Challenge grant issued to raise orchestral funds

Sue and Christopher Bancroft have issued a challenge grant to match 100 percent of all gifts made to the UNT Anshel Brus­ilow Chair in Orchestral Studies until the goal of raising an additional $250,000 is reached.

The challenge grant ends Saturday, May 31.

The additional gifts will help complete a $1 million endowment to honor Brusilow, conductor of the UNT Symphony Or­chestra and regents professor, who is retiring at the end of the 2007-08 school year. The proceeds of the endowment primarily will fund scholarships for orchestral students.

Former UNT music faculty member Sue Bancroft and her husband, Christopher, an alumnus, have been leading the campaign to create the Anshel Brus­ilow Chair in Orchestral Studies.

Brusilow, a former concertmaster of the Philadelphia Or­chestra and former conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, directed the UNT orchestra from 1973 to 1981 and 1989 to 2008.

For more information, call 940-565-2243 or 940-369-7979.

Enrollment opens for children’s music classes

Parents are invited to enroll their babies and preschoolers in UNT’s early childhood music classes, starting June 14.

Designed to nurture children’s musical aptitudes, the classes help babies and toddlers develop a musical foundation through the use of songs, chants, movement and recorded music. Classes are offered on Saturdays from June 14 to July 19.

Cost is $70 for infants and $80 for nursery and preschool-aged children. Each class is limited to 10 to 12 children.

For more information, call 940-391-4085, e-mail ecprogram@music.unt.edu  or visit www.music.unt.edu/musiced .

Participants needed for research study

A University of North Texas psychologist is seeking adults ages 60 and older, as well as grandparents of any age who are raising their grandchildren full time, to participate in two research surveys.

Dr. Bert Hayslip Jr., Regents professor of psychology, is conducting the “Engaged Lifestyles in Later Life Project” through August. In the project, older adults will complete a survey about their views on what they define as an “engaged lifestyle” – a lifestyle that is mentally challenging.

The survey, which is entirely confidential, will include questions to examine the relationship of engaged lifestyles to personality characteristics, to older adults’ relationships with others and their use of mental skills.

Survey respondents must be age 60 and older and live either in their own homes or in retirement communities.

The survey will be mailed to respondents and takes approximately one hour to complete.

Each respondent will be provided with a self-ad­dressed, stamped envelope to mail the survey to Hayslip, and feedback will be provided upon request.

In the project, Hayslip and psychology graduate student Shanna Davis will provide grandparents who are full-time caregivers for their grandchildren with copies of a survey that will ask them questions about their care giving situations.

The survey will also ask them to discuss their relationships to the grandchildren they are raising, who must be younger than 18 years old.

Each grandparent will be assigned a code number that will identify them only to Hayslip and Davis. To volunteer for either study or to receive more information, call 940-565-2675 or e-mail hayslipb@unt.edu .

Grant to aid research on ways to help students

The University of North Texas is one of only seven universities in the nation to receive a research grant to explore student access to higher education, as well as ways universities help students to be more successful in college.

The grant is from the University of Southern Cali­fornia’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy and Practice, which serves as the nation’s hub for enrollment management issues and research.

Troy Johnson, UNT associate vice president for enrollment management, says when it comes to student access and success strategies, most people have clear opinions. This study will look for clearer evidence of what works, what matters and what doesn’t.

“This research will study three similar types of low-income student academic success programs at three major universities: University of Florida, University of North Carolina, and UNT. The focus will be on factors that contribute to understanding timely graduation of low-income students,” Johnson said.

Sarah Collins, UNT’s associate director of enrollment management, said, “The Carolina Covenant at UNC-Chapel Hill, Florida Opportunity Scholars Program at University of Florida and the Emerald Eagle Scholars Program at UNT are three robust institutional programs providing access and support to students from low-income backgrounds.

Each operates at a different stage of maturity, from inception to graduating success stories.”

UNT began the Emerald Eagle Scholar program for academically talented students with high financial need in fall 2007. New freshmen receive tuition and fees for eight semesters as long as they enroll for 15 hours per semester and maintain a certain grade point average.

About 400 students joined the inaugural class of Emerald Eagle Scholars.

Student gets academic achievement scholarship

University of North Texas student Bidisha Kumar, a doctoral candidate from Kolkata, India, has been named the recipient of the Dr. Arthur Ingalls Academic Achievement Scholarship in the amount of $1,000.

The scholarship is awarded to a new doctoral student in the UNT Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, which is part of the UNT College of Arts and Sciences. The award is named for spiritual healer and former college professor Dr. Arthur Ingalls, a UNT alumnus.

Before enrolling at UNT, Kumar completed field work at Uttarakhand, India, where she observed the significance of Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of “Sarvodaya,” or universal welfare.

Kumar is finishing her first year as a UNT doctoral candidate. She received her master’s of arts degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 2001 and her bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of Calcutta in India in 1996.

Kumar worked at the Centre for Science and Environment in India, a non-governmental re­search and public interest organization working in the field of science, technology, environment and development, for two years.

She researched and wrote on ecological, social and policy issues related to urban and rural water use and abuse. Kumar was also a research assistant for five years at the Cen­tre for Development and Environment Policy of the Indian Institute of Management Cal­cutta, where she performed research in the field of interdisciplinary water resource issues.

Kumar’s publications include book chapters, articles and reports in newspapers, journals and magazines that focus on social and environmental issues.

Deadline to apply for scholarships extended

The Division of Institutional Equity and Diversity at the University of North Texas is ex­tending the deadline to apply for two scholarships.

Applications for the A. Ten­nyson Miller and Joe Atkins Scholarship and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Ally Scholarship in Honor of Mary Finley and Dan Emenheiser will be accepted until May 30. Both scholarships are for $500, distributed in equal installments in both the fall and spring semesters.

Information on eligibility re­quirements and scholarship ap­plications are available at www.unt.edu/edo or may be picked up at UNT’s Division of Institutional Equity and Diver­sity, in Room 210 of the Hurley Administration Building.

Students who receive the scholarships must register for and earn full-time credit each semester for the fall and spring, maintain a cumulative grade point average of 3.0 and participate in community service programs with the UNT Multicul­tural Center or Division of Institutional Equity and Diver­sity.

For more information on either of the scholarships, call 940-565-2711.

Lecturer wins Japan’s Imperial Prize in Science

Keiji Morokuma, who delivered the 2008 Ernest R. Da­vidson Lecture in the UNT chemistry department in January, will be presented with Japan’s Im­perial Prize in Science by Em­peror Akihito and Empress Michiko in a ceremony June 9.

Only one scientist each year receives this honor.

UNT’s Davidson Lecture is named after computational chem­ist Ernest R. Davidson.

In 2006, he gave the first lecture in the series that bears his name.

The lectures are funded by annual gifts from UNT chemistry professor Wes Borden and his wife, Sheila.

Mayborn conference scholarships available

Ten students will receive scholarships to attend the fourth annual Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Writers Conference of the Southwest, presented by the UNT Mayborn Graduate School of Journalism.

The Dallas Morning News is offering scholarships to five high school or college minority students to attend the Mayborn Conference.

Five general scholarships open to all high school or college students will also be awarded.

The application deadline is June 13.

The conference will be July 18-20 at the Hilton DFW Lakes Executive Conference Center, 1800 E. Highway 26 in Grape­vine.

Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday is the keynote speaker and will be joined by National Book Award winner Bob Sha­cochis and River of Doubt author Candice Millard, among others.

Scholarships will cover registration for the conference and two nights at the hotel for all recipients.

For more information about the scholarships and the conference, visit www.themayborn.unt.edu  or call 940-565-4564.

Two professors receive NSF CAREER awards

The National Science Foun­dation has awarded two UNT professors National Science Foundation CAREER awards.

The award program, the most prestigious offered by the foundation, supports early career development activities of teacher-scholars who integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.

Pamela Padilla, assistant professor of biology, and Rada Mi­halcea, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, received the awards.

Both awards are for five years; Padilla’s award is roughly $639,000, and Mihalcea’s award is roughly $500,000.

Padilla’s research looks at genetic modifications that occur in the soil nematode C. elegans. The millimeter-long roundworm has served as a genetic model system for humans since the 1970s and was the first multicellular organism with a genome that was completely sequenced.

Padilla was one of the first researchers to use C. elegans as a model system to understand severe oxygen deprivation.

Padilla’s research will look into a mutation of a gene that acts as an insulin-like receptor.

The mutation allows the nematode to survive in an oxygen-deficient environment.

Once the role of that mutation is determined, Padilla will conduct genetic screening to identify additional gene mutations that lead to oxygen deprivation survival.

She will develop a lesson plan that will be used not only for UNT’s undergraduate genetics labs, but also integrated into grade school science programs at the university’s Elm Fork Edu­cation Center.

Mihalcea’s award will support research in the semantic interpretation of text for language-processing applications.

The applications use dictionaries or thesauruses to understand the meanings of words, but distinctions in those meanings can differ from one resource to another.

“Rather than just use one resource to model the meanings of the words, we are trying to combine several different one-language and multi-language re­sources. We will create word meaning representations that are rich, flexible and adaptable to specific language-processing ap­plications,” Mihalcea said in a news release.

Mihalcea plans to integrate these models into educational applications.

They could be used to build a tool to assist Spanish-speaking students comprehend English texts by providing simpler English synonyms or translations into Spanish.