Steven H. Zeisel, institute director and Kenan Distinguished University Professor in nutrition and pediatrics in the Gillings School of Global Public Health and the School of Medicine, will pursue an innovative global health and development research project titled “Choline and Optimal Development.”

The proposed research on choline and brain development is a collaboration among Zeisel, Carol Cheatham, assistant professor of psychology in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Andrew Prentice, scientific director of the Medical Research Council’s Keneba field station in Gambia, Africa.

Grand Challenges Explorations funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in solving persistent global health and development challenges. Zeisel’s project is one of more than 100 Grand Challenges Explorations Round 8 grants announced May 9 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Zeisel is credited with the discovery of choline’s role as an essential nutrient, particularly for fetal and infant development.  His research indicates that women need to eat diets adequate in choline, which is found in foods such as eggs, to assure optimal brain development in their infants.  In addition, several common genetic misspellings, called SNPs, make some women require especially high amounts of choline in their diets. Dietary choline intake in young women is low in low- and middle-income countries and perhaps increasing maternal intake of choline will enhance brain development, as measured by memory function tests, in children.

The Grand Challenges Explorations grant will enable Zeisel and colleagues to design a diet intervention that can be implemented in Gambia, where diet intake of choline is less than half the recommended Adequate Intake. First, investigators at the UNC institute will develop methods for testing infant memory that will work when used in the field in Africa. Also, researchers will test solar-powered instruments for studying brainwaves in infants. These methods will be tested in a study of pregnant women and their babies in Kannapolis. At the same time, the team will conduct studies to determine which of the SNPs in genes of choline metabolism are common in Gambia. The data generated from these studies will enable Zeisel and colleagues to design and implement an intervention that assures adequate intake of choline in a population in Gambia and assess whether this enhances brain development.

Grand Challenges Explorations is a $100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The UNC Nutrition Research Institute, located o the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, is dedicated to developing the field of individualized nutrition — understanding why people have different metabolism and nutrient requirements.

The 2012-13 recipients are Christopher Nelson (anthropology), Donald M. Reid (history) and Susan R. Wolf (philosophy).

They will join 30 other distinguished scholars from 16 states, the District of Columbia, and the countries of Canada, France, Hungary, Japan and the United Kingdom to receive grants from the Center, which is located in Research Triangle Park. The grants support individual research projects across multiple disciplines, including history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, art history, classics, linguistics, musicology, religion and Scandinavian studies.

The College faculty members’ research projects and their named fellowships are:

• Nelson (the ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship): “Dreaming of the Dragon King: Trauma, Madness and Creative Action in Contemporary Japan”
• Reid (the John G. Medlin Jr. Fellowship): “The Factory is Where the Workers Are: Constructing Democracy and Community Chez Lip”
• Wolf (the William C. and Ida Friday Fellowship): “Values and Well-Being.”

The National Humanities Center is a privately incorporated independent institute for advanced study in the humanities. Since 1978, the Center has awarded fellowships to more than 1,200 scholars in the humanities.

SITI Company members in 'Who Do You Think You Are'

PlayMakers Repertory Company, the professional theater in residence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is hosting renowned theater ensemble SITI Company (New New York, N.Y.) as the second participant in a three-year residency program.

SITI Company is developing a performance piece entitled “Who Do You Think You Are” with artistic, technical and administrative support provided by PlayMakers. The ensemble will stage the theatrical work-in-progress at 7:30 p.m., May 18 at Frey Rehearsal Hall in the Center for Dramatic Art on Country Club Road.

Presented in collaboration with the Process Series, this dramatic exploration of the principles of brain science uses the structure and aesthetics of the Rainer Werner Fassbinder film “Katzelmacher” as a jumping off point to present a society that is complex, repressed and verging on domestic violence. The piece had its inception in conversations between SITI Company founder Anne Bogart and former UNC associate professor of psychiatry R. Grant Steen.

SITI Company is at PlayMakers for two weeks as part of a residency program that provides support for the company’s creative “research and development” with access to PlayMakers’ professional staff, production shops, rehearsal halls, performance spaces and the intellectual resources of UNC. SITI will then take its creation, devised from the mediums of theater, dance, performance art, video, visual art, music and other imaginative influences, and incubated at PlayMakers, on to performances around the world.

The showing of “Who Do You Think You Are” is free and open to the public however space is limited and based on availability. To reserve seats email PRCresidencies@gmail.com.

It is presented as part of the current season of the Process Series, a program dedicated to the development of new and significant works in the performing arts to area audiences and the UNC community.  As with all Process Series events, a discussion with the creative artists will follow.

The PlayMakers residency is supported by a $200,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funding three annual residencies by theater ensembles. The grant also supports the Innovate@Carolina Campaign, a $125 million drive to help make Carolina a world leader in launching university-born ideas for the good of society. To learn more about the campaign, visit innovate.unc.edu.

SITI Company is a unique organization committed to providing a “gymnasium-for-the-soul” where the interaction of art, artists, audiences and ideas inspire the possibility for change, optimism and hope. To learn more, visit www.siti.org.

Based in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, PlayMakers is the Carolinas’ premiere resident professional theater company. The Drama League of New York has named PlayMakers one of the best regional theaters in America. Ticket packages are currently available for PlayMakers’ 2012-2013 season. For more on the new season, visit www.playmakersrep.org.

The Process Series is a program of Carolina Performing Arts, co-sponsored by the department of communication studies. For more information, visit www.carolinaperformingarts.org/process-series.

Handa is chair of the public policy department in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also is a fellow of the Carolina Population Center.

The grants were awarded by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation, or 3ie, an organization devoted to improving lives in low and middle-income countries through better policies, programs and projects based on results from impact studies. The organization has offices in New Delhi, London and Washington, D.C.

Handa won two of 10 grants awarded out of 220 applicants. A third grant was awarded to Amber Peterman (Ph.D. ’09), who was advised by Handa.

In both Malawi and Zimbabwe, Handa will examine the governments’ social cash transfer programs, investigating the economic impact of cash transfers on target households and the local community. He will address issues such as the impact of cash transfers on HIV risk, child protection and human capital. In Malawi, for example, the government provides direct payments of cash — on average $13 a month — to families identified as extremely poor and labor-constrained.

Handa is a former social policy adviser for UNICEF’s Eastern and Southern Africa regional office in Nairobi, Kenya. His areas of research focus are poverty, population and human resource economics, social policy and safety nets, and applied development microeconomics.

For details on both projects, visit http://www.3ieimpact.org/funded.html?id=75 and http://www.3ieimpact.org/funded.html?id=77.

Ransohoff, who also is pursuing a minor in environmental science, is from Chapel Hill. Her essay is titled: “The Ethical Issues of Energy Dependence: Slavery in 1850s America and Oil Today.” Winners receive a $5,000 cash prize and a trip to New York to meet Elie Wiesel.

“Sarah has written a brilliant, truly innovative paper,” said Joseph T. Glatthaar, Stephenson Distinguished Professor of History. “When I first read it, I was enthralled by the depth and perceptiveness of her argument.  It is bold, persuasive and skillfully written.  She has earned every bit of this great honor and does great credit to our University.

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity has hosted an annual ethics essay contest since 1989, urging young people to analyze the urgent ethical issues confronting them in today’s complex world. Since that time, thousands of undergraduate students from hundreds of colleges and universities across the nation have participated. Students are judged for their clear articulation of an ethical dilemma, tightly focused and well-researched writing, originality and imagination, eloquence of writing style, and intensity and unity in the essay.

Elie Wiesel was 15 years old when he and his family were deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz. His mother and younger sister perished, his two older sisters survived. Elie and his father were later transported to Buchenwald, where his father died shortly before the camp was liberated in April 1945.

After the war, Elie Wiesel studied in Paris and later became a journalist. He wrote about his experience in the death camps in his internationally acclaimed memoir, Night (La Nuit), which has since been translated into more than 30 languages.

Read a copy of Ransohoff’s award-winning essay: http://www.eliewieselfoundation.org/2012prizewinners.aspx.

New Directions Fellowships assist faculty members in the humanities who seek to acquire training outside their disciplines. According to the Mellon Foundation, the awards are long-term investments in faculty members’ “intellectual range and productivity” and enable strong scholars “to work on problems that interest them most.”

Williams, a native of Jamaica, came with her family to New York at age 11. Thousands of Jamaicans immigrated to the United States in the 1950s and ‘60s for better jobs and educational opportunities. The Civil Rights Act and removal of immigration quotas made their migration possible.

This summer, she will begin interviewing immigrants, including family members, and telling their full stories, including their consciousness of race.

“Jamaica is 98 percent black,” she said. “How was being black different in Jamaica than in the Civil Rights-era United States? What was the emotional adjustment like, being tagged in a different way?”

Williams will be taking coursework on filmmaking, oral history, the sociology of immigration and an anthropology course on life stages.

She is the author of “Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery” (forthcoming in June from UNC Press) and “Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom” (2005, UNC Press). For a story about her newest book, visit http://college.unc.edu/2012/05/02/helpmefindmypeople/. For an interview about her New Directions Fellowship, visit http://history.unc.edu/an-interview-with-heather-williams.

UNC historian Heather Williams is pictured with a quilt she made for the cover of her new book. (photo by Mary Lide Parker)

Thornton Copeland placed an “information wanted” advertisement in the Colored Tennessean after the Civil War, 21 years after being sold away from his mother. Just five sparse lines of text make up the ad, and all Copeland knows is his mother’s first name. UNC historian Heather Williams found around 1,200 of these ads in newspapers published by African Americans after the war. She tells these stories of hope and loss, love and longing in her new book, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (UNC Press, June 2012).

Williams began initially running across the ads while doing research for her dissertation. (She finished graduate school in 2002). After a few months, she had collected 400 of them. She began to piece together slaves’ stories, using census data, journals, letters, government documents and slave narratives. She writes in the book’s introduction that after several years of working on the book, “I am still touched by the stories of people’s stubborn efforts to find their families.”

Thornton Copeland's "Information Wanted" ad. Colored Tennessean, Oct. 7, 1865

“I just found them really powerful,” Williams said. “Here are these people, and they are telling you so much in just a few lines. They are telling you about who they lost; sometimes they lost a lot of relatives. Sometimes it’s a son looking for a mother, a mother looking for a child, a husband looking for a spouse. I thought, ‘How can anyone have that degree of hope to still find a person?’”

About one-third of enslaved children in the Upper South experienced family separation through one of three scenarios: sale away from their parents, sale with their mother away from their father — or their mother and father were sold away from the child. Even infants were sold, like 6-month-old Minnie, who was bought for $150 in 1860.

Writes former slave Delia Garlic of Montgomery, Ala.: “Babies was snatched from their mothers’ breasts and sold to speculators. Children was separated from sisters and brothers and never saw each other again. Course they cry; you think they not cry when they was sold like cattle? I could tell you about it all day, but even then you couldn’t guess the awfulness of it.”

Williams, an accomplished quilter, captures this feeling of parental loss on the front cover of the book, which features a quilt she made with the themes of the book in mind. A pretty blue border featuring red and yellow flowers surrounds a child’s white dress in the center of the quilt. Underneath the dress and around one of the sides of the quilt, Williams traced over the handwriting of a letter from Vilet Lester, a slave who is featured in the book. Lester writes to her former mistress in 1857: “I wish to [k]now what has Ever become of my Presus little girl. I left her in Goldsborough with Mr. Walker and I have not herd from her Since …”

“This is a North Carolina story,” Williams said. “So you’ve got a dress without a little girl, and a mother without a daughter. To me, the cover is sort of inviting you in to the stories that are in the book. And on the back of the quilt, I used fabric with the words, ‘love, courage and faith’ printed on it.”

In talking with a group recently at the Ackland Art Museum about this quilt, Williams said, “One of the sad things about these sources is I never know if [Vilet Lester] got a letter back. I don’t know if she found her child.”

While writing the book, Williams encountered her own feelings of grief and sadness. In October, as the book was going to press, Williams’ father lost his battle with lung cancer. She would work on the book cover quilt at her father’s bedside in Florida, while taking advantage of the good light in his bedroom window.

“In the morning or afternoon, I would sit and quilt, and he would recite poems he learned as a child,” she said. “He would say, ‘It needs more of this or more of that’ … so he helped in the design of the quilt.”

“I had a chance to say goodbye [to my father], and I love you, but a lot of these people did not have that chance.”

"Ashley's sack:" ca. 1850; needlework, 1921. (courtesy of Middleton Place Foundation, Charleston, S.C.)

Williams divides the book into three sections, addressing the issues of separation, the search and reunification. Other than ads in newspapers, former slaves would also reach out to churches or travel long distances in search of family members. In 1865, a reporter for The Nation met a man who had walked 600 miles from Georgia to Concord, N.C., in search of his wife and children. But most people never found their relatives, for as Williams writes, “too many miles and too many years lay between them.”

In chapter five of the book, instead of just weaving mention of the ads throughout the chapter, Williams wanted to devote a number of pages to laying out the ads, back to back, so “the ads could speak.”

“To encounter the ads as they appeared in the newspapers is to begin to grasp the power and the poignancy of these brief, compelling and urgent dispatches …” she writes.

While writing the book, Williams received support from a semester-long research fellowship sponsored by UNC’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities and a year-long John Mellon Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. And throughout the process, input from her undergraduate students helped to inform the book.

Williams uses one of her history quilts called “My Spirit is Lifted” in her classes; it features the Thornton Copeland ad, along with a number of other primary source documents, such as spirituals, lists of people being sold, a photo of an African American soldier. In her research seminar, students were assigned chapters from the manuscript to critique and analyze. Senior Sally Fry, an intern at UNC Press, designed the cover of the book. Senior Matt Schaefer is credited with the term “self-deification” in reference to Mississippi slave owner Francis Terry Leak removing the word “God” and replacing it with his name, as two of his slaves recited their marriage vows.

Williams, a native of Jamaica, will start work on her next project soon. She received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship (see related story) to tell the stories of Jamaican immigrants who came to the United States in the 1950s and ’60s for better jobs and educational opportunities. She plans to produce a documentary film for the project, after she learns filmmaking techniques for the first time.

But Williams said in many ways her current book has no end. It will never really be “finished.”

“For the rest of my life I think I’ll keep finding examples of separation and reunification,” she said. “I want to find more and to dig more.”

Click here for a list of upcoming readings by Williams from Help Me to Find My People.

[ Story by Kim Weaver Spurr ’88 ]

Joe DeSimone

Joseph DeSimone, Chancellor’s Eminent Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been elected into the National Academy of Sciences, one of the highest honors that a U.S. scientist or engineer can receive.

DeSimone is one of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 14 countries elected into the academy. He is the 12th UNC-Chapel Hill faculty member to be elected to the academy, a private organization of scientists and engineers dedicated to advancing science and technology and their use for the public good.

DeSimone, based in the College of Arts and Sciences at UNC, also is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Chemical Engineering at N.C. State University.

With the new class of members announced by the academy, there are 2,152 active members and 430 foreign associates. The academy was established by Congress in 1863 as an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology. Candidates for membership can only be formally nominated by academy members.

DeSimone has more than 280 publications and holds 130-plus patents. His work currently focuses on nanomedicine. In 2004, DeSimone and his students at UNC-Chapel Hill and N.C. State invented a new technology to create nanoparticles called PRINT (Particle Replication In Non-wetting Templates). With PRINT, DeSimone and his team were  the first to successfully adapt manufacturing techniques from the computer industry to make advances in medicine, including .improved approaches to cancer treatment and diagnosis. Other projects  include developing a nanoparticle vaccine for prostate cancer and creating particles that mimic red blood cells. DeSimone co-founded Liquidia Technologies, a Triangle-based nanotechnology company, to further develop the PRINT technology. Liquidia currently has its first product – a nanoparticle flu vaccine – in clinical trials.

DeSimone is also a member of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, an adjunct member at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. and the director of both the Institute for Advanced Materials, Nanoscience and Technology and the Institute for Nanomedicine at UNC.

In 2005, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, also a private, independent nonprofit that provides engineering leadership in service to the nation. That same year, he was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

National Academy of Sciences announcement link:  http://www.nasonline.org/news-and-multimedia/news/2012_05_01_NAS_Election.html

Mayor Michael Bloomberg

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg will speak, and he and four other luminaries will receive honorary degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during the May 13 Commencement ceremony.

Chancellor Holden Thorp will preside at the ceremony at 9:30 a.m. in Kenan Stadium.

This year’s honorary degree recipients are:

• Michael R. Bloomberg, mayor of the City of New York, of New York, who will receive a doctor of laws degree;
• David S. Ferriero, archivist of the United States, of Washington, D.C., who will receive a doctor of laws degree;
• Thomas W. Lambeth, retired executive director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, of Winston-Salem, who will receive a doctor of letters degree;
• Branford Marsalis, world-renowned saxophonist, of Durham, who will receive a doctor of music degree; and
• Katharine Lee Reid, retired director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, of Chapel Hill, who will receive a doctor of fine arts degree.

Bloomberg attended Johns Hopkins University and earned a master of business administration degree from Harvard Business School. He began his career with Salomon Brothers, a prominent Wall Street investment bank, where he eventually headed up the firm’s information systems. After Salomon was acquired in 1981 and he was let go, Bloomberg went on to create Bloomberg LP, a company that now has about 15,000 employees worldwide and more than 300,000 subscribers to its global financial news and information service. In 2001, he was elected mayor just two months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. He has helped build the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University into a leading institution of public health research and training.

Ferriero is the first professional librarian to become archivist of the United States. He is charged with preserving the nation’s official permanent records, now estimated at about 9 billion pages of text, as well as many millions of maps, charts, drawings, photographs, digital data sets, films and videos. Before accepting the post in 2009, Ferriero was the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the New York Public Libraries, where he integrated the four research libraries and 87 branch libraries to create the largest public library system in the United States.  He began his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Library, where he remained for 31 years, rising to the position of acting co-director of libraries. In 1996, he was recruited to Duke University to be university librarian and vice provost for library affairs.

Lambeth, a native Tar Heel, received his bachelor’s degree in history from Carolina in 1957. Lambeth was Gov. Terry Sanford’s chief administrative assistant and later was administrative assistant to U.S. Rep. Richardson Preyer.  Lambeth capped his career with 23 years of service as executive director of the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, where he remains a senior fellow after retirement.  At Carolina, he chaired the Board of Trustees for two years, received the board’s William Richardson Davie Award and was honored with the establishment of the Thomas Willis Lambeth Distinguished Professorship and the Lambeth Lecture in Public Policy.

Marsalis is a member of one of New Orleans’ most distinguished musical families, which includes his father, Ellis, and his siblings Wynton, Delfeayo and Jason. In 2011, the Marsalis Family was honored with the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters award. Marsalis, a three-time Grammy recipient, is a keeper of the history of American jazz and has performed with major symphony orchestras. Marsalis has shared his musical knowledge in faculty positions at Michigan State University, San Francisco State University and currently at N.C. Central University, where his quartet serves as artists-in-residence. After Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans, Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. conceived the New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village in the hard-hit Ninth Ward. The centerpiece of this effort is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.

Reid has had a 40-year career as an art museum curator, administrator and director. At a time when few women held leadership positions in large museums, Reid served as assistant and later deputy director of the Art Institute of Chicago (1982-91), director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (1991-2000) and director of the Cleveland Museum of Art (2000-2005). She also was curator at UNC’s Ackland Art Museum.  Reid held leadership positions with the Association of Art Museum Directors, was a presidential appointee  to the U.S. Department of State’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee and participated in the Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University.

Other Commencement information

The doctoral hooding ceremony will be held May 12 at 10 a.m. at the Dean E. Smith Center. No ticket is required to attend. Marc Levoy, whose career achievements include developing the cartoon animation system used in “The Flintstones” television show and launching Google’s Street View project, is the speaker. Levoy, who received his doctoral degree in computer science from Carolina in 1989, is the VMWare Founders Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, with a joint appointment in Stanford’s electrical engineering department. He helped create the field of computational photography.

The undergraduate baccalaureate program will take place at 3 p.m. May 12 in the Great Hall of the Student Union. Chancellor Thorp, Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Winston Crisp, students and members of the Campus Ministers’ Association will speak.

The Commencement ceremony will be held in Kenan Stadium, rain or shine, and tickets are not necessary. If it rains during Commencement, the ceremony could be shortened, but it will not be relocated. If severe weather threatens and attendees’ safety is at risk, the ceremony will be canceled.

The UNC Department of Public Safety recommends that graduates and guests use park-and-ride shuttles at the Friday Center and at University Mall. Parking and shuttles are also available on the southern side of campus, along Manning Drive. For complete parking and traffic information, go to  http://www.dps.unc.edu/NewsLinks/CommencementWeb/Commencement.htm

Alice Dawson was among the 2012 national academic advising award winners.

Five academic advisers in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have won 2012 national advising awards for making significant contributions to the improvement of academic advising.

The awards will be presented by the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) at its annual conference in Nashville, Tenn., Oct. 4-7.

Gidi Shemer, lecturer in biology and faculty adviser, is the recipient of an Outstanding New Advising Award.

Other UNC winners who have been awarded certificates of merit for outstanding advising included:

• Alice Dawson, senior assistant dean, behavioral and social sciences;
• Valerie Pruvost, senior lecturer in romance languages, faculty adviser in behavioral and social sciences;
• Chloe Russell, adviser, behavioral and social sciences (recognized as outstanding new adviser);
• Ken Shugart, senior adviser, fine arts and humanities.

NACADA was chartered as a nonprofit organization in 1979 to promote quality academic advising to ensure the educational development of students. Since that time, it has grown to more than 10,000 members. The annual awards program was established in 1983.

NACADA hosts an annual fall conference that attracts more than 3,000 attendees. It also publishes a scholarly journal and other special publications related to best practices in academic advising.

Over the past five years, 23 academic advisers at UNC have been honored by NACADA.

More on academic advising at UNC: http://advising.unc.edu

More on the National Academic Advising Association: http://www.nacada.ksu.edu