CAMPUS CURRENT Faculty News

Faculty Activities
Written by ANNE DULLAGHAN, STEPHANIE L. GRAHAM, LYNDSAY GRAVIS and ELAINE REGUS YERI
Grants Support New Research and More was exhibited in Septem-
Recent grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) ber in a group show en-
and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have helped titled Intelligent Design: Courtesy of RACHEL MA
HMC’s departments of Computer Science, Biology and Engi- Interspecies Art, which she
neering fund vital research, teaching and learning resources. co-curated with UC River-
The “CPATH-2: Modular CS1 from the Inside Out: side’s Sweeney Art Gallery direc-
Computational Thinking for all STEM Students,” headed by tor, Tyler Stallings. Also, Mayeri’s
co-principal investigator and Assistant Professor of Computer work was exhibited at A Foundation, London, at Rochelle




Science Christine Alvarado, seeks to establish a curriculum School (UK), where she taught a workshop called “How to







suitable for any student intending to major in science, Act like An Animal.” Her video installation will be shown at a






mathematics or engineering—including computer science solo exhibition at Pomona College Museum of Art in “Project



students. Alvarado received a three-year, $279,758 grant Series 39: Rachel Mayeri Primate Cinema,” Oct. 31–Dec. 20.








from the NSF and she is one of four principal investigators,






including computer science professors Geoffrey Kuenning, NSF Grant Launches the Collaborative Study of Materials






Ran Libeskind-Hadas and Zachary Dodds. The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of







In addition to the CPATH-2 project award, Kuenning $234,310 to a group of faculty headed by Department of
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received NSF funds this fall for two other projects. He is Chemistry Chair Hal Van Ryswyk for the acquisition of a liq-
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collaborating with Erez Zadok of Stonybrook University to uid chromatograph-ion mass spectrometer (lc-ms). The grant
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study how to reduce the power consumption of storage sys- will fill a gap in equipment at the college used for the char-
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tems—commonly called “disk farms”—in high-end comput- acterization and analysis of materials. The lc-ms allows users
ing installations. Plus, a $100,000 grant will allow Kuenning to isolate molecules in complex mixtures and then determine
to continue running and enhancing a repository for scientific their structure. “We are excited about getting an instrument
data used by file systems researchers (people who study how as sophisticated and powerful as this into the hands of our
to store files efficiently, cheaply and reliably). students,” said Van Ryswyk.
NSF support in the amount of $157,489 for “RUI: Char- The new grant also provides the impetus for an experimen-
acterizing Context Dependent Biases iNucleotide Substitu- tal program of collaboration among HMC, other members
tion,” by Eliot Bush, principal investigator and assistant pro- of The Claremont Colleges and other Southern California
fessor of biology, will help to improve the understanding of schools including Whittier College, the University of Red-
nucleotide substitution by focusing on an aspect that is cur- lands and the University of La Verne.
rently poorly characterized: how the context of neighboring
nucleotides biases substitution. Cancer Studies
Additionally, $192,900 in NIH funding for Elizabeth In an invited talk at the SIAM (Society of Industrial and
Orwin, associate professor of engineering, will allow her Applied Mathematics) annual meeting, Lisette de Pillis
team to continue research on the pioneering “Controlling explained some basics of cancer cells and work she has done
Cell Phenotype in a Tissue-Engineered Corneal Model” modeling the effect of chemotherapy and immunotherapy on
project. Each facet of the tissue-engineered corneal model the progress of the disease. De Pillis described how she and
project gives students exposure to a wide range of research her colleagues have developed models based on ordinary dif-
options. ferential equations, that incorporate tumor cells, host cells,
immune cells and drug interaction. The models have been
Primate Cinema successful keeping patients in a region with a favorable basin
Rachel Mayeri, associate professor of media studies, who of attraction (in which the tumor shrinks) and shifting them
makes videos about the intersection of science and art, re- there, by gathering data on an individual’s immune system
cently exhibited her work in the U.S. and abroad. Her series and using that data to guide the treatment. An article about
of videos explore the on-screen social dramas of human and her research was featured on the front page of the October
nonhuman primates. “Primate Cinema: Baboons as Friends” 2009 SIAM newsletter.
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Harvey Mudd College FALL/WINTER 2009
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