The contract, with a $399,997 grant check attached, will be coming from the federal Housing and Urban Development Department’s Community Outreach Partnership Centers program. In announcing the grant, U.S. Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-Saugerties, said the grant “will better enable the University to use the exceptional levels of skill and knowledge of the faculty, staff and students for the benefit of the residents of Binghamton.”

As envisioned by Alden, who directs the Professional and Research Division of the School of Education and Human Development, the C3 project will use community teams to focus on activities within six broad areas: community organizing, community planning, education, health and well-being, job training and housing.

The project will cover downtown Binghamton from the Chenango River east to the Brandywine Highway, and north from the Susquehanna River to Bevier Street. The area includes most of the seventh and ninth council districts.

Two groups will steer the project: a Community Advisory Council made up of members of the designated neighborhoods and community groups and organizations; and a 12-person University Action Team drawn from faculty and professional ranks and supplemented by students. The University team is crossdivisional and includes people from SEHD, the Decker School of Nursing and Harpur College of Arts and Sciences.

“This is really neighborhood based,” Alden said. “The sense of direction comes from people who live there and work there.”

Once the staff is hired and the community council is recruited, one of the first tasks, said Alden, will be to gain a consensus from residents on which problems they want to tackle first. “This is resident driven,” she said. Each of the six task committees will have its own chair drawn from the community.

The campus team and the advisory team’s role will be to link neighborhood teams, working with students, to available resources within the community. The project lists more than 20 partners who supported the grant application. Some of the major partners include the City of Binghamton, United Way, the Binghamton City School District, the YWCA, Broome County Employment and Training, the county Department of Social Services and Health, the Integrated County Planning Team, Fairview Recovery Services, the Urban League, Catholic Charities, Head Start and Opportunities for Broome.

Alden sees the neighborhood office and staff presence in the community as vital. “We’ve had many many programs and students working in areas of the city, but it’s hard to focus on one neighborhood without having a physical presence there,” she said.

One of the ways to extend the program’s presence in the neighborhoods will be to have students work directly with the residents. Students from the masters in social work program that will begin in September 2004 will be among those assigned to the project as part of their practicum. Their role, Alden said, will not be to offer therapy, but direction and structure using a model that stresses neighborhood empowerment and self-investment.

This is the second time the grant proposal was submitted for funding. The first time it was rejected and Alden used the lessons learned to improve the model and to seek out additional partners. “This thing is a huge undertaking,” she said.

For the electronics industry, the BU work may lead to great improvements in how heat generated by microelectronic circuitry is conducted by finding defects in current materials and creating new materials that work better.

Mechanical engineers Bahgat Sammakia and Gary Lehmann and chemist Wayne Jones and the other partners will share in a $3.5 million grant from the Advanced Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. GE will contribute $3.7 million to the project. Their task is to develop and test new nanoengineered materials that will yield a 10-fold improvement in the thermal conductivity of materials that play a critical role in the cooling of computer chips. “If we can do that we will really catch people’s attention,” Lehmann said.

BU’s share of the award will amount to $850,000.

The grant is another step in putting BU in the thick of a race to develop new materials and new technology that will make computer chips smaller, faster and more efficient.

“Nanotechnology is a ripe field,” said Jones, who is working with Sammakia on a project funded by Semiconductor International to develop polymer and polymer-metallic hybrids. Also collaborating on that research is Ganesh Subbarayan, a Purdue University mechanical engineering professor who had worked with Sammakia at IBM –Endicott.

The new GE project will further Jones’ and Sammakia’s work on the synthesis and study of the fundamental properties of conductivity in nanomaterials.

Jones will provide the atomic-level chemical analysis and manipulation of materials developed in collaboration with GE and prepared by Superior MicroPowders of Albuquerque, N.M.

Sammakia and Lehmann will concentrate on developing and testing mathematical models that support the theory. Sandeep Tonapi, ’98 ’01, who earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from BU, where he worked with Sammakia, is also a member of the GE research team.

The challenge for the three comes from working with materials defined at the atomic level and measured in nanometers — best described as 1/50,000th of the size of a human hair.

“It’s a real challenge to characterize materials with embedded nanostructures,” said Lehmann who added that performing accurate measurements at this scale “is a leading edge topic in engineering,” both in scholarly circles and in applied commercial engineering circles.

Sammakia said that when modeling the flow of thermal conductivity on a micro or bulk scale — 10-6 — the pattern is constant. On the nano scale — 10-9 or three orders of magnitude smaller — the pattern is more intermittent creating an additional challenge because the models will have to accommodate both variables.

“The size of the particle is key,” he said.

To test the commercial applications, Lehman will develop an apparatus to conduct measurements of heat flow through a 10-100 micron-thick material layer. Math models, based on the nano-scale heat transport, will be used to correlate the measured response with the materials structure.

The work will benefit from the recent acquisition of an atomic force and scanning tunneling microscope as the result of a National Science Foundation grant to Jones and C.J. Zhong in the chemistry department. The devices allow imaging of individual molecules on surfaces such as circuit boards.

The problem to be solved by this project might be illustrated best by comparing the surface of a circuit board to a plaster wall. Even where a wall may appear smooth to the human eye there are ripples and gaps in the surface. On the circuit board these sub-microscopic gaps trap heat generated by layers of diodes and transistors, limiting their effectiveness. Developing a more efficient material to fill in the gaps represents a high-stakes market, estimated at $205 million worldwide in 2000.

Sammakia said creating the ideal material may involve manipulating the shape of the individual atoms to improve their ability to fill the smallest gaps and to improve conductivity.

The two possibilities the research team will study are spherical shapes and cylindrical shapes. The modeling will help determine which shape is more efficient and model structures synthesized in the lab will help verify these observations.

“The geometry of nano-particles can play an important role in conductivity,” Jones said, although exactly what that role is requires a more fundamental understanding of nanostructures and their properties.

Gale Spencer, professor of nursing and director of both the Kresge Center for Nursing Research and the Community Health Project, said the three-year grant will educate 24 community nurse practitioners or community nurse educators and will develop 20 new clinical sites in underserved or rural areas.

Spencer and Masha Britten, associate professor of nursing, prepared the proposal for the $989,843 grant from the Public Health Service. They have been notified that their score is “well within the fundable range” and have submitted final documents for official approval. Start date on the grant is July 1.

Spencer said development of two Internet-based biohazard courses was added to the grant application in response to the events of September 11. The courses will be developed using the expertise of Laura Terriquez-Kasey, a Decker clinical instructor and former U.S. Army nurse who is a member of the federal Disaster Medical Assistance Team. Terriquez-Kasey’s team spent time at Ground Zero following the terrorist attacks working as part of a medical triage, acute care team. The courses will also draw on the expertise of Robert McDermott of United Health Services and will focus on two related concepts involving biohazards. One will focus on how medical personnel should respond to individuals who have been exposed to a wide range of hazards ranging from biological agents such as anthrax to those toxins released in chemical spills, etc. The second course will focus on a public health approach in responding to these issues. While both courses are designed for Decker students, their subject matter and their distance-learning format will encourage a wide variety of other participants such as environmental engineers, public health nurses, county health departments and others involved in disaster planning.

Students will be asked to develop a protocol for responding to biohazard emergencies as part of the course. “Health departments and community agencies will have protocols in place if something happens,” Spencer said.

One of the hopes, Spencer said, is that some of those who participate in Decker courses via the Internet will decide to pursue their degree through the school. Spencer also sees the Internet learning component as opening new doors at Decker. “I hope that in the future we will do more in distributed learning in the community health program,” and sees distance learning as an increasing larger part of the kinds of courses the school will offer in the future. A part-time technical person will be hired under the grant to assist Decker in putting on the Web-based courses.

Another aspect of the grant focuses on the preparation of community health nursing educators. The grant will allow the Decker school to expand its educator role from a three-course to a four-course sequence. The fourth course will focus on using technology as a teaching tool. This piece of the grant was added to addresses the issue of a rapidly aging population of community nursing educators.

“The median age of nursing faculty is 54,” Spencer observes. The course sequence will allow master’s level community health nurses to prepare for college-level careers as community health educators by attending part-time to complete the program in one calendar year. Master’s level nurses in other specialties will be able to obtain a community health educator advanced certificate in one year by attending the program full time.

Looking to the future, the grant also attempts to meet the demand for nursing personnel, the program seeks to interest teens in nursing career via the Decker School’s TeenNet website. Teens in the program will also have an opportunity to shadow adult students and faculty in the community nursing program.

For many communities the grant may lead to a major expansion of health care services. If the previous Community Health Nursing program grant is any indication, this new grant has some great potential, Spencer noted.

The school is concluding the third year of a $699,210 grant that was critical in meeting the health care needs of several rural communities. Nurse practitioner students in the program are required to seek out a rural or underserved area, perform a needs assessment, and then devise a plan to correct deficiencies that have been discovered. Part of the plan calls for the students to work with the communities in getting grants or other funding to bring their ideas to fruition.

Previously, Decker nurse practitioners have worked with non-profit groups such as the YWCA, SOS Shelter, the Southern Tier Aids Program, and the Imaginarium. In addition, nurse practitioner students have been working with several primary care practices in the region. In the rural areas the projects have had some long-lasting effects. In Tioga County, for instance, one project involved improving education for those suffering with diabetes. Spencer notes that many of those with diabetes were elderly and had to travel great distances to learn how to care for their diabetes. To solve the issue, the students began a health education program at meal sites for the elderly. They also set up a course that could be offered by Tioga County personnel on a continuing basis after they left.

In the village of Towanda, in Bradford County, Penn., another project found childhood obesity to be a major problem. In response the students developed a nutrition education curriculum that would begin in elementary school and continue through high school, and could be worked into regular curriculum. For math classes, for instance, the curriculum would devise problems dealing with calories or food weights that would both bring awareness of nutrition issues as well as math. In Greene, a student working with a previous graduate of the program helped devise a community health fair as part of the opening of a nurse practitioner’s practice in the village. The health fair included a wide range of health screenings for participants, as well as distribution of information about health-promoting activities.

In a more urban setting, Spencer said one student worked with Lourdes Hospital’s home health care program to develop a cultural competency program so that home health care workers would understand the cultural backgrounds of the populations with which they work. In addition to graduating new nurse practitioners and nurse educators, “The whole idea is to serve Broome County and the surrounding region while teaching graduate students how to do a community needs assessment, and then develop and implement projects that meet community needs,” said Spencer.

“When it comes to modern equipment, you never turn it on manually,” said Skormin, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Thomas J. Watson School of Engineering and Applied Science. “It’s done with control panels on a computer and my keyboard could be on the other side of the earth.”

Skormin has used this simple insight to secure a $255,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop an Internet-accessible advanced laser communications research lab that can be used by anyone.

The result is that, with the click of a mouse, engineering students from China, Great Britain and the Czech Republic have tapped into Skormin’s Web page, typed in parameters and caused a piezo-electric mirror, part of a laser aiming device, in a Watson lab to move according to their instructions.

The grant that is the latest in a series from the NSF to Skormin to develop a new curriculum in satellite laser communications and create a virtual lab to accompany the program.

The equipment used by the students is part of a $1 million cache of equipment acquired by Skormin’s research team from the U.S. Air Force’s Rome Research Lab to support research on ways to make information systems secure through the use of laser technology.

While the work Skormin does for that project is classified, the equipment is not. Moreover, Internet access to the equipment is not via Internet 2, a restricted Web network used by member universities and industries. It is accessible by the commercial Internet open to everyone. One caution: The lab does not work with Netscape Navigator.

By opening the use of this equipment to the world, Skormin has partially solved a big problem for many engineering programs. He said the difference between a good undergraduate engineering program and the best program is the quality of the laboratories available to the students.

Knowing that he is working with students prone to exuberance Skormin said, “This is a system that cannot be damaged.”

The control program has built in limitations that will prevent students from accidentally fry the equipment by applying too much voltage. The system cannot be used by more than one person at a time, and BU researchers have first priority.

What they can do is investigate how laser beam steering systems respond to variable conditions. “This is like student experiments of very advanced schools,” Skormin said. In addition to getting near instantaneous feedback from their inputs, the students can have a 360 degree view the equipment they are using.

Varlinskaya, along with Evgeniy Petrov, research professor of psychology, Linda P. Spear and Norman E. Spear, both distinguished professors of psychology, will receive $1.1 million over five years to research ethanol and social interactions in adolescent rats.

“We believe that in humans alcohol has different effects depending on the situation,” Varlinskaya said. Generally, in social settings, the effects are positive. “That’s one of the reasons why teenagers drink in social situations, to feel more comfortable in a group.”

She noted that adolescence is a unique period in human development when social interactions with peers take on a high significance, when social situations are a prime motivator and there is a high frequency of stressful, anxiety-provoking situations. Varlinskaya said not only do adolescents experience a lot of stress in their everyday lives, their response to stress is greater than in adults.

Typically adolescence is the time when experimentation with alcohol begins and when the risk of heavy drinking is elevated, she said. “Most frequently teens drink in social situations with peers,” she said.

“They truly expect alcohol to make them more sociable and relaxed, and these expectations may help them feel socially at ease.

“Drinking, very often heavy, to control stress, alleviate anxiety and cope with problems is more common in adolescence than later in life. Alcohol is very appealing to teenagers.”

Varlinskaya said that while alcohol’s anti-anxiety effects may help teens’ social interactions, at the same time, adolescents are unaware of the different effects of alcohol. This lack of awareness may allow them to drink more without adverse consequences, she said.

“Having some history of drinking, they also may develop tolerance to certain effects of alcohol. This means that particular desired effects may be achieved only when larger amounts are consumed,” she said.

“We believe that this unique combination of socio-environmental, motivational and neurobehavioral factors puts teenagers at a high risk of becoming heavy drinkers and of developing various problems related to extensive alcohol use,” Varlinskaya said.

Because these theories cannot be tested on humans, researchers must use rats. Adolescent rats are similar to human adolescents because they spend more time in social interactions than the younger and the older animals. “Adolescent humans and rats show comparable behavioral, hormonal, and brain changes, and these similarities allow us to use rats to investigate alcohol effects on social behavior and motivation for social contacts,” Varlinskaya said.

The experiment will test rats in both familiar and unfamiliar environments. Unfamiliar environments will be stressful for the rats and will produce anxiety-related behaviors. The rats will be given controlled doses of alcohol to see whether it makes them less anxious.

Testing in a familiar environment will assess whether the alcohol caused pleasant or unpleasant reactions. Another facet will test whether the rats developed a greater tolerance for alcohol.

“If our initial predictions are confirmed,” Varlinskaya concluded, “our research will provide needed information about the role of social and environmental factors in extensive alcohol use during adolescence.”

Antoun, a social anthropologist, was working in the Jordanian peasant village of Kufr al-Ma studying transnational migration and its effect on village life. He’d been in the village off and on for 25 years. He had read the Koran with the local village preacher many years before. On this particular Friday, he was confronted by several young men who insisted that because he had read Islam’s sacred text and was no longer ignorant of the path to salvation he was obligated to convert to Islam.

“I had read the Koran,” Antoun recalls. “They were worried that I was going to hell if I did not convert.”

Reflecting on the change in attitudes towards his presence in the village and at Friday services, Antoun recalled, “I suddenly realized that something had changed.”

The anecdote about events of 1986 is one of several personal observations about the nature of Islamic fundamentalism that can be found in Antoun’s latest book, Understanding Fundamentalism: Christian, Islamic and Jewish Movements.

The book was released in August by AltaMira Press, a small publishing house devoted to scholarly works. But, since the September 11 attacks on the United States by Islamic fundamentalists, the work has gotten considerable academic and media attention.

Antoun had not intended to write the book. He had been working with the publisher on his transnational migration study, hoping to excite interest in getting it published. During that time, Antoun said his editor had been reading his vita and noticed that he’d taught a course on religious fundamentalism since the late 1980s. Soon he was being urged to write a book on the topic.

“I didn’t know if I could write such a book,” he said. But after writing the introduction, finding himself satisfied, he completed the project.

Fundamentalism, in Antoun’s view, is an intellectual and emotional way of looking at the world. The book explains fundamentalism as an “ideal type” and illustrates its attributes with particular groups and movements. He notes that fundamentalism is a label that is often rejected by groups that are considered fundamentalist.

“Fundamentalists are ideal types,” he said. “No one individual or group is completely fundamentalist or completely lacking in fundamentalist attitudes.”

While he sees the worldview of fundamentalists as the same across cultures, Antoun emphatically notes that the cultural content of the various brands of fundamentalism and the historical events that give rise to fundamentalism vary.

What unites fundamentalists across religious boundaries, in Antoun’s view, is their agreement on a number of broad themes. His non-inclusive set of common themes includes:

• An orientation to the modern world, both intellectually and emotionally, that focuses on and protests rapid change. Generally, fundamentalists are in the minority — the “outs” struggling against the “ins” politically.

• A literal belief in the infallibility of sacred scripture, known as scripturalism. Sacred writings are used by fundamentalists as a justification for their actions and beliefs and as a reference point for their lives.

• Their attempts at “traditioning”—the making of the scriptural accounts and ancient traditions, both real and mythic — immediately relevant to present-day events.

• Their belief in “totalism” or the taking of religion out of the worship center and into all facets of life including family life, finances, governments, schools and the arts.

• A use of activism or confronting the establishment, both religious and political, by protests — non-violent and violent.

• Their view of the world as a constant struggle between good and evil.

A process of selective modernization so that modern technology or ways of social organization (definitions of “family” and “marriage”) are adopted and adapted to fit the group’s ideals. Christian fundamentalists, for instance, are selective in the technology they adopt—embracing television and radio to their benefit, but not the Internet. Some other groups control the amount of “modern” culture they adopt through living in controlled communities that reject Western mores and cultural norms in preference for traditional dress and action.

Antoun says fundamentalists react with protest and outrage at the secularization of society and seek to undo cumulative societal changes and replace them with a purified religious institutions and ethics.

Islamic fundamentalism, which started later than its Christian or Jewish counterparts, is driven by the Western economic and cultural penetration of the Islamic world that came about during Western colonialism. It has continued and grown because the fundamentalists often see the non-colonial governments as a “change of masters” from Westerners to Westernized Muslims.

Looking at the events of September 11, Antoun notes that his perspective does not completely explain what happened with the attacks on the United States, but may help us understand the cultural background leading to the terrorist attacks.