In the News

Emily Teeter, Associate Curator of the Oriental Institute, shared her expertise on Cleopatra in last Sunday’s broadcast of Cleopatra’s Palace on the Discovery Channel. She also appeared on Good Morning America on Monday, March 8, and was interviewed Wednesday, March 10, on NBC’s Dateline about the documentary. Cleopatra’s Palace documented the underwater exploration of the Queen of Egypt’s palace, which was discovered in the harbor of Alexandria, Egypt. Teeter also has been recently interviewed about remodeling at the Oriental Institute.

BBC World Newshour, Agence France Presse and WBEZ-FM radio reported on the recent conference on torture at the University. Jacqueline Bhabha, Director of the Human Rights Program at the University, was interviewed for the WBEZ report that was carried on several broadcasts during the week of the four-day conference.

Dr. Michael Roizen, Professor and Chairman of Anesthesiology & Critical Care, was featured in a lead Chicago Tribune Tempo article Friday, March 5, about his current bestseller RealAge: Are You as Young as You Can Be? “I’m going to show you how to live younger through a method that makes health decisions as easy to understand as it is to understand what $100 is worth,” said Roizen in the Tribune article.

Bruce Winstein, the Samuel K. Allison Distinguished Service Professor in Physics; James Cronin, Professor Emeritus in Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics; and Rocky Kolb, Professor in Astronomy & Astrophysics, were interviewed by the Chicago Tribune Tuesday, March 2, about the recent antimatter discovery announced at a special seminar at Fermilab Wednesday, Feb. 24. “This new discovery at Fermilab is the most significant thing done in this field in the last 35 years,” said physicist Cronin, who shared a Nobel Prize with Val Fitch in 1980 for their 1964 sub-atomic particle research. The March 6 issue of Science News also carried an article about the recent discovery.

University students recently auditioned for Jeopardy!’s upcoming college championship game. “This actually is a piece of cake compared to my exams,” said Carolyn Cracraft, a student in Egyptology. Chicago students performed remarkably well as they continued to correctly answer more and more difficult questions asked by Jeopardy! contestant coordinators, according to a Wednesday, March 10 Chicago Tribune article. “It’s been phenomenal, nothing less than that. This is the largest percentage that we’ve kept so far in the two days that we’ve done this week,” said coordinator Glenn Kragan of those who qualified to play the mock-up game. The event was also covered in the Chicago Sun-Times.

The March 15 issue of Newsweek magazine carried an article about new research on the hand-gesturing communication of deaf babies. Susan Goldin-Meadow, Professor in Psychology and Education, who led a 1998 study on the sophisticated sign language used by deaf toddlers of hearing parents in China and the United States, was quoted in the article.

Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor in Law & Ethics in the Law School, wrote an op-ed in favor of the faculty-voted curriculum revision in the College. “I love rigor, but I don’t love being told by some committee of 50 years ago what ideas of rigor I should follow. The new University curriculum provides more spaces for faculty to offer courses that reflect their own ideas of what is worth learning.”

Professor in Psychology and the Committee on Human Development Richard Shweder was quoted in a Saturday, March 6 New York Times article about Americans’ tolerance for cultural differences. “I think we are torn,” said Shweder, who advocates broad tolerance of cultural differences. “It’s a great dilemma right now that’s coming up again about how we’re going to deal with diversity in the United States and what it means to be an American.”