OVERSEAS STUDIES

Departing Soon: Quick Trips Abroad

STANFORD STUDENT Andy Chen, a pianist who lost his heart to Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev in high school, can’t quite believe he’s going to Moscow in the fall to study Russian music, culture and politics.

Chen, ’04, went to several Overseas Studies orientation meetings last year, but concluded that he’d never be able to spend a quarter away from campus. As a physics major, he has to stick with a carefully sequenced track of courses.

Then along came Overseas Seminars—three-week, two-unit courses held before fall quarter begins—and Chen was sold. “This program was the greatest news in the world, because now I can have the experience of studying abroad without having to put a brake on my science courses.”

Chen is one of 75 undergraduates who will help launch the program in early September. Five seminars in four countries—China, Belgium, Korea and Russia—will touch on subjects ranging from local elections in China to globalization to the European Union. The program is one of a handful of innovations designed to boost the percentage of undergraduates who study overseas, currently 28 percent, to 40 percent, in part by making it easier for student-athletes and science and engineering majors to participate. Many—Chen included—will be making their first trips abroad.

In the Moscow seminar, titled Repression, Reform and Revolution: Russian Music, Culture and Politics from 1855 to 1917, Chen and his fellow students will be “connecting the very different styles of composers like Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Borodin and Glinka with the events of a very turbulent time,” says Fred Weldy, a senior lecturer in music. “And closer to the time of the revolution, we’ll look at what I call the ‘bad boy composers,’ like Prokofiev, who were producing really dissonant work.” Weldy will teach the seminar with Coit Blacker, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies and professor, by courtesy, of political science.

The new seminars seem to be a hit: Overseas Studies processed 326 applications for the 75 spots available. Blacker and Weldy had to sort through 130 applications for their 15 slots. They ended up selecting students who were well-versed in music and who also had some background in Slavic languages or the historical period. Sociologist Gi-Wook Shin sat down with the 30 students who made the short list for Korea in a Globalizing World and talked with each about her or his interest in studying in Seoul.

“The topic is so relevant to my major courses, which focus on technologies and organizations,” says Michelle Chun, ’04, a management science and technology major who was selected for Shin’s seminar. “Plus I was born in Korea but came here at age 1, and I’ve never had a chance to study its culture in an academic setting.”

Overseas Studies has enhanced its established programs, too. A four-day conference about the continued effects of World War II on Europe debuted last winter quarter and will be repeated next year. Students from Stanford centers in Moscow, Paris, Oxford, Florence and Berlin gathered in Berlin in March to present papers about the war, and then joined former University president Gerhard Casper and history professors David Kennedy, ’63, and James Sheehan, ’58, for a sobering tour of Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

“The post-war world,” says Brandon Reavis, ’03, who traveled to the Berlin conference from Oxford, “quickly came into focus when we climbed the stairs of the Reichstag, long the stage for Nazi propaganda, to view the reconstructed city through a glass dome built by the united German government.”

MEDICINE

Overcoming Organ Rejection

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR assistant professor of surgery Maria Millan transplants almost 300 organs annually, but she’s particularly pleased with the results for two of her most recent patients. After receiving transplanted kidneys from nonrelatives, they were weaned off antirejection drugs. One remains off the medication.

Previously, transplant patients had to take immunosuppressive medications for the rest of their lives to prevent rejection—and the drugs can have severe side effects, including heart problems and malignancies. But now, teams of Stanford researchers and specialists have developed a new therapy that combines injected blood stem cells from the organ donor with small doses of radiation and medication. The protocol, which was presented to the American Transplant Congress and appeared in the journal Transplantation in May, aims to create a hybrid immune system that accepts the transplanted organ, rather than attacking it as something foreign. “The organ becomes recognized by the body of the recipient as self,” Millan says.

The new therapy draws on 30 years of research—with laboratory animals and in human trials—conducted by Samuel Strober, professor of immunology and rheumatology, who often functions as a de facto communications center for keeping the surgeons, nephrologists, immunologists, pathologists and experts in bone-marrow transplantation and radiation oncology in touch with one another. Although the protocol was tested using live donors, it is designed largely for transplants from cadavers, at a time when an estimated 79,000 people nationwide are waiting for organ replacement—and 6,000 died last year while they waited. “These transplants are life-saving procedures and are able to return patients to a normal lifestyle, which is a very impressive outcome for someone with a basically terminal illness,” Strober says.

Millan, who will help refine the therapy as she and her colleagues do living-donor kidney transplants and cadaver liver transplants, says she’ll consider it a success when her patients remain off medications for two years. “My first priority will always be the patient,” she says. “We’re really talking about the quality of their lives.”

Head of the Class

SCIENCE STARS: Six Stanford faculty members, including President John Hennessy, have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. This year’s selection of Hennessy, Patrick Brown, Eric Knudsen, Michael Levitt, Stephen Schneider and David Siegmund brings the number of Stanford faculty in the academy to 129.

GOOD COMPANY: The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has chosen seven Stanford scholars for membership: Ronald Bracewell, James Fearon, Hector Garcia-Molina, MS ’75, MS ’77, PhD ’79, William Nix, MS ’60, PhD ’63, John Perry, Lee Shulman and Allen Wood. The AAAS class of 2002 also includes six Pulitzer Prize winners, four college presidents, three Nobel laureates, two federal legislators and actress Anjelica Huston.

Cardinal Numbers

Cubic feet of material Richard Klein’s team excavated from the Duinefontein Acheulean archaeological site in South Africa: 9,700

Weight, in tons, of that much dirt: 485

Months needed to excavate it: 10

Animal bones recovered: 6,150

Stone artifacts recovered, including flint stones: 2,771

TV shows based on “a modern Stone Age family”: 1

Year The Flintstones first appeared: 1960

Sources: Richard Klein; Hanna-Barbera

ENGINEERING

Technical Topics, Simple Sentences

THE ASSIGNMENT could be a status report on a graduate student’s research. Or an abstract for a technology conference. Perhaps even a proposal for funding.

“The point is to make the assignments real and useful,” says David Lougee, director of the technical communications program in the School of Engineering. “We’re not teaching essay writing, but how to write about real things.”

For more than 25 years, students in chemical, mechanical, electrical and sundry other engineering specialties have been honing their communication skills—both written and oral—in one-on-one, intensive sessions with tutors who are whizzes at making tech talk understandable. “The model instructor can read dissertations and correct equations,” Lougee says about the eight writing instructors and 20 speech tutors.

The program was launched in 1976 at the behest of engineering faculty with experience outside the academy. “Engineers have for a long time been notoriously bad communicators,” Lougee says. “And the dean kept getting advice from people in industry, saying it was important that students come out of Stanford with communication skills.”

When he took over as director of the program in 1981, Lougee began to hire lecturers and tutors who had doctorates in English and lots of teaching experience. His own work teaching freshman English and serving as a writing consultant for the Graduate School of Business and the Law School had shown him that one-on-one tutorials were the best way to teach writing. Last year alone, the program served 925 undergraduates and graduate students in 3,500 half-hour, or longer, sessions.

Lougee also teaches three writing courses, including one that he coordinates with ME 103, a mechanical engineering shop course in which students have to design and build a prototype for a product. The writing assignments begin with a cover letter, résumé and design proposal directed to a manager, and graduate to a description of the manufacturing system the student intends to use. In the final assignment, six hypothetical months down the design road, the student looks at the projected market share and makes recommendations for changes in the product.

“One of the things I try to emphasize to engineering students is that writing is a kind of problem-solving design process,” Lougee says. “I try to show them that writing in my course is designed to help them think about what they’re doing in the design class.”

LECTURE HALL

How Culture Shapes Psychology, and Vice Versa

WERE ADOLESCENT GIRLS always so mean? Did previous generations manipulate their parents and dump on their friends with such practiced nastiness?

A recent New York Times Magazine article launching that classroom discussion cited a growing body of academic literature on relational aggression and declared the “seething underside of American girlhood” a “certified social problem.” But students enrolled in Psychology 215: Mind, Culture and Society couldn’t help questioning the underlying assumptions of the story.

“How much of this adolescent moodiness do we see because we’re expecting it?” one student asked. “And how much is really happening?”

“I was really frustrated by [the article’s] pigeonholing of adolescent girls,” another student offered. “I’m not sure that’s fair.”

Those responses are gratifying to psychology professors Hazel Rose Markus and Claude Steele, who co-teach the graduate core course. They see their students beginning to understand that human behavior is malleable and is shaped by people’s perceptions and experiences.

“To say that girls are mean because they have traits of meanness, or that we’re somehow growing girls with mean qualities, is an easy story to write,” Markus says. “But in this class we’re really talking about the study of social influence. And whether or not we agree with them, various representations of race, ethnicity, religion and gender are out there, and they do influence us.”

Markus is widely credited with creating the field of cultural psychology, and Steele is known for his research about how internalized racial stereotypes can interfere with minority students’ academic performance. Together they have taught the course for five years, updating the syllabus with new topics that often draw on the headlines of the day, from recent investigations into grade inflation to the centuries of distrust that have shaped the Middle East.

By looking at how sociocultural factors influence psychological processes, and vice versa, Markus and Steele are taking their discipline in new directions. “It’s a shift away from psychology that tries to explain the person by opening up the head or the body and looking inside to see how the parts are working or not working,” Markus says. “Instead, we’re saying, ‘Step back and look at the context, because that’s going to be your best bet to understanding just about everything.’”

Steele likens the course’s investigation of social psychology to Freud’s discovery of the unconscious: “Freud says you see unconscious stuff manifesting itself in basic psychological functioning, and we’d like to claim that we’re discovering the role of context in shaping the psychology of a person.”

In addition to attracting students of psychology and sociology, the course draws from the schools of business, law and education. An increasing percentage of those who enroll have taught in California public schools for several years and want to better address the increasing diversity of their classrooms. “People sometimes make outlandish claims about issues of race and ethnicity, and we want students to understand that there’s now a great deal of scholarship out there,” Markus says.

Each week, Markus and Steele lecture during one class session and open the second to a discussion of assigned readings. The discussion, in turn, is driven by brief “reaction papers” students submit about the readings. In her paper about aging, for example, Cara Rice, ’96, cited the “pervasive tendency of psychologists to identify old age as a time of prevalent psychopathology, including presumably elevated rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness.” That concerned her, Rice added, because data increasingly suggests that “aging is associated with lower rates of every form of psychopathology aside from the dementias.”

The observations Rice and her classmates make in their reaction papers are excerpted and then photocopied for the entire class to read. Students comparing one another’s comments almost guarantees a lively class discussion, Steele says. “The larger mission of the course is to think carefully and in a scholarly way to understand the phenomena,” he adds. “We want them to take a more examined view.”

RESEARCH

Taking a Spin—for 22 Hours in a Centrifuge

WITH AN EYE on future trips to Mars, NASA scientists are putting human guinea pigs aboard a 58-foot centrifuge in Mountain View this summer to see how well they tolerate long-term exposure to increased gravitational force.

At press time, seven Stanford students were still in the pool of 30 candidates for the hypergravity experiment, which sought men between the ages of 18 and 35 who were 5-foot-8 or shorter (women will take part in a subsequent study). “They have to be sufficiently small to fit, and they have to really, really want to participate,” says Malcolm Cohen, chief of NASA’s human information processing branch and a consulting professor in human biology. The passenger cabs where the four finalists will spend seven “habitation sessions”—five of them some 22 hours long—are only 6 feet wide and 7.6 feet long.

Cohen first studied the effects of hypergravity on military jet pilots in the 1960s, and has been teaching Astrobiology and Space Exploration at Stanford since 1982. In this experiment, he hopes to find out if long-term exposure to hypergravity might help astronauts readjust to gravity on Earth—after extended periods of weightlessness on space flights—without debilitating side effects. As the centrifuge spins faster and faster, the study subjects will try to ride it out as they experience G forces up to two times those normally found on Earth. They’ll spend most of their time sitting upright, playing chess or Pong on laptops, or watching videos.

“We’ll be looking to see if they remain reasonably functional in a rotating environment for long periods of time, and testing them to see if their G tolerance is improved or compromised and whether they have severe motion sickness,” Cohen says. “They’ll spend some time standing, but they may not want to walk much.”

MUSIC

An Accordion for the Future

IMAGINE A ROCK CONCERT in which the band makes music not with guitars or drums or electric violins, but with computers. John, Paul, George and Ringo take their places behind a bank of flat-screen monitors. As they click mice and pound on their QWERTY keyboards, “A Hard Day’s Night” fills the air. It sounds like the Beatles, but it doesn’t look like much.

Enter the Accordiatron, a computer-controlled device that bridges the gap between computer-generated music and the art of performance.

Michael Gurevich, a graduate student at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, and Stephan von Muehlen, who earned an MFA last year in product design, invented the Accordiatron in a 2001 course on human-computer interaction. Although people have been making music with computers for decades, Gurevich says, live audiences don’t find the standard monitor-keyboard-mouse setup very satisfying. “There’s no correlation between gestures and sound,” Gurevich explains. The Accordiatron, like a musical instrument, gives an audience something to connect to.

But it’s no conventional instrument. Unconnected to a computer, the Accordiatron—an accordion-meets-iMac tangle of wires and circuitry and neon-orange acrylic—is strangely silent. Plug it in, however, and a musician can make it sound like almost anything.

For example, let’s say Paul is the most computer-savvy Beatle. Using software, he assigns various sounds—guitar riffs, drum beats, piano notes—to the Accordiatron’s buttons. Pitch and tone are controlled by several sensors that detect movement. As soon as Paul straps the Accordiatron to his hands, the computer translates his movement and button-pressing into sound.

Why make it look like an accordion? Gurevich says the inventors appreciated its visual appeal, diversity of sound and range of movement. He concedes there may not be much of a commercial market for the Accordiatron. But it did earn him an A+.

Campus Notebook

At the Top of the Tower
Elena S. Danielson has been appointed associate director of the Hoover Institution and director of the Hoover Library and Archives. Danielson, MA ’70, PhD ’75, joined the institution in 1978 and has served as its archivist since 1997. She succeeds Charles G. Palm, who retired in December. Palm negotiated the groundbreaking 1992 agreement between Hoover and the Russian State Archival Service that led to the worldwide distribution of 12 million pages of material from the Soviet Communist Party and State Archives.

A New Prize for New Authors
Stanford University Libraries has teamed up with the William Saroyan Foundation to establish the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. The biennial award will honor newly published works of fiction, including novels, short stories, dramas and memoirs. It is meant to encourage emerging authors, rather than recognizing established literary figures. A panel of experts will choose the winner of the $12,500 prize, which will be awarded for the first time in spring 2003. The William Saroyan Foundation granted Stanford University Libraries custodianship of the late California author’s literary collection in 1996.

For Phil Lesh, There Comes a Time
Waiting lines of the devoted sprawled along Campus Drive June 2 when former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh returned to play Frost Amphitheater. Beginning in 1966, the Dead played numerous shows on campus, including 14 at Frost, but in 1989 University administrators determined that the traveling fan base of “Deadheads” had outgrown the venue. Andrew Gustin, ’02, made it a three-year personal project to bring Phil Lesh & Friends to the amphitheater, working with the ASSU, the Stanford Concert Network, and University administrators and police officers to put on the show. Lesh, said Gustin a few days before the performance, “was almost giddy at the prospect of returning to Stanford.”

Alumna Named Police Chief
In June, Laura Wilson became Stanford’s sixth police chief, succeeding Marvin Moore, who died of a heart attack on February 10. Wilson, ’91, has worked for the Stanford department of public safety since 1992 and was promoted to lieutenant in 2001. She is the first alumna and the first woman to hold the top post. “Lt. Wilson embodies the balance of top-notch professional experience and superior people skills that are essential to being a successful police chief at Stanford,” says President John Hennessy. “In addition, as a Stanford graduate and longtime officer, she brings a deep understanding of the University community to the job.”

WEEKENDS

A Reflective, but Still Irreverent, Commencement

ALL SMILES: Tori Arch and Colleen Flaherty, both '02, break out the bubbly. Alex Newell, '01, the 2000-01 Stanford Tree, chats with bandmate Rusty Hunt, MS '02.

Rod Searcey

“WE, YOUR PARENTS, know why we are here,” the mother of graduating senior Gideon Lewis-Kraus asserted, as Commencement 2002 began under chalcedonic skies. “It’s because, as I once heard [author] Toni Morrison say, our eyes will always light up when you enter the room.”

As the featured speaker at the Saturday morning Baccalaureate service that launched the University’s 111th graduation weekend, rabbi Ellen Jay Lewis was the first to touch on the theme of family connection that would echo through two days of celebration. Twenty-four hours later, U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in her Commencement address, invoked the memory of her paternal grandfather, who picked and sold cotton to pay for his first year of study at Stillman College. When the cotton ran out, he asked school administrators how other students were paying for their tuition, and was told that scholarships were available for those who wanted to become Presbyterian ministers. “My grandfather said, ‘You know, that’s exactly what I had in mind,’” Rice told the crowd. “And my family has been Presbyterian and college-educated ever since.”

LEADERS: Etchemendy, Rice and Hennessy were alternately lighthearted and serious.

Linda Cicero

The weekend’s speakers also emphasized how education had improved the graduates’ understanding of cultural diversity. At Baccalaureate, speakers and musicians drew on Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Native American, Taoist, Christian, humanist, Zulu and Shinto legacies. “This is a feast of and for the world,” Dean for Religious Life Scotty McLennan told family members and friends who filled the Inner Quad to watch the processional.

CURRENT CLOTHES: World Cup fan Jonah Berger, '02, draped himself in a flag in support of the U.S. team.

Linda Cicero

McLennan noted that it had been “an especially difficult year in the history of the world,” and speakers at other campus gatherings acknowledged the dramatically altered landscape that the Class of ’02 had navigated. When they arrived as wide-eyed frosh, they chatted as much about IPOs as about TAs and RFs, and watched upperclassmen hitch their stars to promising Valley start-ups. But by the spring quarter of their junior year, the nation had entered a recession that would be officially confirmed the following November, and graduate school started looking especially good. Then came the cataclysmic events of September 11.

“We climbed a hill in our town in New Jersey and watched the World Trade Center towers burning,” Richard Cohen said about that day. He and his wife had been reluctant to send their two oldest children far away to college, but they yielded to the adventurous spirit of their third-born, Esther, ’02, who wanted to make the trek to California. Last summer, she worked at Stanford Sierra Camp, and on September 11, she was waiting on campus for a shuttle to take her to the airport for a visit home before classes resumed.

SUN SCREENS: Selin Song, '02, MA '02, Elizabeth Tryon, '02, and Kathryn Kooiker, '02, carried parasols to beat the heat.

Linda Cicero

“I finally got back to New Jersey a week later, and it was wonderful to be home,” Esther said. “But Stanford was my home, too. And I think everyone wanted school to start, so our lives could get back to normal.”

SLAM DUNK: Graduating senior Brandon Fidanque.

Rod Searcey

Esther darted off to hug a friend, and her mother, Treasure, leaned forward with a postscript. “Sending her back was okay,” she said. “We had been paralyzed, but putting her on the plane to California in September helped us all to move forward.”

Altruism, the resilience of the human spirit, acting for the common good—the themes Rabbi Lewis sounded in her Baccalaureate remarks reverberated as the weekend rolled on. Sohini Ramachandran, ’02, who took home the J. E. Wallace Sterling Award for service at Saturday’s Class Day Luncheon, was lauded for her “visionary stewardship of New Student Orientation 2001, including her thoughtful and inspiring address to freshmen and parents in the wake of a national tragedy.”

BIRDS OF A FEATHER: Emily Williams, Heidi Boas and Rebecca Jovin, all '02, went with the lawn-decor look.

Glenn Matsumura

Moments of quiet reflection dotted the weekend—three music lovers sitting separately in front of Hoover Tower as they listened to the peals of the carillon’s 48 bronze bells, and clutches of mothers and great-aunts in sun hats posing for graduation shots with the Burghers of Calais. And the zaniness of previous years was turned down a notch or two, with the traditionally rambunctious Wacky Walk emerging as more of a Mellow Mix. Seniors carried pastel kites, balloons, leis, piñatas and pinwheels, and sprouted flocks of pink flamingoes on their mortarboards. Human dominoes toppled themselves and graduates dressed as bowling pins collapsed in a pile when their bowling ball of a friend somersaulted into them. As Frisbees and—what was that?—airborne tortillas zipped across the football field, one young woman dressed as a neon-green palm tree yelled, “Stay in formation, girls,” and 13 of her closest friends dutifully lined up, personifying a well-trimmed Palm Drive.

CELEBRATION: Bi Ade, '02, center, led the Cha-Cha Slide.

Linda Cicero

The main show also had its own share of ad-libbed banter. By the fourth time President John Hennessy conferred the “rights, responsibilities and privileges” of a Stanford degree on a group of graduates, he was encouraging the crowd to join in. And after accepting the graduate-degree recipients from Stanford’s seven schools, Hennessy asked Provost John Etchemendy whether he’d forgotten anyone. Etchemendy, PhD ’82, scratched his hat and looked quizzical: “Gosh, I don’t know. Let me see.” When the 1,756 undergraduates struck up a chant in response—“Four more years, four more years” —Hennessy could only laugh. “You’ll have to talk to your parents about that,” he added.

FOND FAREWELLS: Former yell leader Jeff Des Jarlais, '02, took the flag for one last lap around the track. Toddler Kira Levermore-Rich joined her dad, Adam, '02, on the field.

Linda Cicero

Secret Service agents on the Rice detail, who tried to blend in with black gowns and caps but were identifiable by their white earpieces and curly phone wires, went on alert when the first beach balls began to bounce from row to row during Rice’s talk. “Three on the right,” one agent was overheard to whisper into her concealed microphone. But her grin said, “Hardly a threat.”

Rice, a former University provost who is on leave as a political science professor and Hoover Institution senior fellow, spoke not about public policy issues, but about the responsibilities that come with a Stanford education. “Many people just as talented and just as smart as you did not get to where you are sitting today, often through no fault of their own,” she told the graduates. “So never ask why someone else has been given more. Ask why you have been given so much.”

Rod Searcey

In September 1998, Rice had encouraged the incoming Class of ’02 to find their academic passion. But today, she noted, “you are stepping into a world that is quite different than the one that existed when you arrived. It is a world that is more sober, and sadder, clearer about its vulnerabilities, yet stronger, more conscious of our differences, and yet more aware of our humanity.”

TWO VIEWS: Several students protested during Rice's speech. Most, like Laurent Crenshaw, '02, listened attentively.

Rod Searcey

When Rice took the podium, a few dozen students staged a quiet protest—walking out of the stadium, or raising their mortarboards with an attached red flyer that spelled out their opposition to actions taken by Rice as national security adviser, provost and a member of the Chevron Board of Directors. Asked about the plans for a protest prior to Commencement, a member of her staff said that Rice “believes in democratic values. And she believes the right to speak one’s mind is one of the most important.”

Linda Cicero

As a solitary bubble floated past the Commencement flower arrangements and Band members prepared to take the stage, Hennessy turned to the newly minted graduates. “I hope you leave this campus with a strong reservoir of the Stanford spirit,” he said.

FUN WITH FOLIAGE: Saxophonist Erich Eminhizer, center, '02, affixed leaves to his graduation gown. Others chose that ubiquitous symbol of Stanford, the palm tree.

Linda Cicero

Then, as he and Rice descended the steps, Shannon Ashford, ’02, shouted, “Condi, you go, girl!”

The national security adviser was all smiles as she waved back.

Rod Searcey