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Laura McAleer appointed associate VP for federal relations

2019-01-07T13:00:00-05:00

The University of Notre Dame on Monday (Jan. 7) named senior Pentagon official Laura McAleer the University’s associate vice president for federal and Washington relations.

McAleer, a Notre Dame alumna, served for the last two decades in congressional and executive branch staff positions, most recently as acting principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs.

“Laura McAleer has evinced throughout her career excellence, integrity and achievement at the highest level,” said Paul J. Browne, Notre Dame’s vice president for public affairs and communications. “Her alma mater could not be prouder of, or more confident in, someone who has demonstrated such professional expertise, intellectual rigor and devotion to duty.”

“It is a tremendous honor to join the Notre Dame team,” McAleer said. “The University is such a foundational part of my identity and outlook, and I am excited to help strengthen its positive impact and reach throughout Washington and beyond.”

McAleer’s responsibilities include development and execution of the University’s federal relations strategy, strengthening its relationships with key constituencies in Washington, including the White House, Congress, federal agencies, regulatory bodies, media and alumni. Although based in Washington, she will often be on campus meeting with faculty and administration. She succeeds the retiring John Sturm, the first person appointed to the position upon its creation in 2012.

McAleer has more than 20 years of civilian and military experience at all levels of government. Until Friday, she helped lead the Department of Defense’s strategic engagement and advocacy in Congress and was a principal representative and spokesperson on defense legislative and resourcing priorities.

McAleer previously worked as a senior legislative adviser on Capitol Hill, holding staff positions in both the Senate and House of Representatives. Beginning on the majority staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, she subsequently served as a foreign policy and national security adviser to four U.S. senators, managing legislative and appropriations portfolios pertaining to defense, homeland security, intelligence and veterans and foreign affairs.

In addition to her congressional work, McAleer served as director for strategic initiatives for the secretary of the Navy, as a strategy and plans officer for the U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, and as a defense adviser and government affairs manager for a Washington-based consulting firm. She also served as an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and as a visiting scholar at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute.

McAleer graduated magna cum laude from Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in government and international relations. She earned a master’s degree in national security and strategic studies from the U.S. Naval War College and an advanced project manager certification from Stanford University. McAleer and her husband, Pete, also a Notre Dame graduate, are the parents of two children.

Researchers make important discovery for ‘smart’ films and encapsulation

2019-01-07T09:00:00-05:00

A study from the University of Notre Dame has found that the properties of a material commonly used to create conductive or protective films and encapsulate drug compounds – and the conditions in which this material will disassemble to release that medication – may be different than initially thought.

Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the study aimed to identify the conditions under which polyelectrolyte complexes, or PECs, would assemble and stay assembled. The researchers found new, important differences between strong and weak PECs.

“The mechanism of weak PECs is completely different than that of strong PECs,” said Jonathan Whitmer, assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and principal investigator for the study. “During our research, we found that when each of the weak polyelectrolytes came together in a solution, the presence of an oppositely charged polymer resulted in a strong pKa shift, enabling both polyelectrolytes to become highly charged and to stay stable. On the contrary, pH has relatively little influence on the charge and assembly of strong PECs, whose strong binding to salt ions determines most of their assembly.”

Weak PECs have been studied for many uses, including as a material to create capsules that hold medications. Weak PECs have a unique ability to bond and release in certain environments, but Whitmer’s team found that pH affected the overall assembly of weak PECs, as well as the conditions in which these materials may release.

“This study completely changes our perspective on the formation of weak PECs and how this material can be used,” said Whitmer, an affiliated member of NDnano. “Not only does this study point out physical mechanisms that will enable us to engineer better PECs, but it also has the potential to improve how this material can be utilized in industry, including the ‘smart’ encapsulation and delivery of medications, thin conductive materials and protective coatings.”

In conducting the study, Whitmer and his team also developed a novel simulation algorithm. This algorithm allowed the researchers to analyze certain aspects of weak PECs that were not possible before, including the proper replication of solution conditions.

The first author on the study is Vikramjit Rathee, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering graduate student. Additional collaborators include Hythem Sidky, a former chemical and biomolecular engineering doctoral student and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, and Ben Sikora, former postdoctoral scholar in the Whitmer lab and currently employed at Honeywell FM&T. The study was supported by the Midwest Integrated Center for Computational Materials, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Material Sciences and Engineering Division, and by startup funds provided by Notre Dame.

The Center for Nano Science and Technology (NDnano) at the University of Notre Dame promotes collaborative research in science and engineering to address unsolved scientific and technical questions with an aim to promote the greater good. NDnano is where Notre Dame faculty, researchers and students meet to broaden understanding, discuss multidisciplinary research opportunities and shape future research directions. To learn more about NDnano, visit nano.nd.edu.

Contact: Brandi R. Klingerman, research communications specialist, Notre Dame Research, bklinger@nd.edu, 574-631-8183; @UNDResearch

Originally published by Brandi Klingerman at research.nd.edu on Dec. 20.

Storm the Stadium 2019 set for April

2019-01-03T08:00:00-05:00

On April 27 (Saturday), the University of Notre Dame Office of Military and Veterans Affairs will host the second annual Storm the Stadium, with proceeds benefiting the University’s military-connected students. Storm the Stadium will feature three courses that will take participants up, down and around Notre Dame Stadium.

Storm the Stadium features a long stair climb course of 3,418 steps, a 1,640-step short course and a third-of-a-mile flat walking course, along with an on-field family fun zone with inflatables and games for children ages 13 and younger.

New features of this year’s event include two timed heats for both the long and short courses and opening the climb to participants ages 14 and older. The event has also been moved to April to allow for cooler weather temperatures. Last year’s first-time event was held on the Fourth of July and saw 1,408 participants take part in the ultimate stair-climbing challenge.

This year’s event will kick off with an opening ceremony at 9:15 a.m. and ends at 12:30 p.m. Climbers can choose one of eight starting waves, including two timed competitive waves, beginning at 9:30 a.m. (timed long and short courses), 9:45 (timed long and short courses), 10 (long and short courses), 10:15 (long and short courses), 10:30 (long and short courses), 10:45 (long and short courses), 11 (short course only) or 11:15 (short course only). An awards ceremony will take place after the timed waves have completed to recognize top finishers.

“Storm the Stadium will honor our veterans and active-duty military members and their families while also providing a fun, healthy, family-focused event,” said Laura Carlson, vice president and associate provost. “Now is the perfect time of year to commit to a New Year’s resolution and begin a training program for this event.”

Long- and short-course climbers will receive a medal upon completion of the course, and all participants will receive an event shirt and free concessions. The cost to participate is $40 for climbers, $25 for walkers and $5 each for those wishing to access only the on-field family fun zone. For more details or to register, visit stormthestadium.nd.edu.

Established in 2017, the Office of Military and Veterans Affairs is responsible for making the Notre Dame experience robust, inclusive and vibrant for military-connected students; achieving excellence in undergraduate, graduate and professional education for military-connected students; and enabling Notre Dame to lead an exemplary model of engagement in the military and veteran space.

Contact: Regan Jones, director of military and veterans affairs, 574-631-8729, omva@nd.edu

NHL, Blackhawks support Notre Dame’s Robinson Center as legacy to 2019 Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic

2018-12-31T13:00:00-05:00

As a legacy to the 2019 Bridgestone NHL Winter Classic, the National Hockey League and Chicago Blackhawks have donated $100,000 to support the redevelopment of the University of Notre Dame’s Robinson Community Learning Center (RCLC).

Representatives of the RCLC were presented with a check Monday (Dec. 31), a day before the Blackhawks and Boston Bruins meet outdoors at Notre Dame Stadium.

Compton Family Ice Arena

The donation will be used to increase access to youth hockey in South Bend in the RCLC’s new 13,800-square-foot building, scheduled to open in 2020. Currently, the center serves approximately 600 people each week. The new building will provide more activities to local residents, students and community members, including regular access to hockey clinics and programming.

The Blackhawks, through their Get Out and Learn (G.O.A.L.) program, are providing the new center with hockey equipment, training programs and hockey clinics. Each year, the Blackhawks will offer updated training support for Robinson Community Learning Center staff and participants. To date, more than 300,000 students across 650 schools have participated in the Blackhawks’ G.O.A.L. program.

The NHL’s donation will support a new computer lab that will include the Future Goals’ Hockey Scholar online program, which uses hockey to teach STEM (science, technology, education, math) concepts. The program is targeted to students in grades 4-7, leveraging hockey to teach critical STEM skills, develop scientific and critical thinking skills and introduce STEM-related hockey careers.

“We are so grateful to the Blackhawks and the NHL for their support of the Robinson Community Learning Center’s youth,” said Jennifer Knapp Beudert, manager of the center. “Through our amazing partnership with the Blackhawks, RCLC kids have been given opportunities to learn new skills, explore potential career paths, and have been able to experience hockey firsthand. Thanks to this Blackhawks and NHL Legacy Project, more RCLC participants will become involved in hockey as well as in STEM learning areas.”

Additionally, the nearby Compton Family Ice Arena at Notre Dame will host its first-ever Little Blackhawks Learn to Play program this spring. The program will be open to children ages 5-9 who want to try hockey for the first time. Participants are provided with free head-to-toe equipment, instruction and certified coaching led by NHL alumni. Five participants will receive a “hockey scholarship” to the Learn to Play program, covering all fees.

The Legacy initiative is an ongoing philanthropic endeavor in which the NHL and local clubs support community organizations in the host city of an NHL event. Since 2007, the league, its teams and partners have collectively donated more than $1.6 million to communities across North America. In the past decade, the Legacy Projects have aided thousands of hospital patients in recovery, helped at-risk youth and families gain better access to educational and vocational training, and provided greater access to people of all ages to learn and play hockey.

NHL, the NHL Shield and the word mark NHL Winter Classic are registered trademarks and the NHL Winter Classic logo is a trademark of the National Hockey League. NHL and NHL team marks are the property of the NHL and its teams. NHL 2018. All Rights Reserved.

For more information, contact:

Jasmine Ghafour, NHL, jghafour@nhl.com

Lyndsey Stroope, Chicago Blackhawks, lstroope@chicagoblackhawks.com

Sue Ryan, Notre Dame, sue.ryan@nd.edu

Book club ‘elevates’ language for Spanish-speaking Catholic school students

2018-12-18T15:00:00-05:00

Every Thursday, Julia Cogan, a junior at the University of Notre Dame, drives the six minutes from campus to Holy Cross School, a Catholic school on South Bend’s near northwest side — a socially and economically diverse area of the city where an increasing number of young people speak one language at home and another at school, straddling a wide and often disorienting lingual and cultural divide.

There, Cogan, a sociology major with a minor in teaching English to speakers of other languages, leads a heritage book club for middle-school students in Clare Roach’s introductory Spanish class. The students speak Spanish at home — easily conversing with Spanish-speaking padres (mothers and fathers), tios (aunts and uncles) and abuelos (grandmas and grandpas) — but struggle to read and write in Spanish because it is not the traditional language of education in South Bend.

Roach, coordinator of the two-way immersion program at Holy Cross as well as the English as a New Language Program at the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) at Notre Dame, calls these sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students her “too-smart people.”

“These kids speak Spanish better than I do; they don’t need to be in an introductory Spanish class where they’re learning colors and numbers and basic greetings,” Roach said. “They’re too linguistically skilled for that.”

The latest in a long line of Notre-Dame backed programs and initiatives aimed at improving educational outcomes for primary and secondary students in the South Bend-Elkhart region, the book club, now in its second year, provides Holy Cross students of Hispanic heritage an opportunity to become scholars in their native language within a collaborative learning environment that promotes discussion and problem solving.

“This just sends a wonderful message” about the value of Spanish language and culture in both the church and the classroom, said Angela Budzinski, Holy Cross principal.

About Notre Dame’s involvement in the club, Budzinski said, “I think it would have been extremely difficult to do without Notre Dame; they’ve been a true partner in this process.”

On a recent Thursday, four students from Roach’s eighth-grade Spanish class — three girls and one boy — sat around a small, rectangular table talking about “Sonrie!” an award-winning graphic memoir by Raina Telgemeier about a girl who endures a series of dental operations and appliances after a fall, in addition to an earthquake, boy trouble and unreliable friends in her hometown of San Francisco.

Taking turns reading aloud, the students soon reached the point in the book about the “terremoto,” or earthquake, prompting a discussion of other Spanish-language words for natural disasters, including “inundacion.”

“Is that a flood?” one of the students whispered in English.

“Yes,” his classmates giggled.

“En español,” said Cogan, who in addition to leading the book club also teaches English to Spanish-speaking adults at La Casa de Amistad, a Hispanic community center in South Bend.

Elevating the language

Newcomers to South Bend have settled on the west side for generations, making it one of the most diverse areas of the city. Polish immigrants led the way, followed by blacks fleeing the south for more freedom and better opportunities in the north and, more recently, Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico and other Latin-American countries.

Today, parts of the west side are more than 60 percent Hispanic, according to census data, with many families speaking primarily Spanish at home. Holy Cross is divided almost evenly between white, black and Hispanic students.

Similar demographic shifts have reshaped the Catholic Church. Since 1991, the percentage of self-identifying Catholics in the U.S. who identify as Hispanic has grown from less than 10 percent to about 40 percent, according to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. More than half of Catholics in the U.S. under the age of 30 identify as Hispanic.

That’s true on the west side, where Catholic parishes founded by European immigrants around the turn of the last century now offer services in both English and Spanish. St. Adalbert Catholic Parish, founded by Polish-Americans in the early 1900s and now located in the heart of the Hispanic community in South Bend, is more than 50 percent Hispanic.

Embracing that reality, Holy Cross, in collaboration with ACE and the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame, launched a two-way immersion program for pre-K students during the 2017-18 school year.

The program, which prioritizes Spanish in the early grades, expanded to kindergarten this year. It will continue to advance one grade level each year, incorporating more English into the curriculum each grade until instruction is evenly split between Spanish and English.

In addition to promoting mastery of Spanish and English and positive cross-culture attitudes and behaviors among students of different backgrounds, the program aims to “elevate the status of Spanish” as a scholarly language, Roach said, so that it is seen as equal to, rather than secondary to, English.

“The fact that (heritage Spanish speakers) speak a language other than English at their kitchen table is not always something that they want to highlight because it spotlights them as different,” Roach explained. “They don’t recognize that their Spanish language is an asset. It’s something that they want to hide.”

But it is an asset, Roach said.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, compared with their non-bilingual peers, bilingual children have an easier time understanding math concepts and solving word problems, developing strong thinking skills, using logic, focusing, remembering and making decisions, thinking about language and learning about other languages.

They also maintain stronger ties with their family, culture and community, Roach said, face better job prospects as adults and benefit from the opportunity to more fully participate in the global community.

‘Fun’ but ‘challenging’

The book club evolved in parallel with the immersion program, Roach said, as a way to promote bi-literacy — the ability to read and write in two languages — among older Spanish-speaking students who grew up learning to read and write in just one language: English.

“I recognized that these kids had a linguistic skill set that would not be met in a traditional introductory Spanish class, so I quickly scrambled to find some resources within the community to meet their unique educational needs and to leverage this blessing that they have, this educational gold that they have, which is that they have a language base in Spanish and in English,” Roach said.

That search led to Tim Jacklich, a political science and Spanish major from Glen Ellyn, Illinois. A sophomore at the time, Jacklich was looking to plug a hole in his fall schedule when he stumbled upon an opening for a Spanish-language teacher at Holy Cross — part of the school’s effort to staff up for the new immersion program.

Jacklich inquired about the opening, which led to a conversation about the book club.

“I put out a couple of emails to professors I knew at Notre Dame and they cast the net,” Roach said. “And Tim reaches out to me and says, ‘I’m free on Thursday mornings. I’m a Spanish major. Maybe I can help.”

Problem solved.

Two weeks later, Jacklich led his first group of Spanish-speaking Holy Cross students in a discussion of “Fantasmas,” or “Ghosts,” a graphic novel — also by Telgemeier — about Catrina, a young girl from a multicultural family who must adjust to a sudden move and learn to accept her sister’s fate as someone with cystic fibrosis.

Jacklich, who had little teaching experience at the time, worked with Roach and Elena Mangione-Lora, associate teaching professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Notre Dame, to develop the curriculum and plan lessons for the club.

“As I got better, I started to plan mini-grammar lessons around the text,” Jacklich said. “So if I noticed a certain verb form or sentence structure I would make note of it and talk to the students about it.”

“It was fun,” he said, “but it was challenging. We were sort of figuring it out as we went.”

About the students, Jacklich said, “I loved the kids. They were just so bright and certainly very welcoming to me and very forgiving when I would make mistakes in Spanish.”

Occasionally, he said, the students would correct his Spanish.

“And how amazing is that?” Roach said. “Because every time that happens, you’re saying to a child, ‘You know, I’m learning too.’”

Jacklich described his fluency in Spanish as intermediate. He spent the summer after his sophomore year teaching at a largely Spanish-speaking school in Tucson through ACE, and he plans to study in Mexico next semester through Notre Dame International. But the book club remains his most immersive experience with Spanish outside of the classroom.

“A unique aspect of it was how much we learned from each other,” Jacklich said of the club.

For example, he said, it was a student who pointed out that Catrina, the protagonist in “Fantasmas,” shared a name with La Calavera Catrina, the referential image of Death in Mexico and an icon of Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday that is central to the plot of the book.

Introduced by Mexican printmaker and illustrator Jose Guadalupe Posada in the early 1900s, La Calavera Catrina is a satirical portrait of those Mexican natives who aspired to adopt European aristocratic traditions in the pre-revolution era. In other words, like the students, she inhabits two worlds simultaneously.

“I would never have picked up on that detail,” Jacklich said.

Why a book club?

According to Roach, “There’s not a lot of stress associated with a book club.” It encourages debate and discussion, Roach said, and “it’s fun.” Especially when the person leading the club is a student as well, and not just a teacher.

Budzinski, the principal, said, “We wanted to take these kids and show them that there is something in the Spanish program in sixth, seventh and eighth grades that’s good for them too.”

As for the decision to build the club around a graphic novel, Roach said, “These students should be starting with early readers in Spanish. But you don’t want to go to a seventh-grader with baby books; that’s the quickest way to shut that seventh-grader down. So the beauty of the graphic novel is it doesn’t feel baby-ish, and yet there is all this support” — visual clues, especially — “for developing literacy skills.”

Along with Jacklich, Roach shared these and other insights about the book club in a widely shared piece for Edutopia, an educational website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit that celebrates and encourages innovation in K-12 education.

The biggest takeaway?

“You don’t have to hire a whole new teacher to engage non-English speakers and promote bilingualism in the classroom; you just have to reach out to your community and see what assets are available,” Roach said. “And we’re lucky enough to have a world-class university in our backyard.”

And students such as Cogan and Jacklich willing to lend a hand.

A ‘dignifying’ experience

Back in the classroom, Cogan wrote on the white board, “¿Has encontrado un desastre natural (have you ever experienced a natural disaster)?” and drew a pair of lines to the words “Si (yes)” and “No (no).”

One of the students spoke about recent flooding in South Bend. The city experienced heavy snow and rain in February, sending the St. Joseph River spilling over its banks and into homes and businesses. Swamped wastewater sewers also contributed to basement flooding throughout the city.

Cogan, in turn, shared her own experience with natural disasters as a native of Missouri, part of the area across the central U.S. known as Tornado Alley, describing the look of the sky — “like a gray/green color” — before a coming twister.

Cogan started leading the book club this fall, the result of a fortuitous conversation with Michael Comuniello, associate director for recruiting with ACE.

Jacklich, who is on track to graduate early next fall, had recently stepped away from the club because of a conflict with school, and Cogan was talking to Comuniello about her work with Spanish-speaking adults in South Bend when he mentioned the opening.

Cogan was intrigued.

“I love working with adults, but I really love working with children too, so I was looking for an opportunity to do that as well,” Cogan said.

Like Jacklich, Cogan described the experience as “rewarding (but) challenging,” especially “talking about linguistic stuff” in Spanish or “making sure I’m using words correctly when I’m with the kids.”

A native of St. Louis, Cogan became interested in Spanish, and language in general, in high school. She took Spanish classes, and she was active in her school’s Spanish Club. She also worked as a teaching assistant at a Catholic school with a large number of Hispanic students. And she spent multiple summers in Nicaragua, where the official language is Spanish.

More recently, as a Notre Dame student, Cogan spent the summer after her freshman year running an English-language program in Peru with support from First Year of Studies. She spent the following summer in Brazil after learning Portuguese. And she’ll study in Toledo, Spain, next semester through Notre Dame International.

Ever humble, she described her proficiency in Spanish as “fluent, probably,” noting she occasionally relies on English while leading the book club.

Budzinski, for her part, praised Notre Dame generally — and Cogan, Jacklich and Roach specifically — for their contributions to the book club as well as the immersion program more widely, saying, “The success of the program truly is because we have this partnership with Notre Dame.”

Said Roach, “Everything about this, the word I would use is dignifying. It dignifies the skill set of the children, it dignifies their reality; it dignifies the talents of our Notre Dame undergrads and their capacity to make a difference in the lives of children locally; it dignifies what we’re trying to do at Holy Cross, which is to increase people’s understanding and appreciation of bilingualism.”

Notre Dame, Clemson: Competitors on the field, collaborators in research

2018-12-18T11:10:00-05:00

The University of Notre Dame will face Clemson University for the first time in the postseason when they take the field for the 2018 College Football Playoff semifinal in the Cotton Bowl, but the two universities share a long history of collaboration in research.

Together, researchers from Notre Dame and Clemson are breaking down the causes of health epidemics, expanding our knowledge of planet formation and analyzing the interactions between humans and machines.

Chronic disease and children’s health

In the U.S., the number of seriously overweight or obese people has gone from alarming to epidemic. Chronic diseases brought on by being overweight or obese make both conditions the second leading cause of preventable death in the country. Notre Dame’s I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters and Professor of Sociology Sarah Mustillo and Clemson Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice Assistant Professor Miao Li research how adverse childhood experiences such as poverty, maltreatment or parent drug use affect children’s health into adulthood, including the likelihood of being overweight or obese. Mustillo and Li, who was a postdoctoral researcher under Mustillo, are among the first researchers to use nationally representative data from one of the world’s longest studies on poverty to study obesity.

The researchers found that very early childhood, from 0-4 years of age, is a critical period in which exposure to economic hardship has a long-term impact on excess weight and obesity. Even if things get better financially for a family after these critical years, the damage is likely done.

Mustillo and Li also received a Notre Dame Global Collaboration Initiative (GCI) grant to facilitate the “Notre Dame-Renmin Partnership on Social Science Research: Theory, Methodology, and Big Data” with the National Survey Research Center at Renmin University in Beijing. The collaboration involves several projects, including collecting daily data on several hundred children to examine whether grandparents can offset the impact of parental stress on children’s well-being.

Exploring planet formation

Using high-resolution infrared observations from Mauna Kea, Hawaii, Terrence Rettig, professor of astrophysics in the Department of Physics at Notre Dame, and Sean Brittain, professor of physics and astronomy at Clemson University, have collaborated on research projects involving the evolution of gas and dust in disks around young stars. Brittain received his Ph.D. in physics at Notre Dame.

Rettig said Brittain has continued the program and has become a highly respected leader in the field. The infrared spectroscopy program has been ongoing for nearly 20 years, beginning as an exploration of comets that evolved to explore gas disks around young stars where planets form.

“Gas and dust within these very young disks does not remain available for more than a few million years to form planets,” Rettig said. “So in order to form planets, they must do it, rather quickly, within that time frame. This research provides a better understanding of planet-forming regions and helps to clarify how the very early planets, such as Earth, might have evolved.”

Building autonomous machines

Panos Antsaklis, the H. Clifford and Evelyn A. Brosey Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Notre Dame, and Yue Wang, the Warren H. Owen-Duke Energy Associate Professor of Engineering at Clemson, examine ways to design engineering systems that exhibit a high degree of autonomy in performing tasks. As a postdoctoral researcher at Notre Dame, Wang worked with Antsaklis to study the interactions between digital computers, engineered physical systems and humans, using energy concepts such as passivity, to design Cyber Physical Networked Embedded Systems.

“The goal is autonomy,” Antsaklis said. “You want to build machines that do things by themselves. Applications like the autonomous cars you see now are an extension of these systems.”

Antsaklis’ current research focuses on addressing problems in the areas of control, computing and communication networks and on hybrid and discrete event dynamical systems. Specifically, he studies those concepts as they relate to drones and ground vehicles, to determine how to equip drones to perform missions with a high degree of autonomy during emergencies like wildfires or when conducting inspections at various locations, including pipelines — without the need for continuous human control.

Notre Dame will face off with Clemson in the Goodyear Cotton Bowl in Arlington, Texas, on Dec. 29.

Jenkins and Nanovic Halls earn LEED Silver certification

2018-12-18T10:00:00-05:00

The U.S. Green Building Council has awarded LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Silver certification to the University of Notre Dame’s Jenkins and Nanovic Halls, in recognition for sustainable design, construction and operation.

“Earning LEED Silver for Jenkins and Nanovic Halls exemplifies the University’s commitment to designing and building energy-efficient, environmentally conscious facilities,” Vice President and University Architect Doug Marsh said.

Throughout the construction process, project managers eliminated and minimized construction waste, diverting 83 percent of waste from the landfill. More than 39 percent of the building material contained recycled content, and about 40 percent of the material was harvested or manufactured within 500 miles of the University.

During daily operation, Jenkins and Nanovic Halls conserve water and use less energy and other natural resources. With low-flow faucets in bathrooms and kitchens and high-efficiency shower heads and toilets, occupants in the building consume about 40 percent less water compared to the average amount of water consumed in standard new construction. Energy-efficient LED lighting is used throughout the building as well as occupancy sensors in nearly all of the offices and open office workspaces to conserve energy. In addition, spaces such as classrooms, conference rooms, lounges and lobbies have lighting controls with dimming capabilities, allowing for adjustability and conservation.

Because of the installation of high-efficiency heating and cooling systems, the building consumes 16 percent less energy and uses no CFC-based refrigerants, which contributes to a healthier, more sustainable atmosphere. Additionally, temperature controls in offices and workstations and all multi-occupant spaces efficiently regulate heating and cooling.

Since 2011, the University of Notre Dame has been committed to following LEED standards for all new construction. The University has earned nine LEED Gold certifications and five LEED Silver certifications including Jenkins and Nanovic Halls. In addition to saving energy and resources, LEED buildings contribute to a greener, more sustainable environment for generations to come.

Grant to help Riley students develop affordable housing in South Bend

2018-12-18T09:00:00-05:00

The community development corporation 466 Works, in collaboration with the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Civic Innovation (CCI), Southeast Organized Area Residents, Neighborhood Development Associates and the South Bend Community School Corp. has been recommended for a $125,000 grant to engage students from Riley High School’s Construction Trades Program in a home build in South Bend’s Southeast Neighborhood.

The money, courtesy of a federally funded Community Development Block Grant from the city of South Bend, will allow the students to build a home for a low- to moderate-income family in a part of the city where access to quality, affordable housing and financing is limited because of market conditions, in addition to the homes the Construction Trades Program builds in more affluent, suburban areas outside of the city.

The Southeast Neighborhood is located southeast of downtown and includes Riley.

Interns with the Bowman Creek Educational Ecosystem (BCE2), from Notre Dame as well as Bethel College and Penn High School, collaborated on the grant with Southeast Organized Area Residents and Neighborhood Development Associates. BCE2 is a program of CCI that brings people from different backgrounds and sectors together to solve challenging problems in the community.

Moving forward, CCI and BCE2 will continue to work through the details of the project, meeting monthly with 466 Works and the school corporation for plan development and with the civil engineering and architecture class at Riley for the design of the home. Notre Dame also partners with Riley on BRIDGES, a before-school enrichment program for girls enrolled in the school’s magnet engineering program.

The city of South Bend administers the Community Development Block Grant program on behalf of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Generally, the program provides resources for cities and counties for a wide range of community development needs, from affordable housing to slum and blight elimination.

This particular grant will help subsidize the cost of the home here, accounting for the difference between the material value of the home, based on development and construction costs, and the market value so that the school corporation comes out whole and the buyer stays right-side-up on the mortgage.

466 Works currently owns 20 vacant lots in the Southeast Neighborhood, many cleared by the city. It will transfer one of those lots to the school corporation for $1 to facilitate the project. The others will remain available for future development, either in conjunction with the school corporation or other community partners.

The project will provide benefits for the community, the homeowner and the students:

• For the community, it will address the need for quality, affordable housing in the city, improve the look and feel of the Southeast Neighborhood and motivate existing homeowners to improve their own properties to keep pace with the improvements.

• For the homeowner, it will provide financial stability, a sense of pride in home ownership and long-term assets in the form of home equity.

• For the students, it will provide valuable skills and experience in the building trades, as well as exposure to the community-building process.

466 Works expects to transfer the lot to the school corporation in April. Construction will follow in June, and the home will be ready for occupancy the following spring. The home will qualify for a Silver Rating from the National Green Building Standard, lowering the monthly utility bills.

466 Works is a nonprofit community development corporation that works to enhance and revitalize the Southeast Neighborhood, characterized by old housing stock, inadequate housing options and a high concentration of vacant homes, through improved infrastructure, safety and quality of residential housing.

CCI, housed in the College of Engineering, works with other research centers and individuals across Notre Dame to identify opportunities for collaboration that address pressing issues in the South Bend-Elkhart region.

For more information, visit civicinnovation.nd.edu.

Contact: Erin Blasko, assistant director of media relations, 574-631-4127, eblasko@nd.edu

Excellence in Leadership Program named in honor of Affleck-Graves

2018-12-17T15:00:00-05:00

The Excellence in Leadership Program at the University of Notre Dame has been named in honor of John Affleck-Graves, the executive vice president of the University, who announced last summer that he will retire in June. University leaders surprised Affleck-Graves with the honor at a recognition event for the program Monday (Dec. 17) at the Morris Inn.

“Of the rich legacy John will leave at Notre Dame, nothing is more valuable than his commitment to invest in and develop the talents of the University’s most valuable asset — its people,” Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., said.

The Excellence in Leadership Program is a yearlong initiative in which 30 senior leaders reflect on and hone their own authentic leadership style, gain experience in building strong communities and form relationships that will be invaluable throughout their careers.

“John not only inspired this program,” Father Jenkins said, “he exemplifies the kind of leader we want to develop at Notre Dame: committed to excellence and to our mission, of the highest integrity, accountable and a team builder. It is most fitting that the program that aspires to develop leaders at Notre Dame, and the certificate given to those who complete it, should bear the name of John Affleck-Graves.”

The program is composed of two complementary components — Executive Leadership and High Performance Leadership. The former is for University employees with potential for senior leadership positions within the next five years. It focuses on culture building, forming communities and leading through change. The latter, for those with the potential to become senior leaders within 10 years, emphasizes team dynamics, developing an understanding of how teams form, how to manage conflict and what makes some teams successful. The program culminates in group projects.

Executive vice president since 2004, Affleck-Graves is the University’s chief financial officer with responsibility for the investment and finance offices. He also has oversight of information technology, human resources, campus safety, event management, construction, building services, landscaping, food services and auxiliary operations, including the Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore, Morris Inn and licensing.

During Affleck-Graves’ 14 years to date, Notre Dame’s annual operating budget has grown to $1.6 billion from $650 million and the endowment has increased to $13 billion from $3.5 billion. Thirty-six new buildings have been constructed totaling 3.3 million square feet, including Campus Crossroads, the 800,000-square-foot addition of three buildings surrounding Notre Dame Stadium that stands as the largest building initiative in Notre Dame’s 176-year history.

A native of South Africa and a naturalized U.S. citizen, Affleck-Graves earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in finance and his doctorate in mathematical statistics from the University of Cape Town. He taught and conducted research at his alma mater for 11 years before coming to Notre Dame in 1986, serving until 2000, including as chair of the Department of Finance and Business Economics the final three years. He spent a year at Florida State University as the Patty Hill Smith Eminent Scholar in Finance, then returned to Notre Dame as vice president and associate provost and Notre Dame Chair in Finance.

He is the first layman to serve as Notre Dame’s executive vice president, following Congregation of Holy Cross Revs. Edmund Joyce, E. William Beauchamp and Timothy Scully.

Basilica of the Sacred Heart to close for maintenance Dec. 26-Jan. 11

2018-12-17T13:00:00-05:00

The Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame will be closed Dec. 26 (Wednesday) through Jan. 11 (Friday) for maintenance of a continued lighting project. No services will be held during this time due to potential unsafe conditions.

Weekday Confessions (11 a.m.) and Mass (11:30 a.m.) will be relocated to Sacred Heart Parish in the Crypt of the Basilica from Jan. 2 (Wednesday) through Jan. 11 (Friday). The Basilica will reopen for the 5 p.m. Vigil Mass on Jan. 12 (Saturday).

A complete Basilica Mass schedule for Christmas and winter break can be found on the Campus Ministry website.

Jim Gaffigan brings ‘Quality Time Tour’ to South Bend for an IDEA Week Event Series show

2018-12-17T11:00:00-05:00

Comedian Jim Gaffigan will bring his “Quality Time Tour” to South Bend for a pre-IDEA Week show. He will perform March 6 (Wednesday) at the Morris Performing Arts Center in downtown South Bend.

The show is hosted by the organizers of Idea Week as part of their new Idea Week Event Series, which will feature entertainment acts and speakers outside of the week’s annual event. This year’s Idea Week will take place April 8-13 (Monday-Saturday).

“A lot of interest was generated in Idea Week after its first successful year,” said event director Nick Swisher. “We had many speakers and entertainment acts contact us to see how they could be a part. To keep the momentum and fun going, as well as to accommodate those acts whose schedules don’t fit our April 8-13 window, we will now be hosting events like Gaffigan throughout the year.”

Idea Week is a cross between a festival and similar innovation and entrepreneurial events in cities such as Boston, Denver and Chicago. It is hosted by the University of Notre Dame, the South Bend-Elkhart region and various community organizations and businesses. Its April event will include more than 50 sessions broken up into four types: Learn, Play, Meet and Compete.

Gaffigan is a four-time Grammy-nominated comedian, actor, writer and producer; a two-time New York Times best-selling author; an Emmy-winning top touring performer; and a multi-platinum-selling recording artist. He is known around the world for his unique brand of humor, which largely revolves around his observations on life.

In addition to two seasons of the critically acclaimed semi-autobiographical “The Jim Gaffigan Show,” which he wrote and produced with his wife, Jeannie, and his widely popular stand-up comedy specials, Gaffigan has guest-starred on many television comedies and dramas, ranging from “Portlandia” and “Bob’s Burgers” to the HBO cult hit “Flight of the Conchords” to dramatic roles in “Law & Order.”

On the silver screen, his many credits include “Three Kings,” “Super Troopers” and “Chappaquiddick.” 2019 will be Gaffigan’s biggest year to date with an astonishing 10 films scheduled for release. Three of these films will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, including “Troupe Zero” with Viola Davis and Allison Janney. Additionally, in October Gaffigan will release his seventh stand-up special, “Quality Time,” and continue his international arena and theater tour.

Gaffigan regularly does humorous commentaries on CBS Sunday. Last year Gaffigan served as master of ceremonies at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner. In 2015, Gaffigan had the great honor of performing for Pope Francis and more than 1 million festival attendees at the Festival of Families in Philadelphia. Gaffigan and his wife live in Manhattan with their five loud and expensive children.

Gaffigan last performed in South Bend at Notre Dame in August 2013.

Tickets to see Gaffigan range from $45 to $95 and go on sale at noon Dec. 21 (Friday) at the Morris Box Office, by phone at 800-537-6415 and online at www.morriscenter.org.

Contact: Erin Blasko, assistant director of media relations, 574-631-4127, eblasko@nd.edu

Three faculty awarded NEH fellowships, continuing record funding for humanities research

2018-12-13T16:00:00-05:00

Three University of Notre Dame faculty members — Rebecca Tinio McKenna, Sarah McKibben and Vincent Phillip Muñoz — have been offered fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the 2018 award cycle.

With 65 total awards, scholars in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters have received more NEH fellowships than any other private university in the United States since 1999.

“We are incredibly proud of these three faculty members who continue Notre Dame’s remarkable success in earning NEH fellowships,” said Sarah A. Mustillo, I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. “These awards recognize the outstanding research that is happening here across a range of disciplines, the creativity and originality of our scholars as well as the excellent support provided by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts throughout the application process.”

Rebecca McKenna

During the 2019-20 academic year, Rebecca Tinio McKenna, assistant professor of history, will continue her research on the history of the piano.

McKenna’s project explores largely forgotten figures in the production of the instrument through the early 20th century. Among these figures are African-American musicians who gave life to the instrument in theaters and saloons, sounding notes that would sell sheet music and, in turn, the piano itself. McKenna’s research brings together historical fields often treated in isolation — music history with labor history, African-American history, business history and imperial histories.

“I am aiming to tell a history of the instrument’s manufacture in the United States together with a history of the sounds piano players produced and the stories they told across the ivory keys,” McKenna said. “In the process, I hope to show some of the connections shared by people in seemingly far-flung places — from the late 19th-century American, middle-class parlor to the ivory warehouses of Zanzibar; from a Connecticut River company town where ivory keys were made, to saloons and theaters in cities like New York, Chicago, Sedalia and New Orleans.”

Sarah Mckibben

Sarah McKibben, associate professor of Irish language and literature, will continue her research on bardic poetry in Ireland, for which she also won a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in early 2018.

McKibben’s research focuses on Irish poets of the 16th and 17th centuries, who composed compelling artistic expressions of praise and warning — as well as satire — in the face of an antagonistic, expanding Tudor-Stuart state.

“Whether inveighing against ‘dlígheadh is fhiú aindligheadh’ (‘[English] law that is mere unlawfulness’), urging a patron to defend them ‘ar smacht ríogh’ (‘against the king’s oppression’), warning him not to be ‘meallta’ (‘wooed’) by English tricks, or comically threatening him with ‘sreath iolfháobhair raghlain rann’ (‘many bright blades of eulogistic quatrains’), bardic poets testify to the richness of the poetic tradition in confronting change,” McKibben said. “Their voices cry out to be heard, and this is why I wish to examine the native literary response to colonial transformation.”

McKibben added that she feels honored to have been selected for an NEH Fellowship for her work in Irish/Celtic studies, which is a field rarely selected for national awards in the United States.

“The award will enable me to make a significant contribution to early modern Irish language studies, a field I enjoy teaching regularly here at Notre Dame,” McKibben said.

Vincent Phillip Muñoz

For Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Tocqueville Associate Professor of Political Science and concurrent associate professor of law, the NEH award will enable him to complete his forthcoming book, “Religious Freedom and the American Founding: The Natural Right of Religious Liberty, the Original Meanings of the Religion Clauses, and Our ‘First Freedom’ Today.”

Muñoz’s research examines the United States founders’ political and constitutional philosophy of religious liberty. His NEH book project will seek to recover the founders’ philosophy of governmental limits and to construct a natural-rights approach to the First Amendment’s religion clauses.

“Our founders deserve a hearing when we think about matters of religious freedom because they have something to teach us about the natural right of religious liberty,” Muñoz said. “The founders might not be able to provide answers to all of our contemporary church-state questions, but we ought to consult them and appropriate the wisdom they do have to offer.”

“The aim of my work is to help citizens and office holders better understand and respect the meaning of our God-given rights,” said Muñoz. “I’m thankful to the NEH and Notre Dame for their support, and will do my best to use this award to recover knowledge that will help serve the common good.”

Shannon Cullinan elected executive vice president at Notre Dame; Micki Kidder, Mike Seamon appointed to newly created positions; Ann Firth promoted to vice president

2018-12-12T12:00:00-05:00

Shannon Cullinan

Shannon Cullinan, vice president for Finance, has been elected executive vice president of the University of Notre Dame, effective July 1, by the University’s Board of Trustees, succeeding John Affleck-Graves in that position.

“Shannon combines expertise in financial management with wide administrative experience and broad engagement with the academy,” Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., said. “Above all, he brings a deep commitment to the mission of Notre Dame. I am excited to have him in this new role.”

John J. Brennan, chair of the Board of Trustees, said: “There is no one better qualified than Shannon Cullinan to succeed John Affleck-Graves. He is already one of the reasons that Notre Dame enjoys a well-deserved reputation nationally for being a superbly managed University.”

“I am deeply humbled by this opportunity and grateful to my predecessors who wisely shaped the Executive Vice President’s Division, dating back to the original visionary, Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C.,” Cullinan said. “I also want to thank John Affleck-Graves for his extraordinary legacy of stewardship and selfless dedication to our employees, especially our staff.”

Micki Kidder

As chief financial officer, Cullinan will be responsible for the Investment and Finance Offices, overseeing the University’s $13 billion endowment and $1.6 billion operating budget. He also will oversee the Offices of Information Technology, Human Resources, and Facilities, Design and Operations.

In addition, in order to better integrate key operations currently under the executive vice president, two individuals have been appointed to newly created positions, both reporting to Cullinan.

Micki Kidder will become the vice president for University Enterprises and Events. In this role, she will oversee campus dining and catering operations; lead the planning and execution of a wide range of University events

from commencement to concerts, including events around football games on and off campus; and lead university enterprises such as the Morris Inn, McKenna Hall, the Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore, St. Michael’s Laundry and licensing.

Mike Seamon

Mike Seamon will take on the new role of vice president for Campus Safety and University Operations. In this position, he will continue to oversee Notre Dame Security Police, the Notre Dame Fire Department, Risk Management and Safety and the Emergency Management Program. He will in addition take on oversight for Building Services, Warehouse, Delivery and Transportation, the Office of Sustainability, Land O’Lakes and other operations vital to the life of Notre Dame.

Kidder and Seamon will begin their new roles March 1.

Father Jenkins also has appointed Ann Firth to the position of vice president and chief of staff to the president, effective immediately. In this position, Firth will not only manage the president’s staff and advise the president, but also assume a role in the implementation of key initiatives of the President’s Office and continue her work as liaison to the Board of Trustees.

Ann Firth

A 1993 Notre Dame alumnus, Cullinan returned to his alma mater in 2000, serving first as assistant vice president for Public Affairs and Communications. He went on to serve as assistant vice president for Development and associate vice president for Campus Services, with oversight of more than a dozen departments and 400 employees.

In 2011, he was named associate vice president for University Relations, where he worked closely with Trustee leadership, executive leadership, deans and the University Relations team to oversee Notre Dame’s advancement and Boldly Campaign efforts. In 2016, Cullinan was appointed vice president for Finance overseeing the Offices of Treasury Services, Budget, Financial Planning, Procurement Services, Northeast Neighborhood Development and the Controller’s Group.

Cullinan worked for four years as the associate executive director of the Center for the Homeless in South Bend, establishing it as a national model. During his tenure at the center, he served as the controller and created a commercial landscape business employing homeless men and women. He also owned and ran an advertising company before working at the center.

The recipient of a Notre Dame Presidential Leadership Award in 2012, he serves on the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County Board, Beacon Health System Foundation Board and Alliance for Catholic Education Advisory Board.

Cullinan graduated with honors from Notre Dame in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in accountancy. He earned his master of business administration degree with highest honors from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Cullinan’s wife, Sarah, also is a Notre Dame graduate. She earned her master’s degree in education through Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education. The Cullinans are the parents of four children.

A member of the University Relations senior management team in her current role as associate vice president and executive director of Development, Kidder oversees the majority of individual leadership fundraising efforts for the University, including regional fundraising and athletics advancement. She also leads the operating and administrative functions of the Development Department, including Special Events, Development Information Services, Donor Services, Finance, Human Resources, Stewardship, Prospect Management and Development Research.

In her previous roles in the Offices of the President and Executive Vice President, Kidder managed important campus-wide initiatives such as the University’s Strategic Emergency Preparedness and Response Protocol and Office of the Board Secretariat.

Kidder is a 2000 graduate of the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and a certified public accountant. She holds a certificate of education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and will receive her Executive MBA degree from the Mendoza College of Business in May.

Prior to joining Notre Dame, Kidder led cross-functional teams in Assurance & Business Advisory Services for PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Kidder is a member of The Stanley Clark School board and has been actively involved in the South Bend community, holding leadership roles for the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Joseph County, Family & Children’s Center, and the Junior League of South Bend. She and her husband, Scott, are parents of three children.

Seamon was appointed to his current position in April 2016. In addition to overseeing Notre Dame Security Police, the Notre Dame Fire Department, Risk Management and Safety, Emergency Management and Game Day Operations, he shepherded the first use of Notre Dame Stadium for a major concert, featuring Garth Brooks.

A 1992 graduate of Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in management, Seamon earned his MBA from the University in 1994. He has served his alma mater since 1997 after previously working as director of sales and marketing for the Tampa Bay Rays of Major League Baseball.

Previously, Seamon served as assistant vice president for University Events, executive assistant to the executive vice president — for both Affleck-Graves and Rev. Timothy Scully, C.S.C. — and executive assistant to the vice president of Finance and vice president of Business Operations.

Seamon serves on the board of directors of the Logan Center and has served on the board of the Boys & Girls Clubs of St. Joseph County. He is a graduate of the South Bend/Mishawaka Leadership Program.

Firth joined the Office of the President in 2011 as associate vice president and counselor to the president and was appointed chief of staff in 2012.

She earned bachelor’s and juris doctor degrees from Notre Dame. After practicing law in Chicago, Firth returned to Notre Dame to join the Division of Student Affairs as the inaugural director of the Office of Residence Life, serving for six years as the University’s primary hearing officer for student disciplinary matters. Firth went on to serve as a member of the Student Affairs’ senior leadership team. As associate vice president for Student Affairs, she was responsible for strategic planning and assessment for the division, ensuring student welfare and safety and managing crisis communications.

Firth is the recipient of a Notre Dame Presidential Award, and she was honored by the Congregation of Holy Cross with the Howard J. Kenna, C.S.C., Award for “extraordinary contributions to Notre Dame and Holy Cross.” She is active in St. Pius X Parish, is a graduate of the South Bend/Mishawaka Leadership Program, and has served on several community boards.

Firth and her husband, John, who also holds two degrees from the University, are the parents of four Notre Dame graduates and a current Notre Dame student.

Early career faculty awarded nationally competitive awards

2018-12-10T13:00:00-05:00

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has recognized four University of Notre Dame faculty members for their excellence in research with new Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards. Over the past five years, Notre Dame faculty have received 37 of these highly competitive awards.

Speaking about the awards, Robert J. Bernhard, vice president for research, said, “The NSF CAREER Award competition is one of the most prestigious for early career faculty and we are proud of our faculty for being recognized in this capacity. Fostering researchers, like these award recipients, and the passion they have for their respective fields is one way Notre Dame continues to advance its mission as a distinguished and distinctive research institution, and we will continue to cultivate an environment that is committed to research, scholarship and creative endeavor.”

The full list of CAREER awardees, who come from the College of Engineering and the College of Science, is as follows:

Kyle James Bibby, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and earth sciences, received the award for “Quantitative viral metagenomics for water quality assessment.” This research focuses on developing technical advancements to improve water quality monitoring and viral pathogen detection in other environments, including food. Bibby’s award was transferred to Notre Dame from the University of Pittsburgh.
John Parkhill, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, was awarded a CAREER Award for “Self-consistent models of electronic dynamics and relaxation.” The aim of the project is to develop theories and computer software to model the motion of electrons in molecules that are stimulated by light and then potentially allow software users to predict important photodynamic properties of materials.

Jonathan K. Whitmer, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, received his CAREER Award for the project titled, “Targeting assembly in colloidal materials by tilting the free energy surface.” The goal of this research is to advance the fundamental understanding of self-assembly using colloidal materials and to develop dynamic control over the process of assembly. This project enhances a researcher’s ability to create designer molecules, particles, and processes for self-assembly into new materials which have advantageous mechanical, optical or electrical properties.

Yanliang Zhang, assistant professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering, received his CAREER Award for research called, “Printing and interface engineering of colloidal nanocrystals for flexible thermoelectrics and electronics.” The aim of this project is to develop new approaches to the use of nanocrystals in the formation of thermoelectric materials and devices, which has the potential to impact a broad range of applications in energy harvesting, cooling, and flexible electronics. Zhang’s award was transferred to Notre Dame from Boise State University.

In addition to the above four awards, 12 faculty from the Colleges of Arts and Letters, Engineering, and Science also received continuing CAREER Awards from past projects.

The CAREER program, which was established by the NSF in 1995, recognizes and supports outstanding early career faculty who exhibit a commitment to stimulating research while also providing educational opportunities for students. It is the NSF’s most prestigious award available to early career faculty. To learn about the University’s previous CAREER awardees, visit https://research.nd.edu/our-services/funding-opportunities/faculty/early-career-programs/nsf—-career-award/.

Contact: Brandi R. Klingerman, research communications specialist, Notre Dame Research, bklinger@nd.edu, 574-631-8183; @UNDResearch

Originally published by Brandi Klingerman at research.nd.edu on Dec. 10.

Record number of Notre Dame students receive Gilman Scholarships to study abroad

2018-12-07T15:00:00-05:00

The U.S. Department of State’s Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship has been awarded to five Notre Dame students who will be studying abroad in spring 2019. This is a record number of recipients for the University in a single application cycle.

Among the selected students:

• Junior Seth Cattanach of Minnesota will study in London. Cattanach is a computer engineering major.

• Junior Brendan O’Donnell of Illinois will study in Dublin-UCD. O’Donnell is a computer engineering major.

• Junior Avian Robinson of Wisconsin will study in Berlin. Robinson is a business analytics major.

• Junior Deandre Tomlinson of New Jersey will study in Puebla, Mexico. Tomlinson is a science computing major.

• Junior Meklit Zenabu of Ohio will study in Jerusalem. Zenabu is a psychology major.

More than 800 students were selected to receive scholarships to participate in credit-bearing study abroad programs and career-oriented internships around the world. More than 100 selection panelists from colleges and universities across the nation reviewed the 3,400 applications for this cycle.

Gilman Scholars receive up to $5,000 to apply toward their study abroad or internship program costs. The program offers grants for U.S. citizen undergraduate students of limited financial means to pursue academic studies or internships abroad, thereby gaining skills critical to our national security and economic competitiveness. The Benjamin A. Gilman Scholarship is a congressionally funded program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the U.S. State Department and was named after the late congressman Benjamin A. Gilman, who served 30 years in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Applications for summer 2019 and fall 2019/academic year 2019-2020 programs will open in mid-January. Student applications are due March 5. Program information and a list of the recipients can be found on the program’s website.

Originally published by Colleen Wilcox at studyabroad.nd.edu on Dec. 7.

University of Notre Dame and Indiana Biosciences Research Institute partner to address health concerns

2018-12-05T13:00:00-05:00

The University of Notre Dame and the Indiana Biosciences Research Institute (IBRI) have signed a strategic alliance agreement to encourage collaborations between Notre Dame and IBRI researchers. The alliance will enable both organizations to work together on research covering significant health issues in Indiana and around the world.

“We are very excited to have this new partnership with the IBRI in place,” said Robert J. Bernhard, vice president for research and professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering. “We believe that partnerships with organizations like the IBRI with significant ties to industry, universities, government and local communities will be an important pathway for research in the future, and we are pleased to be able to give Notre Dame faculty and students access to the IBRI resources and networks.”

The alliance will allow researchers from each institution to share resources, including equipment and space, within each other’s facilities through new collaborations. Additionally, faculty of Notre Dame and employees of IBRI may receive joint or adjunct appointments within the partner institution as needed to support various projects.

“We are delighted to have this strategic alliance with the University of Notre Dame, one of the preeminent research universities in the world,” said Rainer Fischer, the IBRI’s chief executive officer and chief scientific and innovation officer. “This partnership enables the IBRI and Notre Dame to collaborate on research and technology licensing to boost Indiana’s economy and help patients around the world. It is another great example of why the IBRI was created to foster research collaboration between industry and academia.”

The IBRI is an independent, nonprofit applied research institute dedicated to translating scientific discovery into improved outcomes. Its goal is to build a world-class organization that works collaboratively with companies and universities on interrelated health issues to provide better results for patients.

In 2017, the IBRI opened a satellite location at Notre Dame’s Innovation Park in an effort to extend their relationship with the University’s faculty and students. To learn more about the IBRI, their partners and projects, visit https://www.indianabiosciences.org/.

Contact: Brandi Klingerman, research communications specialist, Notre Dame Research, bklinger@nd.edu, 574-631-8183; @UNDResearch

Originally published by Brandi Klingerman at research.nd.edu on Dec. 5.

Study: Tuberculosis survives by using host system against itself

2018-12-05T12:00:00-05:00

In a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, scientists at the University of Notre Dame have discovered that the pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) releases RNA into infected cells. This RNA stimulates the production of a compound known as interferon beta that appears to support the growth of the pathogen.

As part of the study the researchers found that mice lacking a key protein required for responding to foreign RNA and therefore required for interferon beta production were better able to control the MTB infection. The discovery was a surprise to the researchers, as interferon beta is essential to controlling several viral infections.

“The results suggest that our immune response to mycobacterial RNA is beneficial for the pathogen and bad for the host. It’s the total opposite of viral infections,” said Jeff Schorey, George B. Craig Jr. Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Notre Dame and co-author of the study. “This study gives us a better understanding of how the mycobacteria causes disease and what makes it the most successful pathogen in human history.”

MTB infections cause a battle between the immune response and the ability of the bacteria to circumvent that response — who wins the battle determines the body’s ability to control the infection. Schorey and Yong Cheng, a research assistant professor at Notre Dame, set out to determine how mycobacteria RNA could be affecting the host response. What they found was that by releasing RNA, the bacteria set off a chain reaction inside the macrophage, a cell type of the immune system — resulting in a mechanism that benefits the survival of MTB through the production of interferon beta.

While researchers have long known that bacteria produce proteins and other compounds to modulate an immune response, such a role for mycobacterial nucleic acids has only recently been defined. In viral infections, as opposed to bacterial infections, the virus releases its nucleic acids as it needs the machinery of the host cell to help make viral proteins and replicate its genome. In contrast, bacteria already have the machinery for these processes in place, suggesting the release of RNA into the host cell is intentional. The authors found that the MTB use its secretion system known as SecA2 to mediate RNA release from the mycobacteria.

“Bacteria have everything they need to make their proteins, so the fact that they were releasing nucleic acids was a surprise,” Schorey said. “These bugs are using this RNA-sensing pathway, which has evolved to promote antiviral activity — so in other words, the bacteria are manipulating our own immune system against us.”

MTB is the No. 1 cause of death by an infectious organism, and kills up to 1.8 million people each year. The World Health Organization estimates 200,000 of those deaths are children. Health officials lack an effective vaccine against pulmonary tuberculosis, and antibiotics used to treat the disease must be taken for six to nine months — a daunting regimen that challenges patient compliance. The disease is prevalent in parts of the world where health care systems lack infrastructure and funding.

Despite those challenges, Schorey, an affiliated faculty member at Notre Dame’s Eck Institute for Global Health, said the study’s results show potential for the development of immunotherapies to selectively stimulate protective immune responses as a treatment option for MTB and other bacterial infectious diseases.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Contact: Jessica Sieff, assistant director of media relations, 574-631-3933, jsieff@nd.edu

Emergency financial assistance reduces homeless shelter entry and violent crime

2018-12-04T15:00:00-05:00

A new study conducted by researchers at the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) at the University of Notre Dame shows that emergency financial assistance for people facing homelessness not only reduces shelter entry, but also reduces criminal behavior.

Homelessness in the U.S. is a persistent and complex problem. Each year more than 2.3 million people experience homelessness, 7.4 million people live “doubled up” with friends or family for economic reasons, and many more are on the brink of homelessness.

Nearly every major U.S. city offers a hotline for people facing homelessness to request emergency financial assistance, and more than 15 million people call these hotlines every year. Linking call center information to arrest records from the Chicago Police Department, researchers found that total arrests of individuals declined between one and two years after a call for financial assistance in which they were successful in securing funds. For violent crime, fund recipients are 55 percent less likely to be arrested by police, with single individuals driving this decrease.

The decline in crime appears to be related, in part, to greater housing stability. Access to financial assistance significantly decreases arrests for homelessness-related outdoor crimes such as trespassing. However, the study also shows that financial assistance leads to an increase in property crime arrests. This increase is evident for family heads, but not single individuals. The increase is mostly due to shoplifting, and the timing of this increase suggests that financial assistance enables some families to take on financial obligations — such as apartment leases — that they are subsequently unable to meet.

James Sullivan, Gilbert F. Schaefer Professor of Economics at Notre Dame; David Phillips, associate research professor; and Caroline Palmer, a LEO research assistant, led the study of the Homelessness Prevention Call Center (HPCC) in Chicago. The HPCC, which is run by Catholic Charities Chicago, is one of the largest in the nation, taking an average of 70,000 calls per year.

The study, which will be published in the Journal of Public Economics, includes more than 8,500 individuals and families who called HPCC between 2010 and 2012. The researchers linked information from the call center to arrest records from the Chicago Police Department. Because availability of funding for the financial assistance offered by the HPCC varies, the researchers were able to look at the arrest rates of people seeking assistance when funding is available compared to those seeking assistance when no funding is available. The results indicate that policymakers should consider emergency financial assistance as an effective, evidence-based approach for preventing not only homelessness but also crime.

“We are finding that stabilizing one person in the midst of major financial crisis can benefit society as a whole,” Phillips said. “Simply paying someone’s rent for a month until the crisis passes helps not only that person avoid the shelter, but also benefits other people who might otherwise be affected if that person’s unstable situation leads to violence.”

This study, funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, builds on previous research on the HPCC by Sullivan and William Evans, Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Economics at Notre Dame. Sullivan and Evans’ study was published in Science in 2016 and was the first to show that emergency financial aid significantly reduces homelessness.

Contact: Colleen Sharkey, assistant director of media relations, 574-631-9958, csharke2@nd.edu

Notre Dame Stories: Star of wonder

2018-12-04T11:00:00-05:00

In this episode: Star of wonder.

The Gospel account of St. Matthew includes a peculiar episode: Magi or wise men who followed a star to the place of Jesus’ birth. A Notre Dame astrophysicist details the astronomical phenomenon he believes led them to Bethlehem.

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and celebrated speechwriter Peggy Noonan to serve as Notre Dame’s 2019 commencement speaker

2018-12-03T08:00:00-05:00

Peggy Noonan — Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Wall Street Journal, speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and author of five New York Times best-sellers — will deliver the principal address and receive an honorary degree at the University of Notre Dame’s 174th commencement ceremony May 19.

“Peggy Noonan is universally admired for the stirring prose, keen insight and the moral perspective of her commentary on America and the world,” said University President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C. “I look forward to welcoming her to Notre Dame and hearing her address to our graduates.”

After working at CBS News’ radio division following her graduation from Fairleigh Dickinson University, Noonan joined the Reagan White House in 1984 as a speechwriter. She worked with Reagan on several of his most famous speeches, including the “Boys of Pointe du Hoc,” delivered on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, and his address to the nation following the 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion, in which she drew upon poet John Magee’s words about aviators who “slipped the surly bonds of earth … and touched the face of God.” The latter was ranked among the top 10 political speeches of the 20th century, and “Pointe du Hoc” is considered one of the century’s top 60 speeches of any kind.

During Vice President George H.W. Bush’s 1988 run for the presidency, Noonan worked with him on his acceptance speech, in which he spoke of “a kinder, gentler nation” and “a thousand points of light.”

Noonan also worked in a fictional White House as a consultant on NBC’s television drama “The West Wing.”

Since 2000, Noonan has written a political column titled “Declarations,” which is published weekly in the weekend Wall Street Journal. She was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary for “rising to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.”

She is the author of nine books on American politics, history and culture and is one of 10 historians and writers who contributed essays on the American presidency for the book “Character Above All.”

Early in her career, Noonan was an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University, and she has served as a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics and an instructor of history at Yale University.

The 2019 University Commencement Ceremony will be held in Notre Dame Stadium.