APL space scientists help local middle-schoolers explore Mars

It's a bit hard to see Mars from Maryland, but more than 100 middle school students learned how scientists from the Applied Physics Laboratory plan to explore the Red Planet during Comcast-Discovery Space Academy: Mission Mars, an event held on May 10 in APL's Kossiakoff Conference and Education Center.

The Space Academy series--sponsored by Comcast Cable, the Discovery Networks and APL--takes students behind the scenes of actual space missions and introduces them to engineers and scientists who conduct some of NASA's most exciting projects. Mission Mars focuses on Mars exploration and the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars, a powerful camera APL is building to search for chemical traces of past water on the Martian surface. CRISM will fly aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, set for launch in 2005.

Students participated in a "press conference" with space scientists and were given a hands-on tour of APL's spacecraft design and testing facilities.

SOM dean co-hosts broadcast on research compliance programs

The National Council of University Research Administrators is sponsoring a live satellite broadcast designed to educate college and university research administrators about the importance of having comprehensive research compliance programs.

"The True Cost of Compliance and Why We Must Invest" will examine not only the cost to universities in terms of accounting for dollars and time but also the cost of noncompliance.

Michael Amey, assistant dean for research administration in the School of Medicine, is co-hosting the program with John Fini, financial director of research management at Massachusetts General Hospital. Panelists are from universities and federal agencies.

The broadcast is scheduled for 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, May 14, and can be seen in Maryland Hall on the Homewood campus. To reserve a place, contact Vanessa Pigatt at 410-516-5490 or vpi@jhu.edu.

School of Nursing adds forensic focus to graduate curriculum

The School of Nursing has added the Clinical Nurse Specialist Forensic Nursing Focus to its graduate-level curriculum. The focus will prepare students to work in a variety of areas including emergency and acute care departments, sexual assault examination programs, child and/or adult protective service investigation units, psychiatric forensic treatment and evaluation units, and death investigation teams.

Assistant professor Daniel Sheridan, a forensic clinical nurse specialist in the JHH Department of Emergency Medicine, will lead the focus. Sheridan created one of the nation's first hospital-based family violence and sexual assault intervention programs, at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, in 1986. He developed a similar program at Oregon Health Sciences University's hospital in Portland in 1990.

"Forensic nursing explores instances where nursing practice has a high likelihood of overlapping with the legal system, for example, in the cases of child and family abuse, sexual assault and death investigation," Sheridan says. Also, the focus will allow students to further specialize in particular high-risk patient populations such as survivors of child abuse and neglect, intimate partner abuse, elder abuse, abuse of the developmentally disabled, sexual assault and death investigation.

Forensic nursing was recognized by the American Nurses Association as a formal nursing specialty in 1995.

Hopkins students take top spot at business plan competition

Making it easy for customers to switch utility companies was the big idea that put a team of Johns Hopkins students at the top of the Greater Baltimore Technology Council's Mosh Pit Business Plan Competition.

Telemetry Inc. is the name of the fantasy utility software company founded by Hopkins sophomores Carmine Petrone and Ryan Packard, whose third team member was David Dalrymple, a 10-year-old sophomore at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Their business advisers were Jason B. Jones, Marsh Inc.; George J. Nemphos, Piper Rudnick LLP; and John C. Hilgenberg, Eager Street Group Inc.

Telemetry would focus on developing metering tools sold to utilities and their customers. The electric, natural gas and water meters would provide control over the amount of service being consumed and would automatically transmit the data back to the utility company. The consumer would benefit from real-time monitoring and the ability to switch suppliers with relative ease.

The Mosh Pit finals were held on May 3 at Legg Mason, where five regional venture capitalists invested the majority of their "Mosh Pit Dollars" in Telemetry. A total of six teams presented at the finals. One of the two runners-up was Digital Moments, conceived by Hopkins juniors Alex Maestretti, Sarah Cummings and Judy Tompkins. A third Hopkins team project, Health "E" Solutions Inc. from Greg Heiderman, Lawrence B. Chambers Jr. and James Mitrano, SPSBE graduate students; and Tom Shimabukuro, a graduate student at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, also made it to the finals.

The Mosh Pit, created by the GBTC and its members, was designed to offer students a real-life experience in entrepreneurship and an opportunity to work with regional business leaders. The competition was open to undergraduate or graduate students enrolled in Maryland colleges or universities.

Howard County schools thanks APL for involvement

The Board of Education of the Howard County, Md., Public School System has presented its inaugural Friends of Education Award to the Applied Physics Laboratory.

Board chair Jane B. Schuchhardt thanked APL for its "immeasurable contributions to this school system and the children of this county." The award was established this year, she said, to "increase awareness of the importance of community involvement to the achievement of the school system's mission" and to recognize community members who "make exemplary contributions to public education."