Semester assignment program revised by provost: Career Development Awards approved for 64

As the University grows and changes, it is important to review programs periodically to ensure that they are meeting the needs of the faculty and of the institution. During the past year, the Office of the Provost reviewed its developmental assignment programs and, with the approval of the Faculty Senate, revised and expanded the programs to enhance their value and utility.

First, faculty on the clinical-track who wish to pursue projects that will enhance their clinical or technical expertise are now eligible to apply for a developmental assignment.

Second, faculty may apply for a developmental assignment of up to one year in length. These longer awards are intended primarily for 12-month faculty in the health-science colleges whose schedules do not fit the traditional academic calendar, but nine-month faculty may apply for them in special circumstances. In order to incorporate these longer awards and to emphasize that receiving a developmental assignment is a privilege, rather than an entitlement, the program has been retitled Career Development Award program.

The following 2001-2002 developmental assignments have been approved by the Board of Regents, State of Iowa. These projects all relate to the educational mission of the University and involve research in different fields of value to the University.

This year’s recipients, departmental affiliation, and their projects are:

Keith Achepohl, art and art history, will return to Upper Egypt to reexamine the sources he has worked from; and to Venice to complete a book of etchings and to ascertain the possibilities of a semester abroad for art and art history students.

Celesta Albonetti, sociology, will examine relations between defendants’ race/ethnicity and length of imprisonment imposed under the federal sentencing guidelines.

David Baldus, law, will evaluate the capital charging and death sentencing systems of Nebraska (1978-99) and Pennsylvania (1983-99) for evidence of race, gender, ethnicity, and geographic discrimination on the part of prosecutors and sentencing jurors and judges.

Robert S. Baron, psychology, plans to conduct research examining how Internet chat groups affect feelings and opinions about disliked groups. He also will complete the second edition of his book, Group Process, Group Decision, Group Action.

Constance Berman, history, will do research in libraries and archives in Italy for articles on how women’s work was changed through the introduction of watermills, on the role of nuns and lay-brothers on economic growth, and for chapters of a book on the contributions of women to the economic growth of the years 1000-1150 AD.

David B. Bills, planning, policy, and leadership studies, will examine changes in the hiring and promotion practices of employers over a 20-year period.

Ann Budd, geoscience, will examine the effect of the widening of the Atlantic Ocean on the long-term evolution and biodiversity of reef corals of the Caribbean.

Trudy Burns, biostatistics, with Ronald Lauer, professor of pediatrics, will organize and write a scientific monograph that describes the findings from 30 years of epidemiologic investigation (the Muscatine study) and the implications for health practitioners.

Donald J. Burton, chemistry, will investigate two new approaches for alpha-fluorophosphonate preparation.

Nguyen P. Cac, mathematics, will investigate the existence of periodic solutions of some differential equations.

Jonathan C. Carlson, law, will seek to demonstrate that the popular attack by social activists and legal academics on the World Trade Organization and international trade law as antidemocratic institutions that seriously threaten national sovereignty is fundamentally in error.

Kyung Choi, mechanical engineering, will finish writing a new book on design sensitivity analysis (DSA) theories for structural systems.

Don Coffman, curriculum and instruction, will examine the effect of learning to play a musical instrument in a concert band on older adults’ perceived physical and emotional well-being.

Cary R. Covington, political science, will seek to determine the extent to which divided party control of the presidency and Congress affects the ideological content of the national government’s legislative enactments.

David Depew, communication studies and POROI, plans to complete a manuscript bringing recent scholarship on Aristotle’s biological writing to bear on his social and political philosophy, as expressed in his treatise, Politics.

Anne Dipardo, curriculum and instruction and English, will explore attitudes and beliefs about literacy, perceptions of partnership, and patterns that characterize the content of shared reading/writing journals between eighth-grade language arts students and senior citizens.

Walter A. Dobrian, Spanish and Portuguese, will complete the second of two volumes on the poetry of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca.

Maureen Donovan, pharmaceutics, will investigate drug delivery strategies for gene therapies, with primary activities focused on improving cellular delivery efficiency and limiting systemic immune responses.

Oguz C. Durumeric, mathematics, will do research in differential geometry to solve problems arising in topology and variational problems with simple models such as a plane-landing problem and a DNA molecule being in an optimal position.

Wolfgang Ertl, German, will work on a book that investigates the creative development of several major East German poets from about 1980 to the present, including their responses to coming to terms with East Germany’s past and to unified Germany.

Bruce Fehn, curriculum and instruction, will write a history of Alexander Meiklejohn’s Experimental College to explain the rise and fall of an influential experiment in higher education.

Robert Fellows, physiology and biophysics, will develop a computer-based course in human physiology for access via the World Wide Web.

John F. Finamore, classics, (in collaboration with John Dillon of Trinity College of the University of Dublin), will conduct work to produce an edition/translation of the Greek text of Iamblichus’ De Anima (On the Soul).

M. Alison Ford, theatre arts, will participate in theater design projects based in the New York area and begin work on an archive of period furniture in a three-dimensional digital format for use by theater and other designers.

Don C. Fowles, psychology, will study developments in neuroscience and behavior as they relate to psychopathology, especially to chronic antisocial behavior due to a combination of temperament-like deficits and to developmental failures in childhood.

Kate Gfeller, music, will work on development of a music perception test for children who use cochlear implants (assistive hearing devices). This test will measure how accurately children perceive pitch, rhythm, and sound quality through the implant.

Jo M. Hendrickson, curriculum and instruction, will examine questions related to special-education teacher shortages and the increasing numbers of students with emotional and behavioral challenges, issues that adversely affect education.

Stephen D. Hendrix, biological sciences, will develop a new research direction in conservation ecology, which will improve the ability of biologists to forecast the fate of native prairie plants and insects.

Forrest Holly, civil and environmental engineering, will prepare the manuscript of "Mobile Bed Computational Hydraulics." The text, co-authored with Dr. Miodrag Spasojevic, will provide a review of developmental and application issues in computer-based simulation of the movement of water and sediment in natural channels.

Kelly Kadera, political science, will investigate the spread of conflict in Northern Ireland by applying an existing mathematical model of contagious spread of events (Kadera 1998) and focus on lessons derived from that model.

John Kimmich, journalism and mass communication, plans to complete a creative photographic project on Nicodemus Tessin the Elder and Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, both Royal Architects during Sweden’s Era of Greatness (late 1600s).

Tong Li, mathematics, will study mathematical theory of non-equilibrium continuum models of traffic flow incorporating road conditions such as highway entrances, exits, obstacles, and lane changes. She also will study nonlinear stability and instability of detonation waves.

Marc Linder, law, will examine one of the outcomes of the publication of his 1997 book, Void Where Prohibited, OSHA’s look at workers’ right to use the toilet on company time.

Judith Liskin-Gasparro, Spanish and Portuguese, will examine teacher beliefs about correction of student errors during speaking activities in elementary and intermediate Spanish classes, the teachers’ actual error correction practices, and students’ immediate and retrospective responses to the corrections.

Frank Longo, anatomy and cell biology, will travel to the University of Pavia to participate in a research project studying mechanisms of cell differentiation using mouse preimplantation embryos obtained by nuclear transfer.

Tonglin Lu, Asian languages and literature, will study how cinematic representations have contributed to articulating and redefining various versions of modernity in Chinese films in three historical periods: the pre-Communist period, the pre-Cultural Revolution period, and the post-Cultural Revolution period.

Teresa Mangum, English, will investigate the complexities of aging through an examination of our immediate cultural past, the Victorian "aged" in Britain.

Keith (Mac) Marshall, anthropology, will write a book about the radically transformed social, economic, and political world of members of a small Pacific Island community with whom he has worked for more than 30 years.

Ann McCarthy, nursing, will expand her own expertise in school health issues in order to expand school health educational opportunities.

Margaret H. Mills, Russian, will build on previous data collection in Russia with new data from the U.K. and the U.S. Analyses of clinical interviews will form the first comparative discourse model in three distinct environments: 1) government clinics in economically weak regions (Russia), 2) government clinics in economically strong regions (UK), and 3) insurance-based clinics in Iowa.

Joyce Moore, psychological and quantitative foundations, will explore an innovative model of statistics instruction for middle-school classrooms.

George R. Neumann, economics, proposes to develop econometric and computational tools to implement estimation of an equilibrium search model of the labor market.

Peter O’Grady, industrial engineering, will conduct research in complex information systems for product development (both distributive and collaborative design) and product deployment, including modeling complexes.

Joon B. Park, biomedical engineering, will work to finish writing one textbook on ceramics and glasses as biomaterials and also to write a third edition of Biomaterials: An Introduction, which was published in 1979 and reissued in 1992.

Wayne Polyzou, physics and astronomy, plans to investigate a number of methods for formulating relativistic quantum mechanical models of strongly interacting systems involving small distances and high energies that must be satisfied by any sensible physical theory, but that are notoriously difficult to satisfy simultaneously.

Rangaswamy Rajagopal, geography, will organize the results of work on cost-effective screening procedures of the more than one million pounds of chemicals sold annually in the United States into a first comprehensive draft of a book-length manuscript.

Margaret Raymond, law, will study the historical and analytical significance of Weems v. United States, the case establishing the "proportionality doctrine," which permits courts to review the severity of sentences and assess whether they are proportionate to the crime committed.

Thomas Schmidt, physiology and biophysics, will utilize molecular probes and techniques to address how glucocorticoid hormones, such as cortisol, regulate expression of their own receptor gene in rat liver tissue.

Konrad Schulze, internal medicine, will collaborate with Professor Schemann (physiology, Hanover, Germany) in studies on reflex responses of the specialized bundles of gastric musculature known as gastric slings, which determine the shape of the stomach and the movements of luminal contents.

Tom Simmons, English, will complete a book, The Body of Hope, on American poets Hart Crane, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. He also will work on a book, The Return of the Erased, on misconceptions of tribalism and shamanism in American culture.

Alvin Snider, English, will write an essay on how the ongoing reorganization of intellectual labor in the American university shapes the theory and practice of interdisciplinary knowledge. In addition, he will complete a chapter on the poetry of the English writer Aphra Behn (1640-89).

James Snitzer, art and art history, will investigate relations between digital and film-based photographic imagery, especially as it pertains to the perception and construction of the landscape.

Peverill Squire, political science, will survey and conduct interviews with candidates, party leaders, and others to understand better who chooses to run for office and the processes that bring them to make that decision.

Conrad Stoltzfus, microbiology, will investigate whether an increase in the levels of cellular ESS-binding proteins during HIV macrophage infection results in inhibition of Tat splicing.

Osnat Stramer, statistics and actuarial science, is concerned with estimation of continuous time models when observations are discretely observed. New methods to estimate such models are applicable to a wide variety of univariate continuous-time models, such as one-factor interest rate models.

Gerhard Strohmer, mathematics, will complete a manuscript on mathematical fluid dynamics. In addition, he will visit institutions to discuss with other researchers questions related to the use of magnetic fields for the confinement of metals in the metal-casting process and the reduction of turbulence in the casting of semiconductors.

Lihe Wang, mathematics, will study the regularity theory of bi-harmonic maps, level surfaces, and problems of geometric flows.

Amy L. Weiss, speech pathology and audiology, will analyze data from three preliminary studies and write a research grant to support her continuing work investigating factors affecting success of treatment programs for individuals with communication disorders.

Adrien Wing, law, will conduct research and draft a book, Palestinian Democracy?: Embryonic Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law.

Jerold Woodhead, pediatrics, will complete the writing and editing of Guide to Pediatrics, a new textbook based on the General Pediatric Clerkship Curriculum (1995), of which he was one of the principal authors.

Chun-Fang Wu, biological sciences, will integrate genomic and computational approaches with physiological analysis to update teaching topics, design new courses, and train students to perform cutting-edge experiments in brain function and disease.

Han-Chin Wu, civil and environmental engineering, will increase his knowledge in the area of materials science and metallurgy to enhance his research in the utilization of metals in engineering applications in order to conduct research in the simulation of metal behavior for use in civil engineering structures and automotive aerospace vehicle components.

Rose Zbiek, curriculum and instruction, will synthesize and extend a research program focused on how high-school students and teachers reason and prove mathematical statements while using mathematics technology.

You-Kuan Zhang, geoscience, will study the effect of both physical and chemical heterogeneity of geological formations on contaminant transport in groundwater with both theoretical and experimental approaches.

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