Kudos

Kudos

• Douglas Smith, associate professor of psychology, has received a $1.14 million grant from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for research on a way to help people recover more quickly after stroke or other traumatic brain injury. Co-investigators on the four-year grant are psychology professor Robert Jensen, anatomy professor Richard Clough, and physiology professor Ronald Browning.

SIUC pilot data indicate that mild electrical stimulation of the brain’s vagus nerve (approved as a treatment for epilepsy patients) speeds up recovery from severe brain injury in rats. Continued work with this animal model will lay the groundwork needed for testing in people, which could begin in four or five years.

For more on vagus nerve research, see www.siu.edu/~perspect/01_fall/vagus.html.

• A short story by English professor E. Beth Lordan was tapped for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2002 (Houghton Mifflin). "Digging," which was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in September 2001, also was a finalist in the National Magazine Award’s 2002 fiction category. The story appears online at www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/09/lordan.htm.

Lordan’s newest collection of short stories will be published next year by William Morrow. Her fiction was featured in the Fall 1998 issue of Perspectives.

• Plant biologist Karen Renzaglia will be contributing her expertise to a major new National Science Foundation program called "Assembling the Tree of Life." Renzaglia and researchers at five other institutions have collectively been awarded nearly $3 million to put together a comprehensive picture of evolution and patterns of diversification among green plants. That diversification includes such significant events as the transition from single-cell to multi-cell body plans and the colonization of land.

Renzaglia will be responsible for data on the structure and micro-anatomy of the 50 land plants selected as representative of various lineages. She also will help interpret molecular data for those organisms.

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