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For his insights into some of these patterns, including his work on elliptical curves (another mathematical principle at the backbone of today's cutting edge cryptography), Voight won the prestigious Selfridge Prize in 2010 given out by the Number Theory Foundation; he has received support for his research from the National Security Agency; and, in July of this year, he was the winner of a $400,000 CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation, one the government's highest honors for young scientists.


To get a glimpse into how Voight's research might protect privacy in coming decades try this easy problem: Multiply the prime numbers 6,451 and 7,307. Simple. But now reverse the problem. Take this 47,137,457 result and find the prime factors. Now increase your two prime numbers to something large, in the neighborhood of, say, 200 or 300 digits.



Fnding the prime factors that made this large product "would take longer than the lifetime of the universe," Voight says, "using all the computing resources in the world."

That one-way street, in essence, is the heart of modern cryptography and online security

It's that same basic mathematical tool used by the CIA or your smartphone to take plain words or credit card numbers -- and hide them within impregnable codes.

 Or, at least today, codes made this way seem impregnable.



But, Voight is quick to point out: 

"We don't have any proof yet that these systems are secure," and the possible arrival of unfathomably fast quantum computers might also change the security equation.

"John has a rare combination of computational wizardry with deep theoretical insight," says Matthew Greenberg, a professor at the University of Calgary and Voight's collaborator.





Voight's research gets to the mathematical heart of these cyber security concerns. While his work is removed from applied cryptography, he is doing basic research that is expanding the mathematical toolbox that could improve current cryptography or give rise to the next generation of systems.



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Winning is sweet, no doubt, but Snider democratizes debate. The prize is in what the students gain, the people they become. What is important, Snider says, is “building the citizens of the future and in doing that, the world of the future… the kind of skills you develop through debate are twenty-first-century success skills. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you’re going to have to take information and shape it into messages that influence people. You have to be able to critically analyze ideas, arguments, and positions.”

That is Snider’s pitch and it’s echoed by alumni like Charles Morton ’87, a partner at the law firm Venable who also has a faculty appointment at Johns Hopkins University. “Not a day goes by that I don’t rely on a lesson I learned in debate,” Morton says. “In my practice of law, in teaching — it framed my view of the world and helped to empower me as someone who can compete successfully.”

Carrying on UVM's debate tradition in a modern world

Snider points out that debate is a long tradition at UVM — the debate program formed in 1899. And for his commitment to that tradition, Snider has also shaped the way forward for a newer style of competitive debate known as the worlds format, an approach that he believes better prepares them for more “real-life” situations.

In worlds, teams learn the topic only fifteen minutes prior to the start of the debate. After that they can talk only to their partner, no coaches, and have no access to the internet. It requires that debaters be broadly informed and able to think fast on their feet to develop a convincing argument they will deliver in a seven-minute speech.

Snider is a man of gentle heart and he brings a unique sensibility to the UVM's debate program where everyone is welcome at the table. He's even done debate training in 38 countries — a service he does not charge for.

“I think we’re about promoting debate everywhere for everyone,” Snider says. “Close to home, far away — that’s what we do.” And he also inspires.

“Tuna was a phenomenal mentor for me,” says Laura Ellingson ’91, associate professor of communication and women’s and gender studies at Santa Clara University in California. “He taught me how to put together an argument, how to think on my feet — I learned extraordinary research skills from him.” Beyond that, Ellingson drew something deeper from Snider’s faith in her when she was diagnosed with cancer shortly after joining UVM debate. “He’s an amazing man,” she says. “He just kept saying, ‘I believe in you,’ over and over. I have such deep affection and gratitude for his support mentoring me as a debater and as a human being.”

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It was a life Sharma was used to. Starting in grade five, she helped with accounting at her father's automotive dealerships. At the age of fifteen, when her father passed away, she continued accounting work with extended family, selling "anything with wheels."

Although she left the family business to pursue a passion for education and research, family business has not left Sharma. Today, she's a leading scholar on the topic, a research spark begun in her childhood but reignited in grad school at the University of Calgary.

“I was working on a project with a million-dollar grant marked solely for family business,” recalls Sharma, who came to UVM last year from the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University in Montreal. “I was told to do a literature review, and I started reading these articles and I thought, 'They’re talking about my family.’ It was after so many years that I found the literature that actually spoke to me, that was actually more reality to me than anything else that I had studied."

It was a fledgling field at the time, but over the years Sharma has helped define it. Her book Entrepreneurial Family Firms (2010, Prentice Hall) is one of the most widely used college textbooks and has been translated into Mandarin and Greek. She’s also editor of the journal Family Business Review and serves as director for the only global applied research initiative on family business studies, Successful Trans-generational Entrepreneurship Practices at Babson College, a group with forty-one partner institutions in thirty-five countries.

At UVM, Sharma has quickly begun collaborations with fellow faculty to sharpen the family business focus at the university including a  first-ever global family enterprise case competition for students  and two new awards both recognizing Vermont-based businesses that have demonstrated a commitment to creating sustainable business through leadership and innovation.

As Professor Pramodita Sharma continues to delve into what makes family businesses thrive or fail and share those lessons with UVM students, her own memories are never far away. "I often relate my research to some of the things I remember growing up,” she says. “I still find it fascinating.”

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Bringing her varied cultural interests into the classroom -- from her early fascination with mystic women writers to her view of food as a prism through which societies can be observed -- makes her naturally more enthusiastic, Mazzoni says. And it’s clearly infectious. Second-year anthropology major Melissa Guzikowski, who took three courses with Mazzoni, calls her amazing. “She is the reason I decided to pursue Italian studies,” says Guzikowski, “minoring in Italian and studying abroad in Italy.”

Mazzoni's colleague Gayle Nunley, professor of Spanish, is quick to note that Mazzoni has been extremely successful and productive at UVM, publishing numerous books at some of the finest university presses. Of Mazzoni's recent appointment as a prestigious University Scholar Nunley says: “The honor recognizes her stature in the scholarly community as well as her embodiment of the teacher-scholar model that UVM prides itself on.”

“… taste metaphors shape and guide us in our understanding of the world around us and within us.” -- Mazzoni

In a recent talk, “How to Pick, Peel, and Eat Oranges Like an Italian: Recipes for Reading,” Mazzoni likens her graceful approach to revealing an orange’s juicy flesh to the way she cooks and to the way she teaches her students to approach a work of literature -- or the cinema or art for that matter. As themes simmer throughout Italian culture, ancient and new, Mazzoni follows where they take her. Her recipes, she makes clear, in both the kitchen and the classroom, are not carefully codified instructions that lead to uniform outcomes.

Taste, Mazzoni says, is considered the lowest of the human senses, well beneath sight and hearing. “Smell and taste are more animalistic,” she says. “Distinguishing between sweet and bitter is an experience that’s very primal to us and it makes sense that we should use it as a metaphor to try to understand something that is more than sensual. And it makes sense that language helps us do that.”

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The rear wheel, raised slightly off the ground by an outsized kickstand, starts spinning, the blender starts whirring, the fruit liquefies into a pink mash, and, soon, Vivanco is handing out cups of bike-blended smoothie to his — still somewhat astonished — students on their first day of their Global and Regional Studies course, “Bicycles, Globalization and Sustainability.”

Vivanco is a recent recipient of the George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award, UVM's highest teaching honor. Dozens of Vivanco’s former students and colleagues wrote letters of nomination.

Many recalled class meals and desserts at his home, his leadership on study-abroad semesters in Oaxaca, Mexico; his support of student activist efforts including a recent campaign to ban bottled water on campus; and his role as advisor to BUG, a new student bike group that launched a successful bike-sharing program.

Back to the bike ...

Vivanco talks to his students as they gather in a half circle around him and his bike. "We’re trying, through our example, to show that there are other ways to think about getting around, other ways to enjoy a smoothie that don’t require a plug in the wall, other ways to think about what a bike is,” Vivanco says.

And this is the point: Vivanco wants his students to think beyond the bike itself to the patterns and forces behind it. “Bikes challenge the dominance of the automobile and the industries that uphold it.”

Luis Vivanco and his students finish their smoothies and head back into the classroom to get the discussion started, and to get going on a deep stack of reading. He wants them to know more than they do now when they head out in a few days for a class field trip — on their bikes.

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But Junru Wu, a physicist at the University of Vermont, has invented a promising new approach: blast them to death with sound.

He and Meiyin Wu, an ecologist at Montclair State University in New Jersey, have been collaborating for nearly a decade to create a device — they call it BallastSolution. The machine will treat ballast water, as ships take it in and dump it out, with a lethal dose of ultrasound. (Lethal, that is, to wee beasties; it’s harmless to people.)

In recent tests, “we thought we’d be happy if we could kill close to 90%” of the small clams, water fleas, and e. coli bacteria sent into the machine, said Junru Wu, “but the results were over 99%.” The U.N.’s International Maritime Organization will require all ships to have a treatment system by the end of 2016.

Purpose for faculty member's invention

“There are millions of ships out there that will have to comply with these new regulations," says Meiyin Wu.

The device relies on what physicists call “cavitation,” the formation and implosion of tiny bubbles within the organisms. These bubbles in liquid, created by mechanical waves from the ultrasound, “basically rip them apart,” says Junru Wu.

The ultrasound has advantages over other treatments, like ultraviolet light that has a hard time penetrating murky water, or chemical treatments, like chlorine, which have environmental problems. “Our goal is to produce a system that doesn’t produce secondary pollution,” says Meiyin Wu.

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“English, it turns out, is strongly biased toward being positive,” said Peter Dodds, an applied mathematician at the University of Vermont. The UVM team’s study “Positivity of the English Language,” appeared in the journal PLoS ONE."

This new study complements another study by the same Vermont scientists that attracted wide media attention showing that average global happiness, based on Twitter data, has been dropping for the past two years. Combined, the two studies show that short-term average happiness has dropped — against the backdrop of the long-term fundamental positivity of the English language.

Universal positivity

In the new study, Dodds and his colleagues gathered billions of words from four sources: twenty years of the New York Times, the Google Books Project (with millions of titles going back to 1520), Twitter and a half-century of music lyrics.

“We looked at the top 5,000 words in each, in terms of frequency, and in all of those words you see a preponderance of happier words.”

Or, as they write in their study, “a positivity bias is universal,” both for very common words and less common ones and across sources as diverse as tweets, lyrics and British literature.

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This rigorously competitive program gives recipients $240,000 over four years to pursue their research without restriction. To be considered, applicants from all areas of physical and life sciences related to biomedical study must be nominated by an invited institution and demonstrate both excellence and innovation in their research. Shen was one of those scientists.

“Through collaborating, I’ve become versed in how to apply different ‘tools’ to the questions I’m asking,” says Shen. “At the interface, discoveries happen.”

Her research approach relies on a broad research “toolbox.” She asks the same questions from different perspectives -- including biochemistry, bacterial genetics, structural and chemical biology -- to gain a better understanding of molecular mechanisms. While a doctoral student, her research focused on the foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes, which has the ability to grow at refrigerator temperatures. Shen, who wanted to learn how temperature is sensed at the molecular level of the bacteria, was able to determine a novel method for regulating the gene expression of the flagella that help these bacteria move. As a postdoctoral fellow, she switched to a new organism and different approach and devised a procedure for isolating bacterial proteins that share a particular activity, providing a new landscape for drug discovery.

Shen, who joined the UVM College of Medicine faculty in 2011, received a B.S. in microbiology from the University of Alberta, and a doctoral degree in microbiology from Harvard University. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University.

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In an issue of Nature Genetics, Ballif and his colleagues report on their discovery of two proteins on red blood cells responsible for these lesser-known blood types.

The last new blood group proteins to be discovered were nearly a decade ago, Ballif says, “so it’s pretty remarkable to have two identified this year."

Health care professionals will now be able to more rapidly, routinely and confidently screen for these novel blood group proteins, Ballif wrote. "This will leave them better prepared to have blood ready when blood transfusions or other tissue donations are required," he notes. Both of the newly identified proteins are also associated with anticancer drug resistance, so the findings may have implications for improved treatment of breast and other cancers.

Cross-border science

As part of the international effort, Ballif, assistant professor in the biology department, used a mass spectrometer at UVM funded by the Vermont Genetics Network. With this machine, he analyzed proteins purified by his longtime collaborator, Lionel Arnaud at the French National Institute for Blood Transfusion in Paris, France.

Ballif and Arnaud, in turn, relied on antibodies to Langereis and Junior blood antigens developed by affiliates working in blood centers in Japan.

After the protein identification in Vermont, the work returned to France. There Arnaud and his team conducted cellular and genetic tests confirming that these proteins were responsible for the Langereis and Junior blood types. “He was able to test the gene sequence,” Ballif says, “and, sure enough, we found mutations in this particular gene for all the people in our sample who have these problems."

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So ingrained is the association between back-to-the-landers and sprout-eating hippies of the 1970s that discovering two early, distinct waves of the movement was a surprise to University of Vermont history professor Dona Brown,“Like most people I had no idea about it,” she says.

Her original idea for the book which was to investigate the nostalgia for rural life in a country that was so invested in the image of itself as an agrarian nation. But while there are invariably touches of that, it became clear to Brown that the strongest link between the movements is the desire for self-sufficiency.

“It’s an old idea,” Brown says, “that people are valuable in proportion to how they can provide for themselves, how they can stand on their own two feet, how they can be independent of other people and the exigencies of fate or of the government.”

Discovery of what drove the third wave

Most groundbreaking about her book may not be that there were such movements before the 1970s, but the little understood essence of what drove that third wave of back-to-the-landers. Those who left for the land at that time are viewed as part of the environmental movement and Brown acknowledges that, but only to a degree.

"Generally speaking,” Brown says of the first movement, “people started thinking about going back to the land at the moment where there was a tipping point in the population as more people move in and cities become more significant politically and culturally. That happens in the U.S. somewhere between the 1880s and the 1920s. You see people rethinking their personal positions, rethinking whether they wouldn’t be better off in the countryside.”

The second back-to-the-land movement came with the New Deal, which sponsored a series of subsistence homesteads of varying sizes. “It was very much the same idea,” Brown says, “that the land would provide people with a safety net that nothing else they could think of could.”

“There are ideas that I didn’t realize were at the heart of it all along,” Brown says. “I think the thing that ties the interest that the people in the 1970s had to the interests that people in the early twentieth century had was a very strong desire to be independent, to be self-sufficient, to feel the dignity that comes from providing for yourself. That’s very deep-rooted in some people. I think if I have a contribution to make that’s different from how people have written about back-to-the-landers, that’s it...."

As Brown notes in her book, unlike in previous generations, going back in the '70s was not a kinder economic choice given higher land prices and taxes, along with other factors. “That people continued to go back to the land in the face of all those challenges,” she writes, “says a great deal about the persistence of the dream.”

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Payne describes his novel, which portrays the mixture of loss and love that ties together the lives of three desperate people on the Maine coast, as a fictionalization of some of his own observations of the difficult topics of abuse and drug and alcohol addiction. Payne sees Cliff Walking as a love story, one that shows “that the healing power of hope can grow out of feelings of desperation.”

Lifelong writer

Writing and the practice of medicine have been intertwined in Payne’s life for years. A lifelong writer, he has published fiction, non-fiction and poetry in a number of publications including Vermont Life magazine, the Tufts Review, the Vermont Literary Review, Livin’ the Vermont Way magazine and Route 7- Vermont Literary Journal.

A fourth-generation Vermonter from the Northeast Kingdom, Payne studied premed and English at Tufts University, and received his Masters in English from Tufts before earning his medical degree from the UVM College of Medicine in 1983. After finishing his surgical training he went into practice at Northwestern Medical Center in St. Albans, Vermont. Payne has been a member of the faculty of the Department of Surgery since 1988. Over the years, he has studied with and/or been mentored by poets X. J. Kennedy, Galway Kinnell, and the late Denise Levertov, as well as with novelists Howard Frank Mosher, Jennifer Finney Boylan and Chris Bohjalian.

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As a professor and anthropologist in UVM's College of Medicine, as well as an artist and writer, Dana Walrath advances ideas about what world cultures can teach doctors and other caregivers about nurturing patients, along with their families. Walrath put herself in that caregiver role — and her scholarship into practice — when she moved her mother to live with her and her husband. In response to that experience, she began work on her sketchbook, Alzheimer's Through the Looking Glass.

When Alice saw things others didn't — like dead relatives and dashing pirates — the visions were as real, in their way, to Walrath, whose response was not to correct but to sooth — and to bridge for as long as possible an inevitably increasing divide.

In her new blog, where she's now pairing narrative with her graphic representation of "Aliceheimer's," Walrath writes, "I've ... (made) her stories and hallucinations safe, normal, something not to be challenged. When ... she would say, 'You see (my mother) don't you?' I'd say, 'I can't see her but I'm sure you can. You have special powers. You can see things that we can't.' For her, that was enough."

Walrath, who has undergraduate degrees in fine arts and biology from Barnard and has studied painting with abstract expressionist Milton Resnick, got out her basic pencils and scissors, drawing and creating collage from cut text of Lewis Carol's Alice in Wonderland, "playing every single day" in what she says was a sort of celebration and grieving all at once.

Models in medicine

Her style is a departure from a medical establishment bent on finding answers and following protocol. "It definitely comes from other healing traditions," explains Walrath, who has lived in far-flung places from Yemen to Brazil. "It was extremely natural that I could think about other ways to understand what she was going through. Everyone has their own reality — and cultures dictate what reality is."

Since at UVM, Walrath has developed curriculum for a required first-year course (currently called Leadership and Professionalism), initially met with resistance from both students and faculty, according to G. Scott Waterman, M.D., professor of psychiatry and associate dean for student affairs. "I think her perseverance, clarity of purpose and serious understanding of disciplines that we know intersect with medicine, from anthropology to the arts, gave her a perfect foundation from which to be credible in talking about the need to broaden medical education," he says.

Walrath's classes, which she first taught and then trained other medical faculty to lead, use a number of approaches to help students work with diverse populations and to see how the effects of illness go beyond the individual.

In the written reflections that accompany her images — a work-in-progress she intends to publish as a book — through all the whimsy, Walrath continues this teaching, particularly those who might be struggling with the exhausting, angry, awkward nature of life surrounding Alzheimer's.

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The reform effort was launched by the ministry more than a decade ago to ensure China's strong economic growth is sustained by a workforce equipped with 21st century skills. But overturning two millennia of Chinese educational practice based on memorization and rote learning is not an easy task — the new concepts are so alien to China's corps of tradition-bound teachers, especially those in the rural areas, that training sessions fall flat. "They have never experienced anything remotely like this," says Frankel.

Frankel, an attorney who has lived in Hong Kong since 1993 thought he had an answer — to create a library of scripted model lessons in a variety of disciplines, written by master teachers anywhere in the world and delivered by rural teachers in rural schools, who would be videotaped teaching in their own classrooms. Scripts and DVDs would then be distributed throughout rural China.

Riley's "soul of an educator"

Frankel planned to start the video library with science instruction, but when he met Riley in 2008, he immediately added music to the equation. "It was like a dream come true," he says. "She has the soul of an educator" and just the drive, enthusiasm and experience the project needed. A faculty member in UVM's Department of Music, Riley directs the music education program in the College of Education and Social Services, so has spent her career thinking about how to teach music effectively to children and young adults.

Riley was amazed the moment she set eyes on a kindergarten music class in a rural school in Shaanxi Province, a remote area in central China. "The children were all sitting there with their books open in rows silently while the teacher was talking," she says, "and I'm thinking, 'Oh my gosh, they should be on the floor and they should be engaged and they should be singing, moving and playing instruments.' That's what really made me decide, this is something I need to be part of."

Last spring, Riley went to work for six full days in the Shannxi Province sharing her lesson scripts and coaching the teachers who would deliver them. In the afternoons the teachers were videotaped doing so in a room full of students who would then perform on a collection of rhythm instruments, dance to music, answer questions about pieces they listened to, and compose music that exemplified the principles she was teaching.

The project was a towering success. The teachers "were amazed by the whole thing, to see the level of engagement in the students" who are normally bored in music class, Riley says.

Riley will likely return to China to demonstrate more models and again work with teachers. She couldn't be happier. "There are tens of millions of children and millions of teachers in these rural schools," she says. "If our library of DVDs project can help reach out to these young people and enrich their lives, how satisfying is that?"

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Based on Shabazz's study of the 1962 Robert Taylor housing project in Chicago, as well as research on South African mining compounds and observations of current communities from New York ghettos to South Central Los Angeles, there is an architecture and landscape designed to exert control.

"Robert Taylor's open spaces," writes Shabazz in a 2009 issue of the journal Souls, "were 'dead spaces' with no trees, pathways, or playgrounds; tons of concrete isolated residents from the surrounding Black community. Robert Taylor's landscape gave the appearance of openness, while concealing its carceral logic."

There was, he explains, constant policing and surveillance. Units were cage-like. With no supermarkets nearby, small corner stores stocked with processed foods and fatty meats contributed to obesity along with the humiliation of dealing with cashiers enclosed behind bulletproof walls, merchandise received through turnstiles.

Robert Taylor was a training ground and one stop on a relentless circuit. As Shabazz quotes a former resident on growing up there, "Prison was just a change of address."

"My scholarship must have stakes in the greater good." — Shabazz

This geography of prison culture and how poor black men define themselves, is central to Shabazz's work. "The way in which black communities are structured — the containment, the bars, the closed space — what impact does that have on the body?" he asks, "What impact does it have on gender performance?"

The implications of creating communities that serve as prep school for prison is deeply troubling to Shabazz. He is a member of Critical Resistance, an organization seeking to abolish the prison industrial complex.

He looks for answers in education, ending poverty, in decent shelter and basic freedoms. "Why," Shabazz asks, "do we keep people in cages? Does it work? It punishes, but does it keep people safe?"

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Reyes has been working closely with a class of sixth- through eighth-grade English language learners (ELL Stories) in Winooski — 16 students speaking six different languages, all in the U.S. less than 18 months.

"I've always been interested in children with bicultural identities, who have dual language worlds and dual cultural worlds," says Reyes, whose parents are first-generation Filipino. "I'm really interested in the ways that literacy might mediate identity. We talk about student voice but what is student voice for students who are not able to speak English well?"

In Vermont, students speak more than 90 languages and come from 97 countries on 6 continents.

It's an increasing problem for Vermont, and the country as a whole, as more refugees and immigrants enter school systems. From school years 1998-1999 to 2007-2008, ELL enrollment increased by 81 percent to approximately 1,650 students in Vermont. And it's far from a monolithic new culture that's being introduced — in the class where Reyes has been working, one can hear Bhutanese, Nepalese, Iraqi, Vietnamese, Somali and Chinese.

The digital stories, created with iMovie, are fun to make, Reyes readily admits, but students develop a number of mainstream literacy skills and pick up technology applications as readily as their mainstream peers. They learn elements of story development and work on writing, speaking and listening skills.

It's a common misperception among professionals, according to Reyes, that students who come from other cultures resist learning a new language, never true in her experience. That idea, at least when students are given the tools they need to progress, is affirmed watching the digital movies. The movies were screened during an enthusiastic assembly of all middle schoolers.

Reyes considers her research to be emergent. "When I entered the classroom to upload the students' movies," Reyes says, "I was struck by their joy. They proudly pointed to each other's movies and begged me to watch each one. That single moment highlighted for me what learning should be."

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In his 2009 book, Kristallnacht 1938 (Harvard University Press), Steinweis ascertains that thousands of German citizens, neighbors to the Jewish residents who were persecuted on the "Night of Broken Glass," participated in the rioting across hundreds of German communities and encouraged Nazi Storm Troopers as they carried out the orders of Adolf Hitler that resulted in the deaths of more than 90 Jewish residents and the rounding up of 30,000 Jewish men who were sent to concentration camps.

Steinweis' findings significantly change the established narrative on the event that describes it as a top-down organized atrocity perpetrated exclusively by the Nazi regime.

"The original contribution is that the picture of the violence of that night in 1938 that comes out of the trial materials is substantially different than how Germans today perceive the event and scholars have written about it," says Steinweis, who spent almost two years in Germany studying court transcripts and other descriptions of the event that were recently made available. "Popular participation in the event by regular Germans was suppressed so the commonly told version of the event has been exculpatory for ordinary Germans. These personal accounts presented an unpleasant reality that Germans wanted to forget."

Defining participation

Steinweis went to great lengths to define participation — an important distinction when estimating the size of the atrocity. He considers a number of potential participants including German residents who looted businesses after the violence subsided; residents who stood by and watched the burning of synagogues and their contents on the street; and those who expressed support of the anti-semitic pogrom and egged on the Storm Troopers. "I would argue that if you were to include all of these individuals, the total participants would be in the tens of thousands."

Although Stenweis' primary focus in the book is on the expanded number of Germans who partook in Kristallnacht, he makes a point to write about the many German residents who went out of their way to help Jewish neighbors whose lives were destroyed by the event.

"This book is different from my last two because it was written with a crossover readership in mind," says Steinweis, who credits his editor who specializes in helping academics write to a broader audience. "I've gotten emails from people who bought the book at a Barnes and Noble and said they appreciated how readable it was. The question is how do you write history that is both rigorous in a scholarly respect and accessible to more than a few hundred people in your profession."

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This question underlies the decades-long debate between two camps of scientists. On one side, are those who argue in favor of "kin selection," in which individuals are altruistic to those who share their genes. On the other side, are those who argue in favor of "group selection," (or "multilevel selection") in which altruism arises from being part of a group.

In a recent edition of the journal Nature a team of 18 scientists, including UVM's Goodnight, show that the two traditional approaches are actually mathematically equivalent.

One in the same

"What we did in this paper was take the equations of a group that was very strongly kin selectionist and we worked through them and translated them back into classic equations," says Goodnight. "and they're the same."

"It is remarkable that kin selection has been widely accepted and group selection widely disparaged," says Michael Wade, a biologist at Indiana University, and the lead author on the paper, "when they are actually equivalent mathematically."

Goodnight's colleague in the UVM biology department, Sara Cahan, agrees with this conclusion. But she doesn't agree with everything in Goodnight's paper — and is more in the kin selection camp. "Charles and I really enjoy one another — I respect Charles very highly — but we do tend to argue a lot," she says, with a laugh. (Perhaps it's no wonder the students she and Goodnight had in their co-taught graduate seminar "Levels of Selection" called the course "Crossfire.")

"This debate is far from over," says Charles Goodnight.

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"There's evidence that anxiety and tobacco use co-occur at a higher rate than would have been expected," explains Zvolensky, "higher than would typically be found for mood and other emotional disorders."

Zvolensky's research explores a distinction between "anxiety sympathy" and actual symptoms of anxiety in cigarette addiction and the act of quitting. Anxiety sensitivity reflects the belief or expectancy that when you experience internal distress like anxiety symptoms they will cause you harm.

Anxiety sympathy vs. actual anxiety: an important distinction

Medical literature has traditionally focused on symptoms but the subject's belief in what those symptoms could actually do seems to be more important in explaining behavior, according to Zvolensky. In the case of tobacco users with anxiety sensitivity, when they are about to go on a quit attempt and prompt internal stress like withdrawal symptoms, they reflexively catastrophize.

Zvolensky has found that smoking can actually cause anxiety disorders.

"While tobacco use is related to a more anxiety-sensitive personality type compared to nonsmokers, the more you smoke the worse it gets. It's also an important predictor of who will go on to develop problems like panic attacks and agoraphobia."

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Ali's recent book Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and A Sustainable Future begins by Ali asking this question: would the world be a better place if we could somehow curb our desire for material goods?

"The usual environmentalist answer is: 'of course,'" he says. But Ali, associate professor of environmental planning, is not the usual environmentalist.

"I say, 'No.'" he says with a gentle laugh, "No, no."

"The reality is, without minerals, we could not have had modern civilization," he says, adding that we could not have achieved civillization benchmarks such as the Iron Age or Bronze Age without an innate desire for material good.

Today, Ali argues, that treasure impulse, properly channeled and fairly regulated, can spur creativity, the desire for discovery, and economic development.

"Environmentalists have their hearts in the right place and many of them are very concerned about developing countries," he says, "but the way they have framed their whole narrative, it's kind of defeatist: they want to shut down trade, many of them do, and if you shut down trade, you will increase poverty whether you like it or not."

Trade is good

Instead, Treasures of the Earth makes a case for what he calls humanitarian resource extraction. Ali doesn't deny that the ecological history of mining is often a rapacious one that has yielded profound damage to landscapes around the world. And yet many of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people depend on mineral extraction and other non-renewable resources for livelihood.

"I'm for resource conservation," he says, "But I'm not an environmentalist in an absolute sense, in that I think the environment has intrinsic value at the expense of human beings. My environmentalism is very centered on poverty alleviation."

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"When I think of these people," says Naylor, a professor of psychiatry, "I get goose bumps." For 13 years, Naylor has been using cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) to help patients like Toon and Rosenberg manage — and reduce — chronic sensory and emotional pain that stems from sources including back problems, arthritis, migraine headaches, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia.

Naylor's approach includes 11 weeks of cognitive behavioral group therapy focusing on techniques in meditation, mindfulness, coping skills, self care, exercise, and how to recognize stress factors. Participants, on average, have experienced chronic pain for about 11 years.

Treating the whole person

"Our patients have both sensory and emotional aspects to their pain, and they may also have high stress levels, depression, obesity and insomnia. Our focus is on health — not just physical pain. It's about making lifestyle changes, and teaching strategies to support and maintain change."

Naylor, who in addition to her M.D. degree holds a doctorate in cardiovascular physiology from Warsaw Medical Academy and a specialty in psychiatry from Duke University, can understand pain from both sides — she suffers from chronic lower back pain as the result of a car accident six years ago, which she mollifies with her own pain relief techniques.

If there are skeptics to this mind-body approach to managing chronic pain, their numbers are dwindling. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have funded Naylor's MindBody Medicine Research Clinic, and currently provide over $3 million for her neuroimaging research and her voice response relapse prevention program.

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"In girl world," declares actress Lindsay Lohan, "all the fighting has to be sneaky." The movie has a happy Hollywood ending with everyone becoming friends and Lohan declaring that "girl world was finally at peace."

Murray-Close knows that all is not well in real girl world, and her current research on relational aggression — any form of manipulation intended to hurt or control another child's ability to maintain rapport with peers — shows that its frequency increases during middle childhood and can cause depression, academic problems and peer rejection.

Her tests on heart rate assessment, blood pressure and sympathetic nerve system activity among 5th graders convinced Murray-Close that if girls can control their reactions at the point of increased cardiac activity, they can prevent committing acts of relational aggression.

"We have girls re-live a stressor and measure how their body reacts," she says. "One of the arguments here is that if you are someone who gets very physically worked up, this may be a pre-disposition to then respond to aggression. Ultimately, I'd like to develop some coping skills for girls."

Taking the research to another level

Murray-Close is expanding her research at UVM's social development lab by going into local elementary and middle schools to collect data on fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh grade girls who have been victims of relational aggression and those who have committed such acts.

"We'll use data to see if students who engage in this are more depressed, more victimized, even more popular, so we can see the patterns of what might put someone at risk for engaging in these behaviors," says Murray-Close. "There's evidence that shows the aggressors are at risk and more likely to develop depressive symptoms, be disliked by peers and have problems with their friends later in life. We want to figure out what can be done to help them so they don't stay at risk. We also want to help kids who are victimized because they are also at risk."

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"In America, agriculture alone produces more greenhouse gases than all the industries, transportation and animals in Australia — combined," says Andre-Denis Wright, fresh to UVM from Australia's national science laboratory.

At UVM, he will continue his decade-long quest to develop a vaccine that targets the methane-producing bacteria (methanogens) in the front stomach, or rumen, of livestock. "The big goal is to increase their efficiency of digestion and reduce their environmental footprint at the same time," he says.

Wright believes it's possible to develop a vaccine that both cuts emissions and also increases milk and meat production. "If you can reduce methane production, you're returning some of that energy back to the animal," he says. Wright projects that a successful vaccine in dairy cows could increase milk production by 5% or more.

Opening a big can of bacteria

In a previous experiment, highlighted in the journal Nature, Wright and his former colleagues in Australia demonstrated that in 30 sheep a vaccine could reduce methane output by almost 8%. But subsequent experiments yielded different results because of diverse bacterial presences based on location and seasons.

"If we're going to design strategies and protocols for reducing methane-producing bugs we need to know about the bugs were trying to get rid of," he says. And that opens a big can of bacteria.

With the goal of collecting information on these methane-causing bugs and ultimately creating a vaccine that reduces all types of them, Wright has traveled the world, collecting gut bacteria from South American birds to Norwegian reindeer and beyond.

"The trick is getting something that covers all the methanogens from A to Z."

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They're tired. Their boots and legs are sodden.

"It's definitely hard work," says Hedda Peterson, '10. But some inner sun still shines. Asked why she is doing this, she pauses. "It's meaningful to be part of scholarly research," she says.

And Wemple's scholarly research is meaningful to many. Among other things, she studies snow. More specifically, she is interested in how forests in the eastern United States affect melt rates and distribution of snow.

The meaning of melt

"There is a real need for this information beyond science. Anyone running dams or predicting water supplies for cities needs to know about runoff," Wemple says. And that means knowing about how much water is held in the snow pack and where it's located.

Western forests have been studied and found to have a major impact on the snow pack there. "But in the East, they haven't been studied much. Many people say that forests in the East don't have a big effect or intercept much snow because they lose their leaves," Wemple says, "I'm questioning that."

Which is why she has started a study here at Hubbard Brook. Wemple's hope is that next year she'll team with two colleagues in engineering and computer science to do the same snow measuring remotely using wireless sensors.

But, for now, "the students are worker bees," Wemple says, "there is a lot to be learned — and there's a lot of grunt work. I mean, that's science!"

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McCrate, professor of economics and women's studies at UVM since 1985, is known for her ability to reach out to students — that ability earned her the 2009 George V. Kidder Distinguished Faculty Award, presented by the university's alumni.

"Until I met her, I didn't know I could do it."

McCrate's teaching led Annette Hines, '92, to switch majors from business to economics, as well as to pursue law school and an M.B.A. after her years at UVM. "I probably would still be working as a bank teller or as something else I thought I was destined for," Hines says. "Until I met her, I didn't know I could do it."

Among students, McCrate is known for her passionate interest in leveraging economics to explore issues surrounding women and minorities in the labor market. These issues first began to grab McCrate's interest when she entered college in the 1970s at Ohio State University.

"One professor gave back an exam and said that although the top four exam scores were earned by women, women weren't very good at economics," McCrate says. That fueled McCrate's desire to prove women could excel in the male-dominated field. "I said, 'I'm going to stick around and make their lives miserable,'" she recalls with a smile.

McCrate's passion for social justice issues has an enduring influence on her students. Recalls Jessica Banks, '07, a Teach for America sixth grade instructor in an inner-city Atlanta school: "Right away in freshman year, the issues she tackled and the life experience she brought into the classroom fostered what a lot of people ended up doing."

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Critics, collectors, and art historians have since affirmed that not only was this circle serious about their art, they were serious artists. Their movement has come to be known as the Pictures Generation, named for a 1977 group exhibit titled "Pictures" at Artist's Space in SoHo.

In April, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, not generally regarded as a bastion of contemporary work, ushered the 1970s movement into its marble halls with "The Pictures Generation: 1974-1984," the first major museum exhibition to focus on the tightly knit group of artists. Dwyer, a member of the UVM faculty for the past five years, has two pieces on display in the 30-artist show.

Dwyer says the full impact of being in the exhibit didn't really hit her until she stepped into the museum. "As I was walking by some Roman antiquities, I was realizing 'I'm in a show where Roman antiquities are,'" she says and laughs. "All of a sudden it started seeming pretty big to me. Going up those great stairs that are at the center, the feeling just built as I was walking in."

"She's a great artist who is respected by her peers and her work should be better known." — Douglas Eklund, the show's curator

Dwyer considers the 1970s mindset driving her own art and her fellow artists. "It was a time when we were realizing that we're being lied to in the media," she says. "How do you gain control over that? How do you have an identity as a human in America? We took that on through our artwork."

While Dwyer's work in more recent years — which includes sculpture, painting, public art, and installations — is frequently rooted in text, she sees a direct connection to what she was doing 30 years ago. "For me it's a straight shot," she says. "I think I was dealing with language all along. I was trying to distill the picture to its essence and to its implied meaning, almost iconic meaning. I was kind of making icons out of pictures. So, what's the most common icon in our world? It's a word."