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Associate Professor of Physics Brett Barwick Published in ‘Nature Communications’

Research by Trinity College Associate Professor of Physics Brett Barwick contributed to a breakthrough in the field of imaging nanoscale optical fields that was published in the journal Nature Communications earlier this month.

Trinity_3017Web700The project was led by Fabrizio Carbone, a researcher at the Swiss research institute and university Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and exemplified international collaboration. Scientists made contributions from institutions around the world, including the University of Glasgow, EPFL’s Interdisciplinary Center for Electron Microscopy, Boston University, the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, and the Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avancats. The project was funded by the European Research Council (ERC), the Swiss National Science Foundation (NCCR-MUST), Trinity College, the Connecticut Space Grant Consortium, and El Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain).

Barwick and the team of researchers developed a new technique that can track light and electrons through a nanostructured – very tiny, very thin – surface. The silicon nitride membrane array used in the project was only 50 nanometers thick (one nanometer is equal to one billionth of a meter) and was covered with an even thinner layer of silver. When light couples with electrons, they move together as a single wave guided by the shape of the surface itself. These waves of light and electrons are called “surface plasmons” and could potentially be useful in the future of telecommunications and computing, where data can be moved across processors using light instead of electricity. Before this breakthrough, there was no way of tracking the guided light, or plasmons, as they move across the surface buried under the thin silver layer. Now, there is a way of seeing and tracking these buried plasmons, which move at speeds close to speed of light.

The scientists working on this project created a tiny antenna array that would allow the plasmons (light and electrons) to travel across the buried surface. They then punched microscopic nano-holes into the array, which would act as the antennas, or hotspots for the plasmons. Using the ultrafast technique they developed, the researchers were not only able to see the propagation of the guided light, but they were also able to film it – even when it is bound to a buried interface.

This breakthrough and subsequent research paper pave the way for designing and controlling confined fields of plasmons in multi-layered structures where interfaces might be buried underneath one another. This is important for creating future devices that combine light and electronics, commonly referred to as the field of optoelectronics.

Lead researcher Carbone explained the project using an analogy. “Trying to see plasmons in these interfaces between layers is a bit like trying to film people in a house from the outside,” Carbone said. “A regular camera won’t show you anything; but if you use microwave or a similar energy-tracking imaging, you can see right through the walls.”

Barwick travels yearly to work with Carbone and his group members in Lausanne, Switzerland, to complete collaborative experiments. This particular project started during Barwick’s sabbatical there in spring 2014. Barwick said, “Future optoelectronic devices based on these very tiny and sensitive nanostructures will likely need to have protective layers coated on them.  The technique that we have developed allows us to see through those layers and capture the circuit’s dynamics, which would otherwise be invisible.”

Barwick joined the Trinity physics faculty in 2010 and his research interests include experimental studies of fundamental quantum mechanics using ultrashort packets of electrons and probing interactions between photons and electrons on the nanoscale. He teaches both upper level and introductory level courses in the Physics Department and has published numerous scientific articles, some with Trinity students as co-authors, in publications such as Review of Scientific Instruments, Nature Communications, and Optics Express.

Written by Molly Thoms ’17 and Eleanor Worsley ’17

category: Publications

Leslie Desmangles Delivers Shirley G. Wassong Memorial Lecture

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Leslie Desmangles delivers the annual Shirley G. Wassong Memorial Lecture in McCook Auditorium at Trinity College. Photo by John Marinelli.

While many people are familiar with the persecution of Jews by the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s, fewer know about the cruelty and oppression Jews faced in 15th century Spain and later in Portugal. During a Catholic Inquisition that lasted for centuries, thousands of Jews were burned at the stake or imprisoned. This prompted many Jews and conversos ― those who practiced their faith in secret ― to flee to the Caribbean in search of personal safety and greater economic opportunity.

On April 25, Leslie Desmangles, Trinity College professor of religion and international studies, traced the migration of Sephardic Jews in Spain, Portugal, and other parts of Europe to the Spanish colonies of the New World as he delivered the 19th annual Shirley G. Wassong Memorial Lecture in European and American Art, Culture, and History on campus.

The story of Jews in the Caribbean is largely unknown, he said, “but the historical importance of Jewish contributions cannot be overlooked, primarily because of their impact on the economy and culture.”

Desmangles described the changing fortunes of European Jews in their new home. In the lush beauty of Brazil and the Caribbean islands, Jewish settlers initially thrived, becoming involved in the sugar trade and building modest synagogues. Historical records reveal that they preserved their cherished religious traditions, including weekly worship.

Dutch colonies such as Curaçao not only welcomed Jews but also recognized them as citizens while requiring them to farm the land. Many Jews became active in import-export businesses, while others became influential politicians, plantation owners, and bankers. By the end of the 17th century, their riches allowed them to pay off the mortgages of synagogues in the Caribbean, New York, South Carolina, and Rhode Island.

But as certain territories changed hands over the years, Jews once again became the target of religious persecution, which curtailed their ability to own land and conduct business and forced many to conceal their faith. In 1685, France ordered the expulsion of all Jews from French colonies.

Desmangles likened Jewish settlers’ nomadic movement among the sandy islands, in a quest for safer havens, to the biblical story of Jews wandering in the desert.

While Jewish congregations continue to flourish on some islands to this day, much of the Caribbean’s once-thriving population has disappeared over the past 50 years, due in part to interfaith marriages, erosion of customs, and the out-migration of young people. “Jewish children go abroad to study and don’t come back,” Desmangles said.

Immediately following the lecture, Trinity College President Joanne Berger-Sweeney took the podium with Dario Euraque, Trinity professor of history and international studies, and Vijay Prashad, George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and professor of international studies at Trinity, to make two announcements. The first was of a new Honors Day award: the Leslie Desmangles Prize in Caribbean Studies. The second was that Desmangles ― co-founder of the Haitian Studies Association and founder of the Journal of Haitian Studies ― would be the first director of the College’s new Center for Caribbean Studies, to be launched in November 2016.

Desmangles was clearly shocked and overwhelmed. Said Euraque with a laugh, “I think we surprised him.”

The Shirley G. Wassong Memorial Lecture Fund, which supports an annual lecture on the themes of European and American art, culture, and history, was established in 1996 in loving memory of Shirley Wassong by friends, family, and her husband, Joseph F. Wassong, Jr. Trinity Class of ’59. The annual lecture features members of Trinity’s faculty and guest scholars in alternating years. The lecturers are from various academic disciplines, and their topics range from antiquity to the present day. This year’s event marks the 19th Wassong Memorial Lecture.

Written by Carol Latter

To see more photos from this event, please click here.

category: Lectures and Panels
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Royal Society Publishes Paper Co-Authored by Professor of Biology Kent Dunlap and Student

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Michael Ragazzi ’16 and Professor of Biology Kent Dunlap in the research lab in Jacobs Life Sciences Center.

Research by Trinity College Professor of Biology Kent Dunlap and his student Michael Ragazzi ’16 was published this month in one of the world’s oldest scientific journals, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, based in London, England. The paper, which Dunlap and Ragazzi co-authored with researchers from Canada’s McGill University and Cape Breton University, reports that predators inhibit brain cell production in natural populations of electric fish.

A truly international collaboration, the project began with a trip to Central America by Dunlap and Canadian researchers during the spring of 2014. Dunlap’s mission: to capture electric fish, Brachyhypopomus occidentalis, from six field sites, to study how stress from predators affects the brains of those fish in their natural habitat. Electric fish in these streams are exposed to varying levels of predation by catfish.

“I came back from Panama with over 80 fish brains,” said Dunlap, explaining how the brains needed to be painstakingly preserved on dry ice even while doing fieldwork in the tropical heat. Upon arrival on campus, the frozen fish brains became Ragazzi’s challenge. His focus: how best to assay, or examine for analysis, cell birth in the fish brains – a procedure starting with the use of a cryostat to shave extremely thin brain slices. “Through trial and error, Michael optimized the process for detecting newborn [recently produced] brain cells,” said Dunlap, adding that it would be impossible to describe the project without bragging about Ragazzi’s contributions. A biology major now in his senior year, Ragazzi has worked in Dunlap’s research lab since his sophomore year, and this is the second research paper they have co-authored.

According to Ragazzi, the basic question posed by this project is, “How does the natural environment affect brain structure and function?” The use of fish brains was especially intriguing, he explained, due to the fact that “electric fish can produce new brain cells at a rate 10 to 100 times greater than mammals, including humans.” However, they found that environmental stressors can have a large impact on the brain: fish living among a lot of predators produced brain cells at about half the rate as those living among few predators.

Although many studies have examined the effect of stress on the brain in laboratory animals, this study is “the first demonstration of predator-induced alteration of brain cell proliferation in a free-living vertebrate,” according to the paper co-authored by Dunlap and Ragazzi. Their work was funded in part by a grant from the Trinity College Faculty Research Committee.

Ragazzi said the opportunity to work on such an elaborate scientific project was of great value as he considers the possibility of medical school in his future. “I appreciate how the experimental questions we explored integrated different scientific disciplines,” said Ragazzi. “Our work required us to read and incorporate aspects of ecology, neuroscience, biochemistry, and psychology.”

Asked what advice he might offer to other Trinity students who are considering majoring in biology, Ragazzi said, “I would advise them to consider the skills that the biology major can offer. Upper-level classes require you to integrate the basics of biology to understand how larger biological systems function, and they foster your critical thinking skills. Consider doing research with a biology professor; it allows you to sharpen the skills you learn in classes, and it gives you a deeper understanding of scientific research.”

A member of the Trinity College faculty since 1998, Dunlap holds a B.A. from Macalester College and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington, Seattle. In his research, Dunlap pursues questions at the cellular, physiological, behavioral, and evolutionary levels. While his current research is on fish, he has conducted research on lizards, frogs, and rodents in the past.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B is the Royal Society’s flagship biological research journal, dedicated to the fast publication and worldwide dissemination of high-quality research. The criteria for publication selection are: work of outstanding importance, scientific excellence, originality, and interest to a wide spectrum of biologists.

Read the full paper co-authored by Dunlap and Ragazzi in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B here.

Written by Kathy Andrews

category: Publications
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With New Novel ‘The Ramadi Affair,’ Judge Barry Schaller Goes From Fact to Fiction

The Honorable Barry Schaller – a visiting lecturer in public policy and law at Trinity College – has done a lot of writing in his career. He has penned opinions as an associate justice of the Connecticut Supreme Court, from which he has retired, and continues to serve as a judge trial referee for the Connecticut Appellate Court. Schaller has written three books about law and contributes articles to publications including the Connecticut Law Tribune. But these days, his writing is taking him in a very different direction as he explores a new passion for creating literary fiction.

BRSfront Web450Schaller’s first novel, The Ramadi Affair, was published in January by Quid Pro Books in paperback, hardcover, and in electronic form. He sees the novel as a fictional continuation of the themes explored in his 2012 nonfiction book, Veterans on Trial: The Coming Court Battles over PTSD (Potomac Books), addressing the consequences of war in the lives of veterans. The story in The Ramadi Affair follows the post-Iraq life of Justice David Lawson, who may soon be the top candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court.

“In some ways it is a culmination of all the writing I’ve done,” Schaller said of his novel. “After I finished writing Veterans on Trial and then giving talks about it, I felt that I hadn’t really completed the subject. I needed to write more fully about the consequences of war, and I had always wanted to write a novel or two, but always postponed it for something else.”

To further explore the topics in which he was interested – like moral decision-making and post-traumatic stress disorder – Schaller decided to create fictional characters to heighten the issues and make them more intense. “That’s what literature does,” he said. “It takes real-life situations and makes them more engaging, more interesting.”

Schaller was a literature major at Yale University – where he earned his B.A. and J.D. – and he said his favorite novels include The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace. “I’ve loved literature all my life,” he said, “especially literature that deals with characters in a very intense, precise way, but in a big landscape.”

The plot of The Ramadi Affair began to take shape in the summer of 2013 and Schaller wrapped up the writing in spring of 2015, with large breaks in between when work and teaching took up most of his time. “I would keep writing whenever I had a few minutes and felt like it,” he said. “I was very determined.”

The process of writing fiction was something that came naturally to Schaller, even though he had never done it before. “I have had mostly a left-brain career, and I really wanted to let my right brain run loose,” he said. “When I sat down, I did not want to write the way you write a nonfiction book. I would just let the words flow in an intuitive way.”

He found this method freeing, but it did require a lot of editing. “The hard part was the rewriting and editing. Worst of all was the proof-reading,” Schaller said. “I didn’t show it to anybody until I had a draft that satisfied me. A friend who was a combat veteran vetted it, to make sure I got technical details like ranks and military terms right.”

Schaller so enjoyed writing fiction that he began work on a second novel as soon as he sent the first one to his publisher. The plot of the next novel is inspired, in part, by a course on public health issues that Schaller taught at Trinity last spring. “I spent a section of the course on public health problems of people who are living in conflict or are displaced,” he said. “That inspired me to get extremely interested in the problem of refugees. It’s probably the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet, and it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.”

The protagonist in Schaller’s second novel is working with refugees and also is undergoing medical treatment for an illness. Schaller knows firsthand about the latter subject, having been diagnosed with leukemia in 2015. “I wanted to incorporate my thoughts about what it’s like to be told suddenly you have an illness, and have to deal with treatment, hospitals, and doctors,” he said. “I’m still working on that draft, but I’ve probably got 225 pages or so.”

While he still plans to pen articles for law publications, Schaller said that he sees himself continuing to focus on writing novels in the future. “I think another nonfiction book is too big an investment of time,” he said. “And fiction is too darn much fun.”

Written by Andrew J. Concatelli

category: Publications
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Molly Helt Co-Authors Activity Book for Early Treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders

A new book co-authored by Trinity College Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Molly Helt is designed to make early intervention treatment even earlier than ever for infants at risk of developing autism spectrum disorders (ASD).

The Activity Kit for Babies and Toddlers at Risk: How to Use Everyday Routines to Build Social and Communication Skills (The Guilford Press, 2016) shows families – in easy-to-understand terms – how to support their child’s development by incorporating scientific principles into their day-to-day lives, even before receiving an official ASD diagnosis.

MollyHelt DSC_4341 use Web450“I’m the parent of a child with autism, and parents are told to give their children up to 40 hours of intervention a week,” Helt said of her own experience with her oldest child. “So what I found myself doing was adapting a lot of applied behavioral analysis programs to daily routines like bathing, changing, feeding, or going to the playground.”

Concern for her second child led Helt to look into early intervention techniques for children who are considered “at risk.” She knew that children who have an older sibling with autism have a roughly 20 percent chance of developing autism, but she could not find much information about parenting at-risk children. “Autism is something we can’t diagnose until 18 months at the earliest, and I couldn’t just sit around for 18 months and do nothing,” Helt said.

In reality, a child may be significantly older than 18 months before any treatment begins, Helt said. “The average wait time once a parent identifies that they have a child with a problem, to get an appointment [for diagnosis], is nine months nationally,” Helt said. “Here in Connecticut, once you have a diagnosis, you then have to wait an additional three months on average for early intervention to start – and Connecticut is better than a lot of places in the United States. These are crucial months in which a child’s brain is the most plastic and developing the most quickly.”

Inspired both by her own children and by her professional experiences working with parents who are frustrated by having to wait so long for diagnosis and treatment, Helt researched typical development and ASD treatment programs. She and her co-authors adapted those concepts for families with young children who may have ASD – or who may be at risk – to use anytime, anyplace. “It’s basically all about getting autism therapy into your day-to-day life,” Helt said.

The book’s introduction, says, in part, “From the moment your child wakes up to the time she goes to bed, you have many opportunities to build language, social skills, imitation, and pretend play. This book contains games to play while you dress your child, rhymes and songs to use during mealtimes and chores, ways to enrich development and learning during play and errands, and more.”

“I hope this book serves as a ‘how-to’ on how to do early intervention yourself,” Helt said. “We know from autism research that autistic children will do things for their parents they won’t do for anyone else. I really want to inspire parents, to say, ‘You can do this.’ Even if you have a job, you have to eat with your kid and bathe them, and so you can be part of this plan. A lot of these activities are embedded in games, and we want it to be fun and manageable. It doesn’t have to be something that takes away from living your life.”

Helt plans to test this program as part of her ongoing research at Trinity. “In the field of autism, we’ve made very little progress in genetics and underlying biological mechanics of autism over the last 20 years,” she said. “However, we’ve made huge strides in our ability to diagnose earlier, and outcomes have drastically improved. Where we’re making the gains is in early identification and early intervention, and so that’s where I want to go with my research, and that’s where I see the real way to make progress.”

The book’s co-authors are Helt’s mentor Deborah Fein, Ph.D., a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut; Lynn Brennan, BCBA-D, a board-certified applied behavior analyst based in Massachusetts who has worked with children with autism spectrum disorders for more than 20 years; and Marianne Barton, Ph.D., a clinical professor and director of clinical training in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut, where she is also director of the Psychological Services Clinic.

Helt holds a dual Ph.D. in clinical psychology and developmental psychology. She currently teaches developmental psychopathology, developmental neuroscience, clinical psychology, and a senior seminar called “The Social Self” at Trinity College. The Activity Kit for Babies and Toddlers at Risk is her first book. The publisher is already translating the book into Korean and Turkish and has plans to translate it into more languages.

Written by Andrew J. Concatelli

category: Publications
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Assistant Professor of Psychology Elizabeth D. Casserly and Research Assistant Bring Learning Beyond the Classroom

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​Research assistant Jocelyn Redding ’16 and Assistant Professor of Psychology Elizabeth D. Casserly outside the psycholinguistics lab’s soundproof room. Photo by Andrew J. Concatelli

Research assistantships at Trinity College allow students to gain valuable experience and build long-lasting relationships with their mentors.

A research assistantship position can be a half-credit or full-credit course, offering students the chance to further their own research or support the research of a professor or a thesis student. These positions are not only available in the labs of science departments, but are also found in the social sciences and the humanities.

​Jocelyn Redding ’16, a research assistant in Assistant Professor of Psychology Elizabeth D. Casserly’s lab, initially learned about sign language in elementary school and pursued her interest in American Sign Language (ASL) in high school. Her desire to learn more about anything related to the topic of deaf culture led her to Casserly, who specializes in cochlear implant research.

Redding said, “I am going into graduate school, hopefully next fall, so research experience will be a great thing to have on my resume.” Redding currently helps two thesis students in the psychology department, and another student who is doing general psycholinguistic research. “Outside of research experience in general, deaf culture and hearing loss is something that is very important to me, and I do love when people integrate into the deaf community,” she said.

Research assistantships are geared toward upper-year students with a declared major; however, professors do welcome motivated and curious sophomores who would like to start early. Casserly said, “I wouldn’t be able to do my research without students helping me. My research doesn’t only involve a lot of time spent in the lab, but also interpersonal interactions. When we recruit participants for our experiments, it is important that we can explain to them what we need them to do. I just wouldn’t be able to balance so many interactions without my students.”

Written by Ana Medina ’16

category: Research + Scholarship
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Writer-in-Residence Lucy Ferriss Kicks off A.K. Smith Reading Series

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Lucy Ferriss reads from A Sister to Honor at R.J. Julia Booksellers (Madison, Connecticut). Photo by Julia Rubano ’14

Writer-in-residence Lucy Ferriss will open the Trinity College English Department’s Fall 2015 Allan K. Smith Reading Series on Wednesday, September 16, at 4:30 p.m. at the Smith House (123 Vernon Street).

The author of 10 books, Ferriss will read from and discuss her latest novel, A Sister to Honor, which was chosen as a 2015 Great Group Read by the Women’s National Booksellers Association. Set on the campus of a fictional New England college, A Sister to Honor has received many enthusiastic reviews, including one from novelist and social anthropologist Jenny White, who wrote: “A wrenching story of Pakistani siblings struggling to adapt their expectations of love and trust to an entirely different American context where a Facebook post can lead to betrayal and the destruction of an entire family a world away. The story is told with compassion and insight into the traditions of both societies. I couldn’t put it down.”

Asked about the upcoming A.K. Smith series event, Ferriss said, “I’m excited to be reading on the campus that inspired the story.” While on sabbatical last semester, Ferriss spent much of her time traveling around the U.S. for readings and appearances at bookstores, libraries, and writers’ conferences. Among her presentations was one titled “Love, Honor, and Squash: Field Research for Fiction,” for alumni attending Trinity’s Reunion in June, in which she detailed how her research for the book took her from Trinity’s own squash courts to the remote Pashtun villages of Pakistan.

As Ferriss shared in a recent New England Public Radio interview about A Sister to Honor, the concept of honor, both throughout the world of sports and among different cultures, is a significant theme of the novel.

A faculty member at Trinity since 2000, Ferriss teaches courses in fiction writing, contemporary American literature, narrative theory, and Native American literature and culture. She writes regularly for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Lingua Franca blog. Ferriss received a B.A. from Pomona College, M.A. degrees from San Francisco State University and Tufts University, and holds a Ph.D. from Tufts.

Other writers in the Allan K. Smith Reading Series will be poet David Baker on October 1; novelist Jim Shepard ’78 on October 21; author Heidi Julavits on November 18; and poet Kimiko Hahn on December 10. All readings are free and open to the public. A reception and book signing will follow each event.

Written by Kathy Andrews

category: Lectures and Panels
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James Wen’s Paper on the Great Leap Famine Receives Commendation

WenLgA research paper about the causes of China’s Great Leap Famine, co-authored by Trinity College Professor of Economics and International Studies James G. Wen, has been honored by the China Agricultural Economic Review as a Highly Commended Paper of 2014.

The paper, “Communal dining system and the puzzle of the Great Leap Famine: Re-examine the causality between communal dining and the famine,” was written with Yuan Liu and Xiahai Wei, both of the School of Economics and Management at South China Normal University in Guangzhou, China. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, which publishes the Review, called the paper “one of the most impressive pieces of work the team has seen throughout 2014.”

The paper examines China’s Great Leap Famine, which took place during the Great Leap Forward campaign of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party from 1958 to 1961. “The aim of the campaign was to rapidly transform the nation from an agrarian economy into a socialist society with highly developed industry and a national defense,” Wen said. “It turned out to be a great disaster. Around 15 million to 40 million died of hunger, and the economy basically collapsed. The real number has never been published by the Chinese government.”

The official explanation for the famine was bad weather, Wen said. “It was very embarrassing for the Chinese government to admit that this was a man-made mistake.” He said the famine actually began, puzzlingly, after a good harvest in 1958, which saw the highest per-capita grain consumption in rural areas during the famine period, and ended abruptly after this measurement hit the lowest point in 1961. “It was very counterintuitive compared with conventional famines,” Wen said.

When it came to explaining the causes of what he calls a “puzzling” famine, Wen and his co-authors focused on the communal dining system and its compulsory collectivization of the farmers’ food rationing.

As soon as the Great Leap Forward started, Wen said, Mao instituted communal farming and communal dining halls. “He believed if the farmers did not need to cook for themselves, it would save a lot of time for more productive things,” Wen said. “The mistake here was that it was compulsory. Mao took away the rationing of the food from the farmers – the last thing that a farmer could control after everything else was collectivized under the commune system.”

One widely accepted hypothesis, Wen said, was that to feed the urban population, the government’s procurement from the farms was too heavy, leaving the rural population with very little food. However, the paper says that this hypothesis cannot explain why the famine started when the rural per capita grain consumption reached the highest level, but ended when it hit the lowest level. Nevertheless, Wen said, this hypothesis, like the communal dining hypothesis, can explain why the farmers had no incentive to work hard. In this system, the farmers could not leave their land, and they did not get to keep more food if they grew more. This led to the consecutive fall in food production in 1959, 1960, and 1961, he said.

What really triggered the famine, Wen said, was that the communal food was claimed to be free. “So in the first few months after the fall harvest of 1958 you had overconsumption,” Wen said. “The farmers were competing with each other to eat more. In a few months, they exhausted the food. Other famines are related to shortage of food, but this was triggered by overconsumption of food first, followed by meager supply of food.”

By the spring of 1961, Wen said, the famine became so severe that eventually Mao yielded to the reality and agreed that the communal dining halls may have been a bad idea. Instead of admitting any mistake, Wen said, Mao let the farmers decide what they wanted to do, and the farmers chose immediately to claim back their food rationing and went back to preparing food at home.

“It is interesting that we showed that the idealism of sharing everything together often leads to disaster, especially when you force people to share,” Wen said. “If you do anything, you have to base it on people’s voluntary spirit. Even today, it can be a moral lesson to China.”

Currently, farmers in rural China are allowed to migrate to cities to seek jobs but are still not allowed to settle in urban areas, Wen said, creating a “floating population” of about 260 million people. “There is a de facto institutionalized duality between urban and rural. It reminds me of the causes of the Great Famine,” he said. “I have used the lessons from the Great Leap Famine to promote free migration, more secured property rights to land, and free settlement of rural people in urban areas.” Wen’s book on this subject, called Our People Have No Land, was the first of its kind that was permitted to be published in China.

In addition to pursuing his passion for teaching students about the confluence of economics and history at Trinity, Wen is also a specially appointed professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

To read the full text of Wen’s paper, click here.

Written by Andrew J. Concatelli

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Per Sebastian Skardal’s Paper in Science Advances Has Implications for Power Grid, Health Care

aSkardal250x250Research by Trinity College Assistant Professor of Mathematics Per Sebastian Skardal on dynamical systems, with many possible biological and technological applications, was published August 21 in the online journal Science Advances.

Titled “Control of coupled oscillator networks with application to microgrid technologies,” the paper was written in collaboration with co-author Alex Arenas, who served as Skardal’s postdoctoral research adviser at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, Spain. Their research has implications as widely varied as developing small, independently operating power grids and stabilizing dangerous heart rhythms.

Skardal is an applied mathematician with a particular interest is dynamical systems – which he describes as systems that evolve in time – and their ties with complex networks. “I use the example with students these days of Facebook. Everyone goes on Facebook; it’s a social network, so you have these links connecting different people if they’re friends,” he said. “I study how different groups of people or objects interact and how those interactions lead to particular behaviors. I’m particularly interested in when something big happens in the network, when all the objects start behaving similarly, or when an epidemic grows into a big thing that affects a lot of people.”

This line of research led Skardal to many examples of complex networks in nature that sometimes synchronize and sometimes don’t. “For example, we can observe fireflies in Southeast Asia. The males will actually synchronize their flashing,” he said. “This is actually a pretty phenomenal thing that’s going on.”

Another biological example can be found in cardiac pacemaker cells, which Skardal said have to synchronize so they can send signals to the rest of the heart, and in regions of the brain that need to synchronize for brain activity to work. “And we all synchronize our biological clocks – our circadian rhythms – to the sun or whatever light you see,” he said.

The power grid is one example of mechanical synchronization that is generating a lot of interest now and is one of the theoretical applications that Skardal said inspired the paper.

“Essentially, a power grid is a collection of sources and loads – generators and consumers. Each of these elements is really an oscillator,” Skardal said. “An efficient power grid, or a power grid that is working, is a power grid where all of the sources and loads are synchronized with one another, so they have to move at the same rate. And when one desynchronizes, that basically corresponds to a power failure in that region. What’s even more dangerous is if there is a power failure in one place, it can propagate to the other sources and loads that are close by, leading to a large-scale blackout.”

This new research posits what Skardal calls a cheap and easy method to control synchronization. “What we are interested in here is that these systems generally won’t be automatically synchronized,” he said. “We used what has been discovered in these types of systems and found a nice way to build in a cheap control mechanism. It’s a mechanism of building a descriptor for the system and then being able to identify oscillators – or in this case, sources or loads – that require some sort of intervention to stay synchronized with the rest of the population.”

To put it simply, he said, “We’re adding a little discipline to the poorly behaved oscillator.”

Skardal hopes that this research could contribute to the continuing development of microgrids, which he said are smaller power grids that can operate in isolation from the larger power grid. “They can be connected, but they have the functionality of operating on their own,” he said. These may be used in less-connected parts of the world, and they tend to use more green energy, Skardal said, because they don’t need to be fueled by large power plants.

While this paper focuses on the power grid application, Skardal said he is looking forward to exploring many more theoretical and practical applications for his research. “What we really believe and hope for is that these ideas are actually much more general,” he said. “For instance, when a heart is beating asynchronously, in a ventricular fibrillation sort of state, we could use these ideas to synchronize systems using as little control as possible.

A new member of the Trinity College faculty as of July 1, 2015, Skardal holds a B.A. from Boston College and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Science Advances is an online-only open-access journal established earlier this year by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of Science. The peer-reviewed journal rapidly publishes high-quality, original research in all disciplines of science.

Read Skardal’s full paper in Science Advances here.

An article about Skardal’s paper has been published by IEEE Spectrum here.

Written by Andrew J. Concatelli

category: Publications
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Davarian Baldwin’s Vast Scholarship on Display in Hartford, Around the World

400pxBaldwin

Davarian Baldwin during a February panel discussion at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

When Davarian Baldwin, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, joined Trinity’s faculty in 2009, he saw the tremendous value of the College’s Hartford location as a source of scholarship and as an ideal setting for a liberal arts education.

​“It’s about getting students out beyond the campus walls,” he said. “Doing work, talking to people, asking questions, and listening…and hopefully even acting.”

In the years since, Baldwin has made good on that goal, leaving his mark both on Hartford and on urban landscapes throughout the country. His scholarship is vast, including such subjects as the civil rights movement, the role of African Americans in shaping American culture, and urban institutions of higher education.

At Trinity, Baldwin is not only teaching at one such institution, but well positioned among the other cultural institutions that make urban America so distinctive. Recently, he participated in a panel at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum, “Race and Identity at Coney Island.” The interdisciplinary symposium was part of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s current exhibit, “Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861–2008.”

Baldwin’s scholarship is on display not just in Hartford, but around the country. Baldwin’s expertise was featured by USA Today in a recent story about the Harlem Renaissance. The Hartford Courant turned to Baldwin to address the role of social media following protests in Ferguson, Missouri. A recent podcast from the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture featured Baldwin and his theory of “UniverCities.” Also at the Schomburg Center, he was part of a discussion about the role of slavery in the development of institutions of higher education and how those institutions are transforming urban America today.

Among the institutions Baldwin has examined are the University of Chicago, New York University, Arizona State University, and – of course – Trinity. And his scholarship has not been restricted to American audiences; on April 9-10, Baldwin will be in Shanghai, China, to present on “University-Community Relations in the Urban U.S.” at the City and Society International Forum at Tongii University.

“There’s no question that being here and having the support of Trinity’s leadership has helped make this possible,” he said.

category: In the News, Lectures and Panels
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