UVM NOTEBOOK
Chris Landry
photo by Sally McCay
Business Sense
Emerging technologies center comes of age
There was no final exam for the graduates of the inaugural class of the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies. The true test of the University-supported small business development program designed to nurture new high-growth, high-tech firms comes after these grads enter the marketplace.
The ceremonial send-off of Bulldog Entertainment Network, a family-friendly, on-line entertainment business, and ElectroCell Technologies, Inc., a company that treats animal waste to reduce farm odor and the environmental impact of wastewater run-off, marks the successful transition from early-stage businesses to more mature companies ready to compete in the private sector.
“This is a concrete symbol that this program is doing what we’d hoped: churning out businesses and creating jobs,” Sen. Patrick Leahy said at the ceremony. “ElectroCell and Bulldog Entertainment have taken unique technologies and applied them to real-world situations. The demand for VCET is already outgrowing its available space. It has proven its worth in the Vermont economy.”
The University could benefit financially and from the creation of new jobs in Vermont. With thousands of graduates leaving each year, diplomas in hand, ready and eager to enter the workforce, far too often the jobs they’ve sought haven’t been close to home. That could change if companies like the recent graduates, or the three new companies that were welcomed to the VCET are successful.
Opened in June 2005 in Farrell Hall on UVM’s Trinity Campus, VCET has since proven successful at leveraging UVM technology, laboratory facilities, and equipment as well as linking client companies to key faculty, staff, and student interns.
Clients also enjoy the benefits of being connected to an extensive network of private sector mentors and advisors and private investment capital resources. Being located in a modern (even hip) 4,000-square-foot facility with eight offices for client companies, four labs, administrative offices, and conference rooms doesn’t hurt.
Apollo SRI, an early stage company hoping to commercialize a UVM-patented technology based on the research of Christopher Landry, an associate professor of chemistry, uses nano materials for filtering pharmaceutical products to achieve high levels of purity.
“I think we’re a little different than some of the clients at VCET because we’re more research-based,” says Landry. “And we don’t have a finished product yet, so it’s tougher for us to utilize some of VCET’s resources. In other ways, though, we’ve needed VCET more than other clients. I don’t have a business background, for example, so VCET put us in touch with local people with business expertise. They gave us some valuable advice on small business grant writing.”
Ultimately, Apollo SRI hopes to claim its piece of the $4.3 billion Chiral drug market. This is exactly the kind of scenario that led Senator Patrick Leahy to secure almost $3.5 million in federal funding for VCET. “The Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies and other Vermont incubators will tap the technology potential that we have in Vermont and transform that into jobs,” says Leahy. “It will be a major factor in growing our economy.”
When VCET originally opened, President Daniel Mark Fogel called it a “watershed moment” for the University. UVM initiatives driven by the Provost’s Office complement VCET’s efforts by helping protect, market, and negotiate the sale of commercially viable intellectual property generated by faculty researchers. The payoff could potentially be significant for the researcher and the University, which has issued nearly 80 invention disclosures and licensed 26 patents in the last three years. VCET will ensure that research papers don’t sit on a shelf unused or leave the state to be developed elsewhere. With UVM’s sponsored projects funding consistently around $120 million annually, the time is ripe to protect and market these ideas.
“This is another demonstration of UVM’s relevance to the economy. Our success will be measured by number of jobs created and capital,” says VCET President Tom Rainey, who recently announced the another important step forward—the addition of more space for VCET tenants off-campus.
—Jon Reidel
President Fogel rebounds, returns to leadership
With a clean bill of health from his doctors and eager to press forward with the momentum that has marked his years at UVM, President Daniel Mark Fogel resumed work on September 22 following a two-month medical leave.
On July 17, President Fogel fell ill with a case of acute pancreatitis following a busy morning of meetings and was transported from his Waterman office to Fletcher Allen Health Care via a UVM Rescue ambulance. Subsequent complications led to a 12-day hospital stay for the president, during which he was placed in the intensive care unit.
Initially, new provost John M. Hughes stepped into the role of acting president. But as President Fogel’s condition worsened and it became clear that he would need an extended recovery period, the Board of Trustees on July 24 appointed former provost John Bramley, Fogel’s administrative partner in leading the progress of the past four years, to serve as acting president.
In mid-September, Fogel anticipated his return to the UVM president’s office with a mixture of gratitude for the support he received during his illness and excitement for the next steps in the University’s future.
“Rachel and I have been deeply moved by the outpouring of affection and support from the campus community, from throughout Vermont, and from alumni and friends of UVM everywhere,” Fogel said. “And I simply can’t say enough about my gratitude to John Bramley, to John Hughes, and to the entire senior leadership team for stepping up so superbly and for really shining in my absence: thanks to them UVM has not missed a beat in pursuit of the Vision.”UVM mourns loss of psychology pioneers Albee and Ansbacher
George Albee and Heinz Ansbacher, two venerable UVM psychology professors who were national leaders in their fields, both passed away this summer. Professor Ansbacher, one of the world’s leading experts on Adlerian psychology and a professor at the University from 1946 to 1970, died on June 22 at age 101. Heinz Ansbacher and his wife, Rowena, were widely credited for advancing Alfred Adler’s work through their clear analysis and writing. Their 1956 book, The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, has been published in 25 editions and remains a key text in the field.
photo by Sally McCay
Just 3 questions
John Hughes, who moved from Ohio’s Miami University to begin work as the University’s provost and senior vice president in July, has a clear vision of his purpose as the University’s chief academic officer: He will help execute the campus’s strategic plan and, more fundamentally, make things better for students and professors. After earning a doctorate at Dartmouth (where, he is quick to point out, he lived on the Vermont side of the Connecticut River), Hughes spent 25 years as a geologist at Miami University, publishing three books and attracting more than $3 million in grants to pursue his research. His work using specialized equipment to study the arrangement of atoms in minerals continues, albeit in the wee hours, even as he launches into his demanding new role.
Q. What is your sense of the challenges and opportunities ahead for the University of Vermont?
A. The challenges are principally fiscal. No area of university income is growing dramatically here or elsewhere; and yet, the cost of doing business does grow dramatically. But fiscal challenges face every university—there is nothing out of the ordinary. As for opportunities, you can count on one hand the number of universities that are adding 81 net new faculty members over a 10-year period as we are. That’s incredibly exciting. We can either transform the University of Vermont or make mistakes that take 30 years to correct. One of the opportunities I’m looking forward to is giving the deans all they need to hire the right people. We will make sure we get the right people here and then just stand back and let them work with the students. We have to make sure we look at very strong and diverse pools. We can’t hire people who look like ourselves in every way. One of the most important things is that we hire people smarter than ourselves. I would hope that every hire we make is the best person in the pool.
Q. Five years from now, what do you hope the UVM community thinks of you as a provost?
A. I guess I wouldn’t want them thinking of me. I would want them thinking of the accomplishments we have made together. I have this strange notion that at the core of a university are those who teach, and those who are taught, and everybody else works for them. If we can form a better partnership with faculty and administrators to support students and faculty, as well as hire the best possible new faculty, I would hope they would just look back and say, “He helped facilitate that.” Help is in there because a provost can’t do it alone; it’s a partnership.
Q. You’ve been involved in universities for your adult life. Why have you chosen to stay in this field?
A. It is the absolute best job in the world. I can’t wait to get to work in the morning, and I work too late at night because it’s so much fun. I’ve been involved in education since I was at Happy Hill Nursery School at age 4, and I haven’t left that world yet, and I never want to. When I was not in administration, my job was to come in every morning and work with bright 18-to-30-year-olds. The National Science Foundation gave me millions of dollars of toys to play with them with. I worked in a park-like setting, my hours were my own, and the cost of doing that was standing up in front of a group of people and talking with them about something that I love. There could be no better job. As I moved into administration, I continued my research, and I continue it now. As an administrator, I enjoy facilitating all the positive things about higher education for others. I hope my feelings are infectious: I hope that everybody at UVM is as excited about higher education as I am.
Root questions
After spending all summer meticulously growing and studying legumes in a lab, it’s no wonder junior Melanie Lloyd wasn’t looking forward to the start of classes this fall. But it wasn’t a break from school Lloyd was craving; she was going to miss her research. Recipient of a 2006 American Society of Plant Biologists Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship, which came with a $3,000 stipend to support her studies, Lloyd was “ecstatic” to stay on campus this summer.
Since her first week at UVM two years ago, the plant biology major has been reporting to the same lab to study rhizobium, a bacteria, and Medicago truncatula, a legume, and the interaction between them that gives the legume its nitrogen-fixing capability through the creation of nodules on the plant’s root. In order to understand this symbiotic relationship more thoroughly, Lloyd studies the process when it doesn’t work by conducting research on a mutation of the plant—nicknamed Eve—which exhibits super-nodulation, an unexpectedly high growth in nodules on the legume’s root.
Understanding the interaction is important because legumes “are a huge part of the agricultural industry,” explains Lloyd. The nitrogen-fixing process, which enables the legume to make its own fertilizer, also has important agricultural—as well as environmental—implications.
Jeanne Harris, professor of botany and Lloyd’s advisor, explains that while the manufacturing of fertilizer puts a large demand on fossil fuels to attain the high temperatures and pressure required to make fertilizer, “Bacteria are doing it at room temperature and pressure.” Unlocking the secrets to that process could lead to increased energy efficiency in the industry.
While Lloyd’s endeavors may advance research in agricultural and environmental studies, they are sure to benefit her own future as well. Winning the fellowship also means making a trip to Chicago next summer to attend the plant biologists’ annual conference where Lloyd will present a poster on her research along with the other 2006 winners.
“The impact this will have on (Melanie’s education) is going to be enormous,” Harris says. “The experience of doing something as opposed to just studying about it in a class is so important.”
—Amanda Waite ’02 G’04
photo by Sally McCay
Historic home for Arts & Sciences
Hollywood got first crack at renovating the big brick house at 438 College Street, directly behind the Waterman Building. They did some cosmetic surgery—a little landscaping, interior sprucing—enough to create the illusion of a faculty club for the minutes of film that were pared down to seconds of movie in the 2000 mystery/ thriller What Lies Beneath, filmed on location in Burlington and elsewhere in the Champlain Valley.
Sharp-eyed viewers can see the house when Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer stroll up the walk and dine at the club in a scene before the movie gets on to its spookier business. Years after 438 College’s supporting part, it has finally landed a starring role at UVM as the new administrative home for the College of Arts and Sciences. The renovated facility brings the college Dean’s Office, student support staff, computing services, and the Dewey Honors Program all together into one central space.
The extensive, historically accurate renovation restored the century-old building to its original design with beautiful interior woodwork, stained glass windows, and tile fireplaces in some rooms. In keeping with UVM’s campus-wide green building policy, modernization of the old house’s systems were made following sustainable design guidelines from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design rating system.
The house at 438 College was originally built by Edward and Ina Booth, a prominent Burlington family who had made their living in the lumber business. Mr. Booth was also a Burlington alderman, organizer of the Chittenden Trust Company, and “zealous Republican,” according to one bio. The University purchased the house in 1997 from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington, which had used the building as a convent for many years beginning in the 1950s.
—Thomas Weaver
Quote unquote
One of the questions Trina Magi, a member of UVM’s library faculty, has fielded in her career as a reference librarian. To introduce her closing reflection at UVM’s 2006 convocation ceremony, Magi listed some of the most memorable queries she’s heard. Her message: Embrace the way of the interrogative. “It’s not always easy to ask questions,” Magi said, “but it’s the smart people who do.”
Coffee curriculum
Mark Starrett puts a megaphone to his mouth. “We’ve got free coffee plants over here. Come and get one,” he broadcasts to the hundreds of students milling on the green near Chittenden Hall.
Facing toward Starrett’s table, students stand patiently, many in Jackie Onassis-style sunglasses. Some look nervous in the sharp summer sun. Others blissful. It’s Opening Weekend and this is the Class of 2010 Picnic.
Starrett, associate professor of plant and soil science, is the force behind the nearly 2,500 coffee seedlings—one for every first-year student—stacked in a nearby van. On the table, a tiny forest of waxy green plants is getting snatched up quickly as Horticulture Club president Sarah White ’07 replenishes the stock.
“Welcome to UVM,” the label on each pot reads, “just like you will graduate in 4 years, this coffee plant will grow beans in 4 with proper care and feeding!”
Lines snake out from an inflatable fun house and a Ben and Jerry’s station. Starrett laughs. “Our line is longer than ice cream,” he says, turning to White. “Longer than ice cream!”
Under Starrett’s supervision, students in the club seeded and tended the coffee all summer. Their reward: handing out plants to delighted (and sometimes bewildered) freshmen.
“Will this grow into hazelnut flavor?” one student asks.
“My room is all white,” says Bryan Elliott ’10, “except for this plant.”
More than a publicity stunt, Starrett is developing a multidisciplinary course about coffee that will range from conservation issues (like “bird-safe” plantations) to caffeine biology. “We’d like to recruit additional students,” says Deborah Neher, chair of the Plant and Soil Science Department, “and Mark had a great idea: ‘What plant would college students really relate to? Coffee.’”
“We’re greening UVM,” Starrett says, smiling out at all the young people, “one dorm room at a time.”
—Joshua Brown
UVM SHELFLIFE
Steinway's grand
Sylvia Parker's new CD features UVM's fine piano
When Sylvia Parker, senior lecturer of music, spent a long day in fall 2002 at the Steinway factory in Queens, New York, test driving nine pianos for the Music Department, she didn’t know she also was helping choose the piano that would make it possible to record her first album.
Parker and colleagues in the Music Department David Neiweem and Paul Orgel along with Frederick Johnson Pianos, Inc. co-owner Dale Howe ’64 traveled to Queens in search of a concert grand piano, a purchase made possible by a generous donation from former Interim President Edwin Colodny. The quality of UVM’s new “Colodny Steinway” would, in turn, make possible the recording of Parker’s first CD, Bartok, Griffes, Mozart, D. Scarlatti, Sylvia Parker, Piano, on Centaur Records.
Parker had considered publishing an album from her recordings in the past, only to have discovered that out of 20 years of recorded concerts, not one tape was free of some sort of blemish. “It was just amazing,” she exclaims. “This one was just gorgeous until I had that memory slip in the last movement. And this one was wonderful, but I played an F instead of an F sharp there. And somebody in the audience coughed and sniffled, and there was a siren in the background on that one.”
So when the carefully selected Steinway concert grand, one of the best instruments in the world, became available to her, Parker seized the opportunity to record a CD. “It was definitely the piano that made it possible. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing it without that piano.”
Parker contacted Charles Eller of Charles Eller Studios in Charlotte, who traveled to Southwick with an “entire truckload of equipment,” says Parker, including microphones, computers, walkie-talkies, and speakers.
The equipment was so sensitive that Parker had to arrange a moratorium on nearby campus construction noise during their sessions or risk ending up with “very expensive recordings of a truck.”
Now, at the end of this two-year process, Parker feels grateful that Edwin Colodny chose the gift that he did.
“His donation was incredible. What a gift that was to the whole University, not just to my project, which never could have happened without it, but to the Lane Series, to all the artists we bring in, to our Music Department programs, to the reputation of UVM as a place where high-quality music events can occur because we have this wonderful instrument.”
—Amanda Waite ’02 G’04The Truth is Our Weapon: The Rhetorical Diplomacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles
Chris Tudda ’87, Louisiana State University Press
This critical look at the diplomatic strategies of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles offers new insight into the delicate peace of the Cold War period. Basing his work on recently discovered primary sources from the United States, England, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, U.S. Department of State historian Tudda contrasts the administration’s anti-communistic rhetoric with on-the-ground policies in Europe.
The Civil Rights Revolution: Events and Leaders 1955-1968
Frederic O. Sargent, McFarland & Company
Fred Sargent might be retired, but he hasn’t stopped working. The Civil Rights Revolution, the fourth book this professor emeritus of agriculture and resource economics has written since retiring 20 years ago, examines the non-violent, church-centered civil rights movement that abolished segregation in 11 states. Sargent claims that apartheid, which most commonly refers to the racist social system in South Africa, is the best term for the level of segregation employed and experienced in the U.S. South, a fact that he says America has never fully confronted.
Tuf as a Boiled Owl
Kenena Hansen Spalding ’53, AuthorHouse
Kenena Hansen Spalding, keeper of a stack of family letters written by Proctor Swallow, Civil War soldier serving in the Seventh Vermont Volunteer Regiment, began transcribing the collection, passed down through four generations, to share with her children and grandchildren. What she found was the story of a soldier who enlisted expecting to fight alongside fellow Vermonters in Virginia but who ended up in the Gulf of Mexico. While other Vermont soldiers celebrated the end of the war in the streets of Washington, D.C., Swallow was stationed along the Rio Grande River in Texas and was among the last of the troops to return to Vermont. His letters reveal the thoughts and observations of an average soldier, curious about the rest of the war and missing family at home.
(for UVM staff)