Bringing prisons out of the shadows and into the public eye is the mission of Prison Awareness Week, which will take place at The University of Toledo Monday through Saturday, April 8-13.

The UT efforts are part of a larger coalition, Toledoans for Prison Awareness, whose members include the American Civil Liberties Union (Northwest Ohio chapter), Lucas County Libertarian Party and Move to Amend Toledo.

Each day of Prison Awareness Week has a different educational focus, with literature and displays in the Student Union from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and events scheduled for the afternoon or evening.

Listed by date, themes and events will include:

Monday, April 8: Facts and Faces of America’s Prisons

• Filmmaker Derrick A. Jones will show his documentary, “The Great Incarcerator, Part 1: Dark Little Secret,” at 4:30 p.m. in Student Union Room 2591.
• Ben Turk of the Red Bird Prison Abolition Project will talk about how the volunteer group in Columbus, Ohio, wants the prison system to end. He will speak at 6 p.m. in Student Union Room 2591.

Tuesday, April 9: Drug Policy, Civil Rights and Prisons

• Rob Salem, UT clinical law professor, will discuss “Civil Rights, Public Health and Prisons” at 4:30 p.m. in Student Union Room 2591.
• Howard Rahtz, retired Cincinnati police officer who is with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, will address “Why Some Cops Say Legalize Drugs” at 7 p.m. in the Law Center McQuade Auditorium.

Wednesday, April 10: Women & Families Behind Prison Walls

• Mary Dwyer and Joe Clark, longtime volunteers at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, Ohio, will talk about “Marysville: Women’s Prisons, Women’s Issues” at 4:30 p.m. in Student Union Room 2591.
• “Support Networks for Families of the Incarcerated” will be discussed by Joyce Pierce of Families Behind Bars, Germaine Kirk of the Catholic Charities Toledo Diocese and former inmate Rob Hatcher at 6:30 p.m. at St. Andrews Episcopal Church 2770 W. Central Ave., Toledo.

Thursday, April 11: Voices From Prison

• Dr. Peter Linebaugh, UT professor of history, will talk with Lucasville “survivors” Ishaq Alkhair and Abdush Shakur at 4:30 p.m. in Student Union Room 2582.

Friday, April 12: Conference

• “The Prison System: At Large and at Home” in Libbey Hall. The conference begins with a panel discussion at 10 a.m. About “The Prison System at Large” and continues with a “The Prison System at Home” roundtable at 1 p.m. and a panel discussion on “Healing and Hope” at 3:15 p.m.

Saturday, April 13: “Inside/Out: Breaking Down the Walls That Divide”

• Program inside Toledo Correctional Institution that begins at 10 a.m. Learn about education and the prison population, including the Inside/Out Program, where college students learn alongside incarcerated students.Anyone hoping to attend the session must email renee.heberle@utoledo.edu by Wednesday, April 10, to gain entry to the prison.

The Prison Awareness Week events are sponsored and planned by the UT School for Interdisciplinary Studies; departments of History, Criminal Justice and Social Work, Philosophy and Religious Studies; UT Inside/Out Prison Exchange Program; Phi Alpha Theta history honor society; UT Libertarians; and UT Program in Law and Social Thought.

For more information go to tinyurl.com/prisonweek or contact Dr. Cynthia Ingham, UT assistant professor of history, at cynthia.ingham@utoledo.edu.

Media Coverage
The Blade (April 8, 2013)
The Blade (April 13, 2013)
13 ABC (April 16, 2013)

More than 25 northwest Ohio high school students will learn about alternative energy at The University of Toledo on Tuesday, April 9 as part of the Ohio Energy Project.

** Photo Opportunity **
The day will begin at 9 a.m. with a hands-on activity when students will make solar cells with Rick Irving, UT assistant research professor of physics, in Room 3022 of McMaster Hall (see map).

The students from Bettsville Schools and Bowling Green City Schools also will tour the Research and Technology Complex from 10 a.m. to noon to learn about alternative energy research underway at the University.

After lunch there, the students will finish the day with a tour from 12:15 p.m. to 1 p.m. of the Scott Park Campus of Energy and Innovation where they will see and learn about the wind turbines and solar array on the campus from Michael Green, UT’s director of energy management.

The event is one of a number of regional tours that are part of the Ohio Energy Project, which began in 1984 and works to facilitate students’ and teachers’ understanding of the science of energy and its efficient use in order to empower the next generation of energy consumers.

Learn more at www.ohioenergy.org.

Paat

The University Of Toledo College Of Medicine and Life Science’s Medical Mission Hall of Fame will induct its 11th class of honorees on Saturday, April 13.

Maumee resident Richard Paat, M.D., Pablo Pons, M.D., Maria Pons, Ph.D., and Albert Roode, M.D., will be honored during a program in the Howard L. Collier Building Room 1000B on UT’s Health Science Campus beginning at 7 p.m. Admission to the program is free; reservations are not required.

For 20 years, Paat’s commitment to improving the human condition has eased suffering in the Philippines, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Tanzania and Haiti. As chairman of medical missions for the Filipino Association of Toledo’s Special Commission on Education and Relief, Paat now brings five volunteer medical teams to those countries each year. He has led 51 medical missions and disaster relief teams that have treated more than 79,500 patients around the world.

In 2010, Paat brought a medical team to Haiti to care for earthquake victims. He’s also organized emergency medical relief teams to ease suffering in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch, in Indonesia after a tsunami, and in Biloxi, Miss., after Hurricane Katrina.

Pablo and Maria Pons

Clinical professor of internal medicine at The University of Toledo, Paat also serves as the volunteer medical director for International Services of Hope, a faith-based non-governmental organization that provides free surgical care for indigent children from foreign countries.

In addition to his global work, Paat has provided free medical care to the uninsured and homeless in the Toledo area for the past 13 years, volunteering at a free inner-city medical clinic and running a mobile migrant worker clinic during the summers. In 2012, he established a free medical clinic in Perrysburg Heights, a poverty-level, Hispanic community that last year treated 1,000 patients throughout the Toledo region that otherwise would have only limited access to medical care.

Named the Catholic Doctor of the Year by the Mission Doctors Association in 2010, Paat completed his medical degree at the former Medical College of Ohio in 1986, earning honors in pulmonary medicine and hematology/oncology.

Pablo and Maria Pons, of Dublin, Ohio, are founders of Midwest Medical Mission. The organization of physicians, nurses, therapists and technicians from Ohio, Michigan and West Virginia, has served tens of thousands of people in the Dominican Republic on a quarterly basis for 30 years.

Roode

Midwest Medical Mission — which at one time also made trips to Haiti — has grown to now include more than 25 physicians and surgeons and more than 40 nurses, therapists and technicians. The organization operates on an annual budget of less than $10,000 and each member of the group donates their time and pays for their own travel expenses. Any monies raised goes for the purchase of medicines and transportation while in that country.

To be inducted posthumously, Roode, a native of Donora, Penn., was given the native name “Lukurnyang” on behalf of thousands of Murle patients he treated at Pibor in South Sudan following the end of World War II. Forced to leave by political unrest in 1964, Roode is still fondly remembered by that ethnic group more than 50 years later. His son, Dr. Peter Roode, is attempting to rebuild the hospital his father constructed in Pibor that was badly damaged in two civil wars.

The class of 2013 joins 34 prior recipients in receiving the honor.

Dr. Paat and Drs. Pablo and Maria Pons will be in attendance on April 13. Dr. Roode will be represented by his son.

Brickman

Also to be recognized and in attendance will be Scott McLean, M.D., Ph.D., and Todd Brickman, M.D., Ph.D., who will be presented with the Lawrence V. Conway Distinguished Service Award in honor of founding Students for Medical Missions at what is now The University of Toledo’s College of Medicine and Life Sciences. The pair founded the organization as students at the former Medical College of Ohio in 1998 after McLean returned from a medical mission trip to Peru.

Now an assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the Louisiana State University School of Medicine, Brickman completed his bachelor’s degrees from The University of Toledo in chemistry and exercise science in 1993. He earned his medical degree from MCO in 2002 and his Ph.D. in biomedical sciences from UT in 2007. A surgical intern at Strong Memorial Hospital at the University of Rochester Medical Center, he also completed his otolaryngology residency there in 2007. In 2007 and 2008, Brickman served as a microvascular/head and neck fellow at Saint Louis University/Washington University School of Medicine and Saint Louis University Hospital/Barnes Jewish Hospital.

Now a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at the University of Michigan, Dr. McLean completed his bachelor of science degree at the University of Michigan in 1991 and his M.D./Ph.D. at MCO in 1999. He served an internship in surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., in 2000, and finished his residency in otolaryngology at the Mayo Clinic in 2004. A fellowship in the Cranial Base Program at the University of Michigan followed in 2005.

McLean

Lawrence V. Conway, Ph.D., of Toledo, founded the Medical Mission Hall of Fame in 2004 to honor those individuals and/or organizations that have made significant and substantial contributions to advancing the medical well-being of people throughout the world. Conway is a professor emeritus of finance at UT. The Medical Mission Hall of Fame became an affiliate of UT’s College of Medicine and Life Sciences in 2006. A permanent home for the Medical Mission Hall of Fame has been established in the atrium of the Center for Creative Education.

For more information, contact Dan Saevig, associate vice president-alumni relations, at 419.530.4008.

Media Coverage
The Blade (April 5, 2013)

A large fraction of the universe is invisible to the naked eye — and to every other scientific instrument ever invented.

Dr. David Hogg, associate professor of physics at New York University, will talk with students, faculty and staff at The University of Toledo about astronomy’s search for this substance during the 2013 McMaster Cosmology Lecture titled “Where and What is Dark Matter?” Thursday, April 4, at 4 p.m. in the Driscoll Alumni Center Auditorium.

Hogg

“Observations of galaxies — and the universe as a whole — have taught us that most of the matter in the universe is not in the form of ordinary atoms but in some unknown form called dark matter, which interacts with ordinary matter essentially only through gravitational forces,” Hogg said.

“Dark matter gets its name because it does not emit, reflect or absorb light; it is truly invisible. I will discuss the reasons we believe that dark matter exists and why the alternative explanations of the relevant phenomena are now very unlikely to be correct,” he said.

Dr. Michael Cushing, UT assistant professor of astronomy and director of the Ritter Planetarium, said dark matter is one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in astrophysics.

“The debate about whether dark matter really exists is effectively over, so the focus among astronomers is shifting to detecting dark matter directly,” Cushing said. “David is a leader in the field, and I’m excited to hear what he has to share.”

For more information on the free, public colloquium, contact Cushing at michael.cushing@utoledo.edu.

Click here to download a photo of Hogg.

The University of Toledo has a new face leading its business incubation efforts. Scott E. McIntyre has been named manager of business incubation, administering an incubation program in partnership with UT and the State of Ohio’s Edison Technology Program.

“With 20 years as entrepreneur and business development consultant, and now a leader in the exploding Crowdfunding industry, Scott McIntyre adds practical experience ideally suited to help identify and grow companies capable of thriving locally,” said Mary Jo Waldock, UT senior executive director of the Office of Research & Innovation. “We also consider Scott’s education startup, CrowdSchools.org, relevant for our entrepreneurially-minded students who will benefit greatly by learning the ropes before entering the market.”

Previously managing director for Phabriq Development, McIntyre inked an agreement for its CrowdSchools.org startup with UT Innovation Enterprises, agreeing to serve as a pilot in the company’s Ambassador Internship program. CrowdSchools is developing hands-on student training programs for ambitious students from several universities in the Philadelphia area, including University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, Temple University and La Salle University. UT was asked to join because of its progressive stance on student entrepreneurship development.

McIntyre is a founding executive at leading international trade organization, Crowdfunding Professional Association (CfPA.org), and active member of Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory Advocates (CFIRA.org).

A demonstrated leader in the field, McIntyre will speak on the subject of Growth Markets, Expansion, and 2013 Trends in Crowdfunding as part of The Soho Loft’s Innovative Investing Symposium 2013 during the Thomson Reuters PartnerConnect East events this week in Boston.

For more information call Jessica Sattler, associate director of regional and economic engagement for the UT Office of Research and Innovation, at 419.530.6164 or Jessica.Sattler@utoledo.edu.

E.J. Dionne Jr., a political pundit and columnist for The Washington Post, will discuss his latest book at the Edward Shapiro Distinguished Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 4 in the Student Union Auditorium.

Published last year, Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent explains why U.S. politics are so rough-edged right now, according to Jon Richardson, instructor in the Jesup Scott Honors College and chair of the Shapiro Selection Committee.

Dionne

“Dionne’s book examines two deep currents in the American ethos: a strong sense of community on the one hand, and rugged individualism on the other,” Richardson said. “These ideas sometimes work well together and sometimes seem to be at loggerheads.”

Richardson and Dr. Jamie Barlowe, dean of the College of Languages, Literature and Social Sciences, were instrumental in getting Dionne to speak at this year’s Shapiro Lecture.

Dionne writes a column twice a week for The Washington Post Writers Group, which appears in more than 100 newspapers worldwide, including The Blade. He also is a political commentator for National Public Radio, ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

For 14 years, he covered state and local government as well as national politics for The New York Times. In 1990, Dionne joined The Washington Post and reported on national politics. Three years later, he started writing his column, which was syndicated in 1996.

He is the author of Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith & Politics After the Religious Right (2008), Stand Up Fight Back: Republican Toughs, Democratic Wimps, and the Politics of Revenge (2004), and They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (1996).

Dionne also is a University Professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The lecture is a free, public annual event made possible by the Shapiro Endowment. Dr. Edward Shapiro, professor emeritus of economics, retired in 1989 and left the endowment so the University could bring world-renowned speakers to Toledo.

“Dr. Shapiro believed that bringing a speaker who possessed a good deal of public recognition as well as intellectual gravitas was a great way to bring the University and the city closer together,” Richardson said.

Past Shapiro Distinguished Lecture speakers include Elie Wiesel, Oliver Sacks, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Toni Morrison and Wynton Marsalis.

“We have had great success,” Richardson said. “The Shapiro Lecture is one of the most important intellectual events during the school year.”

Doors will open at 6 p.m. for this free, public event. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

Click here to download a photo of Dionne.

Appreciation for the generosity of a grateful patient will be center stage this evening as The University of Toledo College of Medicine and Life Sciences Dean’s Club honors the recipient of a heart transplant.

Tonight from 6-8 p.m. in the Mulford Annex Bryan Lounge on the UT Health Science Campus, members of The Dean’s Club will pay tribute to Alfred and Adela Mundt, a family that has helped advance the health and well being of the greater Toledo-area through their support of The University of Toledo Medical Center.

The couple will receive the Ashel Bryan Distinguished Volunteer Award given to those who have impacted and made significant donations to the College of Medicine and Life Sciences.

After Alfred Mundt suffered a heart attack in 1983 and was treated at the former Medical College of Ohio Hospital, he and Adela continued to donate to and support UTMC’s cardiac system and heart transplant programs in gratitude for the medical care and treatment they received.

The Distinguished Volunteer Award is named for Ashel Bryan, former chair of the MCO Board of Trustees and well-known local businessman and philanthropist. Bryan and his wife, Dorothy, were longtime supporters of the Health Science Campus; their generosity provided an infusion center and supported renovations to the pharmacy, a boardroom and a student lounge, as well as a number of scholarships and endowments.

The annual event also recognizes UT faculty and community members who continue to help advance the College of Medicine and Life Sciences through donation and support for a variety of programs and activities.

For more information, contact Amelia Acuna, assistant director of university communications, at 419.672.8250 or amelia.acuna@utoledo.edu.

Media Coverage
13 ABC (April 2, 2013)

As a follow up to a news conference held at The University of Toledo on March 20, the Mayor will present a proclamation to the city declaring April 16, 2013 as Cancer Prevention Day, in support of Cancer Prevention Study-3 (CPS-3) in Toledo. The presentation will be made at approximately 3:55 p.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, April 2, in City Council Chambers just prior to the City Council meeting.

CPS-3 is the third phase of an ongoing effort to discover the causes of cancer. In phase one, the study officially linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer. In phase two, obesity and certain foods were identified as a cause. Now, CPS-3 will increase understanding further.

“The CPS has revealed incredibly important things about the relationship between human behaviors and cancer,” Bell said. “I am very excited about this partnership with the American Cancer Society, The University of Toledo and the City of Toledo that empowers our citizens to be proactive in the fight against cancer.”

The study is open to anyone between the ages of 30 and 65 who has never been diagnosed with cancer. The University’s goal is to enroll 800 adults from various racial and ethnic backgrounds here in northwest Ohio, to collect data that may one day help eliminate cancer as a major health risk.

The first step will take place at the UT enrollment sites, scheduled on the Main and Health Science Campuses from April 16-20. Participants will be asked to read and sign a consent form, complete a small written survey, provide a waist circumference and a small blood sample.

Additional steps occur at home. Participants will be asked to complete surveys on an ongoing basis that will include questions about factors related to your health. These surveys will be mailed periodically over the span of the research study.

For more information or to register to participate, visit ToledoCPS3.org or contact Andrew Mariani at 888.227.6445 X 5103 or email: andrew.mariani@cancer.org.