Related stories about H1N1 (Swine) Flu and Seasonal Flu

• Seasonal flu vaccine now available for students
• Information about H1N1 (Swine) Flu for the Bryn Mawr College Community
• Oct. 16 update: Handful of mild cases, one student tests positive for H1N1

The Student Health Center held a vaccination clinic on Monday, Nov. 16, during which approximately 250 students received the H1N1 Influenza vaccine.

The next clinic is scheduled for Monday, Nov. 23, from 1-4 p.m. The vaccine is free, and is  being given to students, staff, and faculty 24 years of age and younger. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention highly recommend that people under the age of 25 receive the vaccine.

Students have been alerted to these clinics directly via e-mail from the Health Center. An additional e-mail was sent to students with underlying health conditions that make it especially important that they receive the vaccine, alerting them to its availability and additional hours during which they can receive it. The Health Center plans to  hold additional clinics after the Thanksgiving break and will e-mail students details about those opportunities to receive the vaccine.

The Health Center has treated more students for flu-like symptoms this year than it does during most typical years. However, most of the cases have been relatively mild.

The CDC has posted a Q&A about the H1N1 influenza vaccine on its Web site.

The Health Center also has seasonal flu vaccine available for students at a cost of $20. The vaccine is available to any Bryn Mawr student and is highly recommended for students with asthma or other respiratory diseases, as well as chronic medical conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, or immune suppression as a result of illness or medication.

Updates about the College’s response to seasonal and H1N1 influenza will be available from the Bryn Mawr College homepage via the “Information About H1N1 and Seasonal Flu” link in the left-hand column.

With a greatly expanded stage and all-new lighting and sound equipment, Marjorie Walter Goodhart Theater brings together historic architecture and modern technology. In addition to the new stage, the $19 million facelift includes renovated seating and new restrooms for patrons, new dressing rooms and rehearsal space for performers and a teaching theater and additional classroom space for students.

Goodhart Theater, dedicated in 1928, has always been a stunningly beautiful building, said Lord, who is Bryn Mawr’s director of theater and chair of the Bryn Mawr Arts Program. Now it is also a great working theater, capable of transforming space in myriad ways.

But Lord chose to inaugurate Goodhart’s new teaching theater with a text that resolutely resists the illusion of transformation. Peter Handke’s 1968 piece Offending the Audience cleverly and dispassionately dissects the theatrical experience, refusing to transport the audience to a fictional time and place. Its insistence on the here and now made the play a superb vehicle for exploring and displaying the physical space of the theater.

Offending the Audience offers a "topsy-turvy" view of theater and actors

The Bi-Co production of Handke’s work “asks the audience to think differently about theater—and, in particular, to think differently about this theater,” said Lord’s assistant director, Jessica Rizzo ’11.

As the actors strip their relationship with the audience to its bare essentials, explicitly repudiating the artifice of traditional drama, they show the audience the theater’s machinery and illuminate spaces that are usually concealed. Lord’s staging ultimately takes the actors to the far reaches of the building, revealing almost every corner that is visible from the small stage at the building’s heart.

By design, almost every corner is visible. When the right doors and curtains are opened, the view from the teaching theater extends through the scene shop to the main stage, the auditorium seats, the balcony, and even a bit of the entrance foyer.

Site Specificity and Design

In Philadelphia avant-garde theater circles, Lord is known as a pioneer of site-specific theater, which is often staged in “found spaces” not designed for theatrical productions.

That interest, he recently told students in a directing class, was partly motivated by the constraints imposed by the antiquated theater he found when he began working at Bryn Mawr in 1988. Until its renovation last year, the historic building retained its original utility systems; its stage was very small by contemporary standards, and its narrow proscenium arch often presented staging challenges.

With the help of designer Hiroshi Iwasaki, the College’s technical director, Lord began to approach Goodhart as a found space.

“I said, ‘Let’s not use it as a theater. It’s a great building, so let’s use it as a building,’” Lord said. “I worked often with Hiroshi to figure out how to use the spaces in this building to make events. I usually start with the space itself—I inventory the space and think about what kinds of events are possible in the space, what kinds of impulses I get from the space. Then I ask myself, ‘What are the texts that I care about that might work well in relationship to that space?’”

The renovation of Goodhart, Lord said, hasn’t changed his focus on space. But it has made a difference in his artistic process.

The College’s arts faculty consulted extensively with the architects who handled the renovation, over a period of several years, about its requirements for the building. Consequently, Lord said, “Hiroshi and I were pretty familiar with this space before it even existed. I knew all sorts of things it could do, and for this production I wanted to get to as many of them as I could.

“Offending the Audience was chosen partly because it was friendly to a set of ideas about space,” he explained.

Speeches and Spaces

Sitting in Goodhart’s splendid auditorium, Rizzo drew an analogy between the exploration of language in Handke’s text and the exploration of space in Lord’s staging of it.

“The piece exposes the pure elements of theatrical experience. Its language is clean, it’s stark; it isn’t intended to make itself into something different or refer to something outside itself,” she said.

Student director Jessica Rizzo demonstrates the hidden machinery of the theater

“Sometimes, that language is ugly—like the insults that are hurled at the audience at the end of the play—or very utilitarian.”

The fall production, she said, applied a similar rigor to its examination of the new performance spaces in Goodhart. “For instance, the audience sees the scene shop, which is part of this amazing new complex. There’s nothing beautiful about the scene shop. It’s wonderful, because it allows us to do very practical things that Mark and Hiroshi hadn’t been able to do, but it doesn’t aspire to be beautiful.”

But the play did offer the occasional glimpse of a more poetic kind of language, Rizzo noted. “It provides an opportunity for reflection on language, on what it means to be addressed, on past experiences of plays and theatergoing, that may affect your experiences of plays you will see in the future.”

Similarly, the soaring Gothic-revival architecture of the historic auditorium is visible to the audience through the scene shop, which connects the old stage to the new.

“This space, the grand old traditional theater, is worked into the piece, but we’re looking at the theater topsy-turvy and inside out and from different angles,” Rizzo says. “It really is a space unlike any other.”

Photos by Paola Nogueras ’84

Bryn Mawr was one of a few institutions invited by the Congressional Bi-Partisan Robotics Caucus to a briefing on robots and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. As partners of the Institute for Personal Robotics in Education (IPRE), co-sponsored with Georgia Tech, Bryn Mawr computer scientists have developed software and curricula that are now used in more than 300 schools.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Douglas Blank, Professor of Computer Science Deepak Kumar, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Dianna Xu demonstrated “Scribblers,” the turtle-like, wheeled personal robots used in Bryn Mawr introductory computer science courses; Kumar’s introductory computer-science textbook, written to complement the robots; and Bryn Mawr’s mini-humanoid robot, which is used by several advanced students. All of the computers run on a multipurpose software platform developed by Blank, who is IPRE’s director.

The briefing focused primarily on robotics in elementary and secondary education, and the IPRE exhibit hosted not only members of Congress, their staffers, and assorted luminaries from the worlds of high technology and education, but also a number of young robot fanciers from D.C.-area schools.

Bryn Mawr computer scientist Doug Blank at the IPRE exhibit with D.C.-area students

Blank, Kumar, and Xu have supervised several Bryn Mawr undergraduates who have experimented with using robotics to teach computer science to younger students, including Ashley Gavin ’10, who is teaching a group of students at the Baldwin School through the College’s Praxis Program.

IPRE, now supported by the National Science Foundation, was started with a grant from Microsoft Corporation, which recognized Bryn Mawr’s computer-science department for its role in developing “the nation’s leading educational robotics platform” and for its record of using novel pedagogical approaches to attract women to computer science, thus bucking a national trend.

Computer science has suffered from a precipitous nationwide drop in enrollment since 2000. Declining interest in computer science in the United States is especially acute among women; in fact, it is the only STEM discipline in which the gender gap has actually widened over the last 25 years. IPRE uses robots to pique students’ interest in computer science.

According to IPRE’s founders, using robots to teach basic computer-science concepts helps students see computer science as a discipline focused on creative problem solving. The physical presence of a robot illustrates the discipline’s connection to real-world issues in a way that cold code does not, they argue.

The Bryn Mawr Computer Science Program has been using the IPRE course materials in its introductory course since the fall of 2006, and early indicators support the hypothesis that robotics engages students in computing and retains their interest better than traditional computer-science curricula.

An especially striking statistic is the sharp increase in enrollment in Computer Science 206, the course that follows the introduction to computer science: the number of students taking the course rose from nine in 2006 to 52 this year, while computer-science enrollments nationwide are still in decline. “Our 2009 enrollment is more than 10 times what it was in 2001,” Blank says. “All of our advanced courses have seen increased enrollments.”

Blank appreciated the caucus’ interest in educational robotics. “I was very glad to see our representatives engaged in activities  supporting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) …  I was especially excited to see their appreciation of the use of  educational personal robots towards these ends,” he says.

“I still think we have a  ways to go, though, to let people know that computing is about critical  thinking, general-purpose problem solving, and especially creativity,” Blank continues. “It  really is at the heart of a liberal-arts education. Some still see computing as something that only engineers can do, and we want to chip away at that stereotype.”

Why, she wondered, did Côte d’Ivoire have more and better roads than Ghana did? Why did access to running water and electricity seem so much more challenging in Ghana’s capital city of Accra than in Abidjan?

As a major in Bryn Mawr’s Growth and Structure of Cities Program and a student in the combined 3-2 master’s program the College sponsors with the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of City and Regional Planning, Nyame-Mensah has learned a great deal about issues that affect urban development. Last summer, before she began her senior thesis, she used a grant from the Hanna Holborn Gray Undergraduate Research Program in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences to find answers to some of the questions that had puzzled her since childhood.

The HHG grant funded Nyame-Mensah’s study of planning regulation in Ghana’s capital city of Accra through several neighborhood-development case studies; that research is  now serving as the basis of her thesis. She documented the project (along with her trip to the Netherlands for a conference of the international youth-run THIMUN Youth Network  and a few posts about soccer) on her Bryn Mawr blog, Twenty-Ten.

Before she set off for the summer in Accra, Nyame-Mensah and her 13 fellow HHG scholars prepared for their independent research projects at a two-day seminar featuring experienced researchers on the Bryn Mawr faculty, including Provost Kimberly Cassidy, who is a professor of psychology. The students met with their project advisers and with librarians who specialize in the fields relevant to their research topics.

“Because of the seminars I had a much better idea of how to go about asking questions and generating a thesis,” Nyame-Mensah says.

The seminars were led by Sarah Scheckter, a graduate student in clinical psychology, and Lesley Shipley, a graduate student in the history of art. The graduate-student mentors remained available through the summer to offer their junior colleagues advice and guidance. They used a blog (open only to the HHG scholars) to stay in contact with the young scholars and to make it easier for them to share problems, observations, and research strategies with each other.

Accra, Ghana, in rainy season. Photo from Akua Nyame-Mensah's blog Twenty-Ten.

Nyame-Mensah set off for Ghana on June 8 and arrived late in the evening of June 9. Staying with her father, who now lives in Accra, she experienced her first Ghanaian rainy season and the attendant frustrations proceeding from an infrastructure chronically ill-equipped to deal with the seasonal floods.

To her delight, however, she found communications technologies both advanced and accessible in Ghana.

“The water may not always run through the pipes and the roads may not all be paved but at least I can get fast internet,” she wrote on Twenty Ten. “Interesting how internet/phone infrastructure is much better than the infrastructure needed to get around and get essential utilities.”

Nyame-Mensah, who participated in Bryn Mawr’s Summer Multimedia Development Institute (SMDI) in 2007, is enthusiastic about the possibilities of electronic communications technologies in planning and urban development. Building on the groundwork she had laid in the SMDI program, she spent the summer of 2008 as a Katharine Houghton Hepburn Intern, working with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s PhilaPlace Project, researching how to construct a three-dimensional rendering of South Philadelphia’s Italian Market neighborhood on the basis of historical images and maps in the Historical Society’s collection.

“I think that communications technology plays an important role in planning and development,” Nyame-Mensah explains. “It can help you visualize what is there and help you plan/ model for what you want.”

Much of her summer in Accra, however, was spent on old-fashioned legwork: neighborhood visits and interviews with planners, city officials, and individuals who hoped to develop land in the city.

Nyame-Mensah found a complex patchwork of regulatory schemes that posed significant obstacles, not only to developing land, but to buying land to develop in the first place. She realized that her initial research question about how one goes about buying and developing land in Accra was really two questions, one about buying and another about getting permission to develop.

“The process of obtaining land in Accra involves multiple ministries, agencies, and sometimes numerous owners of the same land,” Nyame-Mensah wrote in her blog. “The next step would be then to go about finding out how to get consent to build on the land.”

One complaint she consistently heard from her interview subjects was that enforcement of planning regulations was both lax and uneven.

“No one wants to deal with squatters that inhabit land in both informal shanty structures and other forms of more permanent shelter until there is interest in that land for development,” she noted in her blog. Unplanned and sometimes dangerous structures are tolerated until someone acquires both the capital and the state approval to develop the land in a more formal way, and then people end up being displaced from their homes.

Further investigation revealed new complexities within this problem too, Nyame-Mensah said. After an interview with a former planning director of Accra, she realized that the unevenness in enforcement has numerous causes, among them the difference between government-regulated land and “stool” lands, or those held by traditional leaders on behalf of their people.

“There was a law enacted in 2008 that combines a lot of the government departments dealing with land,” Nyame-Mensah said. “This new department, known as the Lands Commission, will include a survey and mapping, land-registration and land-valuation division. Though the Town and Country Planning office is not part of this consolidation, the Ghanaian government is currently working on upgrading planning legislation. The process of obtaining land must be reformed even before deciding what can be done with it.”

Nyame-Mensah, a the co-captain of Bryn Mawr’s soccer team,  returned to Bryn Mawr in late August  for preseason training with a wealth of research findings. She acknowledges that she’s not quite as enthusiastic about “writing up” her thesis as she was about conducting the fieldwork for it, but the paper will undoubtedly benefit from the extended research the grant funded.

The events associated with the lectureship will include Subrahmanyam’s series of three lectures, to be delivered on the first three Mondays of November, as well as a variety of related film screenings, lectures, and workshops for faculty and students. Many offerings are open to the public.

Courtly Encounters: Shaping Muslim, Hindu, and Christian Group Perceptions

Subrahmanyam’s Flexner Lectures will focus on the crucial role 16th- and 17th-century Eurasian “courtly encounters” played in shaping Muslim, Hindu and Christian group perceptions of one another and the historical influence and modern-day ramifications of those perceptions. “Many view history as clashes between cultures, but initial encounters among these groups did not take place between societies or cultural systems as such, but between particular sub-cultures or segments of societies,” says Subrahmanyam. His lecture titles and topics are as follows:

When taken together, says Subrahmanyam, “these lectures will provide a broad-ranging reflection on the worlds of early modern Islam, Counter-Reformation Catholicism, Protestantism and a newly emergent Hindu sphere. I will argue that debates on a variety of matters and concepts of pressing interest for the contemporary world—including secularism and cosmopolitanism—can be illuminated by turning to this earlier phase of interactions and conflicts.”

About 2009 Flexner Lecturer Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Having published more than 10 books, Subrahmanyam is a prolific, well-regarded scholar. He is also an accomplished teacher. He taught economic history and comparative economic development at the Delhi School of Economics from 1983 to 1995, when he moved to Paris as directeur d’études in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. In 2002, Subrahmanyam moved to Oxford as the first holder of the newly created Chair in Indian History and Culture. In 2004, he became the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian History at ULCA. A year later, in 2005, he became founding Director of UCLA’s Center for India and South Asia. Subrahmanyam’s vast contributions to the humanities were recognized when he was elected a 2009 fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

About the Mary Flexner Lectureship

The Mary Flexner Lectureship is Bryn Mawr College’s most prestigious lectureship. Today, it is offered in partnership with Harvard University Press. According to Bryn Mawr College President Jane McAuliffe, “Our collaborative purpose is to present the scholarship of leading humanists to Bryn Mawr faculty and students, and to the broader academic community.” Of the Lectureship, President Jane McAuliffe said, “The Mary Flexner Lectureship celebrates Bryn Mawr’s legacy as a college that draws prominent faculty-scholars to its campus for collaborative interdisciplinary conversation that can ignite research and deepen our collective understanding of core humanistic concerns.”

Cartoon from Punch's almanac for 1882

The Bryn Mawr College Library will celebrate the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his landmark book On the Origin of Species with its new exhibition, Darwin’s Ancestors: Tracing the Origins of the “Origin of Species,” which will run through February 2010 in the Class of 1912 Rare Book Room in Canaday Library.

The exhibition will open on Thursday, Oct. 22, with a lecture by Swarthmore College Professor of Biology Scott Gilbert, titled “Disagreements Among Friends: How T. H. Morgan and E. B. Wilson’s Agreeing to Disagree Helped Establish Genetics and the Modern Synthesis.” Wilson was Bryn Mawr’s first biology professor and Morgan the second, and both played prominent roles in the international debates over evolution during the first half of the 20th century. The lecture will be at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 22,  in Carpenter Library 21.

Darwin’s Ancestors will examine the development of natural history from the mid-16th century, when the field was transformed by the appearance of strange new plants and animals brought to Europe from Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Over the following 300 years, amateur and professional scientists enthusiastically collected, described, and classified the natural world both at home and abroad, and looked for ways of understanding the relationships among species. The exhibition will feature the work of many of the key collectors, classifiers, and theorists, from Leonhart Fuchs and Conrad Gesner in the early period, through John Ray and Linnaeus in the late 17th and 18th centuries, to Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Lyell, and Darwin himself in the 19th century.

The curators of the Bryn Mawr exhibition are Angelique Wille, a graduate student in the history of art; Marybeth Matlack, a senior medieval-studies major, and Eric Pumroy, director of library collections.

Darwin’s Ancestors: Tracing the Origins of the “Origin of Species” is sponsored by the Friends of the Library. The show is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

For additional information, please contact the Library’s Special Collections Department: (610) 526-6576 or SpecColl@brynmawr.edu.

Chuck Rickard has more than 30 years of senior-level admissions experience, starting with his appointment as director of admissions at the University of Michigan-Flint in 1976. He retired in 2007 from Kent State, where he served as Associate Vice President for Enrollment Services for 14 years.

We recently sat down with Dean Chuck Rickard and asked him to tell us a little bit about himself.

How did you end up at Bryn Mawr?
I had retired from Kent State as the associate vice president for enrollment services in 2007. I was retired for about a year when I started to get calls from a search firm in Boston. They contacted me a couple of times about interim positions, but I just wasn’t interested until they asked me about this wonderful opportunity at Bryn Mawr.

What was it about Bryn Mawr that was appealing?
I’ve worked only in large public institutions and have always wanted to experience working in a selective liberal-arts college. Bryn Mawr has such a tremendous academic reputation and history that I couldn’t turn down this opportunity. Doing admissions work at Bryn Mawr is exciting because you get to know the students involved. They’re really outstanding young women.

What are your initial impressions now that you’ve been here for just over a month?
We’ve got a great staff here in the admissions office and I think there’s just a tremendous amount of energy throughout the college.

What will you be focused on over the next year?
Recruiting a great class for 2014! I’m also chairing the group that’s looking at how we bring together the graduate and undergraduate admissions functions to create an even more robust admissions program for the entire college [for more about the administrative reorganization that includes coordinating admissions procedures and records across the schools, see this story]. We’ve had two good meetings now and we’ve got a lot of work to do. It’s exciting because each group—undergrad, the Graduate College of Arts and Sciences, postbac, and the Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research—brings a lot of knowledge to the table and we’re learning from each other.

What are the challenges Bryn Mawr and other liberal-arts colleges face in recruiting undergraduates this year?
The economy is going to continue to be an issue for all schools as they recruit students. We have to maintain selectivity and manage affordability. Bryn Mawr is trying to recruit the very best students from all over the world, and there’s an awful lot of competition going on to attract those students to other highly regarded institutions.

Why should a student choose Bryn Mawr?
There are lots of reasons—world-class academics, its international reputation for developing women as leaders, its history and tradition, its beautiful campus, its diverse and distinctive community—but the most important thing is that it be the right school for that individual student. Bryn Mawr is not a place where you go for four years, get a degree and that’s it. The Bryn Mawr experience is transformative, and the community you join is one that remains a part of your life forever.

Tell me a little about yourself.
I’m from Michigan, I’m an old University of Michigan guy – worked there, went to school there, all that stuff. But my wife and I fell in love with North Carolina when I was working at The University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and our children settled down in that area, so that’s where my wife Jan and I live and have decided to retire.

Pan is the inventor of a device that senses changes in an amputee’s residual limb and adjusts the socket that attaches a prosthetic accordingly, thus ameliorating a major source of pain and impairment. The design won one of two “First Awards” sponsored by the American Intellectual Property Law Association at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) last May. As the top winner from China’s delegation to the ISEF, Pan was featured in more than 20 stories in 10 Chinese newspapers and on Hunan TV. She declined an interview request from Hong Kong’s TVB because of scheduling problems.

Her winning entry was the latest version of a project Pan started during her sophomore year in high school. As she pursued the necessary research, developed her ideas, and acquired the materials for her prototype, she encountered a variety of obstacles. According to Pan, the journey was definitely worth the trouble. Among the many things it taught her is that she has a talent for that kind of work.

“Before I started this research, I didn’t know I was good at science,” she says. “But the project gave me a lot of confidence.”

A sampling of Ying Pan's newspaper clippings

By her senior year in high school, her interest in science and engineering played a major role in her education planning. She chose Bryn Mawr, she says, because “It is famous for nurturing women scientists.”

“And the campus is so beautiful!” she adds.

Pan became interested in prosthetic-limb design through a series of incidental encounters with amputees. As a young child, she lived in a relatively poor neighborhood with a significant population of older people, where she sometimes saw amputees with makeshift prostheses constructed from whatever material was available—she remembers seeing a few made out of barrels.

In junior high school, Pan explains, “I was in a school surrounded by many hospitals. Sometimes I would take shortcuts through the hospitals to go home after school and I could usually catch sight of some amputees.”

But the idea of designing a better-fitting prosthesis socket came from a conversation she had with a friend’s uncle, who managed a factory. An amputee had come to his factory to suggest that he produce pads to ease the pain suffered by amputees at the site where a prosthesis connects. The manufacturer rejected the suggestion because he thought the market insufficient to make such an investment profitable. Pan, however, saw a meaningful opportunity in the amputee’s suggestion.

Her first task, she realized, was to determine what caused the pain that had prompted the amputee’s visit to the factory manager.

Solving this puzzle required more than hitting the books; Pan also needed to interview amputees. She telephoned many hospitals and rehabilitation centers before finding one that agreed to let her conduct research there.

Pan eventually pinpointed the cause of the problem: changes in the volume and shape of the residual limb weaken the seal between the stump and the suction cup that holds a prosthesis in place, resulting in chafing, abrasion, and sores. Such changes are especially problematic for children and teenagers whose bodies are still growing, but they often occur seasonally in adults as well.

Her inspiration for a better suction cup, Pan says, came from her father’s blood-pressure meter, which “can detect the pulse of a blood vessel.”

Pan’s device is a two-layer socket. The inside layer, which has contact with the skin, is filled with a silicone gel that regulates the temperature of the socket and conforms to the shape of the residual limb. The outer layer is full of air; a sensor similar to the one in her father’s blood-pressure meter detects the tightness of the fit between socket and stump by measuring the pressure of the air in the outer layer. It inflates or deflates the air cushion to keep the fit secure but not painfully tight.

Pan holds a Chinese patent for the apparatus and has applied for a second patent to cover improvements to her initial design. It will have to undergo a process of medical testing before it can be manufactured.

In the meantime, Pan is settling into the life of a U.S. college student and exploring new academic challenges. In addition to a writing workshop for non-native speakers of English, she is taking courses in physics, economics, and the Growth and Structure of Cities Program. She doesn’t especially miss the media spotlight.

“Every student at Bryn Mawr is so special,” she says. “They have their own personality, their own style, and they are free to do whatever they want within the confines of the Honor Code. I feel so comfortable on this campus.”