Dropping names …

Wong Allen Finger

Cynthia Wong, associate professor of English at the University of Colorado Denver, delivered the keynote address at the 19th METU British Novelist Conference on Dec. 13, in Ankara, Turkey. The conference’s focus this year was on Kazuo Ishiguro and his work. … Brenda J. Allen, professor and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Science at the University of Colorado Denver, recently delivered the 2011 Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture during the National Communication Association's 97th Annual Convention in New Orleans. Her lecture, titled “Voice Lessons for Social Change," explored how communication scholarship about voice can inform efforts to effect social change and create a more humane discipline. During her speech, Allen invited, "all members of the discipline of communication to work toward social change by examining power dynamics related to how we communicate with one another in academia." … Sarah Horton, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver, recently was awarded the Steven Polgar Prize by the Society for Medical Anthropology at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal. The prize is for the best article published in the Medical Anthropology Quarterly in 2010. Horton and co-author Judith Barker, Ph.D., a professor at the University of California-San Francisco, were honored for their article, “Stigmatized Biologies: Examining the Cumulative Effects of Oral Health Disparities for Mexican American Farmworker Children.” … Tom Finger, professor of the School of Medicine’s Department of Cell and Developmental Biology and the Rocky Mountain Taste and Smell Center, recently hosted four hours of live lab interaction as students connected via the web while at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as well as from their classrooms in Montana, Texas, New Jersey, New York and across Colorado. In part, Finger explained how the brain and body work together to taste and smell. Finger worked with museum curator Nicole Garneau, Ph.D., on the distance learning program, which aims to make science come alive for young people. The museum regularly hosts these programs, but it was the first time the hourlong sessions originated from the labs on the Anschutz Medical Campus.