Archive for March, 2010

Aidan Dunn, '11, and Claire Kouba, '11, working with Chilean university students to clear a pile of rubble. (Photo credit: Kat Donner)

“I know a lot of folks in the Stanford community are worried about us down here in Santiago, and it would be great to show them another image of Chile than what they’ve been seeing on the news,” wrote junior AIDAN DUNN, who has been studying at the Bing Overseas Studies center in Santiago, Chile. As soon as the Stanford students got their footing, they began assisting with the clean-up effort.
And speaking of the Santiago program, officials announced recently that the spring quarter program will operate as planned.

Three Stanford researchers have won a $1 million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to continue their theoretical and experimental work on the quantum spin Hall system, a newly discovered type of material inside which the laws of electricity and magnetism are dramatically altered.

The researchers are DAVID GOLDHABER-GORDON, associate professor of physics; SHOUCHENG ZHANG, professor of physics; and YI CUI, assistant professor of materials science and engineering. The full announcement is available on the Stanford News website.

PABLO AGUILERA didn’t break a Guinness World Record, but according to the San Jose Mercury News, he raised $7,000 for Stanford College Prep.

President John Hennessy, donors John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn and John Shoven, director of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, cut the ribbon at the dedication ceremony for the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn building, which is the new home of the institute.

“This is the greatest day in the history of SIEPR,” said JOHN SHOVEN, the Wallace R. Hawley Director of SIEPR and the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics, during the March 11 dedication of the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building, new home to the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). The building is named for lead donors, alumnus JOHN GUNN, a university trustee and SIEPR Advisory Board chair, and his wife, CYNTHIA.

U.S. Assistant Attorney General Tony West greets his old friend, Sally Dickson, associate vice provost for student affairs.

Stanford Law School alumnus TONY WEST, U.S. assistant attorney general, returned to the Farm on Tuesday to talk to members of the Stanford Partnership to End Violence Against Women and to listen to news of their efforts, which have been aided by a Department of Justice grant. The meeting with West, sponsored by Health Promotion Services, was held in Vaden Health Center.

It was something of a reunion for West when he spied SALLY DICKSON, associate vice provost for student affairs. Dickson was associate dean of the Law School when West and his wife, MAYA, attended. Both graduated in 1992. Their daughter, MEENA, graduated from Stanford in 2006. West joked that he credited Dickson with helping him and his wife make it through law school.

West’s visit is part of a yearlong Department of Justice campaign to raise public awareness around issues of violence against women. He said the campaign is intended to “build toward a future where domestic abuse, sexual assault, stalking and dating violence become shameful relics of the past.”

West told students and administrators gathered for the meeting that he wanted to begin the campus tour part of the yearlong campaign at Stanford “because I care deeply about this place and this issue. As the father of a beautiful and talented daughter and a brother to two amazing sisters, the prevention of violence against women is something I’ve cared about for a long time.”

Although progress has been made since the passage of the federal Violence Against Women Act in 1994, West said much work remains.

“Last year, over half a million women age 12 or older were victimized by an intimate partner,” he said. “The sad reality is that today, even 15 years later, domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking and dating violence are still much too prevalent in our homes, our workplaces and on our college campuses.”

West heard presentations from NICOLE BARAN of the Center for Relationship Abuse Awareness and from the center’s student interns. The center is part of the efforts coordinated by Health Promotion Services to draw attention to and curb violence against women. The efforts also include the Sexual Violence Advisory Board, which helps ensure compliance with the university’s policies on sexual assault; the YWCA Sexual Assault Center, a partnership between Stanford and the YWCA Rape Crisis Center of Silicon Valley to assist the community with sexual assault issues; and Men Against Abuse Now, which encourages men to join the movement to end violence against women.

“What you are doing at Stanford is so courageous, so important and so exciting,” West said, adding, “Hat’s off.”

Students streaming to the 12th Annual Midnight Breakfast on Monday, March 8, may have found themselves being served eggs or orange juice by some unexpected smiling but tired faces. Some 40 volunteer administrators, faculty and staff stayed up late to serve students breakfast as part of the annual winter quarter Dead Week tradition.

Midnight Breakfast gives students a late-night calorie boost to help them through the last days of classes, papers and finals. Among the locations serving Midnight Breakfast from 11:30 p.m. to 1 a.m. were Lakeside Dining, Stern Dining, Russo Café and the Axe and Palm. On the menu were cheese omelets, tater tots, bacon and sausage.

Among those participating were TIM WARNER, vice provost for budget and auxiliaries management; SHIRLEY EVERETT, senior associate vice provost for residential and dining enterprises; ERIC MONTELL, executive director of Stanford Dining; DEBORAH GOLDER, associate vice provost and dean of residential education; CHRIS GRIFFITH, associate vice provost and dean of student life; TOM BLACK, registrar; IRA FRIEDMAN, director of Vaden Health Center; and RICK SHAW, dean of undergraduate admission.

Branner Resident Fellow Clyde Moneyhun, director of the Hume Writing Center, left, serves Midnight Breakfast with food service worker Eduardo Alejandres and Florence Moore Resident Fellow Patrick Young, lecturer in computer science. Photo is by Naranja Resident Fellow Kristen Taylor, Mechanical Engineering Design Program administrator.

FRANCIS EVERITT, a research professor at the W.W. Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory, is headed from Stanford to Texas to give a talk Thursday on science and religion. Everitt, the lead scientist on the orbiting experiment known as Gravity Probe B, has been invited by Texas A&M to give the annual Trotter Endowed Lecture.
He’s set to explain how mystery and moral discipline permeate both science and religion, and how reason affects them both in the context of Christian faith. His talk is called “Mystery in Science, Reason in Religion: How the Two Intersect and Overlap.” The Trotter Lecture seeks to reveal connections between science and religion.
The event is a joint lecture, which also will feature Sir Roger Penrose, professor emeritus of mathematics at Oxford.

– Dan Stober

As part of her research on social movements, Sarah Soule, a professor at the Graduate School of Business and a faculty fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, has looked at the movements that have galvanized women, including the Equal Rights Amendment, civil rights, abortion, peace, and education and welfare reform. She also studies the reactions to those movements, particularly the response of law enforcement authorities. In honor of International Women’s Day, the Clayman Institute is focusing on Soule’s work as it relates to women and protests. They’ve produced a video of Soule discussing the gendered responses to women’s confrontations.

Although important maternal and child health advances have been made in recent decades, the World Health Organization estimates that 1,500 women worldwide still die each day from preventable pregnancy-related complications.

In India, where maternal mortality rates are stubbornly high, a handful of states have developed new programs to tackle this challenge by encouraging poor women to deliver their babies in medical facilities rather than at home.

GRANT MILLER, assistant professor of medicine and a core faculty member of the Center for Health Policy/Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research (CHP/CPCOR), has received approximately $1.2 million from the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation to evaluate the efficacy of programs in two Indian states to better align the incentives of maternity care providers with high quality services and good health outcomes.

He and his colleagues Manoj Mohanan of Duke University and Jerry La Forgia of the World Bank will evaluate these new programs in Gujarat and Karnataka, where women below the poverty line receive vouchers for free maternity care in designated hospitals.

“To date there has been little good evidence on the benefits and limitations of these programs, but other Indian states are eager to adopt them,” Miller said.

The full announcement is on the CHP/CPCOR website.

­ – Teal Pennebaker

There is still one more day to check out the Wedding Faire at Stanford Memorial Church. The second day of the Faire takes place on Saturday, March 6, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. The event features cake and flower designers, wedding photographers, and music.

– Photos by L.A. Cicero