Boston College

Incorporating physics, chemistry, and mineralogy, “Intersections of Science and Painting,” a new course created by chemistry professor David McFadden (right), shows students how scientific knowledge and analysis are used to restore and conserve works of art, verify the age of materials, and establish authenticity. Richard Newman (left), who heads the scientific research laboratory at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, joined McFadden’s class in Merkert 130 on April 21 to describe the techniques he employs in examining artwork, and to recount his collaborations with art historians and museums. For the 40 undergraduates in the class—including majors in art, biology, chemistry, and 12 other disciplines—Newman’s lecture was “a nice way of seeing how all the things we had studied are put to use,” said McFadden.

Chemistry Professor Udayan Mohanty was notified in early April that he has been named to a 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for his theoretical studies of rare chemical reactions. He is the only U.S. chemist to receive the award and one of only 180 artists, scientists, and scholars worldwide chosen for the prestigious fellowship. According to the foundation, the award is intended to “provide Fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible.” Mohanty, pictured above in a Merkert Hall conference room on April 16 with (from left) graduate students Zuojun Guo and Qin Wang and Meghan Gibson ’11, credits his University colleagues for their support of his interdisciplinary research. “When you work on these kinds of problems that take years of work, it is important to be surrounded by people who provide you with inspiration,” he said. Mohanty has taught at Boston College since 1985.

Carrying on a tradition begun in 1978, some 620 undergraduates spent spring break on service trips organized by Appalachia Volunteers of Boston College this year. They helped to renovate homes, staff soup kitchens, improve outdoor recreation areas, and repair public facilities. The program, which is student-run, provides training for volunteers, raises money to defray travel and other expenses, and coordinates with regional service providers such as Habitat for Humanity and the Southeast Rural Community Assistance Project to identify projects.

Volunteers traveled to 37 destinations in eight states. As students assembled in Corcoran Commons to board buses for Virginia and the Carolinas on February 28, they were interviewed by @BC.

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A Boston College Minute:
BC bOp! rehearsal, Conte Forum, February 25, 2009

The music is Don Menza’s “Time Check.” The director is Sebastian Bonaiuto. Performing are the 26 student members of BC bOp!—Boston College’s prize-winning instrumental and vocal jazz ensemble—in rehearsal for their March 28, 2009, concert.

A March 24 television documentary produced by PBS’s NOVA and the National Geographic Society chronicles the efforts of award-winning nature photographer James Balog ’74 to document the “latest evidence of a radically warming planet.” Balog, director of the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), uses time-lapse photography to measure glacial melt at 15 mountain and arctic locations in the Northern Hemisphere. The film follows him as he sets up and monitors his cameras in remote, often dangerous places, recording the accelerating pace at which glaciers and ice sheets are breaking up or melting into the sea with the potential of changing world weather patterns and flooding densely inhabited coastlines.

For Balog, who has produced six books of photographs, won numerous photography awards, and exhibited his work in more than 100 museums and galleries worldwide, EIS is an opportunity to use photography for a purpose. “I’m trying to make a commentary about humans encroaching on nature,” he said in an interview with Photo District News magazine. “I hope that my work helps people to think and see differently. And ultimately—we can only hope—to behave differently.”

On April 2, Gabriella Shalev, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, returned to Boston College Law School, where she was a visiting professor in 1976 and 1981, to present a lecture, “Israel and the World: A View from the United Nations.” Some 200 people attended the address, cosponsored by the Law School and the New England chapter of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Afterwards, at a media roundtable in the Daniel R. Coquillette Rare Book Room of the Law Library (from left), Law School Dean John Garvey, Shalev, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, and Derek Shulman, executive director of the New England ADL, answered questions on a range of topics, including the turmoil surrounding the Vatican’s recent lifting of Bishop Richard Williamson’s excommunication and subsequent demand that Williamson recant his denial of the Holocaust. O’Malley emphasized Pope Benedict XVI’s commitment to the Jewish people, and Shalev said “I think the problem was solved.”

In a ceremony on March 28 in the Murray Function Room, President William P. Leahy, SJ, awarded Jeans Santana ’10 (center, with friends) the University’s 17th annual Archbishop Oscar A. Romero Scholarship. Named in honor of the Salvadoran champion of the poor who was assassinated in 1980, the scholarship, which provides 75 percent of senior year tuition, recognizes a Boston College junior who has demonstrated a commitment to Archbishop Romero’s values through “involvement in and service to the Hispanic/Latino community at Boston College and in the wider community.” As an undergraduate, Santana, participated in service trips to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina as well as needy children in the Dominican Republic. He volunteers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, in a research program that investigates health care and mortality rates among Latina breast cancer patients. Being named a Romero scholar “means leading by example and drawing more people to community service,” Santana said afterward. “I have big shoes to fill.”