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."

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Zachary Schmoll, senior business administration major with a  concentration in accounting and statistics

Project title: The Impact of Compensation for NCAA Student Athletes on NBA Draft Decisions

Advisers: Barbara Arel and Michael Tomas III

Why this topic? What was your motivation? I chose this topic because I have always been a sports fan. I have been around basketball most of my life, and I particularly love the NCAA. When I noticed that Professor Arel and Professor Tomas had written a paper on NBA draft decisions, I knew that I wanted to expand on that. After a discussion with Professor Arel, we decided that this would be an interesting topic to pursue.

What was your key discovery? Essentially, the most important discovery I made was that if we assume that the players will make the economically rational decision, the NCAA proposal of paying college athletes $2,000 will have virtually no effect on this decision. The players who were going to enter the NBA before will still enter.

Any surprises along the way?  My results are not necessarily surprising because it does make sense that with million-dollar contracts on the table, a few thousand dollars will not make much of a difference. However, I think that the actual moment I ran my final model and discovered these results was the best moment. Even though it was my original hypothesis, it felt good to be able to empirically prove something that nobody has ever taken the time to do before.

Why does this research matter? I believe that this research matters because the NCAA is seriously considering policies regarding compensation right now. I think that people will be wondering what is the best way to keep these athletes in college, and this type of research could provide a new perspective on this problem.

What's next for the project? I think that this project has plenty of potential for future work. I am planning on taking this particular paper and ideally getting it published, but there's plenty of work, particularly psychological, that could be done on this topic in the future. For example, even though $2000 doesn't make any measurable difference in the number of players entering the NBA according to this model, is there any potential way that players will feel more valued by making even an insignificant amount of money and perhaps be more willing to remain in school? The psychological effect of money is certainly important in reality, and I think that would be a great extension of this research.

Sophia Howat, senior studio art major

Project title:
 Memory and Photographs

Adviser:
 William McDowell

Why this topic? I started taking these photographs based on this tension between trust in our memories and evidence outside of that. I found that using photography makes it more visual and concrete. When you take a picture you’re completely constructing a biased view on things despite this strong association we have of photographs as evidence -- you’re editing, you’re sequencing, you’re doing all these things that are contrary to fact. I think that aspect of photography, paired with that aspect of our memories that is potentially false or narrated, is what’s interesting.

What was your motivation?
 I did a project last spring that involved memories and physically manipulating printed photographs to make sculptural objects. That was a starting point. Broadly this interest in memory and reflecting about things I’m sure has to do with finishing college, living in places that are temporary, figuring out what’s next. I think that plays into why I’m photographing home spaces, trying to collect memories and create a narrative. I’m totally editing it. Maybe I’m not moving objects, maybe I am just documenting things around me, but I am choosing what to photograph, editing the sequence as a finished project, editing how the light reads on the paper. In one sense they’re documents of my life -- they’re what I want to see of the space around me. That’s comforting. Maybe it’s the search for something comfortable in this big area of transition.

What was your key discovery? 
I think that no matter how hard I attempt to photograph a particular subject or theme it’s that the photographs are going to speak, that they have wisdom over the photographer sometimes.

Any surprises along the way? In terms of logistics -- issues in the dark room or with film, figuring out this medium that I’m not incredibly comfortable with. I usually scan in my film because I work with color. So the dark room was a new area for me.

Worst moment/best moment? 
Worst -- repeated instances of film not coming out, being black or just not working. There’s this nostalgia with our film -- the feeling that the picture would have been great but it didn’t come through. Those are bummer moments. Best -- getting over the stress of what I’m supposed to be showing with my photographs or what I’m supposed to be and feeling excited about the project, feeling creative and being present with it.

What are the broader implications of the project? Through this project I’ve found other photographers who I’m interested in, I’ve found other visual interests in photography and subject matter and I have this feeling that it’s relevant. It’s a conversation with people. It’s widened my eyes on photography and art theory.

Why does this research matter?
 I think because it makes people stop and look. There’s a description but really it’s this viewer who will engage -- or not engage -- with the photographs. It asks people to stop and be present and think about this physical process (in a darkroom with silver gelatin prints) with this kind of airy feeling behind it. And maybe it’s a comment or question for people to reconsider the photographs they’re taking and to understand what kind of history they are building with their visual archived memories.

What's next for the project?
 Eventually I’m working toward more prints that will become a book.

Sebastian Downs, senior environmental engineering major

Project title: Bridge Scour Monitoring

Advisers: Donna Rizzo, Mandar Dewoolkar

What is your topic? “Scour” is the erosion of streambed sediment; it happens around obstructions in a river because the water is constricted there, creates vortices, and picks up the sediment. You’re left with a hole in the sediment that a bridge is built on. During floods, this destabilizes bridges and it’s the cause of sixty percent of bridge failures spanning waterways.

There are several existing scouring monitoring systems for bridges, but they all have severe limitations. Some are cost prohibitive -- somewhere in the order of $10,000 for a single sensor. Some less expensive sensors are only good for a single use. Physical probing is cheapest, but it doesn’t give you real-time data. Sonar and fathometers are pretty good but they are not capable of getting data in turbid conditions -- which is what you often have in a flood -- the most critical time to measure. So we came up with something that is more robust and cost-effective.

What did you create? We built a scour monitoring sensor -- a buried rod -- with a goal of being so low-cost that a transportation agency or bridge engineer would be able to install a series of them in an array across an area and interpolate that data in order to get a sense of what the hole looks like.

It works with vibration switches and resistors. The sensor gets buried in the sediment next to the bridge pier. All of the switches are still when they’re trapped by the sediment, but then, as the scour erodes the sediment around them, they become exposed to the flow of the water and start to vibrate. From that vibration, the switch is opened, forcing current through the resistor and -- from a wireless transmitter that goes back to a data logger -- we’re able to measure the presence of the current and can identify how many of the switches are exposed to the water.

This allow us to see how far the scour has reached down each rod and, overall, what the hole looks like. Hopefully, once we have the design finalized, it will be less than $100 per rod. The prototype we built has four switches, but we could put in as many as was deemed necessary based on the size of the river and bridge.

What was your key discovery? Figuring out that vibration switches would do the job. And, also that these same switches will detect deposition after a flood event -- because they stop vibrating.

Why does this research matter? A failure of a bridge can take place in a matter of hours. This could help with better bridge design, better preemptive remediation -- not waiting until it is at risk of failure before identifying problems.

Also, the scour after a storm event appears to be less than it is during the actual max scour point because there is deposition from all the suspended solids in the water. So if you wait until after a storm to go out and measure, you might not be measuring the full extent of the structural damage.

What's next for the project? This research is going to continue after I graduate. Ian Anderson, a graduate student, is going to do some scour monitoring around bridges in the area, and if our new system works out, then he’ll be able to construct more and test them in the field by the end of next year.

Stephanie Parente, senior social work major

Project title: Examining the Effectiveness of Services Provided to War Veterans as They Transition Back to Civilian Life

Adviser: Holly-Lynn Busier

Why this topic? What was your motivation? One of my classmates, Brent Reader, is an Iraq/Afghanistan War veteran and sparked my interest in this topic. Hearing his stories and listening to him talk about how difficult his reintegration experience was inspired me to do more research on this topic.

What was your key discovery? It is important to understand the prevalence and progress of mental health issues among returning war veterans. In order to better serve those who have served our country, the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs must take action. There must be an increase in trained mental health professionals working with war veterans in order to accommodate the escalating number of veteran intakes and claims. Improvements must also be made in regards to the mental health screenings and evaluations. Since it can take a significant amount of time for psychological injuries to manifest, veterans should be screened upon their return and continuously rescreened. Veterans must also be encouraged to seek care and obtain treatment. This can be difficult for many veterans due to the stigma attached to mental health issues. Our society must educate its citizens in order to support our veterans.

Best moment? The best moment was reading the feedback from my surveys that I had distributed to veterans in Vermont.

What are the broader implications of the project? Why does this research matter? Currently, there are over 20 million veterans in the US, which makes up seven percent of the entire population. This project emphasizes the need for post-war care improvements in order to better serve the veteran population.

What's next for the project? My goal is to one day work with the veteran population and hopefully have the opportunity to incorporate my research and my knowledge into my future work with veterans.

Jaime Sheahan, master’s candidate in dietetics

Project title: Frialator Annihilator

Adviser: Amy Nickerson

What was your motivation? I had been working at Rutland Regional Medical Center and found it slightly hypocritical when I'd see a cardiologist go through the line at the food court and grab a basket of fries. I'm thinking, “He was just educating a patient about how they need to change their lifestyle.” When you're in a hospital, you think about nurses and doctors as this representative of health, and when they're not practicing what they preach, it's difficult to watch.

I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if we overhauled the food environment (by getting rid of fried foods for three weeks) and see how those nurses and doctors and everyone else in the hospital would react.

What did you discover? It was kind of split 50/50. A lot of people reacted strongly and felt like we shouldn't be telling them what to eat. It's very similar to what we've seen in New York with the soda ban, whether it's the government coming in or hospital administration dictating to people what options are available to them, it's this nanny state mentality, where people respond very negatively.

But on the flip side, the other half of the people were very positive, saying we need to set a positive example, not just for the hospital and visitors, but for the community at large. If you really want fried food, there's a McDonald's down the street, and you can drive there. But we should be looking at more nutritious foods, more sustainable options sourced locally. It wasn't just that they wanted fried foods gone, it was that they wanted to make positive changes.

The thing I learned the most is that the elimination of certain foods can be more readily accepted if you bring in more positive changes.

Worst moment? Some people were very irate, and I was glad I wasn't present in Rutland at the time fried foods were removed. Some very, very strong reactions. I know people like certain foods, but I think it can be easy to forget how emotional it is.

Why does this research matter? Thirty-six percent of U.S. adults are obese. Thirty-three percent are overweight. I think that’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed. Previously, we were looking at it more on an individual level: looking at obesity as a problem with people being lazy or not having self control. Now we're recognizing we have this toxic food environment that needs to be addressed. Even though a hospital setting is a small part of that, it's an example of health and is a place that can send the right message to a community.

What’s next for the project? The hospital hasn’t made the permanent change, but I think it's a step in the right direction to open up that conversation. One thing that did come out of it is a yogurt bar in the morning, which people love. So I'm hoping those types of changes can stick, and they can slowly ease toward a more healthy environment.

The win capped off a 15-0 season including a 9-0 record in the NEWLL with wins over the University of Maine, Dartmouth College and UMass-Lowell en route to North Region title and a spot in the regional playoffs in Kingston, R.I. UVM beat Hofstra 9-5 in the semifinals before upsetting previously undefeated Cornell.

Despite winning the league title, UVM didn’t receive an invitation to the national championships in Colorado as expected. The team was informed on April 22 after being told it had qualified for nationals that the NEWLL hadn’t been in existence long enough to receive an automatic bid. Team members then pinned their hopes on at-large bid, but weren’t among the eight teams selected. The NEWLL will receive an automatic bid next year.

“Being a part of this year’s team has been an incredible experience,” said senior Stephanie Parente. “We worked extremely hard and had a lot of fun, which I believe is the point of participating in a club sport. We are extremely disappointed that we didn’t make nationals, but we still had an incredible undefeated season. This has been the best team I have ever played on. It’s an amazing group of girls. I wish we could have continued, but I'm sure they’ll be back next year.”

The UVM Women’s Club Lacrosse team is a student-run organization of about 25 players that was started more than a decade ago to provide an opportunity for female athletes to continue playing lacrosse at a collegiate level without the varsity-level commitment.

University of Vermont medical student Luke Neill, who also received his undergraduate degree from UVM in 2011, is working with his long-time friend, Sam Meyer, on software that will do just that – give pharmacists and other healthcare providers a way to reach patients on a device they use all of the time – their cell phones. This low-cost idea could empower patients to take charge of their health, help to avoid additional problems or potentially life-threatening complications, and reduce the public health cost of medical non-compliance, which is estimated to total about $100 to $300 billion annually in the U.S. alone.

Although smartphone and computer applications for inputting personal medication information already exist, this software allows doctors and pharmacists to set up the messages and track compliance data. Meyer is working on the programming; Neill is developing the specific functions that will be useful for providers and patients. As a service that’s free to patients, this system is meant to reach populations that might not otherwise have access to such support.

“There’s a large problem in the U.S. with medication adherence,” Neill says. “We want to address that in a way that’s cost-effective.”

The pair presented their project at the Clinton Global Initiative University Conference at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, April 5 to 7. Social activists, celebrities, political leaders, and experts in technology, business, and other fields – including former President Bill Clinton himself – came to the meeting to learn and support innovative ideas from students.

For the annual conference, invitees create a “Commitment to Action” that is specific and measureable, and geared to help on any scale – from the local to the global.

“Access to basic health information and instruction is one of the primary obstacles to improving healthcare globally,” Neill states in his Commitment to Action. “By leveraging the simplicity and ubiquity of text messages, I will be able to provide patients who lack the typical healthcare infrastructure with relevant and specific instruction and support.”

Neill’s and Meyer’s HIPAA-compliant software program allows patients to enroll at the pharmacy and then begin receiving text messages that help them understand their medications and implications for their health. The messages are not simply reminders, Neill says; they are designed to monitor behavior patterns and change habits as well.

“The best part is that we can contextualize the feedback,” Neill says, citing the software's ability to provide statistics on the average rate of adherence for a particular med. When that information is delivered to patients and they can see where they fall on the spectrum, there's an opportunity to harness competitive instincts to raise adherence overall. Providers benefit from aggregate data on compliance, as well. Eventually, the goal is to make the software available in developing countries where access to other technology is limited, but cell phone use is widespread.

Neill set up a pilot to test the software with first-year students at the College of Medicine and help work out any bugs prior to the Clinton conference; next he plans to network with local pharmacists for a trial. All of these efforts come with a price tag – ultimately Neill and Meyer will be faced with applying for FDA approval, which can be a costly legal process. Neill says he’s been in contact with some foundations and non-profits interested in helping support the cause.

At Clinton Global Initiative University, Neill’s commitment was selected for recognition prior to a panel discussion on "Ensuring Medication Safety" as an exemplary approach to addressing a global public health challenge. Actor Matthew Perry welcomed Neill and Meyer to the stage for the honor. Following the session, the pair met with Michael Botticelli, the deputy director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, who expressed his congratulations.

The conference provided the networking opportunities Neill had hoped for, and he's now in contact with three groups interested in collaboration, including five medical students from St. Louis University School of Medicine who would like to use the software to educate type 2 diabetics patients at a health clinic in North St. Louis; a group working on a Rural India Social and Health Improvement project at Northwestern University; and a startup company in Poland, working on medication validation and tracking.

But perhaps the most exciting introduction came when Neill and Meyer met President Clinton and Chelsea the first evening. "Both were extremely friendly and reinforced my drive to continue on my commitment to make a positive global change," Neill says.

Born out of concern for the children under her care and the picture books she was reading them, Franz decided to write her senior thesis on the subject with one primary question in mind: “How do children’s picture books potentially deter or reinforce materialistic values and consumer culture?” She revealed her findings – among the first to focus on the role of children’s literature in shaping material and consumer values – in her 196-page Honors College senior thesis, “Cultivating Little Consumers: How Picture Books Influence Materialism in Children.”

“I read three or four books a night as a babysitter and started noticing how much greed there was in children’s books and became deeply concerned,” says Franz, who is double-minoring in studio arts and green building and community design. “I realized how damaging consumerism is to the environment and tied that to my love of children. This study was an attempt to reconcile the two.”

Franz, who based her results on a content analysis of 30 picture books written between 1998 and 2012 from a list of Caldecott Medal Winners, New York Times bestsellers and librarian recommended books, found that picture books reflect, reinforce, and deter consumerism simultaneously with environmental messages serving as the most frequent way to counter consumerism. In the study, a number of picture books featured excessive amounts of toys, sending pro-consumer messages to children ages zero to six while others contained more outdoor-related themes that Franz says serve as a tool for countering consumerism.

Franz will be among more than 300 students presenting their research at the 2013 Student Research Conference on Tuesday, April 23 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Davis Center.

“The results of this study reveal that picture books have a significant potential to act as both an avenue for becoming consumers and a tool for countering consumerism” says Franz, who has a professional certificate in sustainable business practices from UVM. “In order to help children to become positive, connected, responsible individuals, we must improve the quality and consciousness of the media and their ability to respond to it. Picture books, whose tradition is to inspire imagination and offer refuge, are a fantastic place to start. I know I’ll never read a book the same way again.”   

Coding consumerism

Franz, who cited a study showing a decrease in the number of interactions with the outdoors is resulting in “nature deficit disorder," created a comprehensive and unique coding system that identified 50 indicators across 10 categories representing different ways in which picture books can promote and discourage the consumer socialization of readers. Text and illustrations were coded to measure the occurrence of indicators of consumerism or counter-consumerism across five themes: individual material orientation, interpersonal material orientation, social norms, commercialization and environmental messages.

Some of the 37 pro-consumer indicators included “desire for more stuff,” “material goods as a vehicle for approval/gaining friends” and “focus on objects instead of peers in social setting.” Among the 13 counter-consumer indicators were “self-acceptance,” “sharing,” and “positive orientation to the outdoors/inspiration.” Overall, the average book contained 5.34 indicators of pro and counter-consumerism. The most frequent number of instances among counter-consumer indicators were “outdoor engagement” and “creative/imaginative engagement,” while “standard of living: above average” and “engagement with toys/games” topped the pro-consumer indicators.

The Pete the Cat books, for example, included pro-consumer indicators by showing Pete with a nice car, an expensive guitar, surfboards, and a significant number of toys located in an above-average home. Conversely, “nature immersion” ranked high due to the fact that “outdoor engagement” was found in 76.7 percent of the sample (23 of 30 books), with characters playing on playgrounds, skateboarding, biking or playing in the sand at the beach. Many characters go on walks, while others describe a “more emotional engagement in their natural surroundings” like feeling the wind, smelling the air or imagining riding a bird across the landscape in The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.

“Rachel took on an ambitious capstone research project that required great persistence in the design phase,” says Stephanie Kaza, Franz’s adviser and director of the Environmental Program. “Her thoughtful and meticulous analysis reveals important findings on the specific nature of consumer messages in children’s literature. Perhaps her greatest triumph was sticking it out through the many challenging phases of such a major piece of independent work.”

Putting research into practice

Franz is hoping scholars, parents, caregivers and educators use the information to offset other consumer drivers like television, video games and social media. She also hopes her research, which identifies leverage points for shaping consumerism through more careful selection of children’s picture books, is expanded to include classic books to examine how these values have changed over time.

“Most books, like our lives, have a combination of both messages,” says Franz, who has worked as an executive assistant at a design firm during college. “Parents are the number one source for countering consumerism. I’m hoping this study encourages people to develop critical thinking skills around consumerism and to select books more carefully.”

The resolution, unanimously passed by the Vermont House and Senate, was read aloud in front of many of Bryan’s colleagues from the political science department, and was followed by a lengthy standing ovation by the entire chamber. Bryan, who was accompanied by his wife Lee, is retiring this year and is considered one of the most influential political scientists in Vermont state history.  

The resolution, sponsored by Sen. Philip Baruth, Bryan’s UVM colleague from the English Department, and Rep. Terry Macaig of Williston, was co-sponsored by dozens of other senators and representatives.

“Whereas, Professor Frank Bryan is truly a citizen scholar as his appreciation of Vermont politics is rooted in a strong, personal, cultural affinity for and love of his home state as well as a superb mastery of the erudite elements of political science,” reads the resolution. “Whereas, he has written extensively in the academic and general presses, and in books on state and local politics, including his 2004 seminal work Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works which is based on three decades of empirical research… Whereas, in the state at large, Professor Frank Bryan is a renowned Vermont civic educator and an unofficial spokesperson for the unique cultural and political life of Vermont that has historically been associated with our State…”

Gregory Gause, professor and chair of the Political Science Department who was on hand for the reading of the resolution, says Bryan has been the face of the political science department, and for many, the face of the university for decades.

“Professor Frank Bryan has been a pillar of our department for 36 years,” writes Gause in his nominating letter for Bryan’s professor emeritus status. “In all three areas of his professional life – teaching, research and service – Professor Bryan has had an exemplary career… Bryan is, for two generations of UVM students and Vermonters more generally, ‘Mr. Vermont Politics.’ He is beloved by his colleagues as a great teacher, serious scholar, model colleague and good friend.”

Bryan has authored or edited six scholarly books and authored more than 40 scholarly articles and book chapters.A reviewer in Political Science Quarterly called Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works “the best book I have ever read on local government.” In 1986 Bryan both received the Andrew E. Nuquist Town Government Award from the Vermont League of Cities and Towns and was named a “New England Local Hero” by New England Magazine. His more recent honors and awards include the Medallion Award from the National Association of Secretaries of State (2010); an honorary degree from Marlboro College (2008); and the Curtiss/Loyzelle Green Mountain Boys’ State Director’s Award for more than 20 years of delivering the keynote address at Boys’ State (2006).

At UVM, Bryan has been the recipient of the George V. Kidder Outstanding Faculty Award (2004); Class of 2004 Award for Valuable Contributions to Students (2004); Kroepsch-Maurice Award for Excellence in Teaching (1999); named Dean’s Lecturer in 1996 by the College of Arts and Sciences; and won the Senior Class Council Award for Contributions to the Students of the University of Vermont (1991).

Diaz, born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey, is the author of Drown (1997); the Pulitzer Prize winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007); and New York Times bestseller This Is How you Lose Her (2012). He is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, PEN/Malamud Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

A graduate of Rutgers College, Diaz is currently the fiction editor at Boston Review and is the Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Part of the Writers' Workshop series, this event, free and open to the public, is made possible with support from the University Program Board, the English Department, the James and Mary Brigham Buckham Fund and the Chief Diversity Office.

Suddenly he recalled another deadline, a commissioned poem about a painting from a favorite artist, Romare Bearden. He’s chosen Calypso’s Magical Garden – Calypso the nymph in Greek mythology, the seductress who held Odysseus hostage on her island, the enchantress who lured Jackson back into his world of words. “It’s bad,” his new poem begins, “when a man doesn’t own even his dreams/a faint head full of the scent of a woman…”

That’s what tax extensions are for.

It wasn’t his accounting skills, of course, that won Jackson a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, one of the most prestigious honors granted to “midcareer” academics and artists who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation receives between 3,500 and 4,000 applications each year and awards approximately 200 fellowships.

Established in 1925 by former United States Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, in memory of their seventeen-year-old son who died in 1922, the foundation has sought to "add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding."

Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company, Hoops and Leaving Saturn, which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He has published poems and essays in periodicals including AGNI, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker and Tin House. His work has been included in Best American Poetry (2004, 2011) and Best of the Best American Poetry. Poetry editor of the Harvard Review, Jackson, among other honors, has been a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers' Award.

“It is good to follow in the long tradition of poets I've admired who have also been awarded a Guggenheim,” he says. “It is fortifying and affirming.

Jackson’s grant proposal is to pursue the intriguing story of Edmonia Lewis, an African American woman who studied at Oberlin before the Civil War, stood trial for the alleged poisoning of her roommates, was acquitted and went on to become an internationally acclaimed sculptor, living most of her life in Rome. It’s a story with many twists and unknowns, of a woman who, in many ways, transcended her race given the time in which she lived, and in others, even in a progressive place like Oberlin, could not.

“She didn’t respect the boundaries between races,” Jackson says, and she was kidnapped, brutally beaten and left in a field after she was accused. Her lawyer, John Mercer Langston – great uncle of the poet Langston Hughes – provides the primary source for her story. Jackson’s ambition is to write a verse play about her trial, placed within history yet using modern techniques to appeal to a contemporary audience.

‘Writing in miniatures’

Jackson has longed used art metaphors to talk about poetry, particularly for his students. In class before workshopping their poems – he assigns one a week, which he admits is intense – Jackson compares the luxury of prose writers working on a large canvas to the constraints on poets, writing in miniatures where every stroke has weight.

Four years ago he started The Painted Word poetry series in which he brings established and emerging poets to read at the Fleming Museum once a month. While these are events open to everyone, Jackson is driven by the desire to give students the opportunity to come in close contact with working poets. This spring’s series will wrap up, however, with the first annual student reading on Wednesday, April 24 at 6 p.m. “The students really do astound me with their poems every semester,” he says. “I could have built the whole series around their work.”

Jackson is inspired both to nurture his students as poets and also to be part of the broad conversation about poetry in and outside of the academy: “I want to help shape the dialogue particularly around poetry and race and our collective American literary inheritance.” 

But with or without Calypso’s call, Jackson’s art is who he is, above publishing books and winning prizes. Writing, he says, is the only way he lives and grows in the world. Experiences filter through his imagination and demand interpretation. “That’s the pressure,” he says. “Not the pressure of a career or to produce but to know that my existence is so tied with how I process it through this thing called the poem… I walk it.”

In October of that year, Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Four decades later, new research shows that the law is working.

Not only has the act “successfully prevented the extirpation of any marine mammal population in the United States in the forty years since it was enacted,” write UVM conservation biologist Joe Roman and his colleagues in a new report, but also, “the current status of many marine mammal populations is considerably better than in 1972.”

Their study, published online on March 22, in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, shows that population trends for most stocks of these animals remain unknown, but of those stocks that are known, many are increasing.

“At a very fundamental level, the MMPA has accomplished what its framers set out to do,” says co-author Andrew Read, professor of marine biology at Duke University, “to protect individual marine mammals from harm as a result of human activities.”

Restored roles

Some marine mammals, like endangered right whales, continue to be in deep trouble, but other populations “particularly seals and sea lions, have recovered to or near their carrying capacity,” the scientists write.

“We have seen remarkable recoveries of some populations of marine mammals, such as gray seals in New England and sea lions and elephant seals along the Pacific coast,” says Read.

“U.S. waters are pretty compromised with lots of ship traffic and ship strikes, big fisheries, pollution, boat noise, “ Joe Roman says. “And yet it’s safer to be a marine mammal in U.S. waters than elsewhere,” he says, due to the Act’s strong protections against commercial and accidental killing — what the law calls “take” — and its aim to maintain sustainable populations of mammals and their ecological roles in oceans.

“It’s important to evaluate such broad legislation,” says Caitlin Campbell ’12, an Environmental Sciences graduate from UVM’s College of Arts & Sciences, and a co-author on the paper.

“A lot of people think that the hard part was getting it passed through Congress, but in reality you have to make sure that big protective measures like this actually are effective,” she says. “This paper shows that this act is doing its job.”

The research team — Campbell; Joe Roman in UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics; Irit Altman from Boston University; Meagan Dunphy-Daly and Andrew Read from Duke University; and Michael Jasny from the Natural Resources Defense Council — gathered hundreds of data sets from around the world, including from NOAA, Canadian agencies, and the IUCN. Their goal was to get an accurate picture of population levels and trends of more than two hundred stocks of marine mammals from the Pantropical Spotted Dolphin to the West Indian Manatee.

The team concluded that for many of these animals there simply aren't enough data. For seventy-one percent of the stocks they identified, they couldn’t say which way the population was heading, up or down. “There isn’t enough research,” Roman says.

But for the ones they could evaluate, they found that nineteen percent of stocks were increasing, while five percent were stable and only five percent were declining.

Another fundamental conclusion of this research: “stopping harvesting these mammals, stop fisheries bycatch, stop killing them — and many populations bounce back,” says Roman. Marine mammals are long-lived “so it’s going to take decades, maybe longer for populations to rebound,” he says, “but it seems the trends are increasing.”

Beyond whale oil

In 1934, trends were definitely not increasing for right whales, when an international treaty banned hunting these nearly extinguished creatures. But other protections lagged, and by the 1960s many whales and other marine mammals — including some dolphins and seals — faced plummeting populations and the risk of extinction.

Yet in the early 1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense resisted legislation to protect whales and other marine mammals: they relied on sperm whale oil for use as a lubricant in submarines and other military engines, Roman’s team writes.

In one curious part of the complex negotiations at the White House, Lee Talbot, a canny scientist working for Richard Nixon, produced an affidavit from the DuPont Corporation stating that they could produce an artificial lubricant that could do the same job as the whale oil. This helped make the Pentagon more receptive toward whale-protecting legislation. In October 1972, the Marine Mammal Protection Act passed. This victory was also a key step toward the passage of the more forceful (though less ecologically oriented) Endangered Species Act that passed the next year.

Under these two laws, “countless tens of thousands of individual whales, seals, and manatees have been protected from harm since 1972,” the scientists write, “exactly as intended by those who crafted the legislation.”

In 1994, major amendments to the MMPA established a new framework for dealing with interactions between marine mammals and commercial fisheries, “which remains perhaps the most important conservation issue facing these iconic animals," says Andrew Read.

This new framework, relies on “a negotiated rule-making process,” Read says, looking for solutions to the incidental death of mammals in commercial fisheries. One of the strengths of the new process is that it “requires the direct involvement of fishermen, conservationists and scientists in the management process,” Read says.

Still, some deeply depleted species, like right whales, may never recover, and additional threats beyond direct killing remain. The Marine Mammal Protection Act has generally been ineffective in dealing with problems like increasing underwater noise from naval operations and other ships, new diseases, and depleted prey species in fraying food webs. “Existing conservation measures have not protected large whales from fisheries interactions or ship strikes in the northwestern Atlantic,” the team writes.

And this points to a new generation of challenges such as moving shipping lanes in whale feeding territory, slowing speed boats in manatee habitat, changing lobster fishing technologies and other fishing gear modifications, and continuing to improve ecosystem-based fisheries management. “That’s going to be hard and require real political will,” Joe Roman says.

A Rochester, Vt. native, Achee enrolled at UVM dedicated to begin her training as a nurse as well as to develop an expertise in how to help women around the world, especially around issues of sexual violence. As a survivor of sexual violence, Achee has worked with communities throughout Vermont to advocate for women’s empowerment in areas of our society where it is needed most. She created a leadership weekend for the Girl Scouts Beyond Bars; an empowerment event for young girls who have a parent in prison. Her work with the organization introduced children to positive role models, strategies for living a healthy lifestyle, and how to foster self-efficacy.

Two other UVM students were chosen as finalists for this year's Truman award: Tad Cooke '14, an ecological food and energy systems major from Williston, Vt., and Hillary Laggis ’14, a public communications major from Hardwick, Vt.

The Truman Foundation, a federal agency that seeks to identify and support college juniors who are on track to be future public servants and change agents, issues the Truman Scholarship. Each year, universities across the country submit up to four nominees through a rigorous application review and interview process (in total, 629 students were nominated in 2013). At UVM, the Office of Fellowships Advising oversees this process.

"We are thrilled that Jeanelle has been recognized in this way -- she is a truly inspiring person," said Lisa Schnell, associate dean of the Honors College, who supervises the Office of Fellowships Advising. "Indeed, all four Truman nominees this year were stellar candidates for the award, and of the three Vermonters who were finalists -- Jeanelle, Tad, and Hillary -- UVM has every right to be proud. Their success is all theirs, but I know that they would want me to mention that behind them all the way was Brit Chase, UVM's fellowships adviser, who spent countless hours helping them prepare for the competition, as well as a faculty committee and individual UVM faculty mentors who have been extremely generous in the support and mentoring of all the nominees."

In addition to her work with Girl Scouts Beyond Bars, Achee, a certified crisis counselor, has dedicated thousands of hours to counseling victims at Hope Works, Chittenden County’s largest non-profit organization dedicated to supporting people who have experienced the trauma of sexual violence. She has also been an active volunteer in statewide campaigns for presidential candidates John Kerry and Barack Obama. She’s volunteered for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ re-election. She co-founded the Vermont Student Summit for Building Peace in Iraq, a foundation for a statewide student-led peace group. She’s received state and national recognition for her service to her community, including the Duke of Edinburgh Silver Award, the Miss America Community Service Award, and the Vermont Governor’s Award for Outstanding Community Service. A global studies minor, she is also a member of Mortar Board, and is a former member of the Dewey House for Civic Engagement, UVM’s residential learning community for students who are dedicated to becoming engaged and active members in the community through public service.

"Jeanelle Achee is an exceptional young woman who represents all that we hope for in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences -- someone who really does make a difference for the health and wellbeing of others," says Dean Patricia Prelock.

"As a student here, Jeanelle has made a huge impact not just on her fellow students' lives -- counseling individuals through crises, advising on writing papers, organizing service activities, for instance -- but also faculty," says Luis Vivanco, director of the Global and Regional Studies Program. "Her combination of humility, dedication and insightfulness about people is amazing. While the Truman is an excellent reflection on her qualities and commitment, she's an excellent reflection on the Truman program."

Achee is the fourth UVM student to win the award. Brent Reader ’13, a social work major, received the award in 2012. Alumna Kesha Ram, now a Vermont state representative, was a winner in 2007, and William F. Steinman was a winner in 1988.

Timothy H. Breen is a leading historian of Colonial and Revolutionary America.  He has been a Guggenheim fellow and a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Rome and held appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, Cambridge University and Oxford University. He has published more than sixty scholarly articles and eleven books and won numerous prestigious awards. Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence won the Colonial War Society Prize, and one of his most important books (co-authored with Stephen Innes), Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, has become a seminal text in historical studies of colonial America. Breen is currently developing new work on Revolutionary Vermont and working on a book that reconstructs a tour of the new United States conducted by George Washington during his first term as president.

Sture Hansson is world-renowned aquatic ecologist. He earned his bachelor of science degree at Uppsala University and received his doctorate at Stockholm University where he now teaches in the Department of Ecology, Environment, and Plant Sciences. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry. In his research, he mixes basic and applied issues with a general focus on aquatic environments, in particular, the Baltic Sea. His research studies are oriented around trophic interactions, predator-prey relationships, and competition and food web structures. He studies the impact of large-scale human interferences in the food webs and how discharges of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus) influence food webs from the bottom up, while fisheries cause top-down impact.

Stephen Polasky is among the world’s leaders in combining ecology and economics to quantify the benefits of nature to human society. As an interdisciplinary scientist, he holds joint appointments in the Department of Applied Economics and the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior and draws tools from across the social and natural sciences to address some of the largest issues facing humanity. He has assessed the impact of biofuels on agricultural landscapes, climate change, and food prices, and he has pioneered a rigorous return-on-investment approach to endangered species policy. He was the senior staff economist for environment and resources for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers 1998-1999. He was elected into the National Academy of Sciences and has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

David Richardson is an internationally recognized leader in the fields of conservation biology, environmental policy and environmental management. Richardson is also one of the world's leading scientists on the study of biological invasions and their impacts on ecosystem services.  He is an elected member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa and a member of the Royal Society of South Africa. The National Research Foundation of South Africa awarded him an A-1 rating for the high quality and significant impact of his research. He has published 232 articles and edited four books. He is founder and editor-in-chief of the international conservation journal Diversity and Distributions: A Journal of Conservation Biology and the founding organizer of the international conference on the Ecology and Management of Alien Plant Invasions. His research in “practical biogeography” seeks find “affordable, sustainable management strategies” and addresses whether plants and animals should be relocated in the face of rapid climate change.  

The James Marsh Professors-at-Large Program brings outstanding individuals of international distinction in the arts and humanities, sciences, social sciences, and applied fields to the University of Vermont. Professors-at-Large are non-resident faculty with six-year terms of office who conduct three or four residencies of one to two weeks. The program is named for James Marsh, the university’s fifth president, a major figure in nineteenth-century American intellectual life. The mandate of these professors is to invigorate the intellectual and cultural life of the university. Selected not only for their high accomplishments, but also for their broad-ranging interests and their personal and professional accessibility, Professors-at-Large typically offer public lectures or performances in the arts in addition to working with faculty and students.

For more information, visit the Marsh Professor-at-Large website, or contact Bess Malson-Huddle, Elizabeth.Malson-Huddle@uvm.edu, (802) 656-0462.