Brown University

For Assistant Professor of Music Eric Nathan, November brought the premiere of a new composition by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a Copland House residency award announcement.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —For three weeks in January 2017, Eric Nathan will live and work in the home that legendary composer Aaron Copland called “my hideaway, my solitude” in Cortlandt Manor, N.Y. One of nine composers to win a 2016 Copland House residency award, the assistant professor of music at Brown University said he is looking forward to the opportunity to focus on writing without distraction in the former home of “the dean of American music.”

Other composers have described Copland House as a place where one can “sense the spirit of someone who has created so much and has been so influential to American music,” Nathan said. That makes the residency particularly promising for Nathan, for whom specific places have served as a creative spur and compositional tool.

This month, the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered Nathan’s commissioned work, “the space of a door,” a composition inspired by his emotional experience upon first visiting the Providence Athenaeum, an independent library and cultural center dating to the 1830s, last December. A recent review of the performance described “the space of a door” as music that is “clean and shot through with rhythmic vitality” that “conjures images of a physical space” and “is filled with resonant harmonies that are left to hang in space.”

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In a pair of tents on the grounds of a health center in a tiny town, Dr. Adam Levine is managing a cholera treatment unit where the staff still sees 10 to 15 new cases a day, more than a month after Hurricane Matthew.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —Since Dr. Adam Levine arrived in Haiti in late October, he’s been managing a cholera treatment unit for International Medical Corps. Hurricane Matthew devastated the area on Oct. 4, creating conditions that foment the spread of the disease. The unit is still running near its 30-bed capacity.

The unit is a pair of tents on the grounds of a local health center in Les Anglais, said Levine, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Brown University and a physician at Rhode Island Hospital. The town sits almost at Haiti’s western tip on the southwest shore of its southern peninsula.

Levine, who directs the new Humanitarian Innovation Initiative at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, answered questions about his work providing life-saving rehydration and medicine to people who make a difficult trek to the center from surrounding villages.

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New research identifies four organizational and administrative factors that can decrease teacher turnover and lift student test scores in math. 

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —A school is more likely to retain effective teachers, a new study reports, if it is led by a principal who promotes professional development for teachers, is characterized by collaborative relationships among teachers, has a safe and orderly learning environment and sets high expectations for academic achievement among students, a new study reports.

The study, which focused on middle schools in New York City and used data from the Department of Education’s School Survey, broadens the context in which teacher effectiveness and student achievement is considered, its authors said.

“In recent years, researchers and policymakers have focused much of their attention on measuring and improving teacher effectiveness,” said Matthew A. Kraft, assistant professor of education and economics at Brown University and lead author. “However, teachers do not work in a vacuum; their school’s climate can either enhance or undermine their ability to succeed with students.”

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With the Humanitarian Innovation Initiative at the University’s Watson Institute, Dr. Adam Levine and colleagues hope to improve the effectiveness and accountability of disaster preparedness, humanitarian response and post-emergency reconstruction through scholarship.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — From the horror of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia to the urban slums of Bangladesh, where annual springtime rains bring cholera and dehydration to thousands of children, Dr. Adam Levine has worked to foster collaboration between two well-meaning fields that are nevertheless often culturally at odds: relief and research. A medical veteran of those crises and others, Levine believes that academic rigor and perspective can make humanitarian work more effective and evidence based, and that aiding disaster relief can engage academia directly in saving many thousands of imperiled lives.

Now, through the Humanitarian Innovation Initiative (HI2) that Levine has founded at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, he hopes to greatly expand the opportunities for students to learn, researchers to study, and humanitarians to heal together.

“Getting these two very different cultures to work together is not going to happen naturally, but it can still happen with some dedicated work and advanced planning,” said Levine, an associate professor of emergency medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School and a physician at Rhode Island Hospital. “That’s a big part of what HI2 is really supposed to be about — bringing together academics from Brown University and elsewhere with humanitarian practitioners in the field to develop projects that can improve care in future emergencies.”

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