2002 Recipients of The Deans' Award for Academic Accomplishment

Two summers ago, Heidi Boas worked for the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) in Washington, DC. This is where she led an effort to funnel money to Afghani women suffering under the repressive Taliban regime. She also did research for an important Congressional speech given by a FMF board member on health care for refugee women.

Last spring, Heidi took a course on international women's health. That summer, she traveled to Kenya where she conducted extensive research on the health concerns of female refugees, focusing on their reproductive health care needs. She interviewed dozens of refugee women, employees of various aid organizations and health care providers. From this, she collected information about how, and to what extent, refugee women's health care needs were met. Heidi came to understand that seemingly unrelated conditions, such as adequate housing, protection from crime, and adequate employment, are all related to women's health. This understanding became the nucleus of her honors thesis.

This year, Heidi was chosen by Anne Firth Murray (founder, Global Fund for Women), to be the TA for her course on International Women's Health. In that role, Heidi went well beyond expectations in inspiring and mentoring the students in her class. She is tenacious in her quest for understanding, and compassionate and socially responsive in her commitment to improving the plight of refugee women. She is a leader among her peers.

Theresa Bridgeman worked in Oaxaca, Mexico for the past two summers, studying folic acid (vitamin B11) use among women of childbearing ages. Tess and her colleague interviewed women, doctors and healthcare promoters in eight communities. Their research revealed that these communities have the highest rate of neural tube defects in the state of Oaxaca. Virtually none of the women consumed folic acid, a vitamin which reduces the chances of neural tube defects in newborns by up to 75 percent.

Armed with these results, Tess and her colleague approached the Secretary of Health for the state of Oaxaca. Tess was invited to return to conduct a more comprehensive study and begin implementing educational programs regarding folic acid and reproductive health in general. With superb preparatory work and a highly sophisticated design and methodology, Tess returned to Oaxaca last summer to conduct her research. The results of that work will form the basis of Tess' senior honors thesis, which is expected to result in several articles in top journals.

Tess' work has already benefited the people of Oaxaca yet it will also serve as a model for other developing countries and other health parameters.

Stephen Fried found his passion and calling in the world of theater. He informed that passion with a love of history, in particular a love of Russian history. While studying at the Stanford overseas campus in Moscow, Stephen took a course on Stalin and Stalinism. He learned Russian with an insistence (and persistence) seldom seen and landed an internship at a Russian theatrical company. Also while overseas, Steve looked at materials in the Moscow party archives, specifically those relating to the history of theater during the 1930s.

The following summer, Steven interned with the Arena Stage in Washington, DC (one of five leading regional theaters in the country) where he studied directing. When he returned to campus, Steve took everything he had learned and applied it to his senior project in the Drama Department. He researched, wrote, directed, lit and acted in a show called Habeas Corpus: Meyerhold, The Final Chapter.

The piece is a complex meditation on the great Soviet director Vsevolod Meyerhold. It speaks of the social and political experiment that constituted Soviet culture and government in the post-Revolutionary era, which culminated in Meyerhold's assassination. The quality of the play is such that the Drama Department hopes to send it to the New York Fringe Festival and a theatre in Moscow.

Kenny Lin is a Junior majoring in Biological Sciences and History. He was selected for outstanding accomplishments in medical research and initiating collaborative interaction in the research community.

Kenny carried out research in the Vascular Biology laboratory of nominator John Cooke, Associate Professor of Medicine. Kenny has conclusively shown that the elevation of asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) in diabetics is due to glucose-induced oxidative stress. This sheds new light on impaired function of the endothelium (the "Teflon coat" of the blood vessel) caused by diabetes. It may open up a new therapeutic avenue to prevent vascular complications from this disease.

Kenny's work led to a paper which has recently been submitted to Circulation, the most prestigious academic journal in cardiovascular medicine. The American College of Cardiology invited Kenny to present his findings at its annual scientific meeting in March.

Kenny is developing a new method to measure the plasma ADMA level using laser capillary zone electrophoresis (CZE). This will open a new chapter in the study of ADMA, as the technology will deliver results with a hundredfold increase in efficiency and resolution.

Rachel's passion for women's history and history in general was evident in a seminar on Renaissance Italy, which she took as a sophomore. An excellent Latinist, Rachel worked with Professor Paula Findlen on a translation of a 1727 oration on women's education, given by a nine-year old girl in Milan. The work has been edited for publication and will appear in a volume in The Other Voice series published by the University of Chicago Press. Working together, Rachel and Professor Findlen will complete several more Latin translations of women's scientific and philosophical writings from the eighteenth century. They, too, will result in publications over the next several years. By acting as primary translator of these unstudied, relatively unknown publications, Rachel made significant intellectual contributions to women's history and the history of science.

Rachel's honors thesis continues her interest in women’s history, focusing on the American West at the turn of the century. Using archival sources, she researched the diaries of a female Stanford student circa 1900, to reconstruct one woman's experience of the Bay Area during that time.

Abigail first began working in Professor Russel Fernald's lab during her sophomore year at Stanford. She began with a project focused on testing the behavioral role of the brain peptide, arginine vasotocin (AVT). She hypothesized that AVT might be a key regulator of agonistic interactions. By end of sophomore year, she showed clear effects of AVT on social behavior within groups of animals — effects that were contingent on social circumstance.

During the summer following her sophomore year, Abby worked at Jackson Laboratories in Maine, where she learned useful neurobiological techniques for cellular investigations. She returned from this experience wanting to take her own experiments to a more mechanistic level. She learned a new suite of molecular techniques and within a few months had cloned and sequenced the cDNA encoding AVT. She then went on to identify its expression pattern within the brain, localizing it to nuclei known to be involved in social behavior. This was the extent of her originally proposed project. Yet Abby wanted to identify and localize the AVT receptor. Then she would have a more complete, interesting analysis of how the entire AVT system might work. Abby designed a cloning strategy for the receptor and within a few weeks was able to find and sequence the responsible gene.

Abby presented the results of some of her work at the national Neuroscience Society meeting in 2001. She will likely have two manuscripts ready for publication at the end of her research.

As a sophomore, Barry took Dr. Ben Barres's Neurobiology 200 course at the medical school. He began writing to Dr. Barres, suggesting innovative and imaginative ideas for research based on ideas that had occurred to him during the course. In particular, Barry proposed the possibility that neuronal activity might be coordinated by glial circuitry. While neurons are well-known to be organized in circuits, glial cells have never been suggested to be similarly arranged, which made Barry's suggestion totally heretical. It was an idea that had never occurred to Dr. Barres, who is considered to be an expert in the field.

Barry's research in the lab focused on the role of astrocytes, a little-studied brain cell type, and its role in the development of synaptic connections. Barry hypothesized that astrocytes secrete a protein that induces formation of synaptic connections between neurons, but they only release this signal if prompted by neurons. Barry's innovative work suggested a completely unexpected, important active role for astrocytes in synaptic plasticity. His findings have been submitted to the Society of Neuroscience Annual Meeting and the Society for Neurochemistry Annual Meeting. In addition, his work will be written up for publication with Barry as the first author.

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