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

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

Appointments

Nii O. Attoh-Okine, professor of civil and environmental engineering and interim academic director of UD’s Cybersecurity Initiative, has been named to the state of Delaware Cyber Security Advisory Council. This council was established by the governor’s office in 2015 and includes a small group of senior advisers from the government, military, industry and academia. Attoh-Okine brings his expertise in cyber resilience of critical infrastructure, blockchain technologies and data science to the council. The Cybersecurity Initiative at UD was established in 2014 as a partnership among the state, the University, federal agencies and the private sector to address cybersecurity problems through education, workforce training and research and development.

Presentations

Jon Cox, assistant professor of art and design, gave a talk Sept. 4 to a sold-out crowd at Longwood Gardens, ”Longwood Lecture Series: Conservation and Culture in the Amazon,” about his experiences in the Amazon as a National Geographic Explorer. Cox is also sharing these stories in an exhibition of his work, “The Ese’Eja People of the Amazon: Connected by a Thread,” on view Oct. 18-Feb. 1, at the Yanke Center, Boise State University in Boise, Idaho. In addition, on Friday, Oct. 26, the multimedia exhibition opening and film screening of “Hadza: The Roots of Equality” opens at the Albert Wisner Public Library in Warwick New York. The exhibit includes screening of the film Hadza: Last of the First and documents Hazda daily life and culture in the savannahs and grasslands of northern Tanzania through photography, an immersive soundscape, text and artifacts.

Hagit Shatkay, professor of computer and information sciences, was the keynote speaker at the 2018 annual Symposium of the Center for Machine Learning and Health (CMLH) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. As part of Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance, the CMLH sponsors research projects on digital healthcare innovation, with the aim of developing new technologies that improve healthcare. The 2018 symposium served as the induction and orientation of the 2018 class of CMLH Fellows. In Shatkay’s talk, titled "Tell Us Something We Don’t Know: Letting the Data Speak via Language Models," she discussed probabilistic generative language models for representing both biomedical text and biomedical and clinical non-textual data in non-traditional ways, enabling the discovery of new information, revealing hitherto unknown relationships and connections, and providing new insight into what the data convey. She discussed work done along with her group of students and collaborators, for developing methods that utilize both text and non-text biological and clinical data toward gaining insight into gene function, protein location, and identifying patterns of co-morbidity in disease.

Philadelphia Contemporary hosted a dialogue between Emory Douglas, minister of culture for the Black Panther Party and the art director and designer of the movement’s newspaper The Black Panther, and Colette Gaiter, professor of art and design, on Oct. 14 at Cherry Street Pier, as part of its Festival for the People, Oct. 14-28. On Oct. 19, Gaiter presented “Seizing the Time: Emory Douglas, 1968, and The Black Panther Newspaper,” at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago.

Honors

Work by Robyn Pendleton-Phillips, associate professor of art and design, has been chosen to appear in the Illustration Research Conference Exhibition in the Ruskin Gallery of the Cambridge School of Art from Nov. 1-27. The exhibition, in connection with the International Research Conference on Nov. 17-18, focuses on the practice, tradition and art forms related to current ornamentation and printed pattern as a meaningful part of illustration and design experience.

Aaron Terry, assistant professor of printmaking, is taking part in the American Color Print Society's annual exhibition at The Plastic Club in Philadelphia, Oct. 7-25.

Peter Williams, professor of art and design, exhibited new work in the prestigious EXPO Chicago 2018, held Sept. 19-22. “Peter Williams: River of Styx,” the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles presented by Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, is slated from Oct. 20 through Dec. 15. The works in River of Styx challenge the viewer to make sense of what they are seeing and confront their own understandings of who we are as a people and a country.

Publications

Heinz-Uwe Haus, professor of theatre, published an essay "Richard Zipser: Remembering East Germany. From Oberlin to East Berlin, online edition 2018: an Afterword" at Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, volume 19, number 2/3 August/December 2018. Zipser's comprehensive English online publication is based on his shorter documentary memoir in German Von Oberlin nach Ostberlin: ein Amerikaner unterwegs in der DDR-Literaturszen (Links Verlag, Berlin 2013).  

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