FYI

Homerin

Emil Homerin, chair of the Department of Religion and Classics and associate professor of religion, has received a travel and study fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his work editing and translating an influential manuscript of Islamic mystical theology. He will spend four months at the American Research Center in Egypt and also will travel to Turkey to research a commentary by the 14th-century mystic and scholar al-Qaysri.

Patrick Macey, associate professor of musicology at the Eastman School, recently was awarded the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize by the Renaissance Society of America for his book Bonfire Songs: Savonarola's Musical Legacy. The book, published in 1998 by Oxford University Press, explores music in Florence, Italy, in the 1490s during the time of Lorenzo de' Medici and the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola.

Raffaella Borasi, Frederica Warner Professor and senior associate dean at the Warner School, has co-authored a book with Marjorie Siegel, associate professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. The book, titled Reading Counts: Expanding the Role of Reading in Mathematics Classrooms (Teachers College Press, 2000), explores how reading can be integrated successfully into the teaching of inquiry-oriented mathematics.

Weather, battery life, and even the way a lawn grows are all linked by four mathematical laws, according to a paper published recently in Physical Review Letters. Co-authors Yonathan Shapir, associate professor of physics, and Jacob Jorné, professor of chemical engineering, have shown how natural cyclical events, such as seasonal weather, generate very specific patterns--the same patterns that govern the geometric images called fractals.

In a paper published in a recent issue of Science, a Rochester team has contributed to an expanding worldwide effort to use increasingly sensitive chemical tools to look for signs of past life in remote places. The Rochester scientists announced that they were able to re-create in the laboratory chemical signatures that were previously thought to be produced only by living organisms. Ariel Anbar, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences and chemistry, is the study's lead investigator.

A clinical trial examining the safety and efficacy of subantimicrobial dose doxycycline (SDD) in conjunction with scaling and root planing (SRP) in the treatment of adult periodontitis has found that SDD significantly improved the results of SRP, the nonsurgical standard of care for adult periodontitis, a condition that may be linked to heart attack, stroke, and diabetes. The results of the study were published in the April issue of the Journal of Periodontology; Jack Caton, professor of periodontology at the Eastman Dental Center, is the study's lead investigator.

The Memorial Art Gallery has received a 2000 Conservation Support grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The $50,000 award--the largest conservation grant in MAG's history--will help preserve the gallery's collection of works on paper by funding a compact mobile storage system for the collection, which comprises 3,500 prints, drawings, paintings, photographs, and manuscripts.

The University/WXXI-TV collaborative Echoes From the Ancients will be in the national spotlight the first week of June as world leaders in information technology gather to honor "Innovators of the 21st Century." Production members of the PBS documentary about excavations at Yodefat, Israel, were named finalists in the education and academia category for a Computerworld Smithsonian Award, which recognizes vision and leadership in using information technology to benefit society.

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