine-minute-long radio conversation with Bongard for their flagship science program, Quirks & Quarks.

Bloomberg News produced its own “QuickTake” video about the research and also tweeted the video. Sky News produced an online story and also interviewed Bongard for global television broadcast on their program, “The Sarah-Jane Mee Show.”

Many of the nation’s leading science magazines covered this research including Scientific American, The Scientist, Cosmos, Popular Mechanics, IEEE Spectrum and a thoughtful story, “Meet Xenobot, an Eerie New Kind of Programmable Organism,” in Wired.

Other influential publications took up the xen0bot story too, including Smithsonian, The Economist, The Week, Esquire, and Forbes.

Newspapers around the world reported the news, from The Boston Globe to the San Francisco Chronicle to the The Times (of London) and other British tabloids, including The Telegraph, The Independent, and The Guardian which republished a UVM-produced video.

Other international coverage included the Irish Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, New Zealand Herald, L’Express (France), Der Tagesspiegel (Germany), and El Mundo (Spain). 

The MIT Technology Review, reported a story, “These “xenobots” are living machines designed by an evolutionary algorithm,” and another one for their Chinese edition. And Inverse may get the best-but-most-misleading-headline award with its story, “Scientists develop ‘walking caviar’ to make the first-ever living machine.” Even the inimitable website IFLScience!, with its fifty million readers, covered the xenobot work.

Local and Vermont media also covered the work, including an interview with WCAX television. 

Source: UVM News

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Voices for Change

With every mass shooting, gun violence surges into the headlines. And with it come the thoughts and prayers, the calls for gun control legislation, more effective mental health screening, or bolstered school safety. The debate rages, then quiets, until the cycle begins anew with the next instance, tragically, often weeks or mere days away. But for advocates working to effect change, this issue is a constant. Three UVM alumni, all of them motivated by the unthinkable massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School seven years ago, are among the faithful raising awareness and pressing for progress on this deeply rooted American problem. 

Po Murray

On December 14, 2012, Po Murray ’89 believed she was living in one of America’s safest neighborhoods. The illusion would shatter that morning when a 20-year-old neighbor named Adam Lanza murdered his mother in their home then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary armed with an assault rifle, a handgun, and multiple rounds of ammunition.  

Murray and her husband, Tom Murray ’89, had lived in Newtown, Connecticut, for thirteen years, and their four children had all attended Sandy Hook Elementary. Their youngest, Tommy, graduated from Sandy Hook the previous spring and was a sixth grader in middle school when the shooting occurred. The Murray family lost beloved teachers they had known for years and children from their neighborhood, as shock and grief rippled through their entire community. Though she considered herself politically aware at the time, Po Murray admits she had no sense of the weakness of gun laws. “At that moment in time we decided we needed to take action to create some cultural and legislative changes to reduce the epidemic of gun violence in our country,” she says. 

Initially, Murray joined with neighbors and co-founded Sandy Hook Promise to help heal the community and advocate for gun control. A few months later, she took the lead again, co-founding Newtown Action Alliance, a national all-volunteer grassroots organization focused on advancing common sense gun laws in the state and nationally. 

Last fall, Murray was in the midst of a fairly typical week, which saw her traveling to Washington, D.C., with families affected by gun violence to bring their personal stories to Congress. She was joined by Fred Guttenberg, who lost his 14-year-old daughter, Jaime, in the 2018 Parkland, Florida, school shooting. He and Murray lobbied Congress to take action on Jaime’s Law, requiring background checks on ammunition purchases. 

Murray is heartened that H.R. 1296, the Assault Weapons Ban of 2019, introduced by Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, has garnered 214 co-sponsors. With just four co-sponsors still needed to push a vote, Murray says, “We’ve moved really close, closer than we’ve ever been.” She adds that banning assault weapons is just one of many laws and other steps necessary to stem the tide of gun violence. 

She finds hope in the fact that so many candidates for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president are speaking out on gun control, often adopting the tell-it-like-it-is terminology of Newtown Action Alliance, describing assault rifles as “weapons of war.” She also finds hope in the “unapologetic voices” of the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as they rose up to demand action. She credits them with helping push red states, and states like Vermont with a deep gun culture, and some Republican lawmakers to shift course in favor of common-sense gun laws. “As this generation of students becomes voters, there will be a significant change in the future,” Murray says. 

Mariah McGough

On December 14, 2012, Mariah McGough ’17 was a high school senior in Brookfield, Connecticut, which borders Newtown. Among the schools where she worked part-time in an after-school program: Sandy Hook Elementary. She knew two of the twenty children killed and continued her job when school resumed after the horrific day. “Needless to say, it was a life-changing experience. The work I do now is very personal, but even more rewarding for that reason,” she says.  

McGough is a communications associate with Everytown for Gun Safety, a New York City-based non-profit. She works, in particular, with the organization’s grassroots effort Moms Demand Action. She’s the point person in the northeast region and a number of other states, working with volunteers, mothers and fathers, and families touched by gun violence, helping them share their personal stories with the media. “My job is to elevate their voices and change how we talk about gun violence in America by passing the mic over to them,” she says. 

A public communication major at UVM, McGough has found work in line with her education and purpose. She credits Kate Finley Woodruff, faculty member and associate dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, as a key influence. A class with Woodruff on socially responsible marketing steered McGough toward non-profit work; she later gained experience with an internship in Burlington and began her career at Everytown as an intern. “Without a doubt, I wouldn’t be where I am right now without the way that I was taught about communications at UVM,” she says. 

McGough takes exception to the notion that “change never happens” when it comes to addressing gun violence. Citing the issue of daily individual shootings in American cities, as opposed to mass shootings, she highlights the number of community-based initiatives that are making a difference. She notes the state-level institution of common-sense measures, such as red flag laws, allowing law enforcement to temporarily remove firearms from an individual who might harm themselves or others. “Action in congress is long overdue,” McGough says. “But the fact is, it is happening in incremental steps—at the local level, at the state level. Groups like ours are gaining more momentum than ever before.”

Rob Cox

On December 14, 2012, Rob Cox ’89 was on a transatlantic flight from London to New York. The longtime Reuters journalist was returning from a business trip, looking forward to being back home with his wife, Hannah, and their two sons in Newtown, Connecticut. As his plane landed at JFK in the early afternoon, Cox’s phone lit up with texts, voicemail alerts, and 200-some new emails. The first text he read was from a Danish friend: “Please tell me your son wasn’t at that school.”

Fortunately, neither of his sons was at that school. Older son, Sam, was at his first semester of boarding school; younger son, Ethan, was at Newtown’s middle school, on lock down. “When I got home, I hugged my children so tightly I am surprised to this day that I did not break their ribs. I was so thankful that my boys were safe,” Cox says. “But, by then, I knew there were 26 families in my town who were not so fortunate.”

As their emotions processed through empathy, compassion, anger, Cox and his neighbors also felt an immediate call to action. Within 24 hours of the massacre, Cox and a circle of friends were working to develop what would become Sandy Hook Promise, an organization dedicated to healing their own community and helping others avoid the same fate. 

Cox left the Sandy Hook Promise Board in 2015, but continued to focus on links between finance and the gun industry in his Reuters columns. That work took on a renewed emphasis with the 2018 killings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. A day after that shooting, Cox took the lead among national media in highlighting Wall Street’s ties to the gun complex. Subsequent pieces covered consumer protests which helped motivate corporate action, such as Walmart’s ceasing sales of AR-15 ammunition and advocating for universal background check laws. 

Though Cox now lives in Paris, focused on his work as global editor for Reuters, colleagues with the news organization in the United States carry forward his work examining connections between finance and the gun violence epidemic. 

Read a 2014 interview with Rob Cox, recounting the first years of Sandy Hook Promise and reflecting on UVM’s influence upon him.

Source: UVM News

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Author Ibram Kendi Delivers MLK Celebration Keynote

“We’ve been taught about King’s dream, but how often have we been taught about King’s nightmare?” Ibram X. Kendi asked audience members as he opened his keynote speech for the University of Vermont’s Annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration, Education and Learning Series. “If King’s dream has been racial progress, then his nightmare has historically been racist progress.”

A bestselling author, celebrated historian and founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, Kendi demonstrated how the opposite of “racist” is not “not racist” or lack of racism, but “antiracist,” and how racial inequity is not the result of racist people or ideas, but the result of racist policies.

“When you track racist ideas or racist policies, you’re tracking and studying the ways in which they evolve and change, the ways in which they became more sophisticated…and there’s no more sophisticated racist idea ever created than the idea that this nation is post-racial. Because like every other racist idea, the purpose of this idea is to make Americans believe that the problem is people and not policy,” he said.

In Washington, D.C., Kendi leads a first-of-its-kind center dedicated to eliminating racist policies that perpetuate racism and racial inequity and is a professor of history and international relations. In 2016 he became the youngest winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction for his book “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which explores the tangled history of racist policies that spur and justify racist ideas. His latest book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” quickly became a “New York Times” bestseller. Kendi was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019 and is a regular contributor to “The Atlantic” and the “New York Times,” among other outlets.

Throughout his speech, Kendi challenged racially charged ideas and perceptions with history and facts. He pointed to disparities in the justice system, noting that African Americans account for 40 percent of the incarcerated population and only 13 percent of the national population. “It’s either because black people commit more crimes or it’s because of racist policies,” he said.

He explained that similar policies, like Jim Crow Laws, have come to be considered racist based on their outcome and results observed in practice, not on a litmus test of racist language or intent at the time of its proposal. “Historically the heartbeat of racism itself has always been denial,” Kendi said, then posed a question: “But what if we, as a nation, defined policies as racist based on outcomes?” 

Just as the margin between justice and injustice does not exist in policy—every law, legislation or policy either leads to justice or injustice, he argued—the margin between racist and antiracist does not exist in our daily lives. Kendi implored the audience to consider the binary nature of racism and how the opposite of racism is not the absence of it, but rather the act of being antiracist. “Every idea either connotes one or the other. Are we supporting racist or antiracist? There is nothing between racist and antiracist.”

He explained that the sting of being called “racist” stems from its perception as an attack rather than as a fact or descriptive word, like a tattoo rather than a trait. In a personal and powerful anecdote, Kendi compared the sting and hurt he felt in the moment his doctor diagnosed him with stage four cancer, to the pain that can come with being called “racist.” What’s more, he shared how to become “antiracist.”

“Even though I’m shocked that someone would say that about me, I have two options: I deny it, or I go through the painful process of healing.”

Source: UVM News

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In Cuba, Cleaner Rivers Follow Greener Farming

When the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s, food production on the island of Cuba was reduced—as the supply of Russian fertilizers, pesticides, tractors, and oil dried up. Under the stress of an imminent food crisis, the island quickly rebuilt a new form of diversified farming—including many urban organic gardens—that depended less on imported synthetic chemicals. Over the last two decades, Cuba blossomed into a worldwide model for conservation agriculture, with improved soils and cleaner water.

At least that’s been a popular story among journalists.

Now—for the first time in more than fifty years—a team of Cuban and U.S. field scientists have worked together to rigorously test a key aspect of this story: the impacts of contemporary agriculture on water quality in Cuba’s rivers. Despite centuries of sugarcane plantations and other intensive farming, the international team discovered that none of the rivers they explored show deep damage.

Instead, the scientists measured much lower nutrient concentrations in all of the twenty-five Cuban rivers they studied than are found in the U.S.’s Mississippi River. And they think Cuba’s transition toward sustainable agriculture—and its reduced use of fertilizers on cropland—may be a primary cause.

“A lot of stories about the value of Cuba’s shift to conservation agriculture have been based on fuzzy, feel-good evidence,” says University of Vermont geologist Paul Bierman, who co-led the new research. “This study provides hard data that a crucial part of this story is true.”

Bierman and geoscientist Amanda Schmidt from Oberlin College led the American half of the international team, while Rita Yvelice Sibello Hernández, a scientist with CEAC (Centro de Estudios Ambientales de Cienfuegos), an ecological research group, headed up the Cuban effort with CEAC science director Carlos Alonso-Hernández.

The new study, “¡Cuba! River Water Chemistry Reveals Rapid Chemical Weathering, the Echo of Uplift, and the Promise of More Sustainable Agriculture,” was published January 30, in the early online edition of the journal GSA Today, the leading publication of the Geological Society of America.

Pollution problems

The scientists from both countries worked side-by-side as one team doing extensive fieldwork—with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation—and then coordinated lab work and analysis to look at many measures of river water across central Cuba. The team found high levels of E. coli bacteria in the waters—likely the result of large numbers of livestock and Cuba’s intensive use of horses and other draft animals for transportation and farm work.

However, the scientists also found much lower levels of phosphorus and nitrogen pollution in Cuban rivers than in the United States where intensive farming and chemical fertilizer use is widespread. The new study shows dissolved nitrogen levels in Cuban rivers running at roughly a quarter to a third of those found in the Mississippi River—where excess nitrogen is a primary engine of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. “Cuban river waters provide evidence that agriculture need not overload rivers, and thus reservoirs and coastal zones, with nutrients,” writes the 15-person research team that included seven Cuban scientists and students and eight U.S. scientists and students from UVM, Oberlin, and Williams College.

“This research can help us to better understand how land and rivers interact in the context of sustainable organic agriculture,” said the CEAC’s Rita Yvelice Sibello Hernández, “and may give a good example to other people in the Caribbean and all over the world.”

Scientific diplomacy

Cuba is a motorboat trip from Florida—less than a hundred miles. And the island nation is the most populous in the Caribbean with more than 11 million citizens and a long and tortuous history of complex relations—cooperation and conflict—with the United States. But there has been vanishingly little collaboration between U.S. and Cuban scientists since the 1960s—much less than with other, more-potent geopolitical foes of the United States, from Iran to China.

“We have much to learn from each other,” says Cuban scientist Alejandro Garcia Moya, a co-author on the new study. The kind of river data that the team collected “are needed to guide sustainable development in Cuba, and by example, in other tropical and island nations,” the team writes. Not only did the U.S. team provide important technical expertise and verification of results—but the joint research reveals that Cuba also has a lot of opportunity to improve its river water quality. The new study points toward the need for improved management strategies to reduce animal manure and sediment loads going into rivers—such as fencing to keep cattle off river banks—that “could further and rapidly improve central Cuban river water quality,” the scientists note.

Conversely, “Cuba has been having a forced experiment in organic agriculture since the late 1980s,” says Oberlin’s Amanda Schmidt. “So Cuba is a very interesting place to look at the effects of both conventional agriculture and the effects of organic agriculture at a national scale,”—and may suggest pathways to improve U.S. agriculture. Fertilizer use in Cuba peaked in 1978 and has been lower since, according to World Bank and other data. U.S. fertilizer use spiked after the 1960s and has remained at more than twice the Cuban use rate.

“There’s a takeaway we bring back to the U.S.: our river waters do not need to look the way they do,” says Paul Bierman—a professor in UVM’s Geology Department, Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, and Gund Institute for Environment—“we can manage fertilizer differently.” There are, of course, complex questions about yields, farm policy and more, but this newly reported data on the low levels of nutrient pollution found in twenty-five Cuban rivers, “suggests the benefits of Cuba’s shift to conservation agriculture after 1990,” the U.S./Cuban team writes, “and provides a model for more sustainable agriculture worldwide.”

Source: UVM News

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President Garimella to Participate in High-Profile Symposium at National Science Foundation

University of Vermont president Suresh Garimella will participate in a panel discussion at a high-profile symposium this week commemorating the 70th anniversary of the National Science Foundation.

The event, which will feature some of the nation’s top science leaders, will be held Feb. 6-7 at the organization’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. It is being sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Garimella will participate in a Feb. 6 panel titled “Partnerships to Address National Priorities.”  He is the only higher education leader on the panel.

“I’m pleased and honored to be attending NSF’s Anniversary Symposium and participating in this important panel discussion,” Garimella said. “Partnerships between the public and private sectors are a key means of driving innovation and of spawning the applied research that leads to economic growth and improved human welfare. I look forward to engaging in a dialog with the other panel members, to sharing my thoughts and to learning from my distinguished colleagues.”

Other panel members include geophysicist Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences and chair of the National Research Council; Prem Natarajan, vice president of Alexa AI and head of Natural Language Understanding at Amazon; Paul Dabbar, undersecretary of science at the U.S. Department of Energy; Walter Copan, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S. Department of Commerce; and Robert Conn, president of the Kavli Foundation (awaiting confirmation?). The panel will be moderated by Michael Kratsios, chief technology officer in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House.   

Before coming to UVM in 2019, Garimella was executive vice president for research and partnerships at Purdue University. He led a $660 million per year research enterprise there and oversaw Discovery Park, a unique set of facilities and institutes where disciplines converge to solve global challenges related to health and life sciences, sustainability, food, energy and defense, and security. He was responsible for Purdue’s international programs and its global and corporate partnerships, focused on strengthening relationships to advance innovation, research, education and commercialization.

In 2018, Garimella was appointed to the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation and also serves as an independent body of advisers to both the president and Congress on policy matters related to science, engineering and educating the next generation of scientists. He is also a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

During Garimella’s inaugural year at UVM, the university has formed research partnerships with Google and the U.S. Army and is in the process of exploring alliances with several other multi-national organizations.  

Garimella is the co-author of over 525 widely cited archival publications and 13 patents.

The National Science Foundation was created in 1950, when President Truman signed the National Science Foundation Act, creating the only federal agency charged with funding fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In addition to commemorating NSF’s 70th anniversary, the symposium marks 75 years since the publication of Vannevar Bush’s visionary report, “Science—the Endless Frontier,” which laid the groundwork for the agency’s creation. 

The agenda for the symposium includes four other panel discussions and a series of presentations by leading scientists, including Frances Córdova, NSF director.

The panel (scheduled from 3:45-4:45 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 6), and the entire symposium, will be webcast at https://www.nsf.gov/about/history/.

 


Source: UVM News

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‘Choose Vermont Scholarship’ Program to Award $60,000 in Scholarships to Vermont’s Incoming College Students

The Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development, Vermont Student Assistance Corporation and 13 Vermont colleges and universities — including the University of Vermont — are announcing the “2020 Choose Vermont Scholarship Program,” which will award $60,000 in scholarship money to students who commit to attend a Vermont school by June 1. Both out-of-state and Vermont students are eligible to enter.

The program was developed through a partnership across Vermont’s higher education sector to market Vermont as a top destination for attending college.  The campaign targets students already accepted to a Vermont school, encouraging them to take the next step and “Choose Vermont.”

“As we work to grow our workforce and help Vermonters in their careers, our higher education system plays a critical role,” said Governor Phil Scott. “These institutions, however, are feeling the effects of Vermont’s demographic crisis and declining enrollment. It’s a testament to Vermonters’ ingenuity and collaboration that public and private partners are willing to work together to pool marketing resources and highlight the state as an ideal location for higher education.”

“The variety of higher education institutions we have in Vermont makes it a wonderful landscape for attending college. Whether you are looking for a top liberal arts school or learning a trade at a technical school, Vermont has it all,” said Ted Brady, Deputy Secretary of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development. “Couple that with tremendous access to outdoor recreation, the arts, and welcoming and vibrant communities, and it all adds up to an incredible place to attend college.”

Students who commit to attend one of the 13 participating Vermont schools between January 1, 2020 and June 1, 2020 and then register at ThinkVermont.com/scholarship will become eligible to win a $5,000 scholarship to their school.  The Vermont Student Assistance Corporation will offer an additional $5,000 scholarship to a student who commits to any of the 13 participating schools.

The inaugural Choose Vermont Scholarship Program was launched in May of 2019, giving away two $5,000 scholarships and drawing over 1,400 entries.  The success of that program led to more scholarship funding from colleges statewide for the 2020 program.

The Choose Vermont Scholarship Program is made possible by Vermont’s participating colleges and universities along with the support of the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation, the Association of Vermont Independent Colleges, and the Agency of Commerce and Community Development.

For full details and to find participating schools: https://www.thinkvermont.com/scholarship

Source: UVM News

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A Pioneer in the Lab and on the Land

In 1962, when Jackson J. W. Clemmons, Ph.D., M.D., moved to Vermont to join the UVM Department of Pathology, he was only the second African American on the College of Medicine faculty, and the first to stay for any length of time.

Early on, a large farmhouse for sale in the town of Charlotte caught his eye. Public transportation stopped at Shelburne so, according to his daughter, Lydia Clemmons, the doctor walked the remaining six miles down a dirt road to reach the property. Locals called it the “white elephant house,” but Dr. Clemmons’ childhood experience apprenticing with his grandfather, a master carpenter, helped him see the possibilities beneath its surface.

“I didn’t look at this like an old run-down house. This was a good building that could be developed,” recalls Dr. Clemmons. He and his wife, also named Lydia Clemmons, who was the first African American nurse anesthetist at UVM, purchased the Charlotte property—148 acres with six historic buildings—and raised five children there.

Pioneering through rocky terrain was second nature for the Clemmonses. As a biochemist, Dr. Clemmons had been part of the lab team of the noted scientist Karl Paul Link in Wisconsin that developed the anticoagulants Dicoumarol and Warfarin. He earned a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, and was then accepted into Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Ohio and promised financial aid; but, the younger Lydia says, the school’s admissions office rescinded that aid offer when he arrived and the administrators realized he was African American. The couple pinched pennies to get by, and Dr. Clemmons received his M.D. in 1959. Three years later he came to UVM, where he practiced pediatric pathology until 1991.

Seven years ago, the Clemmons family began asking the perennial question posed by all farming families: Does the next generation want to continue on the land? Concerned that African Americans have, over the last 100 years, lost 93 percent of their U.S. agricultural assets, the family decided to preserve the property and launched Clemmons Family Farm, a multicultural center dedicated to celebrating African American heritage through the arts.

“It’s very rare to find a farm that is owned by black people in New England,” says the younger Lydia. “It’s more than a family story. This is American history.”

Last May, Dr. Clemmons was awarded an honorary degree at UVM’s commencement ceremony—recognition by the institution for his work as a pioneer and innovative leader, both at the University and in the wider community.


This story originally appeared in Vermont Medicine Magazine.

Source: UVM News

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UVM Adds Two Mamava Pods to Campus

The University of Vermont held a ceremony today formally inaugurating a new Mamava lactation pod in UVM’s STEM complex, one of two new pods the university recently added to campus. The other is located in Patrick Gymnasium.

Burlington-based Mamava is the country’s leading provider of lactation suites that enable parents to pump breast milk or breastfeed their infants in private, comfortably and with dignity.

“We’re very pleased to make these new Mamava pods available to nursing parents at the university,” said Wanda Heading-Grant, UVM’s vice president for Human Resources, Diversity and Multi-Cultural Affairs. “The workplace can be a challenging environment for parents who breastfeed. We are committed to doing everything we can do to provide spaces that enable them to care for their infants comfortably and privately.”

“We’re thrilled to see these Mamava pods at UVM,” said Sascha Mayer, co-founder and CEO of Mamava and a UVM alumna. “There are seven UVM alumni on staff at Mamava and UVM was the university that helped ignite our entrepreneurial spirit and passion for social justice. Parents deserve a dignified place to use a breast pump or breastfeed distraction-free—anywhere, anytime. We are proud to see UVM support their breastfeeding community while also supporting Mamava, a company appropriately conceived, birthed, and growing in the Viridis Montis.”

The process that brought the new Mamava pods to campus was a deliberate one.

While the university has had private lactation rooms for years, they were not located evenly on campus, leaving some breastfeeding parents with no nearby facilities.

That fact was brought to the attention of Stephanie Loscalzo, a member of UVM’s Staff Council who works in the dean’s office of the College of Arts and Sciences, by a nursing mother who was having to walk across campus to find a lactation room.

Loscalzo formed a subcommittee of employees to address the issue. As its first order of business, the subcommittee undertook an inventory of existing lactation spaces on campus.

“We identified two areas that were underserved — central campus and the athletic complex,” Loscalzo said.

Loscalzo and several colleagues, including Emily McCarthy in the Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity Office and Mindy Kear from Larner College of Medicine, developed a proposal to acquire the Mamava pods and received the go-ahead from UVM’s central administration.

“The university couldn’t have been more empathetic and responsive,” Loscalzo said.

As part of its work, the subcommittee also created a liaisons program so breastfeeding parents had a designated person to help find a nearby lactation room or advocate for them, if a new space was needed. Later a website was created to consolidate all information relevant to breast-feeding parents at UVM.

The Mamava suite is a self-contained, mobile pod with comfortable benches, a fold-down table, an electrical outlet for plugging in a breast pump, and a locking door for privacy. Mamava’s Original lactation pod—7’3” high and wide, with a depth of 3’7”—is meant for individual use, but can fit more than one person, as well as mothers with babies and other children in tow. The UVM pods are Mamava’s larger ADA model—twice the size at 50 square feet, and wheelchair accessible.

UVM staff from various departments collaborated to support bringing the Mamava pods to campus, including Larner College of Medicine, HRS/Employee Wellness, Fleming Museum, Women’s Center, AAEO, College of Arts & Sciences, Student Financial Services, Tutoring Center, UVM Extension, Staff Council, College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, Physical Plant Department and UVM Athletics.

Source: UVM News

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With New Grant, UVM Neighborhood Program Expands to Hickok Place

The University of Vermont’s Office of Student and Community Relations (OSCR) and the Neighborhood Group Isham Street Gardening and Other Optimistic Doings (ISGOOD) were recently awarded a $2,250 Grow Grant from the New England Grassroots Environment Fund. 

The grant will fund materials to expand their work from Isham Street in Burlington, where they’ve focused in the past, to neighboring Hickok Place.

When Hickok Place residents and landlords saw the positive impacts on Isham Street from ISGOOD’s efforts, they wanted the same for their street. ISGOOD and OSCR responded by developing an action plan with their guidance fortified by funding from the Grow Grant and a landlord motivated to make change for his tenants on Hickok Place.

Work on Isham Street began 10 years ago with OSCR’s Community Coalition teaming up with Brian Cina and Phil Hammerslough, residents of Isham Street and the co-founders of ISGOOD. The Coalition is composed of UVM and Champlain College students, staff, and administrators, neighbors, landlords, and Burlington city officials and staff.

Focusing on topics ranging from housing problems to quality-of-life issues, members developed a street strategy as a community development pilot project. Using concepts such as collective efficacy, restorative practices, community-based research, and crime prevention through Environment Design 2.0, the strategy was later recognized as a best practice in Burlington’s Neighborhood Project Plan.

With help from groups and organizations, ISGOOD has been successful in cultivating community and relationships through gardening. Volunteers from UVM’s Upward Bound, the Summer Enrichment Scholars Program, TREK, the Burlington Health and Rehabilitation Center, and many others, have and continue to help the group and their mission thrive. In addition, a landlord donated central community garden was established in 2012 with an AARP grant also being secured that year.

In the spring of 2017, an Isham Street resident and UVM student applied for ISGOOD’s first awarded Grow Grant to complete gardens on the east side of the street. Most recently, UVM’s University Relations office provided funding to complete the gardening on the west side of the Street.

Through community gardening, positive relationships, and inviting people in, a traditionally transient crime heavy street had people now engaging with each other in a way they never had before. ISGOOD hosts annual Welcome to the Street events for new renters and carries out random acts of kindness throughout the year, like delivering Welcome Bags with resources in the fall, snow shovels in the winter, and potted house plants in the spring.

These efforts have resulted in a 50 percent reduction in burglaries, a 68 percent decrease in noise and an 86 percent reduction in vandalism (2012 to 2015 data from Burlington Police Department). The newfound sense of community and belonging and the increased safety net on the street has led to students renting for 2 years instead of the usual one year, and some shift in the street demographics. For instance, a family with young children has moved to the street in large part because of the sense of community.

With the new grant, OSCR and ISGOOD will continue this community-building model for its adjacent neighbors, with the intent to create a safe, resilient, and healthy neighborhood for all residents in this highly impacted area of the City.

Source: UVM News

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New Bio Explores Life of Sen. George Aiken

Across more than three decades, from 1941 to 1975, Senator George Aiken was a prominent voice on Capitol Hill during tumultuous times, helping to shape the nation’s course on issues from the Vietnam War to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. And throughout that long political career, from which he retired as senior member of the Senate, Aiken was what is now an increasingly rare animal—a legislator who consistently sought to bridge the partisan divide. A Republican, Aiken ate breakfast every morning with majority leader Sen. Mike Mansfield, a Democrat. (The Vermont senator always kept it simple, favoring an English muffin with peanut butter and coffee.)

“Say We Won and Get Out: George D. Aiken and the Vietnam War” by Stephen Terry ’64 details Aiken’s life and rise to prominence in the U.S. Senate—examining how his approach to politics stemmed from his early life as a farmer and horticulturist in Putney, Vermont. The author, whose credentials include working as a senate staffer for Aiken and serving as managing editor of the Rutland Herald, draws from historical records to weave a tale through Aiken’s early life, his rapid ascendance in Vermont politics, his public service in the nation’s capital, and his evolving views of the Vietnam war. The book includes Aiken’s “Declare Victory and Go Home” speech, in which he never actually spoke those oft-quoted words.  

As the Watergate cover-up unraveled and possible impeachment of Richard Nixon loomed, Aiken and other key senior Republicans decided they could no longer support the president. Nixon resigned his office after GOP senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott told the President that the Senate would convict him if the full House voted to impeach. 

The book’s inclusion of a 1973 Vermont Life interview with Aiken conducted by a freelance journalist named Bernie Sanders offers a very different echo of today’s political headlines. In his capacity as an Aiken staffer, author Steve Terry was at the senator’s side for the interview as Sanders asked Aiken about the changing nature of Vermont, about businessmen running government, about corporations taking over Vermont businesses, and about all of the presidents that Aiken served with. 

The story of George Aiken’s life and politics couldn’t be told without including a close look into the role of his second wife, Lola. The daughter of a Barre granite worker, she was also deeply rooted in Vermont and was a fierce advocate for her husband and his legacy for years after his death in 1982. Lola Aiken passed away in 2014 at age 102. 

UVM student Louis Augeriworked with Terry as research assistant on Say We Won. The dual political science and history major won the 2018 Green Mountain Scholar Award for outstanding student research. An extensive companion website was developed by Eliza Giles, media director at CRVT.

The Aiken biography is published by the Center for Research on Vermont and White River Press with support from the Silver Special Collections Library and Continuing and Distance Education at the University of Vermont’s George D. Aiken Lecture series. 

Source: UVM News