Newsletter Volume 7 Issue 17 April 28, 2021 |
|
Next week, on Tuesday and not Monday, we will hear Sam Sober talk about his work on how the brain learns complex behavioral skills. The week after that, we will hear about a topic I did not even know existed when Lauren Klein will show how research into eating can tell us much about the people who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States. There is so much history I didn’t learn about when I was growing up, and I am very thankful to learn about it now. I also want to thank Don O’Shea, who is doing an incredible job of preparing the videos of our Colloquiums and other programs for posting on our website. They provide a valuable resource not only for us, but for the broader community.
It is always a joy to celebrate when one of our members wins an award. You can read about Mike Kutner's latest below.
I am very grateful to Gretchen Schulz, Ann Hartle, and Marge Crouse for help with editing and proofing.
|
|
Save the Date! May 20, 2021 2:00-4:00 pm
Emeritus College Annual Awards and New Members Reception
Please scroll to read more below
Lunch Colloquium - Tuesday, May 4
Samuel Sober
"The Songbird and the Mouse: The Neuroscience of Skilled Behavior”
Please scroll to read more below
Lunch Colloquium - Monday, May 10
Lauren Klein
"An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States"
Please scroll to read more below
Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday, April 12
Julie Schwietert Collazo and Rosayra Pablo Cruz
“Shifting the Locus of Power in Immigration Narratives”
Please scroll to read more below
Faculty Activities
Mike Kutner
Please scroll to reach more below
Walking the Campus with Dianne
Please scroll to read more below
|
|
Save the Date! May 20, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. |
|
Our annual Awards and New Members Reception will be Thursday, May 20 at 2:00-4:00 p.m. Normally, this reception would be in Governors' Hall of the Miller-Ward Alumni House, but it will again be on Zoom this year. We will honor many of our members at this reception.
EUEC Faculty Awards of Distinction
It is a great pleasure to announce the award winners for this year. Many thanks to our Awards and Honors Committee for their work in determining the winners of this year's awards. The Committee members for the selection were Donna Brogan, Jim Keller, Marianne Scharbo-DeHaan, and Ron Gould. The recipients this year are:
-
W. Virgil Brown, Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Medicine
-
Sidney Perkowitz, Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Condensed Matter Physics
Heilbrun Distinguished Emeritus Fellowship
-
Rosemary Magee, Director Emerita, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archive, & Rare Book Library
New Members and Donors
We will also recognize members who have joined in the past year and those who have donated to EUEC in the past year. This is a large and fantastic group and we hope many of you will be present to celebrate them!
|
|
Lunch Colloquium - Tuesday, May 4, 2021 |
|
"The Songbird and the Mouse: The Neuroscience of Skilled Behavior”
Samuel Sober
Associate Professor of Biology, Co-Director,
Simons-Emory International Consortium on Motor Control
Lunch Colloquium - Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Humans and animals excel at learning complex behavioral skills. During learning, the brain collects information from the senses to detect errors in behavior and uses this information to rewire itself to improve future performance – a process of “sensorimotor learning” that underlies crucial behaviors such as speaking, walking, and tool use. However, our understanding of how the brain accomplishes such feats of dexterity remains rudimentary due to a lack of tools to measure brain activity and scientific frameworks to understand the complexity of the resulting data. Samuel Sober will discuss the work he and his fellow researchers are doing (in a consortium of eight groups from three countries) that combines neurobiology, mathematics, and technology development to understand how the brain controls skilled behaviors as diverse as birdsong and mammalian locomotion—manifest, indeed, all across the tree of life.
About Samuel Sober:
Dr. Samuel Sober is Associate Professor of Biology, Director of Graduate Studies for the Emory Neuroscience Graduate Program, and President of the Atlanta Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience. Since 2020, he has also been Co-Director of the Simons-Emory International Consortium on Motor Control.
Dr. Sober received his BA from Wesleyan University in 1998 and his PhD from the University of California, San Francisco in 2005.
Work in his lab uses the songbird vocal control system to investigate how the brain controls vocal behavior and learns from experience. This is done by using a range of techniques to describe how neural circuits drive vocal output and are modified by sensorimotor experience. Dr. Sober's work combines physiological recordings from neurons and muscles, behavioral manipulations, and computational approaches to describe the interplay between sensory feedback, motor production, and neural plasticity.
In 2020, the Simons Foundation awarded Dr. Sober and other scientists from Emory and their collaborators $2.5 million to develop new tools to study how the brain controls behavior in vertebrates. Named the Simons-Emory International Consortium on Motor Control, the project brings together eight research groups from three countries that use cutting-edge techniques to explore connections between the firing of neurons and the movement of muscles. Their work spans a range of behaviors in an array of species, from songbirds and monkeys to rats and mice.
Solving mysteries about how the brain and muscles of different animals work together may one day benefit humans dealing with neural system injuries, says Gordon Berman, co-director of the consortium and an Emory assistant professor of biology. Other Emory members of the consortium are Chethan Pandarinath, assistant professor in Emory’s Department of Neurosurgery and in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Ilya Nemenman, professor of physics.
|
|
Lunch Colloquium - Monday, May 10, 2021 |
|
"An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States ”
Lauren Klein
Associate Professor in the Departments of English and
Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University
Lunch Colloquium - Zoom Meeting
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
There is no eating in the archive. This is not only a practical admonition to any would-be researcher but also a methodological challenge, in that there is no eating—or, at least, no food—preserved among the printed records of the early United States. Synthesizing a range of textual artifacts with accounts (both real and imagined) of foods harvested, dishes prepared, and meals consumed, this talk—based on Lauren Klein’s recent book, An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)—will reveal how eating emerged as an aesthetic activity over the course of the eighteenth century and how it subsequently transformed into a means of expressing both allegiance and resistance to the dominant Enlightenment worldview. Accounts of the enslaved men and women who cooked the meals of the nation’s founders help show how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States.
About Lauren Klein:
Lauren Klein is an associate professor in the departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before moving to Emory, she taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Klein works at the intersection of digital humanities, data science, and early American literature, with a research focus on issues of gender and race. She has designed platforms for exploring the contents of historical newspapers, modeled the invisible labor of women abolitionists, and recreated forgotten visualization schemes with fabric and addressable LEDs. In 2017, she was named one of the “rising stars in digital humanities” by Inside Higher Ed. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. Her current project, Data by Design: An Interactive History of Data Visualization, 1786-1900, was recently funded by an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication.
|
|
Report - Lunch Colloquium - Monday, April 12, 2021 |
|
"Shifting the Locus of Power in Immigration Narratives'"
Julie Schwietert Collazo
Co-Founder and Director, Immigrant Families Together (IFT)
Rosayra (Rosy) Pablo Cruz
Guatemalan Immigrant and Activist
At the Lunch Colloquium on Monday, April 12, the co-authors of The Book of Rosy: A Mother’s Story of Separation at the Border (named one of the best nonfiction books of 2020) discussed the experiences that led to the book and what they’ve learned about the need to recast immigration narratives for more just and inclusive storytelling. The program was given in a question-and-answer format with Ms. Schwietert Collazo making introductory remarks about how the project came to be and then interviewing Ms. Pablo Cruz about specific issues related to the project.
In 2018, Ms. Schwietert Collazo and her husband, a Cuban refugee, were inspired to help those detained at the southwestern border under then President Trump’s immigration policies. After hearing a news clip about a lawyer who was providing pro-bono assistance to detainees, they began fundraising to assist his efforts. This effort became IFT, or Immigrant Families Together, a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to reuniting and supporting immigrant families separated at the US/Mexico border. (immigrantfamiliestogether.com).
On April 16, 2018, Ms. Pablo Cruz illegally entered the United States with her two sons, 5 and 15 years old. (Her daughters remained behind with family in Guatemala.) She was assigned to a detention center at the border while her two sons were sent to a facility in New York State. Her bond was set at $12,000, an impossible fee for her to pay (even when it was later reduced to $7,500). Ms. Schwietert Collazo’s organization paid her bond, arranged for transportation and host families on her trip to New York, and provided support services for her and her family once she got there. Plans for The Book of Rosy developed after a book editor read about IFT work of this sort and suggested to Ms. Schwietert Collazo that she propose a book to publicize the work. She and Ms. Pablo Cruz decided to collaborate in telling the story of Ms. Pablo Cruz’s experiences.
Below, I have summarized some of Ms. Schwietert Collazo’s questions in Spanish to Ms. Pablo Cruz and her translation of Ms. Pablo Cruz ’s replies.
JSC: Our book was published during the controversy about American Dirt, a novel that tells the story of a Mexican mother and son’s journey to the border after a drug cartel murders the rest of their family, written by Jeanine Cummins, a non-migrant and non-Mexican accused of “appropriating” story material that was not her own. The two books were often discussed together. You have read that novel (in Spanish). What is your reaction to it and to the larger question of who can tell what stories?
RPC: It is a question of how well a writer who has not had the experiences she is writing about can represent those experiences. One of the barriers to immigrants telling their own stories is that the stories are often weaponized and used against them. But in spite of this fear of repercussions, telling their stories can lead to personal growth and societal growth, as well, as people come to understand the truths behind the stories better.
JSC: Why are asylum seekers unable or reluctant to be clear about their experiences when others ask them to tell their stories?
RPC: Many asylum seekers come from places of low power–as indigenous people, as LBGTQIA individuals, etc.–where not speaking truth to power is a strategy of survival. There are also problems with subtleties of language, with points being lost as non-native speakers try to understand one another. Then too, they often relate their stories without understanding the realities behind the questions they’re being asked, for example the approved reasons for immigration—and the disapproved ones. They may inadvertently phrase something in a way that will prompt refusal of asylum. They also may omit part of their stories out of concern about the safety of those left behind.
JSC: Now you have told your story, how do you deal with your fears for your family in Guatemala and for your children both here and there? And were you fearful of being deported following the publication of the book?
RPC: Confronting fear is not a one-time event, but a continuing process. The questions I keep in mind when confronting fear are, “Who else will be impacted by my actions? Who am I responsible to?” Thus far, I am comfortable with the decisions I have made. [Later, Ms. Pablo Cruz clarified that she has been granted asylum herself and hopes that her two boys, still living with her in New York City, will soon be granted asylum, too.]
JSC: How has reader reaction been to your decision to tell your story?
RPC: Some reactions have been very positive. But I have received messages refuting and criticizing my story, too. Still, the story is my life as lived, so others’ opinions are just opinions. I hope my story will help others—both those who have had experiences similar to mine--and those who haven’t but who may benefit from knowing what it’s like to do so.
In the Q& A with Emeritus College members that followed, Ms. Schwietert Collazo and
Ms. Pablo Cruz replied to questions on a number of issues, including the University of Syracuse’s extensive database on immigration related issues (TRACT), the role of the narcotics trade in driving immigrants out of their home countries (Ms. Pablo Cruz firmly speaks against the legalization of narcotics), and her life now, as a recent graduate of the National Domestic Workers Alliance’s training program, herself working for a family in New York and also advocating on behalf of other asylum-seeking women, helping to ensure they know their rights as workers and assisting them in many other ways, as well.
A final note. Ms. Schwietert Collazo, known still as “Julie” to her former Oxford professors Patti Owen-Smith and Gretchen Schulz, answered their questions about what the organization she co-founded, Immigrant Families Together, is doing now by way of ongoing efforts to assist immigrant parents and their children—those still in Mexico, those who’ve been detained in this country, and those who are out of detention but still in need of help of many kinds. You may wish to visit their website to learn more about their work: https://immigrantfamiliestogether.com/
Unfortunately, as of now, a note on the website says: “We are unable to accept GA donations at this time, as our charity registration as a 501c3 in this state has not yet been finalized.” Let’s hope that changes soon so those of us who might want to donate to the cause will be able to do so.
--Pat Miller
|
|
Michael Kutner
Rollins Professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics
|
|
Michael Kutner is the recipient of the 2021 Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions to the Betterment of Society. This award is offered annually by the American Statistical Association (ASA) to statisticians who, “have made substantial contributions to the statistical profession and to society in general.” The award will be presented at the ASA President’s Address and Founders and Fellows Recognition at the 2021 Joint Statistical Meetings in Seattle, Washington. This award is one of the ASA’s most highly distinguished competitive awards.
Kutner was nominated for the award by Christopher J. Nachtsheim, PhD, from the University of Minnesota. In his nomination letter, Nachtsheim highlighted Kutner’s, “Long-standing commitment to the betterment of society through the application of statistical methods within biomedical research, particularly in the area of clinical trials; the development and dissemination of statistical training for students and researchers across international and interdisciplinary boundaries; and the support and mentoring of the next generation of statistical researchers and collaborators.”
|
|
Walking the Campus with Dianne |
|
|
I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the new construction on our last walk. I'll be sure to get photos of the R. Rollins building once it's completed...maybe even indoors if the pandemic has abated enough to allow us to move more freely.
Let's go back inside for our next walk - to another restroom. This particular place is a bit different from most on campus. It almost has a pleasant, home-like feel to it with the round mirrors and little trash cans on the floor.
|
|
Where will you find this on the Emory campus? |
|
Emory University Emeritus College
The Luce Center
825 Houston Mill Road NE #206
Atlanta, GA 30329
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
