IN BRIEF

CAMPUS NEWS

On March 18, The College of New Jersey will become the new home of ParkinSong, a concert whose proceeds will benefit Parkinson’s disease research.

Trenton-area native and popular stage, film, and television actor Richard Kind, who starred in the sitcom Spin City with Michael J. Fox, whose own struggles with Parkinson’s are well known, will host.  Featured artists will include Sara Hickman, Kelly Willis, Chuck Prophet, and Ana Egge.

The show will begin at 7 p.m. in the Mildred & Ernest E. Mayo Concert Hall (in the Music Building), with a patrons’ reception in the Social Sciences Building to follow at 10 pm.

This will be the third ParkinSong concert held in recent years. The event is the brainchild of siblings Rob Litowitz, Debra Litowitz Frank, and Carol Litowitz Golden, who originally thought up the concept as a unique way to honor their parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Their mother, Selma, a 1950 alumna of New Jersey State Teachers College at Trenton (now TCNJ), was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the body’s central nervous system, in 1991.This year’s ParkinSong will be a memorial tribute to Selma, who lost her battle with the disease in December 2005.

For more information on the concert series and its accompanying CD compilation, please visit www.parkinsong.com. Tickets can be purchased at www.ticketweb.com or by calling 866.468.7619.

The Trenton Computer Festival, the oldest and largest personal computer show and sale in the world, is scheduled for Saturday, April 28 and Sunday, April 29 at TCNJ.  Organizers expect a large turnout of local, regional, and international visitors. The brainchild of Sol Libes of the Amateur Computer Group of New Jersey and Allen Katz, professor of electrical/computer engineering at TCNJ, the Trenton Computer Festival, the first-ever computer festival of its kind, began in 1976. For more information, including a full schedule of events and ticket prices/advance tickets, please visit http://www.tcf-nj.org.

FACULTY AND STAFF

Donna Sayers Adomat, assistant professor of literacy in the department of special education, language, and literacy, won the American Educational Research Association's Outstanding Dissertation Award for Literature. Nominations were invited for dissertations that deal with research, evaluation, and scholarship in educational leadership preparation and development, and the impact of preparation on leadership practice. 

Susan Bakewell-Sachs, dean of the School of Nursing, Health and Exercise Science, was selected by the March of Dimes as the 2007 Reality Awards Amazing Race Winner for her work as a nurse, an educator, an author, and an advocate. The Reality Awards is a statewide recognition of maternal child health nurses. 

Deborah Compte, associate professor of Spanish, and Simona Wright, professor of Italian and chair of the modern languages department Chair, attended the 38th NeMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) Conference held in Baltimore, March 1-4. Compte presented a paper entitled “Lope de Vega's Peasant Heroines: Figures of Agency and Exemplarity.” Wright chaired a session on Italian Theater and contributed to a roundtable discussion, “Teaching Italian and Italian Culture,” by presenting: “Conversation Hour: An Experiment in the Making.”

Jo-Ann Gross, professor of history, will present a lecture on March 8 at All Souls College, Oxford University on "Shrines and Sacred History in Tajikistan: Oral Tradition and Cultural Geography." In addition, Professor Gross recently published a chapter entitled, "The Naqshbandiya Connection: From Central Asia to India and Back (16th-19th Centuries)" in India and Central Asia: Commerce and Culture, 1500-1800.

Alejandra Irigoin, professor of history, has been invited to present a paper, "The End of a Silver Era: The Global Consequences of the Breakdown of the Spanish Silver Peso Standard" at the Stern School of Business at NYU on February 23.

Jack Kirnan was recently welcomed as the interim dean of the School of Business. Kirnan comes from Rutgers University’s School of Business, where he served as senior director of MBA programs. He also brings a wealth of professional experience derived from his work at Schwab, Credit Suisse First Boston, Salomon Smith Barney, Kidder Peabody, Merrill Lynch, and Texaco.

Jess Row, assistant professor of English, is one of the writers included in the upcoming issue of Granta’s Best American Novelists 2. Every 10 years, Granta, "the magazine of new fiction," devotes a special issue recognizing promising fiction writers. In this issue, Jess Row joins company with established authors Nell Freudenberger, Anthony Doerr, Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart, and many more.

Qin Shao, professor of history, has been awarded a residential fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University for 2007-2008. The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program is a highly competitive program that has provided yearlong residencies to more than 300 award-winning writers, artists, scientists and other scholars. The Institute sustains a continuing commitment to the study of women, gender and society.

Thulsi Wickramasinghe, associate professor of physics, has begun a collaboration with Dr. Michael Mumma, director of the Astro-Biology Institute at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. They will work on a project to investigate the possibility of the existence of microbial life on Mars. Two physics majors, sophomore Justin Nieusma and senior John Gannon, will be a part of the study. The group traveled to NASA last month to begin the research.

Morton Winston, professor of philosophy and religion, was recently awarded his third Fulbright Scholarship after being named the Danish Distinguished Chair in Human Rights and International Relations at the Danish Center for Human Rights in Copenhagen. The award will bring Winston to Denmark, where he will conduct research on human rights in Eastern Europe.

STUDENTS

Monique Reuben, junior English major, has won a coveted summer internship with the American Society of Magazine Editors. The internship program allows a select number of college juniors nationwide to spend 10 weeks working for a national consumer or business magazine, while providing them with mentoring and other career-enhancing experiences.

Andrew Grant, a senior physics major with a minor in journalism, has received early acceptance and a scholarship from NYU’s prestigious graduate program for science journalists. Andrew, editor-in-chief of The Signal, is the third journalism student in the past  two years to be accepted into this highly competitive program.