UConn Advance - October 17, 2005 - Steps taken to stem health care identity theft

Edward Ayers, an expert on southern American history and the Civil War, will give the Edmund J. Fusco Sr. Distinguished Lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 18 at 4:30 p.m. at Konover Auditorium. The title of his presentation is “Eye to Eye with the American Civil War.”

Ayers is dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His latest book, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863, won the 2004 Bancroft Prize and the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award. The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (1992) was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and was named the best book on the history of American race relations and the American South.

Ayers received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tennessee and a doctorate from Yale.

His appearance here will be filmed by Book TV.

Economist and Nobel laureate Finn Kydland, who holds the Henley Endowed Chair in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will lecture on “What Makes a Good Researcher?” on Oct. 19 at 10 a.m. in Konover Auditorium.

Kydland shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Economics with Edward Prescott of Arizona State University. Their work, which has influenced monetary policy, analyzes the design of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles.

The Association of Graduate Students in Economics invited Kydland to speak in its lecture series on trends in research and how to be a good researcher.

A reception will follow his talk, and he will later meet with the students.

Christian Zimmerman, associate professor of economics, was a Ph.D. student of Kydland’s at Carnegie Mellon University.

A national expert in vegetable breeding and genetics will deliver the first Maynard Lecture in Plant Science on Thursday, Oct. 20, from 1:30 to 3 p.m. in Konover Auditorium.

Irwin Goldman, a professor of horticulture and interim associate dean for research at the University of Wisconsin, will discuss the medicinal benefits of horticultural crops.

His talk, which is titled “Take Two Onions and Call Me in the Morning: The Possibilities and Limitations of Horticultural Crops as Human Medicine,” will focus on some of the so-called “functional foods” that do not typically grab headlines.

Goldman’s research goes beyond the nutritional benefits of the vitamins and minerals found in fruits and vegetables and examines how some less obvious compounds, such as the sulfur found in onions, affects human health.

Research conducted in his lab has confirmed that the sulfur in raw onion juice serves as a natural blood thinner, and also found that beet pigments may protect against cancer.

Goldman’s research also focuses on enhancing the medicinal benefits of certain vegetables. For example, he has discovered a natural genetic mutation that allows carrots to produce Vitamin E, previously found only in one vegetable – sweet potatoes.

The Maynard lecture series in plant science has been made possible through an endowment at the UConn Foundation, funded by Donald N. Maynard, a 1954 graduate of the plant science department.

Maynard earned his master’s in horticulture at North Carolina State and his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts and is now professor emeritus at the University of Florida.

He is co-author of three textbooks, including Knott’s Handbook for Vegetable Growers.

Coming to campus

- October 17, 2005