CLINTON — A man who once served as a professor and associate dean at Cornell Law School is returning to Central New York to assume the top leadership role at a different school.

 

The Hamilton College board of trustees has named David Wippman as the school’s 20th president. 

 

The appointment is effective July 1, 2016, Hamilton College said in a Dec. 11 news release.

 

Wippman, 60, currently serves as the dean of the University of Minnesota Law School.

 

“I am honored to be asked to lead one of the oldest and finest liberal arts colleges in the United States,” Wippman said in the release.

 

He will succeed Joan Hinde Stewart following her retirement on June 30, 2016, after 13 years as president.

 

Stephen Sadove, chairman of the school’s board of trustees, introduced Wippman to students, faculty and staff on Friday afternoon in the College Chapel.

 

“David Wippman emerged as the top finalist from a strong and diverse pool of well-qualified candidates because of his intelligence, warmth and enthusiasm for the liberal arts,” Sadove said in the release. “He personifies many of the objectives of a Hamilton education: He is a strong and collaborative leader, an effective communicator and a person committed to active citizenship. Hamilton is in a strong and stable position with a growing reputation. It will be difficult to follow Joan Stewart, but we believe we’ve found the perfect person to do so.”

 

Prior to becoming dean at Minnesota, Wippman was professor and associate dean at Cornell Law School and served as vice provost for international relations at Cornell University, where he oversaw efforts to enhance the university’s international programs, according to the Hamilton College release.

 

A Minnesota native, Wippman earned a bachelor’s degree at Princeton University in 1976; a master’s degree through a fellowship in the graduate program in English literature at Yale University in 1978; and his law degree from Yale Law School in 1982, the release stated.

 

Wippman is a recognized authority in international law, the school added. He has taught public international law, international criminal law, international human rights and ethnic conflict, and is “often called on to provide expert commentary,” Hamilton College said. 

 

Throughout his career, he has traveled to areas dealing with conflict, including Nicaragua, the Philippines, Liberia, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone.

 

Former Vice President of the United States Walter Mondale, a graduate of the University of Minnesota Law School, knows Wippman well, according to Hamilton College.

 

“As an expert in international law, David Wippman is an inspired choice to lead a college named for Alexander Hamilton and that counts among its distinguished alumni the 1912 Nobel Peace Prize winner Elihu Root, Civil Rights leader Bob Moses and former U.S. ambassadors Sol Linowitz, Bill Luers and Ned Walker,” Mondale said in the news release. “I commend Hamilton College and its trustees for choosing as its next leader someone who personifies the democratic values that Hamilton seeks to instill in its graduates.”          

 

 

 

CORTLAND — SUNY Cortland on Oct. 30 announced it will receive nearly $800,000 to assist science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors and professionals in becoming K-12 educators in “high-need” school districts. 

 

It’s the second phase of funding the school has earned through the National Science Foundation’s Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program.

 

The scholarship program is named after the co-inventor of the microchip, the school said.

 

SUNY Cortland in 2010 received its first phase of Noyce funding, according to the news release.

 

The school will award 38 scholarships over a five-year period to students pursuing biology, chemistry, geology, physics, and mathematics.

 

It’ll award 28 scholarships worth $11,500 each to junior or senior undergraduates and 10 scholarships worth $14,000 at the graduate level.

 

SUNY Cortland will also use the funding, which totals $799,855, to establish a first-year learning community for future STEM educators and to research teaching outcomes after program participants graduate.

 

“It responds to the critical need for … highly successful math and science teachers, particularly in secondary education or junior high and high school,” says Kerri Freese, coordinator of the Noyce Scholarship Program at SUNY Cortland.

 

Freese spoke with CNYBJ on Dec. 14. 

 

Erik Bitterbaum, president of SUNY Cortland, called it “truly wonderful news” for future teachers and for the districts that will eventually benefit from their teaching.

 

“We need great teachers in STEM disciplines at all grade levels: teachers who enter the classroom with both a depth of knowledge in their content areas and the ability to pass that knowledge on to students,” said Bitterbaum.

 

The deadline for students to apply for the funding is April 29, 2016, for scholarships applicable to the 2016-17 academic year, according to the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship page on the SUNY Cortland website.

 

With its initial round of Noyce funding, SUNY Cortland awarded 54 scholarships during the five-year span from 2009 and 2014.

 

The number of scholarships that SUNY Cortland will award in the second phase “will be slightly less” to devote “proper” funding to study the impact of immersion practices such as specialized classes, field experience, and professional development, according to its release.

 

Teaching commitment

Noyce Scholars make a post-graduation commitment to teach in districts with high-need schools across New York. 

 

The term “high need” is an NSF definition, says Freese, which includes a given district’s percentage of students receiving free and reduced lunches and/or its percentage of teachers who are teaching courses outside their certification.

 

The Binghamton, Cincinnatus, Cortland, Dryden, Homer, Marathon, McGraw, South Seneca, and Tully school districts wrote letters of support for SUNY Cortland’s pursuit of additional funding, she adds. 

 

The goal is to create a “continuous pipeline of highly trained,” STEM educators to teach in the districts that need them the most.

 

“This program involves the hard work of a lot of different people from across campus,” Gregory Phelan, professor and chair of the school’s Chemistry Department as well as the principal investigator for the grant, said.

 

In addition to making a teaching commitment to a school in a high-need area, future recipients will participate in small-group activities such as campus workshops, seminars, and book talks with “highly effective” New York State Master Teachers.

 

They are instructors that SUNY has recognized “for their dedication to providing the most innovative STEM education,” according to the SUNY website.

 

Those seminars and book talks seek to provide a “casual, out-of-classroom” environment to discuss best-teaching practices in high-need schools, SUNY Cortland said.      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SYRACUSE — Upstate Medical University’s Center for Global Health & Translational Science is looking for healthy men and women between the ages of 18 and 45 who want to be part of a study to develop a vaccine to combat the dengue (pronounced DENG-ee) virus.

 

The initiative targets a “global public health concern,” Upstate Medical said in a news release issued at its Nov. 23 announcement at Upstate’s Institute for Human Performance at 505 Irving Ave. in Syracuse.

 

The U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC) is working with the local medical school on the development of a dengue human-infection model.

 

Researchers will infect participants with a “mild form” of the dengue virus to develop symptoms, Dr. Timothy Endy, founding member of Upstate’s Center for Global Health & Translational Science, said during his remarks at the announcement. 

 

The USAMRMC will invest up to $12 million over the next 3 1/2 years to pay for five clinical trials in which healthy adults can volunteer to participate.

 

Each volunteer will be financially compensated for the time associated with his or her six-month participation in the study, Upstate said.

 

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration, or FDA, will regulate the trials, the medical school added.

 

Researchers will screen the volunteers to ensure that they are medically fit, are dengue free, and have a healthy and uncompromised immune system. 

 

For more information about the study, or to participate, contact the clinical-research coordinators at Upstate’s Center for Global Health & Translational Science at (315) 459-3031.

 

Upstate’s role

The U.S. Army selected Upstate as a partner in this development effort, “in part,” because of Upstate’s established clinical-trial center with investigators who are experts in dengue disease and experienced with human-infection trials, the medical school said.

 

The initiative will generate at least three or four new hires for clinical trials, Dr. Mark Polhemus, director of the Center for Global Health & Transitional Science, said when questioned about what effect the grant would have on employment. 

 

The new hires will include a new investigator and a new clinical trialist as well, said Endy. 

 

“A number of new hires will happen,” Endy added in responding to a reporter’s question. 

 

About dengue

Dengue isn’t well known but it’s an “important” mosquito-borne viral disease that “truly is a global health problem,” said Endy. 

 

“The severity of dengue can range from just having … a flu-like illness to the more severe form of dengue hemorrhagic fever where children and young adults are hospitalized in the intensive-care unit, mortality can be as high as 10 percent,” said Endy.

 

Dengue is caused by any one of four related viruses transmitted to humans through a bite from an Aedes aegypti mosquito, the type of mosquito that serves as a vector (carrier and transmitter) for the dengue virus, according to a fact sheet that Upstate Medical provided. 

 

Dengue cases have been reported in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Samoa, Guam, Key West, Florida, and in the Hawaiian islands, said Endy.

 

Upstate has treated “several” patients admitted for acute dengue, including a traveler who had returned from Hawaii this past summer.

 

U.S. soldiers on active duty in places like Haiti and Somalia have been infected with dengue.

 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has listed dengue as the leading cause of fever in returning travelers.

 

“Unfortunately, there is no licensed vaccine or [a] therapeutic against dengue and the delay for development of these types of therapeutics is largely because of a lack of an appropriate animal model to test vaccines and therapeutics,” said Endy.

 

Trial protocols

Upstate focuses the development of its protocols on safety of the individual volunteers, said Polhemus. 

 

The SUNY institutional review boards, the FDA, and the human-research protection organization of the U.S. Department of Defense “extensively” review the protocols, he adds.

 

For this dengue human-infection model, Upstate will have extensive oversight during the conduct of the trial by the independent dengue-safety monitoring board. Members will be monitoring for any safety signals during the study. 

 

“And we’ll have, additionally, an independent clinical monitor who’ll be monitoring the conduct of the study to ensure that all is in accordance with the protocol,” said 

Polhemus.

 

Prior to enrollment, researchers will “thoroughly” screen volunteers with an “extensive” evaluation for their inclusion, exclusion criteria, and ability to be involved in the study. 

 

“And once in the study, they’re closely monitored by our staff, both as outpatients and as soon as fever symptoms develop, as inpatients at our Community General Hospital where they’ll be closely monitored until resolution of their symptoms,” he added.