Since last fall I have been contributing periodically to Temple Today, an online newsletter that is distributed five days a week to Temple University administrators, faculty and staff. In addition, the stories are also re-purposed to appear on the university’s home page, www.temple.edu, and on the home pages of the various colleges.

The 500- to 700-word articles have included:

• an article about Mohammad Kiani, a professor of mechanical engineering, whose “pediatric brain on a chip” drug research testing device was hailed as one of the top 10 innovations of 2013 by The Scientist magazine
• an article about Ron Levy, the director of Temple’s new Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology and an internationally renowned AIDS drug researcher, who conducts his investigations using high-performing computer clusters, and
• an article about undergraduate anthropology students spending their winter break unearthing 5,000-year-old Bronze Age skeletons in Oman under the direction of Kimberly Williams, an assistant professor of anthropology and a skeletal biologist.
• an article about award-winning teacher Jason Chein, an associate professor of psychology and a neuroscientist whose expertise includes functional MRIs, which noninvasively allow him to understand what’s going on inside our brains. His collaborative research with Professor Laurence Steinberg has made them the nation’s foremost experts regarding adolescents’ enhanced risk taking and led to graduated drivers’ licenses which limit the number of other teenagers that can be in a car when a teen is driving.