Trustees approved a 2.9 percent increase in tuition, the lowest since 1977. The increase brings in-state tuition to $13,728 and out-of-state tuition to $34,656 for the 2013-2014 academic year.

Further lowering the real cost of tuition for Vermonters, UVM president Tom Sullivan announced that all of this year's $1.2 million increase over last year’s state appropriation will be used to create scholarships for in-state students, fully offsetting the rise in their tuition.

Trustees also approved a 2.9 percent increase in room rates, an average 4.2 percent increase in meals, and 2.6 percent increase in student fees, bringing an increase of 3 percent in the overall cost of attendance. 

A vote to approve the general fund budget of approximately $300 million was deferred until early June, when more up-to-date data is available on the incoming class and how much financial aid will be needed by the approximately 2,400 first-year students.

A milestone for Gen Ed

Major progress on UVM's General Education initiative was announced in the Educational Policy and Institutional Resources (EPIR) committee, leading to a resolution passed by the full board to approve a three-credit foundational writing and informational literacy requirement for all first-year, first-time students, beginning in fall 2014.

A writing and information literacy framework that was successfully piloted in eight courses last year served as the basis for the new requirement, the first of six proposed learning outcomes in the Faculty Senate’s Gen Ed initiative to be implemented. The General Education committee believes the process used can serve as a model for the development of proposals for the other learning outcomes and will facilitate and speed their implementation. 

While writing requirements for first-year students are not unusual, UVM is distinctive and innovative in linking writing to information literacy and in teaching students to access, critically evaluate and ethically use print and digital research sources.

A pilot is underway to develop and assess writing and information literacy skills throughout the remaining undergraduate years. Faculty development workshops are underway to help incorporate and evaluate writing within  the academic disciplines.

A revised debt ratio and a new STEM complex

UVM’s debt ratio – the proportion of the university’s annual debt service payments relative to annual expenses – also came up for discussion. Because of earlier board action, the current ratio of 6 percent was scheduled to be reduced to 5 percent in 2017. Administrators proposed lowering the current ratio to 5.75 percent and rescheduling the reduction to 5 percent for 2023.

The change, which the board passed on Saturday, gives the university the flexibility to borrow as much as $125 million for the bonding of future capital projects, if funds are made available to pay the additional debt service.    

In anticipation of the debt ratio discussion, the board had asked for an example of how the university would use its extra debt capacity.

President Sullivan and Robert Vaughan, director of capital planning and management, presented a conceptual plan for a $100 million phased overhaul of the university’s current STEM facilities, one of the top priorities in the Strategic Action Plan the president issued in November 2012.               

In Phase I of the plan, the Angell Lecture Hall would be demolished and replaced with a 112,000 square foot, $53 million building that would house laboratories for chemistry, physics, and psychology, as well as general purpose classrooms and utility space.

Phase II would focus on the Cook Physical Science Building. Once the Phase I building was completed, all the occupants of Cook would be moved into it, and Cook would be totally renovated at a cost of $37 million. The renovated Cook would serve the non-laboratory needs of the STEM program, housing classrooms and administrative offices. Once both phases were complete, faculty and staff would be redistributed between the two buildings. 

Phase III would be a $9 million renovation of Votey Hall that would address both deferred maintenance and incorporate upgrades. The new building would house teaching and research labs and general purpose classrooms.

The overall plan would also consolidate the Department of Mathematics, now housed in three buildings on Colchester Avenue.

Vaughan estimated that the project would take five years to complete. The university will present more detailed programming for each building, which could include conceptual diagrams, at the October board meeting.

In other developments

Vice President for Student and Campus Life Tom Gustafson initiated an engaged discussion in the Educational Policy and Institutional Resources committee on the new Career Success Action Plan, noting that President Sullivan “raised expectations for less talking and more action.” Abu Rizvi, dean of the Honors College, spearheaded the development of the plan, working closely with Pamela Gardner, director of Career Services, and constituencies from the SGA and graduate student senate to alumni and parents. He and his colleagues also visited a number of universities to review best practices.

Rizvi identified five key components of the plan for EPIR committee members:

• Internships, employment and other experiential learning opportunities are critical;
• Employers, alumni, parents and other stakeholders are needed to build a culture of career success;
• Students must be engaged in career preparation throughout their college education;
• A centralized physical location is important for student engagement (a careers hub is under renovation in the Davis Center and will open in the fall of 2013 );
• Progress must be tracked to ensure accountability and inform any necessary mid-course corrections.

Much of the plan will be implemented in the coming academic year.

President Sullivan and Shane Jacobson, vice president and chief operating officer of the UVM Foundation provided the full board with an update and status report on the comprehensive campaign. The provisional goal of the campaign is $500 million, double the last campaign’s goal, Jacobson said, an objective the university is on track to achieve. Jacobson cited four reasons why the campaign will be successful. The campaign is:

• Strategic, aligned with the university mission and vision;
• Inclusive, offering an opportunity for donors at every level to participate;
• Comprehensive, incorporating a wide range of campus priorities; and
• Meaningful, with every gift valued and celebrated.

The comprehensive campaign is “absolutely essential and transformative,” Sullivan said. “Our success -- and we will be successful -- is going to enhance quality and will build the very thing we all cherish:  the reputation of this great university.”

Sullivan is an “outstanding fundraiser,” Jacobson said. “Individually and in small and large groups, he hits home run after home run.”  Sullivan has visited all 14 counties in Vermont and has made more than 25 fund-raising trips outside the state. The Foundation expects to announce the public phase of the campaign in October 2015. 

The Socially Responsible Investing Advisory Council informed committee members of the Budget, Finance and Investment committee that a group led by graduate student Elizabeth Palchek is researching the Student Climate Culture’s proposal to divest from fossil fuel companies. The Council will present a report to Richard Cate, vice president for finance and administration, by June 1, 2013, summarizing the research and providing recommendations for strategic investments in the energy sector. The board also voted to reaffirm divesture from Sudan, acting on BFI’s recommendation.

Read a PDF of the consent agenda, itemizing all action items approved by the board.

A novelist, poet and short story writer, Broughton taught writing and literature for 35 years at the University of Vermont, from 1966 to 2001, chairing the English Department and developing and directing the Writers' Workshop Program, still in existence today. That program brings working writers to campus for readings and master classes; its most recent guest in April 2013: Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz.

As a writer, Broughton was recognized nationally, with awards and fellowships including the prestigious Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and his work was selected for inclusion in the O'Henry Awards and Best American Poetry anthologies. He traveled as a cultural representative under the auspices of the State Department's United States Information Agency to southeast Asia, Egypt and to Italy, a country he'd visited many times over the course of his life and that figured prominently in his writing.

The New York Times wrote of his 1980 novel Winter Journey, which takes place in Rome: "Not the least of Mr. Broughton's accomplishments is to seize material we had thought to be worn out, used up, discarded, replaced -- by a newer model of artistry, the ironic grimace -- and make it somehow lyrical all over again. Craft counts."

In his early years in the English Department, Broughton noticed an uptick in the interest in writing poetry among students. "Dylan Thomas and the beat poets brought poetry down into the street, out of the clouds," he told a campus publication in 1972. That was an accessibility he believed in.

Born in 1936 in Bryn Mawr, Pa., he was educated at Exeter, Harvard and at Julliard as a classical pianist, ultimately receiving his bachelor's degree at Swarthmore. He told the Burlington Free Press in a 2001 article that the discipline he acquired at Julliard he took with him to the writing process. He received his master's in English literature from the University of Washington.

He was the author of four novels, A Family Gathering (1977), Winter Journey (1980), The Horsemaster (1981) and Hob's Daughter (1984); two collections of short stories, The Jesse Tree (1975) and Suicidal Tendencies (2003); and nine collections of poetry, Adam’s Dream (1975), In the Face of Descent (1975), The Others We Are (1979), Far From Home (1979), Dreams Before Sleep (1982), Preparing to Be Happy (1988), In The Country of Elegies (1995), The Origin of Green (2001) and A World Remembered (2010).

He is survived by his wife, Laurel Broughton, who also taught in the English Department, and by three children and five grandchildren. A celebration of his life will be held at Trinity Church, Shelburne, Saturday, May 25, at 11 a.m. The family asks that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to Vermont Respite House or Kids on the Ball, c/o the King Street Youth Center.

Read a poem from A World Remembered, "The Old Orchard," reprinted in Vermont Quarterly in 2010.

Take gold. It’s the softest of all metals, prized since ancient times for both its beauty and malleability. It can be easily bent into rings or pounded into foil. But that can be changed at the nanoscale.

A recent experiment — reported in Nature Communications and led by University of Vermont engineer Frederic Sansoz and Scott Mao at the University of Pittsburgh — demonstrated that gold nanowires could be made to have Herculean strength: ten times stronger than steel.

Nearly perfect

To do this, the scientists created tiny layers called “twin boundaries” in the crystalline structure of the gold. Each of these layers was especially tiny even by the yardstick of nanotechnology: about 0.7 nanometers thick, only a few atoms across.

The microscopic wires were all pure gold, but “just by changing the structure of the material at the atomic scale we increased the strength fifty times,” Sansoz says. “It’s higher than titanium alloys and comparable to Kevlar fibers. It becomes a super-strength material.”

In fact, the gold wires that they tested in both the lab and in computer simulations on the Bluemoon supercomputer at UVM’s Vermont Advanced Computing Center come very close to a state of matter that physicists call “theoretical strength.” This is the strongest possible arrangement of atoms of that element.

“We demonstrated that we attained nearly the maximum strength that Mother Nature could achieve,” Sansoz says.

To strengthen the gold, they relied on one of the basic principles of nanotechnology: that when you make things extremely small they are going to become more perfect.

"Perfect in the sense that their arrangement of atoms in the real world will become more like an idealized model," says UVM’s Sansoz. "With smaller crystals — in for example, gold or copper — it's easier to have fewer defects in them.”

And eliminating the defects at the interface separating two crystals, or grains, has been shown by nanotechnology experts to be a powerful strategy for making materials stronger, more easily molded, and less electrically resistant — or a host of other qualities sought by designers and manufacturers.

Not so perfect

But while Sansoz’s work with gold pushes it toward a kind of perfection of strength, another experiment he and colleagues recently completed demonstrates that one perception of perfection at the nanoscale may not actually be so perfect after all.

Since 2004, when a seminal paper came out in Science, materials scientists have been excited about "coherent twin boundaries" or CTBs. Based on theory and experiment, these CTB's are often described as "perfect," appearing like a dead-flat, one-atom-thick plane in computer models and electron microscope images.

Over the last decade, a body of literature has shown these coherent twin boundaries — found at the nanoscale within the crystalline structure of common metals like gold, silver and copper — are highly effective at making materials much stronger while maintaining their ability to undergo permanent change in shape without breaking and still allowing easy transmission of electrons — an important fact for computer manufacturing and other electronics applications.

But new research by Sansoz and colleagues from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere shows that coherent twin boundaries found in copper "are inherently defective."

With a high-resolution electron microscope, using a more powerful technique than has ever been used to examine these boundaries, they found tiny kink-like steps and curvatures in what had previously been observed as perfect.

Even more surprising, these kinks and other defects appear to be the cause of the coherent twin boundary's strength and other desirable qualities.

Kinks and curves

"Everything we have learned on these materials in the past 10 years will have to be revisited with this new information," Sansoz says.

The experiment, reported in the May 19 edition of Nature Materials and led by Morris Wang at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, applied a newly developed mapping technique to study the crystal orientation of CTBs in so-called nanotwinned copper and "boom — it revealed these defects," says Sansoz.

This real-world discovery conformed to earlier intriguing theoretical findings that Sansoz had been making with "atomistic simulations" on a computer. The lab results sent Sansoz back to his computer models where he introduced the newly discovered "kink" defects into his calculations. At UVM’s Vermont Advanced Computing Center, he theoretically confirmed that the kink defects observed by the Livermore team lead to "rather rich deformation processes at the atomic scale," he says, "that did not exist with preconceived-to-be perfect twin boundaries."

With the computer model, "we found a series of completely new mechanisms," he says, for explaining why coherent twin boundaries simultaneously add strength and yet also allow stretching (what scientists call "tensile ductility") — properties that are usually mutually exclusive in conventional materials.

"We had no idea such defects existed," says Sansoz. "So much for the perfect twin boundary. We now call them defective twin boundaries."

Better understanding

For several decades, scientists have looked for ways to shrink the size of individual crystalline grains within metals and other materials. Like a series of dykes or walls within the larger structure, the boundaries between grains can slow internal slip and help resist failure. Generally, the more of these boundaries — the stronger the material.

Originally, scientists believed that coherent twin boundaries in materials were much more reliable and stable than conventional grain boundaries, which are incoherently full of defects. But the new research shows they could both contain similar types of defects despite very different boundary energies.

"Understanding these defective structures is the first step to take full use of these CTBs for strengthening and maintaining the ductility and electrical conductivity of many materials," Morris Wang says. "To understand the behavior and mechanisms of these defects will help our engineering design of these materials for high-strength applications."

For Sansoz, this discovery underlines a deep principle, "There are all manner of defects in nature," he says. "With nanotech, you are trying to control the way they are formed and dispersed in matter, and to understand their impact on properties. The point of this new Nature Materials paper is that some defects make a material stronger."

Musician Wynton Marsalis helped them mark the moment, delivering the University of Vermont 2013 commencement address with a heartfelt talk that was wise, wry, musical, and throughout—appropriately enough for the father of Simeon Marsalis, UVM Class of 2013—fatherly. Then the New Orleans native picked up his horn and played “When the Saints Go Marching In,” the crowd clapping time.

Marsalis’ counsel to the graduates revolved around two central themes—the power of family and the importance of being present in our daily lives. His talk was laced with numerous familiar references to student life at UVM and in Burlington—Bailey/Howe Library to Club Metronome, free popcorn in the Davis Center to the cliffs of Red Rocks Park.

“Improvisation is what challenges the jazz man to give order to an unknowable moment of the present,” Marsalis said. “The size and grandeur of this moment challenges you to be present and to create the relationships you want to experience. This day is the final test of your college career. What you do is what you will do. Approach this day with grace, with grit, with graciousness, and with gratitude. This is not preparation for life. This is life.”

As Marsalis directly addressed his son Simeon and, on behalf of all of the parents and step-parents in the crowd, all of the graduates, his voice wavered with emotion. “From every changed diaper to every sickness to every shoulder ride…” Marsalis said and paused to gather himself as the crowd applauded. “And every bedtime story, every fight with a curfew, over home, over habits and even further onto all the triumphs and the failures rolled up into one. All of us, we thank you. All of you give meaning and depth to our lives and so many good times. We are so proud of you all and we fear for you. We fear because part of us is not ready to accept that you are grown. But you are. Still, to us, you will always be our baby. You will always be our child.”

Describing the bonds of family, Marsalis used the vehicle he knows best, music. Referencing the tradition of New Orleans jazz parades, he told his audience that the dancers that follow the band are called the second line. “When we play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ we sing, ‘Oh lord, I want to be in that number.’ We are in that number today. We are your support system. Our presence today is our pride.”

Watch Marsalis' full speech on YouTube. Read a PDF of the transcript.

 At this year’s ceremonies, approximately 3,258 graduates received diplomas, including 2,577 bachelor's, 439 master's, 122 doctoral and 106 M.D. degree recipients, in addition to 14 post-baccalaureate certificates. Degree recipients are students from 44 states, as well as 79 international students from 17 countries. Approximately 1,207 graduates are from Vermont. The graduating class includes 379 African, Latino/a, Asian and Native American (ALANA) students and students identifying with two or more races.

In addition to Wynton Marsalis, four other individuals received honorary degrees at the ceremony: James Douglas, Kathy Giusti, William Meezan and Dr. John Tampas. Learn more about these recipients.

During the ceremony, the UVM Alumni Association presented the annual George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award for excellence in teaching to Richard Foote, professor of mathematics.

Eight students were honored with five university awards. Tram Tran won the Mary Jean Simpson Award, honoring the senior woman who exhibits the highest qualities of leadership, academic competence and character; Rob Rudy won the F.T. Kidder Medal, honoring the senior man ranking first in character, leadership and scholarship; Kyle DeVivo and Eliza Kelsten won the Class of 1967 Award, presented to seniors who best exhibit leadership, academic competence and character, and who have earned the respect of faculty and fellow students; Michelle Leung and Ryan Little won the Keith M. Miser Leadership Award, recognizing outstanding service to the university; and Brent Reader and Tracie Ebalu won the Elmer Nicholson Achievement Prize, recognizing the greatness of the students' UVM experiences and the expectation that they will make major contributions in their fields of interest.

“I remember specifically asking my mom and dad, “Why does Uncle John just paint broken churches? Why doesn’t he paint ‘together’ churches?” recalls Gavin. “They had created a narrative in their minds about how war had been a horrible experience for Uncle John, so we never asked him about it, which sounded perfectly reasonable to me. But it turned out that he didn’t talk about it because it was actually top secret, and he wasn't allowed to.”

Years later, when her son was sifting through some paintings, photographs and letters in the basement that her uncle, John Jarvie, had woven together chronologically, it became evident that he was in fact a member of a top secret unit of 1,100 eclectic artists, actors, set designers and sound technicians known as the “Ghost Army.” The special unit was responsible for engineering some of the greatest military deceptions in history using inflatable rubber tanks and artillery, deceptive artistic scenes, and the latest sound technology. Its efforts helped the Allies win the war by arranging 20 intricately orchestrated battlefield deceptions from June 1944 to March 1945 in France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany that tricked Hitler’s armies into believing that Allied forces were in places they were nowhere near.

“My uncle was the youngest of his generation, so all my aunts and uncles, including my parents, died not knowing about it,” says Gavin. “All they knew was that he served in the war and painted on his down time. We were really totally unaware of it until he was able to talk about it after an imposed secrecy for 50 years.”

The unprecedented use of art to help win the war without ever firing a shot by the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops is the focus of the documentary Ghost Army by filmmaker Rick Beyer premiering on PBS on Tuesday, May 21 at 8 p.m. Special screenings at the GI Film Festival, National Press Club, and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans have drawn early praise. In Vermont, the documentary will premiere at 1 a.m. on May 22 and will be shown again at 10 p.m. the same day. State-by-state listings can be found at www.pbs.org.

Artists as warriors

By broadcasting fake radio traffic and using inflatable tanks, jeeps and aircraft to create phantom soldier and artillery formations, the Ghost Army managed to convince German reconnaissance and intelligence that they were an army of up to 30,000 men. They played sound recordings of tanks and loud troops, using state-of-the-art recording devices to project sounds of up to 15 miles. To add to each deception, some members of the Ghost Army hung out in local bars and cafes telling fake stories in hopes that spies might overhear them and buy into the forthcoming grand illusion.

In order to pull off such intricate deceptions, including a crossing of the Rhine to draw German troops away from actual sites, the U.S. military recruited from art schools and ad agencies across the country. Some members of the unit would go on to enjoy successful careers, including fashion designer Bill Blass, who sketched renderings of clothing designs and his future company logo while sitting in his foxhole. Minimalist painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly and photographer Art Kane were also part of the unit. Jarvie went on to become a successful art director for Women’s Wear Daily and other Fairchild Inc. publications. Paintings and other works by many of these artists have been part of a traveling exhibit “Artists of Deception: The Ghost Army.”

“There was no rule book for it, so they had to have an extremely bright group of guys who were not only talented and intelligent, but also had to be able to think on their feet and problem solve to deal with whatever confronted them,” says Gavin. “They had to be very realistic and very careful. You can’t have a tank blow up just because it took a bullet. As Rick likes to say, ‘the Trojan Horse only works once.’”

Deception to documentary

The more Gavin learned about her uncle’s unit, which was secret until 1996 although some parts still remain classified, the more she thought it might be worth telling to a larger audience. She ran it by a friend, who set up a meeting with Beyer at a Starbucks in Lexington, Mass. Beyer was immediately hooked by the idea and has worked on the film, which includes interviews with 21 surviving members of the unit, for the past eight years.

Gavin, who is listed as a producer on the film, has worked tirelessly to raise money and support Beyers’ efforts. “I don’t know if there’s a name for what I do, because I don’t know the first thing about making movies,” says Gavin, who graduated from UVM with a degree in English and history and later taught history before working in research in Boston as a psycho-educational specialist. “I delivered the idea for the story, but primarily I’ve tried to help Rick find fundraising opportunities and support him and the film however possible.”

Gavin says the self-funded film has multiple messages and serves as an example of how creative, collaborative thinking can produce powerful results.

“Somehow the army was able to determine who would be good in this unit and they did it with totally opposite segments of our culture and society,” says Gavin. “It’s an amazing example of the military complex, corporate America and the whole art and design world working hand-in-glove for a common purpose. They developed road maps for creative, outside-the-box thinking and problem solving that we should be using today.”

The main ceremony and each college’s ceremony will be webcast live. See the complete schedule of all ceremonies and receptions.

This year, President Tom Sullivan will confer degrees on approximately 3,258 graduates, including 2,577 bachelor's, 439 master's, 122 doctoral, and 106 M.D. degree recipients, in addition to 14 post-baccalaureate certificates. Among expected degree recipients are students from 44 states and 79 international students from 17 countries. Approximately 1,207 graduates are from Vermont. The graduating class includes an expected 379 African, Latino/a, Asian and Native American (ALANA) and bi/multi-racial students.

Wynton Marsalis, one of the world’s great jazz and classical musicians, will deliver the address to graduates at the main ceremony and receive an honorary doctor of humane letters degree. Born to a musical family in New Orleans, Marsalis is celebrated for his contributions as a performer, composer, and educator. He has nine Grammy awards to his credit and is the only artist to win both jazz and classical Grammys in the same year (1983) repeating the same feat the following year (1984). In 1987, Marsalis co-founded a jazz program at Lincoln Center, which in 1996 became Lincoln Center’s twelfth constituent, Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 1997, Marsalis became the first jazz musician awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his epic oratorio, Blood on the Fields. He has written six books, most recently Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life (Random House, 2008) with Geoffrey C. Ward; and Squeak, Rumble, Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! (Candlewick, 2012), illustrated by Paul Rogers. Today Marsalis serves as Jazz at Lincoln Center’s managing and artistic director.

Four others will receive honorary degrees at the ceremony: James Douglas, Kathy Giusti, William Meezan and John Tampas. Learn more about these recipients.

For the second year, Guidebook, a free mobile app with event details, maps, local information and more, is available for download, and free wireless access will be provided at the ceremonies by choosing the “UVM Guest” network; no password is required.

The following street closings are planned in conjunction with commencement: from Friday, May 17, at 7 p.m. through Sunday, May 19, at 8 p.m., University Place will be closed from Colchester Avenue to Main Street, and South Prospect Street will be closed from College Street to the University Health Center entrance. In addition, on Sunday, May 19 from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., South Prospect Street will be closed from Colchester Avenue to Main Street, and College Street will be closed from South Prospect Street to South Williams Street.

Shuttle buses will run between ceremony sites and parking areas. A parking map is available on the Commencement 2013 website.  Guests are encouraged to carpool when possible and take shuttles from hotels when provided. Parking on residential streets is prohibited.

In keeping with the university’s end to the sale of bottled water on campus, guests are encouraged to bring a refillable water bottle from home. Water kiosks will be available on the green, where cups will also be provided for those without a water bottle. Commemorative commencement refillable water bottles will be available for purchase at the UVM Bookstore, at the commencement concession stands and at all food service locations.

Guests should also note that only service animals, and not pets, are allowed during the main commencement ceremony and each of the college and school ceremonies.

More information about commencement weekend is available on the Commencement 2013 website.

Registered nurses with similar interests and expertise are placed together as an online classroom community to enable collaboration throughout the nine courses (eight online, plus one week, on-campus simulation laboratory). The RN-BS Program is typically completed in three years — one course taken each semester (including summer). The distance learning component offers the flexibility of accessing the program from home, while the cohort provides a personalized student community able to connect with each other through a variety of Web 2.0 tools and social media, in both asynchronous and synchronous sessions.

The Institute of Medicine's Future of Nursing Report calls for increasing the percentage of nurses holding a BSN degree or higher to 80 percent by 2020. Additionally, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, the American Organization of Nurse Executives and the American Nurses’ Association recommend a baccalaureate degree for professional nursing practice.

A partnership between the UVM Department of Nursing and Continuing Education, the UVM RN-BS Program has been in existence for more than twenty years with a distance learning option available since 2004. Inquire or apply online at UVM.                                                            

Hoffman is originally from Chelsea, Vt. He credits his college mentors, particularly Professors Martin Oyata, Cao Chunjing, and Brit Chase in the Fellowships Office for pushing him academically and intellectually while at UVM. After completing his Fulbright experience he plans to return to the U.S. and pursue a master’s degree in Chinese-English translation and interpretation. He ultimately plans to work as a language interpreter for the U.S. government or in the private sector.

Emma Kantrov ’12 has been awarded an English teaching assistantship to Brazil for the 2014 academic year. She will be teaching at a university and mentoring Brazilian students who will go on to become English language teachers throughout the country.

While at UVM, Kantrov majored in environmental sciences and minored in Spanish. She spent extensive time outside of the classroom working as a teacher and a tutor in after school programs run by the Burlington school district as well as the Sara Holbrook Community Center. Her experience tutoring refugees, immigrants and English language learners in the Burlington area inspired her to pursue science education as a career. The Fulbright will enable her to build on her teaching experiences while also perfecting her Spanish and Portuguese language skills.

Kantrov credits her college mentors, particularly Portuguese language professor Debora Teixeira, for their mentorship and support throughout the Fulbright application process. Originally from Lexington, Mass., she plans to return to the Boston area after her Fulbright experience and teach science in a high school that caters to newly arrived immigrants.

Brienne Toomey ’12 was awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Germany for the 2013-2014 academic year. She will teach English as well as American government, history and civics, and she will also serve as an adviser to German teachers who teach English.

A North Andover, Mass. native, Toomey came to UVM to pursue environmental studies and to prepare to embark on a career that focused on environmental resource conservation. Her study of German language and culture (she was a double environmental studies and German major) played a prominent role in how she thought of promoting sustainable living in society. While studying abroad in Germany during her junior year, she saw how the country had made significant changes to its energy generation and transportation practices in order to live in a more sustainable and energy efficient manner. During her Fulbright year, Toomey plans to explore these practices and potentially bring these ideas back to organizations in the U.S.

Toomey graduated from UVM magna cum laude and as an Honors College scholar. While at the university she was an active participant in the DREAM Mentoring Program, and she regularly contributed her art work to The Water Tower. Since graduating she has been working for the National Gardening Association in Burlington. After returning from Germany in 2014, Toomey plans to continue her work in renewable technologies and sustainable initiatives.

A rigorous undergraduate intellectual experience is required to assemble a strong Fulbright proposal, and Toomey credits her mentors in the German and Russian language department for pushing her to perfect her language and enable her to study language through a cultural lens. She says Professors Wolfgang Mieder, Dennis Mahoney, Helga Schrekenberger, and Adrianna Borra were especially influential in her studies.

Doubleday, Hodulik, Hoffman, Kantrov, and Toomey are five of more than 1,500 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2013-2014 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Student Program. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The primary source of funding for the Fulbright Program is an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations in foreign countries and in the United States also provide direct and indirect support.

Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. The program operates in more than 155 countries worldwide.

Since 2005, when the university put a centralized fellowship outreach and support program in place, 125 UVM students have won or been finalists in the country's most prestigious and competitive competitions, including the Fulbright, Rhodes, Goldwater, Marshall, Udall, Truman, Madison, Critical Language, SMART, Gilman and Boren Overseas scholarships.

It’s no surprise that he felt excited to return to his alma mater as a faculty member in 1982. Thinking back over the past 30 years in his role as a professor, he fondly recalls faculty meetings where everyone sat around the table dressed in dark business attire, Sam Feitelberg’s ability to convince faculty to perform embarrassing skits, and attending Jean Held’s dinner parties. Reed says he enjoyed “the adventure of problem-based learning modules” and became passionate about teaching “great students who inspire us and make the world a better place.”

As a member of the last master’s degree class prior to UVM’s transition to the DPT degree, alumna Jessica Goodine, M.P.T.’05, was one of only 16 students in the MPT program her first year. The small class size provided an excellent learning environment and created significant bonds among the students.

Goodine, who specializes in working with spinal cord injury patients and is co-founder of the nonprofit corporation Empower Spinal Cord Injury, says, “The program taught me how to learn in a completely new manner, how to start from the problem and work backwards through problem-based learning.” While she didn’t find this educational format easy, she says “it taught me how to look at a patient as a whole, work together with my peers, and how to perform an effective and efficient literature search.” Goodine says the influence of Deborah O’Rourke, P.T., Ph.D., clinical associate professor of rehabilitation and movement sciences, had the greatest impact on her.

“Her office door was always open, she always had time to listen, she was incredibly empathetic, and she was always able to provide me with advice and multiple solutions,” shares Goodine. “If it weren’t for Deb, I would not have finished my program and I would not be where I am today in my PT career.”

Current UVM Rehabilitation and Movement Sciences Professor and Chair Diane Jette, P.T., M.S., D.Sc., worked part-time for Feitelberg from 1975 to 1981 while her husband completed a  graduate degree in psychology at UVM. She believes that though PT education has changed over the past decades, it has also stayed the same.

“We have become much more evidence-based in our approaches to patient care,” Jette says. “In the 1970s, there was not a lot of empirical evidence to support our practice, so most of our treatment decisions were based on what we knew about the anatomy and physiology of the human body, but the effectiveness had not been tested. As both basic and applied science have provided more sophisticated information about how the human body functions, physical therapist researchers have advanced our clinical knowledge, physical therapists’ treatments have become more sophisticated and more are better supported by studies of their effectiveness.” Jette also explains why the education of physical therapists changed over the past 40 years.

“In the 70s, physical therapists were educated at the baccalaureate level and practiced largely in hospital settings. Now the majority of PTs practice in out-patient practices and many own their own practices. In most states, patients may receive treatment by physical therapists without physician referral.”

It was due to this increasing scope of practice, expanding knowledge base and focus on professionalism, explains Jette, that all U.S. physical therapy programs now award the DPT degree. When she arrived at UVM in 2006, the PT program was in the process of transitioning to the DPT, and classes were small, but in the past six years, the program’s cohort size has tripled and the curriculum has been completely redesigned.

“Our DPT students have courses that prepare them to participate in healthcare at the system and societal levels, including health policy, quality improvement in healthcare, health care ethics and health promotion and wellness,” says Jette. “Because the focus of healthcare has shifted in many respects to the management of chronic conditions, and PT has a large role in improving  and maintaining the health and function of individuals with many types of conditions, our students now have courses that aid their understanding of how pharmaceuticals affect their patients and their interventions, how imaging studies can be applied and interpreted in designing their treatment plans, and how to advocate for access to healthcare resources for their patients across their lifespan.”

Despite four decades of evolution and these major curricular changes, the characteristics of UVM’s PT students have not altered over time. According to Jette, they are “passionate, hard-working, creative and highly intelligent.” And, she adds, they will be playing a vital role in the evolving health care system and all of our lives.

“Our graduates will be helping all of us manage the inevitable changes that come with aging and allowing us to remain active and functional through our older years,” she says. “They are, and will continue to be, Sam’s legacy.”

John J. (Jack) Murray, M.D.’63, is the 2013 recipient of the A. Bradley Soule Award, established in 1983, which honors an alumnus/a whose loyalty and dedication to the College of Medicine most emulate those qualities found in its first recipient, A. Bradley Soule, M.D.'28. Dr. Murray has a long history of dedication and service to the University Of Vermont College Of Medicine. Returning to Burlington, VT in June 1968, having served two years in the U.S. Air Force, Dr. Murray worked as a pediatrician in private practice and as a clinical instructor in the Department of Pediatrics at the College of Medicine from 1968 to 2007. During his clinical teaching years he was privileged to help educate residents and medical students. He developed the Pediatric Senior Sports Medicine elective in 1983, serving as its director until 2005. As a member of the UVM Admissions Committee from 2007 through July 2012, Dr. Murray has helped to select an impressive group of candidates for admission to the College who best display its values. His dedication to excellence in medical practice is reflected in his service on that committee, and in the wisdom acquired from his many years of working as a pediatrician. He has been a class agent for the Class of 1963 since graduation, ensuring that the members of his class remain engaged with the College and one another. Dr. Murray also earned the Medical Alumni Association’s Service to Medicine and Community Award in 1995.

Alumni honored with this year's Distinguished Academic Achievement Award, established in 1985, which recognizes outstanding scientific or academic achievement, include:

Richard H. Feins, M.D.’73, Professor of Surgery, Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, N.C.

Dr. Feins is a thoracic surgeon. He trained in general surgery and cardiothoracic surgery at the University of Rochester, where he served on the faculty until 2005. He then moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as Professor of Surgery and head of General Thoracic Surgery. Throughout his career Dr. Feins has demonstrated creative leadership and innovation in thoracic surgery education. He has served on the American Board of Thoracic surgery as a director for eight years and then as Chair from 2007-2009. In addition, he has served on the Board of Directors of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons, the Joint Council for Surgical Education, the Thoracic Surgery Foundation for Research and Education, and the General Thoracic Surgery Club. e is the co-director of the national Cardiothoracic Surgery Resident Boot Camp and the Executive Director of the Cardiothoracic Surgery “Senior Tour,” a nationwide organization of retired cardiothoracic surgeons who volunteer in the training of cardiothoracic surgery residents. Dr. Feins is recognized nationally as a “go-to-guy” on matters pertaining to the education of future thoracic surgeons and for simulation based training. In addition to having compiled an extensive bibliography of publications and prestigious awards, Dr. Feins, with his wife, Ceil, somehow managed to find time to devote their energies to a competitive collegiate rowing program they co-founded on the Erie Canal, which has become on the premier such programs in the U.S.

Edward P. Havranek, MD ’ 83, Professor, University of Colorado School of Medicine; Cardiologist, Denver Health Medical Center; Director of Health Services Research, Denver Health

Dr. Edward P. Havranek is a Denver, Colo., cardiologist with a long-standing interest in measuring and improving the quality of care for cardiovascular disease, particularly heart failure. His current funded research focuses on causes and solutions to the problems of health disparities based on race and ethnicity. Dr. Havranek currently serves as chair of the American Heart Association’s Quality of Care and Outcomes Research Annual Scientific Forum Program Committee and is a member of the Database Steering Committee for the American Heart Association and the Technical Advisory Committee for Colorado’s Regional Health Information Organization. He was a clinical coordinator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services-sponsored National Heart Care Projects from 1999 to 2005, chair of the Care Standards Committee of the Heart Failure Society of America from 2002 to 2006, and a member of the governor’s Health Information Technology Advisory Committee for Colorado in 2008 and 2009. Dr. Havranek serves on the editorial boards for several major cardiology journals.

Douglas W. Losordo, MD ’83, Interventional Cardiologist and Professor of Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois

Dr. Losordo is board-certified in internal medicine, cardiovascular disease, and interventional cardiology and is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Physicians, the American College of Chest Physicians, and the Society for Cardiac Angiography and Interventions. His major research interests encompass angiogenesis/vasculogenesis, progenitor/adult stem cells, tissue repair/regeneration, and vascular biology. Working with the late Jeff Isner at St. Elizabeth’s Medical in Boston, Mass, he developed a program in therapeutic angiogenesis and cell-based tissue repair and executed the full “translational medicine” paradigm: identifying novel therapeutics in the laboratory, developing these strategies in small and large animal models and designing and executing first in human clinical trials. Dr. Losordo previously served as director of the Feinberg Cardiovascular Research Institute and as the Eileen M. Foell Professor of Heart Research at Northwestern University’s School of Medicine and director of the Program in Cardiovascular Regenerative Medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

The College's Service to Medicine and Community Award, established in 1984, is presented to graduates who have maintained a high standard of medical service and who have achieved an outstanding record of community service or assumed other significant responsibilities in addition to their medical practice. The 2013 recipients of this award are:

Joyce M. Dobbertin, MD ’98, Family Physician, Corner Medical Office, Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital

Dr. Joyce M. Dobbertin has been a dedicated and active member of her local community in St. Johnsbury, Vt. As a physician, she has been tireless in her involvement with patient care as well as the coming of age of medicine as regards electronic health records, community outreach and epitomizing what a “community doc” should be. She is the physician champion for the Vermont Blueprint at NVRH, Corner Medical helping with the design and implementation of the Blueprint in the Northeast Kingdom.   Dr. Dobbertin was named Physician of the Year in 2012 by the Vermont Medical Society and Medical Director of the Year in 2008 by the Vermont Health Care Association. For the last several years, Dr. Dobbertin has served as Volunteer Medical Doctor for two weeks a year at the Hillside Medical Clinic in Punta Gordo, Belize and performed similar volunteer work in Kingston and throughout Jamaica.   In addition, she served on the Board of Trustees of the Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital in St. Johnsbury from 2007 to 2010.

Omar Khan, MD ’03,Medical Director, Preventive Medicine & Community Health & Director, Global Health Residency Track, Christiana Care Health System; Chair, Global Health Working Group, Delaware Health Sciences Alliance; Section Editor, Global Health, BMC Public Health

Dr. Omar Khan has made extensive contributions in the realm of global & community health, including experience working with USAID and serving as faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and the University of Vermont, where he helped start the Global Health electives in the Department of Family Medicine. In addition to his appointments at Christiana Care and Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children, both in Delaware, he holds faculty appointments as clinical associate professor with Drexel University’s College of Health Sciences and as clinical assistant professor with the Departments of Family Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Jefferson Medical College, and the University of Vermont. A reviewer or editorial board member for a number of prestigious medical journals, including JAMA and The Lancet, he has authored or co-authored five books in the area of global/community health. His most recent book, Megacities & Global Health, co-authored with Greg Pappas, was published in 2011. Dr. Khan has authored over 55 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and in January 2012 was appointed as a Reviewer for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). In 2009 he was named a “Top Doc” by Philadelphia magazine.

The Early Achievement Award, established in 2000, recognizes early-career physicians for outstanding academic achievements or contributions through community or medical service. The 2013 award recipient is:

Halleh Akbarnia, MD ’98, Attending Emergency Physician, St. Francis Hospital of Evanston, Ill.

Dr. Halleh Akbarnia joined the medical staff of Saint Francis Hospital (SFH) in 2007, and is an active member of the SFH Critical Care, Sepsis, and Graduate Medical Education Committees.  She served as the Chair of the Performance Distinction Committee, representing SFH at the System level, and a member of the Medical Executive Committee 2010-2011.  She was awarded the “Non Medicine Specialist of the Year” for the 2010-2011 year by graduating 2011 Internal Medicine Residents and the 2009-2010 “Teacher of The Year” by the Resurrection Emergency Medicine Residents.  Prior to joining St. Francis Hospital, she was assistant Medical Director at her residency program, VCUHS/MCV in Richmond, Virginia and was named “Teacher of the Year” in 2005 by the residents there.  Dr. Akbarnia is class agent for The Class of 1998.  She is an “outstanding leader within her class” and “has continued to unite our class” years later, writes one of her nominators.

For awards information, go to the 2013 Medical Alumni Association Awards website.

Images of the recipients are available for download here.

The United Academics 2013 Jeffrey Brace Awards go to UVM students Alex Buckingham, a senior nursing student originally from New York; Tracie Ebalu, a senior psychology major from New York City and Lagos, Nigeria; Jessica Fuller, a sophomore from Hummelstown, Penn., double majoring in economics and history; Chelsea Howland of Springfield, Vt., a sophomore nutrition and food science major; Hang Nguyen of Denver, Col., a senior studying medical laboratory science; Emily Reynolds, a senior biochemistry student from Waterbury, Vt.; Alyssa Solomon, a sophomore from Andover, Mass., majoring in environmental studies; Carina R. Valadez Villasenor, a senior social work major from Modesto, Cal., and Chester, Vt.; and Erik Wallenberg of Burlington, a master’s student in history.



Joanna Kamhi, originally of Essex Junction, Vt., received the second annual Linda Backus Memorial Scholarship. Kamhi is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in politics, philosophy and economics with a concentration in distributive justice.

"This year we had an unusually strong group of applicants, so the scholarship committee had hard decisions to make,” said Denise Youngblood, professor of history and chair of the scholarships committee. “It’s gratifying to learn about the social and economic justice activities of so many hard-working, engaged student activists and to be able to recognize some of them with these awards.”

Learn more on the United Academics website.

Twitter, BBC, Bitly, and beyond

The new website went public on April 30. On its front page, a wavering graph rises and falls like a ticker at the New York Stock Exchange. Except, instead of averaging the value of thousands of companies, the hedonometer compiles and averages the emotional state of tens of millions of people.

“What it’s doing right now is measuring Twitter, checking the happiness of tweets in English,” says Chris Danforth, a UVM mathematician who co-led the creation of the site with fellow mathematician Peter Dodds.

But soon the hedonometer will be drawing in other data streams, like Google Trends, the New York Times, blogs, CNN transcripts, and text captured by the link-shortening service Bitly. And it will be data-mining in twelve languages.

Hedonometer.org is based on the research of Dodds and Danforth and their team in the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont’s Complex Systems Center, and the technology of Brian Tivnan, Matt McMahon and their team from MITRE, a not-for-profit organization that operates federal research and development centers and has expertise in big data analytics.

In February, the research team made headlines with the hedonometer. Studying geo-tagged tweets from cell phones, they reported on the happiest and saddest cities in America: Napa, CA, at the top and Beaumont, TX, at the bottom. In future versions of the new website, the researchers plan to make this kind of geographically linked data available, allowing as-it-happens observation of how a happiness signal varies, say, between Seattle and San Diego.

“Reporters, policymakers, academics — anyone — can come to the site,” says Danforth, “and see population-level responses to major events.”

Like the Boston Marathon bombings.

Boston’s impact

On Monday, April 15, reporters and TV crews from all over the world flocked to Boston to report on what they thought would be stories of athletic triumph. Instead, as the world now knows, two crude bombs near the finish line were detonated, killing three and injuring more than 260. Reporters turned to telling this new, tragic story. Many went out and started interviewing people. The stories were compelling; many people they spoke to around Boston seemed scared, angry and sad.

But suppose reporters wanted to find out how the bombings were affecting the mood of the world — in real-time. Was this horror registering in the global psyche, and how deeply?

“Many of the articles written in response to the bombing have quoted individual tweets reflecting qualitative micro-stories,” says Danforth. But capturing a few online comments or reactions on video does not necessarily reflect the overall mood of the English-speaking world anymore than talking to ten people in the park equals the US Census.

What if a reporter had also turned to the hedonometer? First, she’d have seen a dramatic downward spike in happiness for that day. Clearly, the Boston Marathon bombings were registering around the world. “Our instrument reflects a kind of quantitative macro-story,” Danforth says, “one that journalists can use to bring big data into an article attempting to characterize the public response to the incident.”

Then — in the same way that a stockbroker might drill down into a market average to get a sense of which companies are moving the markets the most — a reporter could dig deeper into the hedonometer’s data. There, she could see that “explosion,” “victims,” and “kill” are at the top of a list of trending words pushing the hedonometer down to its lowest ever point on April 15.

“They rise to the top because they are words that are negative,” Danforth says, “but primarily because they appear so much more than they usually do in the background in the ambient chatter of English.”

Emotional temperature

The hedonometer draws on what scientists call the “psychological valence” of about 10,000 words. Paid volunteers, using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, rated these words for their “emotional temperature,” says Dodds, director of UVM’s Complex Systems Center.

The volunteers ranked words they perceived as the happiest near the top of a 1-9 scale; sad words near the bottom. Averaging the volunteers’ responses, each word received a score: “happy” itself ranked 8.30, “hahaha” 7.94, “cherry” 7.04, and the more-neutral “pancake” 6.96. Truly neutral words, “and” and “the” scored 5.22 and 4.98. At the bottom, “crash” 2.60, the emoticon “:(“ 2.36, “war” 1.80, and “jail” 1.76.

Using these scores, the team collects some fifty million tweets from around the world each day—“then we basically toss all the words into a huge bucket,” says Dodds—and calculate the bucket’s average happiness score. As the site develops, the scientists anticipate that it will be gathering billions of words and sentences daily.

"Our method is only reasonable for large-scale texts, like what's available on the Web," Dodds says. "Any word or expression can be used in different ways. There's too much variability in individual expression," to use this approach to understand small groups or small samples. For example, “sick” may mean something radically different to a 14-year-old skateboarder than it does to his pediatrician.

But that's the beauty of big data. Each word is like an atom in the air when you’re trying to figure out the temperature. It’s the aggregate effect that registers, and no individual tweet or word makes much difference. In the Boston Marathon bombings example, positively scored words like “prayers” and “families” also spiked, but, obviously, not for positive reasons.

“If we remove ‘prayers,’ ‘love,’ and ‘families,’” says Chris Danforth, “it’s not going to change the day’s overall deviation from the background, because of all the other words.”

Changing which words are used to assess the overall emotional picture, “is like changing the filter on a lens you’re using,” explains Peter Dodds. “You can take out all the color, or you can turn up the contrast, but you can still see the picture.”

The verdict of consciousness

In 1881, a little-known book, Mathematical Psychics, published by Francis Edgeworth, asked the reader to “imagine an ideally perfect instrument, a psychophysical machine, continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual, exactly according to the verdict of consciousness.”

In other words, a hedonometer. While Edgeworth’s was a thought experiment, Dodds and Danforth’s hedonometer is a real device. Of course, it doesn’t directly measure “the height of pleasure.” While the team is opening conversations with experts in brain scanning about how fMRI images might corroborate their remote-sensing approach, "we can’t — and really don’t want to — look inside people's heads," says Dodds.

Nor is their hedonometer “ideally perfect.” They’re working now to expand beyond the “atoms” of single words to explore the “molecules” of two-word expressions. But the hedonometer does work.

“The key piece is not whether we’re correctly measuring atoms and molecules,” says Brian Tivnan, a researcher from MITRE. “It’s the relative context that is so important: which is why the sudden drop from the Boston
Marathon bombings jumps out at you. The hedonometer shows the pulse of a society.”

Of course, happiness isn’t simple. Plato, Buddha, Freud and Tina Turner all pondered its meaning. Many Americans rank happiness as what they want most in life, but what is it, really?

“We’re not trying to tell you that contentment is better than happiness — we’re not trying to define the word,” says Danforth. The Nasdaq Index doesn’t capture the whole stock market. Gross Domestic Product doesn’t define the meaning of the economy. An EKG doesn’t tell a doctor everything about your heart. But all these aggregate measures, of something remote, are widely studied. The hedonometer may prove to be the same.

“We’re just saying we’re measuring something important and interesting,” says Chris Danforth. “And, now, sharing it with the world.

State health lab one of oldest in country

The state health lab dates back to 1898, when the Vermont State Laboratory of Hygiene was established by the legislature, just the third of its kind to be organized in the U.S. The Health Department’s current lab facility is now one of the oldest in the country. Built in 1952, it originally housed administrative offices as well as the lab. The building was renovated in 1985 to serve exclusively as a lab, but the renovations did not replace the antiquated heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems. There is also no additional space for new instrumentation.  
    
Because of these limitations, it has become increasingly difficult to adapt the current facility to accommodate changing scientific technology that requires special facility design, such as safe specimen receipt/processing areas, “clean room” areas for preparing specimens for testing by molecular biology or low level contaminant chemistry procedures, and temperature/humidity and controls.

Co-located labs will bring tangible benefits

The new building was designed collaboratively by the Health Department and UVM to maximize the advantages of having the two buildings in close proximity. The new building will be physically connected to the Colchester Research Facility and the two buildings will share a front door.  
    
“The goal is to create a state scientific campus,” said Dr. Chen. “This collaboration is very much in line with the national trend in health sciences research to build facilities that bridge the distance from the research bench to the community to health policy. This positions us to meet the future challenges of emerging diseases and health threats.”  
    
“The co-location allows us to bring professionals at the Health Department who are actively engaged in public health issues together with UVM faculty who work nationally and internationally to investigate patterns of disease and look for new diagnostics and treatments,” said John Evans, UVM senior adviser for business engagement.  

Health and UVM officials cited a number of mutual benefits, such as the ability to partner on specialized medical research, the potential for increasing research funding and enhanced recruitment, and cost economies for both resulting from sharing facilities.

From the Health Department’s point of view, being connected to a major medical research facility keeps public health on the leading edge of the health sciences, expands the training ground for future laboratorians, and provides surge capacity with specialized labs, instruments and personnel in the event of a public health emergency that requires 24/7 response.

For UVM, there are many benefits from sharing specialized space for biomedical research with health department scientists, including expanded opportunities for cooperative projects and increased external funding. In addition, the state-of-the-art facilities provide training and internships in research and public health for undergraduate, graduate and medical students.