For the Record provides information about recent professional activities of University of Delaware faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Recent honors, media, presentations and publications include the following:

Honors

The University of Delaware’s Randall Duncan and Millicent Sullivan have been elected to the College of Fellows at the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). Duncan, professor of biological sciences and mechanical engineering, was cited for outstanding contributions to understanding of mechanotransduction and the functional response of bone to mechanical strain. Sullivan, the Centennial Junior Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, was recognized for outstanding contributions to the development of new materials for gene and drug delivery. The AIMBE College of Fellows represents the most accomplished and distinguished medical and biological engineers responsible for innovation and discovery.

Dan Rich, University Professor of Public Policy and director of the University’s Community Engagement Initiative, has been named the 2017 recipient of the John H. Taylor Jr. Education Leadership Award for his sustained leadership in advancing education in Delaware. Rich, who received the Order of the First State in November, has been instrumental in advocating for early childhood education, educational opportunities for low-income students statewide and increased access to higher education. The Taylor Award will be presented by The Partnership Inc., the nonprofit education affiliate of the Delaware State Chamber of Commerce, at this year’s Superstars in Education ceremony and reception. The event begins at 4:45 p.m., Monday, May 8, at Wilmington University; for more information and to register, visit the website.

A team of four University of Delaware students won awards at the Princeton Hack-a-thon on April 1-2. Their project, Olli Recalli, won “Best DIY Project” and “Best Use of Watson IoT - sponsored by IBM.” They combined the capabilities of self-driving shuttle bus Olli and IBM’s Watson to develop a system that alerts passengers of items inadvertently left behind. When the bus stops, a light-sensitive resistor on the seat checks to see whether the passenger has left and then uses a camera to take a picture of the luggage storage area underneath the seat. The picture is sent to Watson, which checks to see if the space is empty or if an object is there. If Watson finds something, it identifies the type and color of the object and alerts passengers as to what was left behind. The team of Mark Seda, Jonathan Wood, Liz Strobel and Aric Lu now plans to scale up their solution to work with multiple devices and then collaborate with IBM and Olli to implement the technology.

Yuqing Wang, who earned her Master of Arts in Liberal Studies degree in 2015, has earned recognition from ProQuest for her thesis, “Behind South Korean Cosmetic Surgery: Its historical causes and its intertwined relationship with Korean pop culture.” The thesis, which Wang completed under the direction of D. Heyward Brock, professor of English, was among ProQuest’s top 25 most-accessed dissertations and theses during February 2017. ProQuest is the repository for theses and dissertations from more than 700 universities and contains some 2 million documents.

"Ilustrados y Afrancecados: A Session in Honor of Prof. Theodore E. D. Braun" was held at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, March 30-April 2, in Minneapolis. The session honored work by Braun, professor emeritus of French and comparative literature, in establishing and helping to forward the goals of the Ibero-American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Braun offered his "Reflections on my Life," in which he spoke of his extremely impoverished origins, his education and academic awards, such as a scholarship to attend Bishop Loughlin High School and a full-tuition scholarship to attend Teachers College of St. John's University where he was to become the valedictorian. Braun also discussed his career as a high school teacher at his alma mater and at the Lycée Emile-Loubet in Valence, France, his work at the Army Education Center in Ludwigsburg, Germany, as a graduate student and teaching assistant at the University of California at Berkeley, and his career as assistant and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and professor at the University of Delaware. Also, he discussed his establishing and endowing an award for French undergraduate and graduate students at UD and a travel grant for French researchers with the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He also discussed some of his of his teaching, scholarship and service activities, and aspects of his personal life, including his marriage and his fatherhood.

Media

Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, was featured on WHYY-TV, Philadelphia's PBS television station, on the First program for March 31. In addition, she was heard on the Newsworks program on 90.9 FM, WHYY's NPR radio station, also on March 31. Both interviews were conducted by WHYY correspondent Shirley Min in conjunction with her reports on the exhibition "Victorian Passions: Stories from the Mark Samuels Lasner," which Stetz curated, and which opened on Feb. 14. The exhibition will remain on view in the Special Collections Gallery of UD's Morris Library until June 3. A permanent online version of the exhibition can also be accessed on the University of Delaware Library's website.

Presentations

Meredith K. Ray, professor of Italian in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, discussed her new book Margherita Sarrocchi’s Letters to Galileo: Astronomy, Astrology and Poetics in 17th Century Italy on April 10 at Harvard University.

Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, was the keynote speaker on April 8 at the first academic conference ever devoted to the life and writings of the Irish author, "George Egerton" (Mary Chavelita Dunne, 1859-1945). Her lecture, "Turning Over a New Leaf from the Yellow Book: 'George Egerton' and Life-Writing," was a re-evaluation of the only published biography of Egerton, as well as an account of her own critical work on Egerton's life and legacy as a "New Woman" of the late-Victorian period. The conference, "George Egerton and the Fin de Siècle," was held at Loughborough University, U.K. It was sponsored by the British Association for Victorian Studies; the Cultural Currents (1870-1930) Research Group; and Loughborough University's School of the Arts, English, and Drama.

Heinz-Uwe Haus, professor of theatre, chaired The Wangen ISSEI Symposium 2017 held March 30-April 1 in Zurich, Switzerland, and presented a talk on “The Revolution of 1989/90 and the Idea of Atlantic Community.”

Theodore E. D. Braun, professor emeritus of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, presented "Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac: A Model for Fontenelle, Swift, and Voltaire?" at Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Montgomery, Alabama, March 2-4, and "Cyrano de Bergerac: Precursor of Swift and Voltaire" at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Minneapolis, March 30-April 2. Also at the Minneapolis event, Braun organized and chair a session on “Science Fiction – II.”

Publications

An article by Mary P. Watson’s research group in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was published in March in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and was more recently highlighted on the blog “In the Pipeline,” part of Science Translational Medicine journal. The article describes a strategy the researchers developed for a new carbon-carbon bond-forming reaction. “We organic chemists just cannot get enough of these things,” blogger Derek Lowe wrote of the reaction. Authors of the journal article were Corey H. Basch, Jennie Liao, Jianyu Xu, Jacob J. Plane and Watson. The group, Watson said, is excited about the potential of their discovery to contribute to the discovery of new bioactive molecules.

Heinz-Uwe Haus, professor of theatre, has published Did this Path Have a Heart or How to Die in the Most Inspiring Pose in: Lumina Lina, The Romanian Institute of Orthodox Theology and Spirituality, AN XXI/Nr. 4, New York.

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