Panhia Lee

Lily Haseotes Bentas Center dedication honors service, generosity of Cumberland Farms executive

NEWPORT, R.I. (Sept. 14, 2016) – A newly constructed 23,000-square-foot academic wing on Salve Regina’s seaside campus will be named in honor of Cumberland Farms Chairman of the Board Lily Haseotes Bentas for her longtime friendship and service to the university.

The Lily Haseotes Bentas Center will be officially dedicated during a ceremony on Saturday, Sept. 17 at 4 p.m. United States senators from Rhode Island, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, will offer remarks, along with members of the Haseotes family and representatives from the Salve Regina community.

The Bentas Center is connected to the 67,000-square-foot reconstructed O’Hare Academic Building, Ochre Point Avenue, sharing a large university commons area overlooking Newport’s Cliff Walk and the Atlantic Ocean. The Center will house the Department of Business Studies and Economics, along with its business outreach program, the Rodgers Family Department of Nursing, student common areas, classrooms, conference areas and faculty offices.

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Giving Africans a Voice

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This summer Julia Steketee (left) used her French and some Wolof to speak with Senegalese women about health issues in Dakar.

Over the summer, Furniture Design major Julia Steketee 18 FD explored the world of 2D half a world away, flexing her photography and graphic design muscles as an intern at Speak Up Africa in Dakar, Senegal. The organization focuses on advocacy and communication with an emphasis on health-related projects like Zero Malaria Starts with Me.

“A big part of the experience was being a woman on my own in West Africa,” says the native of Atlanta, GA, who learned some Wolof – the local language – while also speaking with locals in French. “People were really friendly and open and wanted to show me how wonderful their country is.”

Steketee’s father works in public health, so when she began looking for summer internships he helped connect her with Speak Up Africa. Through RISD Careers, she learned that she could apply for a Textron Award, which helped to finance the experience. “I wanted to use my design skills in an NGO environment,” Steketee explains, “to help people through design. And I like the fact that Speak Up Africa is run by Senegalese people, giving Africans a voice.”

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Reconstructing Cuba

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As a summer intern at NYC’s American Museum of Natural History, senior Joyce Lin focused on fabricating models of Cuba’s swamps and coral reefs | photo courtesy AMNH/R. Mickens

As visitors to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in NYC beat the city heat and explored four floors of exhibits illuminating everything from dinosaurs to outer space, a team of curators, artists and research associates was busily at work up on the fifth floor. The space was closed off as the team painstakingly worked on ¡Cuba!, an exhibit that will open in November and explore in depth the island’s biodiversity, culture and history. Among the skilled fabricators and model makers working to ensure that the exhibit meets the AMNH’s high standards was rising senior Joyce Lin BRDD 17 FD, who landed a summer internship at the museum funded through a Textron Charitable Trust Fellowship.

“There are a lot of Cuban animals I was completely unfamiliar with,” says Lin – unique species “like the solenodon, a small but venomous rodent that’s found nowhere else on the planet.” In fact, 32% of Cuba’s vertebrates and 50% of its plants are endemic to the island. Other species the exhibit will highlight include the endangered Cuban crocodile and the long extinct giant sloth.

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With MRI technique, brain scientists induce feelings about faces

In a new study, researchers report they were able to train unknowing volunteers to develop a mild but significant preference or dislike for faces that they had previously regarded neutrally.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Volunteers who started an experiment feeling neutral about certain faces they saw ended up unknowingly adopting the feelings that scientists induced via an MRI feedback technique, according to newly published research.

The study in PLOS Biology therefore suggests that there is a single region of the brain where both positive and negative feelings for faces take shape and provides the second demonstration this year that the MRI technique can be used to train a mental process in an unknowing subject. This spring, the team used the same method to associate the perception of color with the context of a pattern so strongly that volunteers saw the color when cued by the pattern, even if the color wasn’t really there.

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