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Podcast: Hannah Valantine on diversity

March 2nd, 2012

HANNAH VALANTINE recalls that when she told her colleagues at London University’s Medical School more than 30 years ago that she was interested in cardiology she got variations of the same response.

“A black cardiologist who’s a woman as well? You must be mad!” Today, Valantine is one of the world’s leading transplant doctors and also the senior associate dean for diversity and leadership at the Stanford School of Medicine, a position she has held for seven years.

Recently, PAUL COSTELLO, the Medical School’s chief communications officer, recorded an audio interview with Valantine in which she discussed her views on diversity.

“We have been graduating women as MDs at a rate of at least 50 percent for over 10 years. And so it’s so disheartening that despite those statistics we find that at the full professor level there’s only 20 percent or so and even fewer at the leadership position,” said Valantine, who has instituted a policy that all search committees include “a good representation of women.” When it comes to women and underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, Valantine makes the case for “the richness of different perspectives and the potential that holds for excellence and innovation; coming up with something that is greater than the sum of the parts.”

Listen to the podcast by clicking the link below:

Hannah Valantine on fostering diversity

What’s on the minds of Stanford parents?

February 27th, 2012

Stanford parents have a reputation for asking hard questions.

PROVOST JOHN ETCHEMENDY’s Friday welcome address for Parents’ Weekend was no exception. During a brief, 15-minute talk, the provost updated them on university news. He also shared email exchanges with freshmen.

Then he opened the floor for questions.

Provost John Etchemendy

With the president on sabbatical, the provost explained that he was doing double duty.

“Normally, Parents’ Weekend features two question-and-answer sessions—this one with me in the morning and the other with President Hennessy in the afternoon,” he told a nearly full house at Memorial Auditorium.

“I’m happy to say that, in past years, I’ve successfully encouraged parents to save their really hard questions for the president. But, as many of you know, President Hennessy is on a brief sabbatical leave. So we’ll have to make do with this one opportunity.”

Parents wasted no time sharing what was on their minds. Among the issues raised:

• Challenging changes to the Axess system for paying bills online

• Cumbersome delivery of packages to their children, including delayed deliveries of overnight mail and long lines for pickup

• Whether Stanford takes steps to assure the human rights of workers who make university-licensed apparel

• The future of online education and of ebooks

• Federal privacy laws that allow students to keep their grades and university records private, even from parents

• The reasons for the high cost of higher education

• Whether sophomore seminars will still be available under proposed changes to undergraduate education

• Alcohol use—especially hard alcohol—among Stanford students

• The role of the arts and creativity in undergraduate education and the application of real-world problems to the curriculum

• Availability of recreational music opportunities on campus

• Whether Stanford should stress internships in light of a challenging job market

Mom Ayele Amavigan asked a question of the provost.

The question-and-answer period also offered a bit of levity. A mother who had complained last year that her son’s bike had been stolen on campus returned this year to announce that the bike had been recovered. She also took the opportunity to ask the provost to expand the Stanford Guest House, which is operated by Residential and Dining Enterprises and located on the grounds of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. She said the facility is reasonably priced and convenient, but complained that reservations must be made well in advance.

“Please get more rooms in the Stanford Guest House before 2014,” she said. “I’m bringing 12 people for my son’s graduation.”

John Lennon Bus 2.0

February 15th, 2012

As The Dish mentioned in a post on Monday, the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus rolled into campus over the weekend. Stanford computer science majors joined John Lennon staff on board to help a group of local middle and high school students design and build an iPad app in 48 hours. The teenagers came up with a farming game to promote understanding of agriculture in developing countries. Players have to allocate resources among technology, crop improvement and debt payments to increase the health of the people in their virtual village. STEVE FYFFE, videographer for the Stanford News Service, captured the action.

Love and other drugs: Ask Stanford Med

February 14th, 2012

When you ask someone to describe the physical sensation of love, chances are you’ll get an answer like falling head-over-heels, having butterflies in the stomach or walking on sunshine. As it turns out, and as described in a Stanford study, those intense, consuming feelings of love can do more than make you happy: They appear to block pain in ways similar to painkillers or illicit drugs.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, the Medical School’s SCOPE blog asked SEAN MACKEY, associate professor of anesthesia and senior author of that pain study, to respond to your questions about the analgesic effects of love – and he’s happy to answer general questions about pain research, too.

You have until Friday at 5 p. m. to submit your questions. For more information, visit LIA STEAKLEY‘s full SCOPE blog post.

SLAC kicks off golden anniversary

February 6th, 2012

SLAC communications staffers, from left, Thanh Ly, conference and event manager; Lina Ruhlman, tour coordinator; LaPria Genevro, administrative associate; Melinda Lee, outreach manager, and Rod Reape, multimedia services supervisor

SLACers are no slouches when it comes to having fun, and the photos just in from the lab’s recent 50^th anniversary kickoff celebration demonstrate that SLAC people work hard and play hard.

The Jan. 26 event started with employees assembling on SLAC’s main green for a variety of photos and videos taken from land, lift bucket and helicopter by BRAD PLUMMER, the lab’s multimedia manager, plus four other professional photographers.

Later, employees enjoyed sumptuous edibles while local band “So Timeless” got funky on stage. There was a photo booth complete with outrageous wigs and shiny shades that staff definitely weren’t shy about putting on for the camera.

Many of these wacky images are online and available now at https://buzzimages.smugmug.com/SLAC.

LAPRIA GENEVRO, administrative associate in SLAC’s communications office, led the party planning. Among the myriad tasks checked off over the two months leading up to the event, she and colleagues selected the menu and band, created 34 reusable centerpieces and assembled the 1,700 “50th Anniversary” and “SLAC” buttons that employees took away.

Genevro said her team especially enjoyed thinking up fun “SLACspeak” names for the drinks: Project M (mock mojito), the Photonic Tonic (faux kir royale), the Accelerator (coffee), Tau Tea (hot water for tea), Synchrotron Cider (hot apple cider) and Cosmic Cocoa (hot chocolate).

The golden anniversary will be a central theme for many of the lab’s outreach activities this year, such as tours and public lectures, said MELINDA LEE, SLAC’s community relations manager. A scientific symposium and special event for VIPs and employees will be held in August and a community event is planned for September.

Read the full story by SLAC science writer MIKE ROSS on the lab’s News Center website.

Stanford football scores on Signing Day

February 3rd, 2012

Cardinal football coach DAVID SHAW announced earlier this week that 22 high school seniors have signed official national letters of intent to play football at Stanford.

The 22 student-athletes attend high school in 14 states- three each from California, Texas and Arizona; two each from Florida and Washington, along with one player each from the states of Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia and Utah.

“We are excited to welcome one of the best recruiting classes in school history,” said Shaw, the Bradford M. Freeman Director of Football, who was named the 2011 Pac-12 Conference’s Coach of the Year after guiding the Cardinal to an 11-2 record and a second straight BCS bowl appearance. “We say that not because of how high this class is rated, but instead because of the combination of ability, intelligence, toughness and character in this class. We cannot wait for these young men to join us this summer and have an immediate impact on our team this season.”

According to the announcement on the Athletics website, one of the recruits, Brandon Fanaika of Pleasant Grove, Utah, who is listed as the No. 9 offensive guard in the country and top prospect in his home state, is expected to take a two-year church mission before enrolling at Stanford in 2014.

In the video below, Shaw talks about the recruits as athletes and scholars.

Sleep research pioneers return to Jerry House

January 31st, 2012

Professor William Dement stands in front of the commemorative plaque. Photo by Robert Tognoli

For a 10-year period starting in the mid-70s, the residence now known as Jerry House served as the site of a series of pioneering sleep studies: Undergraduates and members of the community lent themselves for study during “summer sleep camps” at the house, named for the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. Until that time, the field of sleep research - still in its infancy – had centered on nighttime events, but researcher MARY CARSKADON, now a professor of psychiatry & human behavior at Brown University, focused these camp studies on the role of sleep in daytime function. The participants’ sleeping and waking were manipulated, recorded and examined; and the end result was important data on sleep restriction and sleep deprivation, and the establishment of clinical protocols still used today.

“Much of the essential, pioneering sleep work at Stanford was done in these camps,” sleep expert RAFAEL PELAYO recently told SCOPE blog writer MICHELLE BRANDT. “The work had great consequences on the development of the field of sleep research here and around the world.”

This weekend, WILLIAM DEMENT, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, who established the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic and Research Center at Stanford in 1970, joined Pelayo, Carskadon and others in honoring this early, important research and unveiling a wood-and-glass commemorative plaque to be housed there. (Writer Patrick May was there and reported on the event for the San Jose Mercury News.) The plaque outlines the significance of the studies and highlights the successful careers of Carskadon and Dement.

Read Brandt’s full post on the Medical School’s SCOPE blog.

Forgiveness expert Fred Luskin inaugurates new SCOPE blog feature

January 24th, 2012

Fred Luskin, a research associate in the Stanford Prevention Research Center and co-founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, gave a presenation during Parents' Weekend 2011. Photo: L.A. Cicero

This week, the medical school’s SCOPE blog has introduced a new feature that gives readers the opportunity to send questions on a specific topic to our medical school faculty.

Once a month, SCOPE will select a specific topic and invite a professor or researcher to answer your questions on the subject. Editors will take questions in the comments section of the blog post and via the @SUMedicine Twitter feed over the course of a week. (Just send an @reply to @SUMedicine and include the hashtag #AskSUMed in your tweet.)

“Once the submission period ends, we’ll select questions for the faculty member and post them here on SCOPE with the answers,” the blog post says.

To get things started, they have asked FRED LUSKIN, a research associate at the Stanford Prevention Research Center and co-founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, to respond to your questions about why forgiveness is important for health.

A central goal of Luskin’s research is to show that forgiveness is beneficial for emotional, physical and relationship well-being. His work demonstrates how learning to forgive leads to increased physical vitality, hope, optimism and conflict resolution skills as well as decreased anger, depression and stress. For more information about submitting your questions to Luskin, visit the full SCOPE blog post.

—By Lia Steakley

Beyond the Speech: Martin Luther King Jr. Day Challenge

January 13th, 2012

Martin Luther King speaks at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium in 1967

Last fall, a challenge was issued to students: Come up with a service project that honors the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. beyond a one-day celebration or the “I Have a Dream” speech.

Ten service project proposals were submitted to the first “Beyond the Speech: Martin Luther King Jr. Day Challenge.” The proposals involved issues ranging from education and the environment to homelessness and political empowerment.

The challenge was organized by the Haas Center for Public Service with support from the Martin Luther King Celebration Committee and the Educational Resources Division of the Office of the Vice Provost for Student Affairs.

It was designed to encourage students and student groups to plan and implement service projects that extend the celebration and work of King “beyond one day of service, beyond one day of honor and beyond one month of celebration.” A panel of faculty and staff evaluated the proposals based on the depth of thought or reflection on King’s life or message; creativity, innovation and impact; collaboration, partnership, new audience engagement and new participants; creative marketing and visibility and management of financial resources.

Below are descriptions of the winning projects, which received grants ranging from $350 to $600:

“Hope to Life,” a project submitted by freshman JESSICA REED, who plans to conduct videotaped interviews with Stanford students and faculty to find out how they use their education to bring hope to their lives and to the lives of others. Reed plans to share these interviews with high school students and begin a discussion about how they can use education to fulfill their own dreams.

“Dr. King’s principles root deeply in my goal for this project,” Reed wrote in her proposal. “He once spoke to a group of middle school students in Philadelphia, saying, ‘Whenever a building is constructed, you usually have an architect who draws a blueprint, and that blueprint serves as the pattern, as the guide, and a building is not well erected without a good, solid blueprint.’ I desire to help students understand that they can use their education as a foundation for greatness. However, they also need hope to keep pursuing their education even when obstacles try to stop them.”

JUAN FLORES, a sophomore, proposed a project inspired by the It Gets Better Project designed to combat suicide among LGBT youth. Working with La Familia de Stanford, a queer and questioning Latina/o support and activism group, Flores seeks to incorporate elements from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech into the video that would be posted on the It Gets Better website. Organizers also want to reach out to LGBT teenagers with “mentorship and support” in high schools, homeless shelters “and/or where hope is needed most,” Flores wrote.

Senior MICHAEL TUBBS, who submitted a proposal on behalf of the Stanford Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), plans to implement an initiative to promote political education, empowerment and mobilization among marginalized youth, through voter registration activities for high school students in Oakland.

“As Dr. King once noted, ‘Almost always, the creative, dedicated minority has made the world better.’ We hope to transform the high school students of Oakland into the creative, dedicated citizens they have the potential to be and dispel the notion that young people are apathetic and uninvolved,” wrote Tubbs.

GILLIE COLLINS, a sophomore, proposed a storytelling event, developed in collaboration with STAND, a student anti-genocide coalition, designed to bring attention to the civil rights of Burmese civilians brutalized by the military junta that has ruled the country since 1962. “The Burma storytelling event would highlight these injustices by sharing relevant stories with the Stanford community that would otherwise go unheard,” Collins wrote. “This project is founded on the idea that all human beings deserve equal treatment and basic civil liberties, principles that guided Dr. King’s work.”

The winners of the challenge are expected to conduct their projects during the months of January and February and make a presentation to the Stanford community during the Student Affairs Assessment Poster Fair, which takes place in the spring.

Dedication of Tresidder among 2012 notable anniversaries

January 12th, 2012

Tresidder Memorial Union, named for Stanford's fourth president, Donald Tresidder, opened in 1962. This photo was taken in 1964.

Stanford will be celebrating a number of notable anniversaries in 2012, according to the Stanford Historical Society’s publication A Chronology of Stanford University and its Founders.

For instance, 25 years ago, Stanford cheerleading made a comeback after falling on hard times in the 1970s, the baseball team won the College World Series—a first for Stanford—and seismic concerns forced the abrupt closing of Roble Hall and relocation of 294 students.

Fifty years ago, Tresidder Memorial Union was dedicated, and 153,000 people came to Stanford Stadium to see a U.S.-Soviet Union track meet that culminated in “the Cold War rivals joining hands during the closing ceremony and marching in pairs past the stands before a roaring crowd.”

Seventy-five years ago, RUSSELL and SIGURD VARIAN began a collaboration with physicist WILLIAM HANSON that led to the invention of the klystron microwave tube, while dedications were held for both Frost Amphitheater and Memorial Hall. Also, the Hanna family moved into the now-famous house built for them by Frank Lloyd Wright.

What are other notable anniversaries? One hundred years ago, Lane Medical Library was dedicated at the Medical Department, which was then located in San Francisco. And, 125 years ago, the university’s cornerstone was laid at what is now Building 60 on what would have been LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR‘s 19^th birthday.

A Chronology of Stanford University and its Founders (2001), written by KAREN BARTHOLOMEW, CLAUDE BRINEGAR and ROXANNE NILAN, can be purchased in the Stanford Bookstore.