February 25, 2008 (Vol. 7, No. 3)

Quorum Series, Part Three: New Faculty Research

Following is the third segment of the 2008 Quorum Series, presenting highlights of the research being conducted by Lehman faculty.

Antoinette Blum
Dwight Kincaid
Jane Levitt
Kathleen López
Juliana Maantay
Susan Markens
Cheryl Merzel
Matthew G. Nagler
Melvyn Nathanson
Victor Pan

Antoinette Blum

Antoinette Blum (Professor, Languages & Literatures) wrote an 80-page introduction for the republication of: "Destin du théâtre" de Jean-Richard Bloch. Présentation par Antoinette Blum, Le Théâtre en question (Bruxelles: Complexe, forthcoming). In the introduction, she analyzes the tie between Jean-Richard Bloch's politics and his concept of theater. The book is expected to be published in June 2008. She also published the article "Romain Rolland et la question juive" in Europe (issue on Romain Rolland), October 2007, no. 942: 86-96.

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Dwight Kincaid

Dwight Kincaid (Professor, Biological Sciences) published the article (with R. Stalter & J. Baden) "The vascular flora of three abandoned rice fields, Georgetown, South Carolina: A 39-year comparison," in Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas vol. 1, no. 1 (2007): 665-677.

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Jane Levitt

Jane Levitt (Associate Professor, Health Sciences) presented the paper "Partnerships and Collaborations to Improve Health Literacy" at a Town Hall Meeting on Improving Health Literacy, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (October 2007), and another paper, "A Public Health Approach to Health Disparities," at The Bronx Forum on Health Care Disparities in the Bronx (a partnership between Hostos Community College and the Jewish Community Relations Council of NY/CAUSE-NY) (December 2007).

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Kathleen López

Kathleen López (Assistant Professor, Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies) wrote the chapter "Transnational Histories: A Dual-Sided Approach to Researching Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Migration to Cuba," in Chinese Overseas: Migration, Research, and Documentation, ed. Tan Chee-Beng, Colin Storey, and Julia Zimmerman (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2007).

Professor López also authored (with Rebekah E. Pite) "Letters from Soledad in the Atkins Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society," Massachusetts Historical Review 9 (2007).

She presented the following papers: "Transpacific Connections: Historical and Contemporary Interactions between China and Latin America" at the Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan Noon Lecture Series (October 2007); "Beyond Indenture: Strategies of Social Mobility among Chinese Workers in Late Nineteenth-Century Cuba," at the Asia in Latin America Conference, University of Texas at Austin (October 2007); and "Transnational Families among Chinese in Cuba," at the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas (ISSCO), Peking University, China (September 2007).

Professor López received the George N. Shuster Fellowship to attend the Tenth Annual Festival of Chinese Overseas in Havana and to examine the ongoing restoration project in Havana's Chinatown. She also received a PSC-CUNY 38 Research Award for additional research toward her book manuscript on the history of Chinese migration to Cuba.

In addition, she served as faculty leader for a session on "Cold War and Cuba" at the Center for Media and Learning/American Social History Project (CUNY) and New York City Department of Education Summer Staff Development Seminars for Teachers of American History (July 2007).

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Juliana Maantay

Juliana Maantay (Associate Professor, Environmental, Geographic, and Geological Sciences) published the following articles: (with A.R. Maroko and C. Herrmann) "Mapping Population Distribution in the Urban Environment: The Cadastral-based Expert Dasymetric System (CEDS)" in "Cartography 2007: Reflections, Status, and Prediction," special issue, Cartography and Geographic Information Science 34, no. 2 (2007): 77-102; (with A.R. Maroko and C. Herrmann) "Perfecting the Denominator: Developing a Cadastral-based Expert Dasymetric System (CEDS) in New York City" in The U.S. National Report to the International Cartographic Association, ed., Michael Leitner and André Skupin, 2007. Professor Maantay presented a paper based on the latter article (with A.R. Maroko and J. Tu) at the Nature, Ecology, and Society Colloquium, held at the CUNY Graduate Center (March 2007); at "Medical Geography Issues and Modeling," a session she chaired and moderated at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in San Francisco (April 2007); and (with A.R. Maroko and C. Herrmann) at the Proceedings of the International Cartographic Association, eld in Moscow (August 2007).

She also wrote a review of Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, by Julie Sze, in Urban Affairs Review (forthcoming).

Professor Maantay has presented the following papers: "GIS Case Studies from the Urban Environment," at the ArcGIS User Group, ESRI Center, New York (March 2007); "Geographic Information Science in Environmental Health Research," at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx (July 2007); "GIS and Visualization Technologies in the Planning Process," at "Planning a More Livable New York," American Planning Association, New York (October 2007); and "Using Geographic Information Systems for Health Planning and Research," at the Greater New York Hospital Association–United Hospital Fund, 18th Annual Symposium on Health Care in New York: Research and Practice, held in New York City (October 2007).

In other news, she has been awarded (with Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center) a two-year grant from the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities to research health disparities in the Bronx, especially the relationship between diabetes and obesity and access to healthy food choices and active recreational opportunities. The grant will support the work of two Ph.D. students at Lehman and the CUNY Graduate Center's Earth and Environmental Studies (EES) program and one undergraduate intern (2007-2009).

More than a year after its publication, GIS for the Urban Environment (Redlands, CA: Environmental Systems Research Press, 2006), which Professor Maantay co-authored with John Ziegler, continues to win awards. At the Annual American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM) — Cartography and Geographic Information (CaGIS) meeting in St. Louis, Professor Maantay accepted a prize in the atlas/book professional category, an award she won in the ACSM-CaGIS 35th Annual Map Competition for 2006. In addition, the book was selected as one of the "Top Ten Books of 2007" by Planetizen.com, a public-interest information exchange.

In June 2007, Professor Maantay received the Galileo Award from the New York State Geographic Information Association (NYS GIS) for mentoring and collaborating with Brian Morgan, a recent Lehman graduate. Morgan's poster, "Poverty and Childhood Asthma in the Bronx, NYC," was awarded Best Undergraduate Student Map in 2007 by the NYS GIS.

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Susan Markens

Susan Markens (Assistant Professor, Sociology) published Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction (University of California Press, 2007).

She also published a comment (with Julie E. Press) on marital happiness in "The Forum" section of Sociological Forum 22, no. 3 (September 2007).

Professor Markens wrote the entry "Surrogacy" in the Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, ed., Jodi A. O'Brien (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, forthcoming).

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Cheryl Merzel

Cheryl Merzel (Associate Professor, Health Sciences) published the following articles: "Making the connections: community capacity for tobacco control in an urban African American community," American Journal of Community Psychology Dec. 13, 2007 [Epub ahead of print] DOI 10.1007/s10464-007-9155-7; amd "Developing and sustaining community-academic partnerships: Lessons from Downstate New York Healthy Start," Health Promotion Practice 2007 8:375-383.

In other news, Professor Merzel delivered a presentation, "Community-based Prevention Interventions: Challenges, Lessons, Future Directions," to the Research Division of the Department of Family & Social Medicine, Albert Einstein College of Medicine (June 2007).

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Matthew G. Nagler

Matthew G. Nagler (Assistant Professor, Economics) published the article "Understanding the Internet's Relevance to Media Ownership Policy: A Model of Too Many Choices" in B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy 7, no. 1 (Topics) (2007). His article "Funding Shocks and Optimal University Admissions and Financial Aid Policies" will be published in the Atlantic Economic Journal (2008).

In other news, Professor Nagler is researching the determinants of the pricing of black cohosh botanical supplements in collaboration with Professor Edward Kennelly (Biological Sciences).

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Melvyn Nathanson

Melvyn Nathanson (Professor, Mathematics) edited (with A. Granville and J. Solymosi) Additive Combinatorics (Providence: American Mathematical Society, 2007) and (with B.M. Landman, J. Nesetril, and C. Pomerance) Combinatorial Number Theory (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007).

In 2007, Professor Nathanson authored fourteen research papers in mathematics that were published or accepted for publication. He also gave invited lectures at the Institute for Advanced Study, Columbia University, and the Integers Conference at the University of West Georgia. In January 2008, he delivered two series of invited lectures at the University of Lisbon and the University of Barcelona.

In other news, Professor Nathanson spent the fall semester at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was a visiting faculty member in the School of Mathematics.

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Victor Pan

Victor Pan (Distinguished Professor, Mathematics and Computer Science) wrote the following chapters: (with I. Z. Emiris and E. Tsigaridis) "Algebraic and Numerical Algorithms," Chap. 16, pp. 1-49, and (with I. Z. Emiris) "Fast Fourier Transform and Its Applications," Chap. 18, pp. 1-40, in Algorithms and Theory of Computation Handbook, ed., M. Atallah (Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, forthcoming).

Professor Pan wrote the following articles: (with M. Kunin, R. Rosholt, and H. Kodal) "Homotopic Residual Correction Algorithms for General and Structures Matrices," Math of Computation, 75, 345-368 (2006); (with B. Murphy, R. E. Rosholt, Y. Tang, X. Yan, and W. Cao) "Linking the TPR1, DPR1, and Arrow-head Matrix Structures," Computers and Mathematics with Applications, 52, 10-11, 1603-1608 (2006); and (with D. Ivolgin, B. Murphy, R.E. Rosholt, Y. Tang, X. Wang, and X. Yan) "Root-finding with Eigen-solving," pp. 185-210 in Symbolic-Numeric Computation, ed. Dongming Wang and Lihong Zhi (Basel/Boston: Birkhäuser, 2007)

In the Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Symbolic—Numeric Computation (SNC 2007), July 2007, London, Ontario, Canada, ed., Jan Vershelde and Stephen Watt (New York: ACM Press, 2007), he wrote (with G. Qian, B. Murphy, R.E. Rosholt, and Y. Tang) "Real Root-finding," pp. 161-169; (with X. Yan) "Null Space and Eigenspace Computation with Additive Preconditioning," pp. 170-179; and (with B. Murphy, R.E. Rosholt, and M. Tabanjeh) "The Schur Aggregation for Solving Linear Systems of Equations," pp. 180-188.

Professor Pan also wrote "New Homotopic/Factorization and Symmetrization Techniques for Newton's and Newton's/Structured Iteration," Computers and Mathematics with Applications, 54, 721-729 (2007); (with D. Ivolgin, B. Murphy, R.E. Rosholt, I. Taj-Eddin, Y. Tang, and X. Yan) "Additive Preconditioning and Aggregation in Matrix Computations," Computers and Mathematics with Applications (in press); (with B. Murphy, G. Qian, and R.E. Rosholt) "A New Error-free Floating-Point Summation Algorithm," Computers and Mathematics with Applications (in press); (with B. Murphy, R.E. Rosholt, Y. Tang, X. Wang, and A. Zheng); "Eigen-solving via Reduction to DPR1 matricies," Computers and Mathematics with Applications (in press); and (with D. Ivolgin, B. Murphy, G. Qian, R.E. Rosholt, I. Taj-Eddin, Y. Tang, and X. Yan) "Additive Preconditioning in Matrix Computations," Proceedings of Mathematics and Mechanics (in press).

In July 2007, Professor Pan gave an invited talk at a mini-symposium at the Sixth International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM 2007) in Zurich, Switzerland. He also gave an invited talk at the Second International Conference on Matrix Methods and Operator Equations in Moscow (Russia), and he attended an International Workshop on Symbolic-Numerical Computations (SNC 2007) in London, Ontario, where three refereed papers were accepted by the program committee.

Professor Pan supervised two CUNY Ph.D. students in defending their doctoral dissertations. Both students are members of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Lehman.

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