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New SSW program for geriatric care

This fall BU's School of Social Work will launch the Geriatric Education Model, an innovative interdisciplinary social-work training program.

Students in the two-year master's program will combine course work and professional seminars within the specially designed Placement Without Walls internship program. This program breaks from field education tradition with its client-focused approach. Interns will work out of one of five consortium agencies serving the elderly in Roxbury and South Boston, but the students' primary responsibility will be to their clients. They will coordinate everything from home health care to nutrition, housing issues, and mental-health care.

"Elderly patients on a fixed income may face a score of challenges every week, from dealing with chronic conditions such as diabetes to worrying about losing independence -- or even losing the home they have lived in their whole lives," says Trudy Zimmerman, SSW assistant dean for field education and a clinical assistant professor. "Even getting to a routine doctor's appointment may be difficult for someone who lacks transportation and doesn't know what options are available."

Scott Miyake Geron, SSW associate professor of social welfare and research, and Rob Hudson, SSW professor and chair of the social welfare policy department, will serve as principal investigators of the training project. A $212,000 grant from the Retirement Research Foundation -- the nation's largest private foundation devoted solely to aging and retirement issues -- was recently received to help launch the program. The grant will provide six students in the 2001-02 academic year with $6,000 stipends.

HIV/AIDS expert joins BU Medical Center

Paul Skolnik, M.D., has been appointed director of the Center for HIV/AIDS Care and Research at Boston Medical Center and professor of medicine at BU's School of Medicine. Skolnik had directed the HIV/AIDS research laboratory in the Division of Geographic Medicine and Infectious Disease at New England Medical Center and the Immunovirology Laboratory for the Lifespan-Tufts-Brown Center for AIDS Research grant.

Skolnik is a member of the Immunology Research Agenda Committee of the Adult AIDS Clinical Trials Group of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He is a fellow of both the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Diseases Society of America. He has been selected by his peers for inclusion in Best Doctors in America, Northeast Region, every year since 1996, and he was one of Boston magazine's Boston's best doctors in 1997.

Wong selected for NAE's Frontiers of Engineering symposium

Joyce Wong, Clare Booth Luce Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering, was one of 81 of the nation's top young engineers selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) seventh annual Frontiers of Engineering symposium. The three-day event, to be held September 13 to 15 in Irvine, Calif., will bring together engineers ages 30 to 45 who are performing leading-edge engineering research and technical work. The participants -- from industry, academia, and government -- were nominated by fellow engineers or organizations and were chosen from a field of nearly 170 applicants.

CAS program receives NEC grant

The College of Arts and Sciences department of mathematics and statistics received a $30,000 grant recently from the NEC Foundation of America in support of its Program for Mathematics for Young Scientists (PROMYS).

PROMYS is a six-week summer program at BU designed to encourage ambitious high school students to explore the creative world of mathematics. The program recruits students nationally, with a focus on females, low-income students, and minorities.

The PROMYS program was organized in 1989 by its current directors, Glenn Stevens and David Fried, both CAS mathematics professors.

NEC Foundation of America was established in 1991 with a $10 million endowment from NEC Corporation and its U.S. subsidiaries and affiliates. The foundation supports programs with national reach and impact in the areas of science and technology education, principally at the secondary level, and efforts to apply technology to assist people with disabilities.

Yager wins cable TV award

Larry Yager, imaging specialist and photo computer technician at BU's Photo Services, recently received the Director's Choice Award from the Alliance for Community Media for the Somerville Producers Group cable show Dead Air Live. The weekly show, which airs in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Arlington, earned its name, according to Yager, because "before the show, there was just dead air."

Dead Air Live has been on the air since November 1974 and is the longest-running local access program in the world. Yager, who tapes an average of 25 shows a year, accepted the award in Washington, D.C. "It was really nice for us to get a little recognition for the years of producing community programming," he says.

Yager and the award can be viewed at http://www.bu.edu/photo/Larry4/.

1 August 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations