John Sowa, professor of chemistry, has written a first-hand
narrative of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor accident for the newsletter of the
Health Physics Society. Sowa was at a science conference in nearby Hershey with a group of
Union students during the 1979 accident. “A Union student was calmed by a TV shot of
workers moving around without shirts,” he wrote. “'They must know how much
radiation is around the plant and being shirtless, it must be OK.' I breathed a sigh
of relief.”
Martin Strosberg, professor of management in GMI, recently presented a paper
titled “Health Care Resource Allocation in the Post-Communist Baltic States” at
a conference on medical ethics held in Riga, Latvia. The conference was sponsored by the
Albert Schweitzer Institute for the Humanities in collaboration with the Soros Foundation.
Carol Weisse, associate professor of psychology and director of health
professions, and students Kafi Nsombi Sanders '99 and Beth Wierzbieniec
'99 offered a workshop to Scotia-Glenville middle school students titled
“What's in a Name? When Racism Hurts” as part of their Diversity Awareness
Day Program on May 18. The interactional program was geared to make students aware of
stereotypes generated by different names. They presented findings from Sanders'
senior thesis project illustrating how doctors may be treating patients differently based
on their race, and worked with students to generate ideas for preventing such biases in
the health care profession.
Robert Sharlet, Chauncey Winters Professor of Political Science, recently
delivered papers at two international conferences. In April, he presented
“Constitutional Law Reform in the Post-Soviet States” at Yale Law School for a
conference on “Promoting Legal Reform in the Former Soviet Union.” He also gave
one of the opening keynote addresses. Conference proceedings are being translated into
Russian, and will be published electronically. In May, he presented “Russia's
Second Constitutional Court: Politics, Law and Stability” at the University of
California at Berkeley for a conference on “Russia on the Eve of the Twenty-First
Century: Stability or Disorder?” held under the auspices of a Carnegie Corporation
grant won by the research team for purposes of the conference and a forthcoming book.