Somewhere under the rainbow

After a dismal and rainy day on Tuesday, November 6, the skies began clearing around 4 p.m. As the sun broke through the clouds, a supernumerary rainbow could be seen arching across campus. A second, fainter rainbow can be seen on the outside of the first.

UMD receives grants from Department of Education

North Dartmouth, Mass. —UMass Dartmouth’s Center For University and School Partnerships has received two U.S. Department of Education grants totaling $3.5 million to attract, retain and support K-12 teachers in high need subject areas as identified by partner districts Fall River, New Bedford and Wareham.

“I’m absolutely thrilled to be given this opportunity to provide alternative pathways into teaching to individuals who may never have thought about teaching as a profession,” said Karen O’Connor, director of the Center for University, School and Community Partnerships (CUSP), which will coordinate the grant programs.

In September, UMass Dartmouth’s James J. Kaput Center for Research and Innovation in Mathematics Education received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to examine new strategies to excite students about learning math, and increase the number and diversity of students in the math, science, and engineering pipeline. The combined total of the Kaput Center and CUSP grants is $5.5 million.

One CUSP grant—$1.9 million over five years—will support the SouthCoast Partnership for the Journey into Education and Teaching (JET). It was one of nine such grants awarded across the country. The grant’s purpose is to prepare paraprofessionals (teacher aides) in partner schools for full-time classroom teaching positions in elementary and special education.

Course work will be offered by UMass Dartmouth and Bristol Community College along with Lesley University. JET Program Director Pam Herrup said the partnership will address the shortages of highly qualified educators with special education competencies to teach in high needs elementary schools.

“The paraprofessionals have first-hand experience working in inclusion classrooms. JET will enable them to build on that, stay in the profession and in the community long-term,” Herrup said. “One teacher said, ‘in my first year, I taught special ed with an amazing paraprofessional who taught me what I needed to do.’”

The class structure will accommodate the candidates’ work schedules with distance learning and weekend offerings. The grant will provide on-going academic advisement and tuition support for paraprofessionals to obtain a teaching license. It is anticipated that the program will train  200 new classroom teachers.

The second, the Teacher Quality Enhancement-Recruitment Program (TQE-R), totals $1.6 million over four years and is designed to attract math, science and foreign language teachers to middle school classrooms in Wareham, New Bedford and Fall River.

Tyra Lopes, TQE-R program director, said that recruitment efforts will target three populations: career changers, college juniors and seniors majoring in the target fields who are “on the fence” about teaching and long-term substitutes with preliminary licenses who need to obtain full licensure.

Lopes explained that the grant funds would provide scholarships and tuition to ultimately attract 50 individuals into the profession. In addition to recruitment, her job involves preparation (for licensure) and support, Lopes said.

Online programs and webcams will be used to connect first-to-third year teachers with more experienced mentors across the state. They will also have the opportunity to access lesson plans and communicate with scientists and mathematicians via the “E-Mentoring for Student Success,” tool funded by the National Science Foundation.

“Mentoring is the key to the retention of teachers, especially in high need schools,” O’Connor said. “If beginning teachers are not supported in their first few years, there is a very good chance that we will lose them from the profession.” As new teachers, they will be provided with professional support on-site and also through a Beginning Teacher Network sponsored by CUSP.

“Each of these grant programs will attract students to UMass Dartmouth who may not have thought about teaching as a profession, but who possess valuable skills and experience combined with a strong desire to teach. Engineers, business executives, retired bankers and retired military personnel are examples. The teacher candidates will gain authentic and relevant urban teaching experience during a one-year residency that will help them be successful once they get a full-time job,” O’Connor added.

Alpert joins Charlton College of Business

North Dartmouth, Mass. — Hershel Alpert, former President/CEO of Alperts Furniture in Seekonk, has been appointed the Charlton Executive-in-Residence at UMass Dartmouth’s Charlton College of Business for this academic year. He will serve as a guest speaker, manage the college’s executive-on-campus program and assist with the branding efforts of the Charlton College of Business.

Dr. Eileen Peacock, Dean of the Charlton College of Business said, “Mr. Alpert will be a great addition to our faculty, bringing the perspective of a successful entrepreneur. We are looking forward to having him work with our students and faculty.”

Alpert has had a long and successful career in business. He is currently the Principal of Alpert Consulting and is a consultant to the President of Serta International Mattress Company. The Alperts Furniture showroom produced substantially more dollars per square foot than other stores of its size and was amongst the most productive in the industry.

From 1964 to 1972, Alpert was President of Arlan’s Furniture with stores in Massachusetts, New York, and Florida. From 1972 to 1985, Alpert was President of Alperts Furniture Warehouse and Showroom, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Cinema Corporation (formerly Harcourt General Corp.) with 15 stores in New York, Ohio, Florida and Massachusetts.

Alperts was a highly systemic company, was fully computerized since 1972, and had radio frequency bar coding since 1990. Its sales system was P.O.S. and it employed computer-aided design systems for its sales associates. All systems were created internally.

Alpert was President and Chairman of the National Home Furnishing Association (NHFA), founded in 1919 the leading trade association, with 3,000 members having over 10,000 stores, serving the specific needs of home furnishings retailers. NHFA provides essential information, government representation, professional education and training, and business and operating tools to its members, in addition to providing industry-wide leadership on key issues affecting retailers. Alpert also serves on the boards of the Buttonwood Park Zoological Society, the New Bedford Symphony Orchestra, the United WayFund (New Bedford area) and was a member of the City of New Bedford Industrial Development Financing Authority. He currently serves on the City of New Bedford Airport Commission.

Alpert is an authority and expert on the furniture business and retailing and has been quoted in a variety of business publications including: Inc. Magazine, Furniture Today, and the Boston Business Journal. Mr. Alpert holds a BA degree in Business from Colby College where he was awarded the Congdon Medal as the outstanding senior of his class.

UMD professor begins third decade of monthly sampling

North Dartmouth, Mass. —University of Massachusetts Professor Jefferson Turner has been sampling the waters of Buzzards Bay since the Dukakis administration — and when he embarked aboard the R/V Lucky Lady last week, he began his third decade of monthly sampling, a record of perseverance rare in environmental science.

“There are few coastal environmental studies that have sampled as many parameters simultaneously for as long as we have,” said Turner, who holds a joint appointment in UMass Dartmouth’s Biology Department and School for Marine Science and Technology. “There are some that have sampled for a few years — five, even 10 — but only a few dozen such multi-decadal studies in the whole world.”

Month after month for twenty years, Turner — along with an evolving cast of students, technicians and volunteers — has toured eight stations throughout the bay, sampling for water quality, nutrient levels, and plankton demographics. While a few measurements are made on board, most samples yield up their data only upon painstaking analysis back in the laboratory. For every six-hour cruise, many times that amount of laboratory work remains to be done before the measurements can begin to be assembled into a recent history of bay water quality.

What stories these samples have to tell, we still don’t know, because a lot of the samples have sat for years on the shelf, awaiting analysis.

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Quality Engineering (now Department of Environmental Protection, (DEP)) started funding Turner’s water quality project in 1987, shortly after Governor Michael Dukakis declared UMass Dartmouth a “center of excellence in marine science.” For the first decade, the state supported the sampling cruises and laboratory analysis, but in the 1990s, the funding became intermittent and then evaporated altogether.

For years thereafter, Turner was able to cobble together enough support to maintain the monthly cruise schedule, but lab work was financially out of the question. So he stored the samples against a hoped-for restoration of funding, freezing or otherwise preserving them to prevent decomposition.

When the late 1990s brought a crash in the Buzzards Bay lobster harvest, the Bay’s water quality was suspected to have played a role. Brian Rothschild, then Dean of SMAST, recognized that Turner’s dataset was the only one that could address that suspicion: it was year-round and in the right place, and it spanned sufficient time to capture crucial changes in water quality. Rothschild secured support for Turner’s work through a mixed-species grant from NOAA Fisheries.

The first decade-plus of analysis was completed and summarized in the report “Plankton and Water Quality Monitoring in Buzzards Bay, 1987-2000. “Now, with the NOAA funding, processing has been completed on the full twenty years of environmental samples, leaving the remaining years of plankton samples to identify and count.

Aside from Turner himself, there have been two constants throughout the project. UMass Dartmouth’s R/V Lucky Lady, which had been acquired by the University just months before Turner’s first Buzzards Bay sampling cruise, has been the project’s exclusive research platform ever since. The other constant is that the same two captains, the father-son team of Ron and Ray Rock, have been in charge of the vessel for the last 12 years. The captains not only operate the vessel, but also do most of the maintenance on it. These two factors have led to an extraordinary record of safety and successful operation of the boat.

Only one month was missed over the 20 years of the project. A quick cold snap in January 2004 froze the harbor, and the Lucky Lady was stuck in the ice for the month—a month that included the coldest night for 50 years.

The original DEQE grant bought the necessary equipment and funded graduate students as research assistants for the project. Volunteer students — some 100 or more over the 20 years of the project — have also played a significant role. Turner noted that “a student often learns more marine science in a few hours aboard the boat than might be learned in several days in a classroom.”

The data generated to date, explained Turner, show Buzzards Bay environmental parameters to have been highly variable over the past two decades, but with no significant long-term change in most places. However, with the changeover in New Bedford to secondary sewage treatment in 1996, the station off Fort Rodman near the sewage outfall showed almost immediate improvement in several parameters. There have also been signs of improved water quality in New Bedford Harbor, and Turner expects that the sewage treatment upgrade likely had some role in that.

“But we don’t know yet about subtle changes in plankton communities,” Turner pointed out. “We need more analysis; the environmental parameters are done, but not the biological parameters. But now at least we have numbers instead of frozen samples.”

“We also don’t know yet about possible signals related to climate change.  We’ve had a lack of icy winters recently; will we see the changes in timing — of spring algae blooms, for instance — that Europe has seen?”

“This is the kind of data you need to answer the questions people are asking about fisheries and climate change. We needed a baseline to get a handle on what is normal so that we could recognize what is abnormal. We started monitoring related to sewage treatment issues; no one anticipated that 20 years later we’d be using the data to address lobster fishery questions.”

UMassOnline launches new program

SHREWSBURY, Mass. — Fueled by a $650,000 development grant from the Sloan Foundation, UMassOnline announced on Tuesday, November 6, that in addition to five inaugural course offerings launched last month, an additional round of five more certificate, degree or professional development courses will join the portfolio this January.

All five campuses in the University of Massachusetts system — Amherst, Dartmouth, Boston, Lowell and the Medical School in Worcester — will have one or more blended learning programs.

According to David Gray, CEO of UMassOnline, “We set out to be among the first to define and develop learning options that acknowledge long-standing and well-known preferences among some students for at least some element of campus connection and community, and we’ve done that.”

“Secondly, we wanted to recognize and adapt our online offerings to the fact that some online students and faculty benefit tremendously when an element of face-to-face learning time is offered as part of any online course, but especially in evidence when content benefits from interaction or hands-on application. We have met this benchmark, too. The overall result is that the UMassOnline staff, our campus-based faculty, and our academic development professionals across all the campuses have achieved a ‘best of both worlds’ solution in these programs.”

Overview of New UMassOnline Blended Learning Programs

UMass Amherst:

BA in Health and Human Services

Doctor of Nursing Practice

UMass Boston:

Expansion of RN to BS

Post-Baccalaureate Clinical Educator Certificate Program

UMass Dartmouth:

B.A. in Liberal Arts Degree Completion Program

Business Programs

UMass Lowell:

Health Management and Policy Master’s Program with Certificates in Health Informatics, Health Management, and Health Policy

UMass

Worcester Graduate School of Nursing:

Post Master’s Certificate for Nurse Educators Program

OBGYN Professional Development Training for Clinical Issues

UMassOnline, the online learning division of the University of Massachusetts, provides the highest quality education offered by the UMass system in a flexible, online format enabling students, professionals and lifelong learners to take courses anywhere, anytime.

With over 66 undergraduate and graduate degree, certificate and professional development programs and more than 1,300 individual courses, UMassOnline offers one of the largest accredited online programs available. Programs span the disciplines for which the University is best known: liberal arts, education, management, nursing, public health, information technology, and other disciplines.

All UMassOnline courses are taught by the same award-winning faculty who teach on-campus, offering online students the same rich experience as the face-to-face classroom. Students from almost every state and around the world are among the 26,627 enrollees.

SCIENCE OF THE NOW

New sex-typing data discovered

By Nathan Yetton

A recent study has shown brand new information on how the male gender is determined in mammals.

Using mice, a group from the Department of Cell Biology at the Duke University Medical Center has investigated the role of receptor protein FGFR2 in gonad tissue. Receptor proteins receive specific signals from the body, triggering all sorts of behaviors and changes. This is the first time that FGFR2 has been linked to the growth of the male sex organs.

One of the uses of FGFR2 is the development of Sertoli cells. Sertoli cells are involved in the early development of testicular tissues. These cells later become the testes and the somniferous tubes among other organs.

Another FGF receptor protein is FGF9. This receptor is involved in the distribution of XY specific cells. It has been shown in recent studies that male sex-typing is defined early on by the quantity of XY cells present. FGF9 is involved in that process.

When Both FGFR2 and FGF9 were inhibited, the mice did not develop into full males. In fact, at varying concentrations, the intended testicles of the genetically male mice resembled something closer to ovaries. These are called ovotestis. These were observed under microscopes, and ovum like cells were found on the exterior of the gonads. When inhibited too early, the gonads failed to develop at all.

From these data, it is apparent that FGFR2 is necessary for the formation of the testicles. Why is this important? For one thing, it shows that we know little about the formation of sex and gender. It alludes to advancements not only in science, but also in society. If gender is more malleable outside of the X/Y determination principle that has been followed for a long time, it is possible that gender itself may lie outside those bounds.

The notion that male-assigned sex is reversible at early stages of development locally around the gonads may make the difference between someone who is born male or female but identifies with the opposite gender. This could be the opening of a whole new study in science in which we develop a real understanding of what it means to be male or female.

A person could have conceivably been born with a feminine body because of a prenatal flummox in the sex-assignment process, only to have been assigned a separate gender due to the discrepancy of gender determination between various tissues in early development. We finally have a potential vindication for people who are transgendered.

SNIPPETS FROM YOUR STUDENT SENATE

Changes and explanations to Student Senate’s by-laws

By-laws changes and explanations for the Student Senate Constitution

I. General Changes
a. Used the definitions set down by Article I of the Constitution, corrected grammatical errors.
b. This makes the By-laws appear more professional.

II. Amendments
a. Moved to end, added numbers, changed majority needed to amend from 2/3 to 3/4, changed the wording of the second part to include all by-laws, not just new ones.
b. Amendment process naturally goes at the end; numbers allow for more readability; it should be more difficult for the Senate to amend the by-laws because they don’t have to go through the students and trustees; the by-laws should all be subject to review due to unconstitutionality, not just as they are passed.

III. Meetings
a. Moved from Constitution to the beginning of the by-laws and format changed to be consistent with the by-laws; revised parliamentarian duties; eliminated Executive Session section; added definition of “first meeting;” added a section to explain the Senate advisor; rewrote constituency meeting section; general cleanup and reorganization; eliminated submission of motions,
b. Meetings should be able to be easily changed by the Senate, as they do not affect the student body or the University; this increases clarity, Executive Session is explained in the next part of the by-laws. This is a necessary definition for several parts of the Constitution. There is no such explanation currently; the previous version sounded unprofessional and was very unclear. This makes it more readable and understandable; it is almost word-for-word the same thing it says under legislation.

IV. Legislation
a. Added an override of the Executive Board’s decision to not hear an emergency motion; changed numbers to have periods, not parentheses, after them.
b. The Executive Board should not have the power to refuse to hear a motion that a majority of the senate believes is pertinent; this makes it more consistent with the rest of the by-laws.

V. Recognizing and Unrecognizing an SRO
a. Changed format to make it more consistent with the rest of the by-laws; inactivity period for unrecognizing an SRO reduced to two years; eliminated the stipulation for unrecognizing an SRO that is academic; added a section specifically stipulating what requirements SROs must adhere to.
b. This makes it more professional. Five years is far too long for an SRO to remain in existence if it is inactive; many SROs are academic and cannot receive funds from the departments. In addition, this is in direct conflict with Title IV section 2, which lists academic organizations as a possible candidate for an SRO. These requirements are currently scattered throughout the by-laws or not enumerated at all.

VI. Committees
a. Fused Constitution and by-laws committee information into a single part of the by-laws; overhauled and reformatted; added a section that lists the seven committees; explains and creates a system where goals are accomplished through taskforces and stipulates meeting requirements; stated that senators should be members of at least two committees, requires that committees meet regularly and at consistent times, committee chairs required to submit written reports and oral reports; included clear descriptions of the committees.
b. Committees should be alterable by the Senate as their organization doesn’t affect the Board of Trustees or the students; this allows for greater readability as well as a more effective committee system. Committees were previously too numerous to be effective and merely talked about problems rather than accomplishing them; this should be a clearly stated requirement. This increases their effectiveness, this keeps committees on track, this makes it easier for committees to determine what issues to tackle.

VII. Elections
a. Changed advertisement requirements so vacancies and the date of the next internal election are constantly advertised. Included requirement that all questions be directed to the candidates as a whole; fused tie and runoff procedure sections; eliminated elections committee and gave their duties to election officials; general cleanup of election official duties; eliminated absentee ballots; Student Election guidelines moved before election responsibilities of election officials; general cleanup of election guidelines; eliminated need for personal identification number in order to vote online; removed redundancies; removed designation of incumbents on ballots. Procedure for Seeking elected office was struck and pertinent information was moved to other sections.
b. The student body should always be aware of the vacancies and when the next election will occur. This rule allows for questions to be more unbiased and we already follow this rule (it just puts it in writing); a tie necessarily means that no one received a majority, so it does not need to be separate. Elections are not a full time committee job and should be conducted by those who are seeking seats; this makes it more understandable and professional; elections are now usually online; Student Election Guidelines are referenced in the responsibilities of election officials, this makes it more understandable and professional; the student identification number should be sufficient for this purpose; redundancies are unprofessional; all candidates should have an equal chance at election; most of it was redundant.

VIII. Serving of two seats
a. Added a section to guarantee against a senator serving in two senate seats simultaneously; cut down the SFAC seat conflict rule and added it to the end of this.
b. This has always been the de facto rule and it is a very fair rule because they are related.

IX. Impeachment
a. Added a list of impeachable offenses.
b. Should be specifically enumerated to avoid arbitrary impeachment.

X. Finance
a. Kept the same, just moved to the end of the by-laws
b. The Finance by-laws are the majority of the bylaws and should not be stuck in the middle of all the rest.