“Children who have profound visual deficits often expend a disproportionate amount of effort trying to see straight ahead, and as a consequence they neglect their peripheral vision,” said Duje Tadin, associate professor of at Rochester. “This is problematic because visual periphery—which plays a critical role in mobility and other key visual functions—is often less affected by visual impairments.”

“We know that action video games (AVG) can improve visual perception, so we isolated the AVG components that we thought would have the strongest effect on perception and devised a kid-friendly game that compels players to pay attention to the entire visual field, not just where their vision is most impaired,” said , who is also a professor in the . “As a result, we’ve seen up to 50 percent improvement in visual perception tasks.”

Successful AVG players distribute and switch their attention across a wide area, while at the same time they remain vigilant for unexpected moving targets to appear, all while ignoring irrelevant stimuli.

The researchers created a with these specific task characteristics while eliminating other components of AVGs, such as the demand for speeded hand-eye coordination, and any violent or other non-child-friendly material.

Game training

Twenty-four low-vision youths from the Tennessee and Oklahoma Schools for the Blind participated in the training experiment that appears in . Pre-training screening showed that while most children had central visual acuity worse than the 20/200 legal blindness limit, they also underutilized their peripheral vision.

According to the study’s lead author, Jeffrey Nyquist, founder and CEO of NeuroTrainer, the students’ issues with the periphery were in part attentional.

Nyquist and the team hypothesized that training the students to pay more attention to their peripheral visual field could have quick results.

“We didn’t improve the kids’ hardware—these children have profound physical problems with their optics, muscles, and retina, and we can’t fix that,” said Nyquist. “But we could improve their software by training their brain to reallocate attentional resources to make better use of their periphery vision.”

The students were divided into 3 groups: a control group that played a Tetris-like game; a group that played a kid-friendly commercially-available AVG, Ratchet & Clank; and a group that used the training game devised by the researchers. All games were played on a large projection screen to better involve visual periphery.

The game the researchers developed has a dual-task component. Students tracked multiple moving objects simultaneously while being on the lookout for another object that briefly appears and requires a response from the player.

“The goal is to pay attention to a number of objects over a large area, and to be prepared to react to unexpected events in the even further periphery,” explained Tadin. “It forces the low-vision students to expand their visual field—to shift their attention to the neglected areas of the visual field.”

After a total of eight hours of training, groups who trained with the commercially-available AVG and the custom dual-task game showed significant visual improvements.

Improvements were seen in a range of visual tasks. The students were able to better perceive moving objects (motion perception) in the far periphery, they were able to better attend to visual crowding, such as identifying a specific letter within a field of other letters, and they were much faster at finding objects in cluttered scenes (visual search), like finding a stapler on a messy desk.

Range and stability of visual improvements

“We were surprised by the range of improvements, and we were even more surprised when we tested a few of the students a year later and found that the gains they made were stable,” said Nyquist. “Within just a few hours of training, they were able to expand their usable visual field and visual search ability.”

Nyquist notes that when the researchers began their work with the students, it was to assess how they maneuver around their environments. “But we quickly went from assessing to thinking ‘maybe we have something that can train them and improve their real-life abilities,’” he said. “When we realized that the students achieved up to 50 percent improvement in visual tasks, we were blown away.”

The research was supported by the National Eye Institute. Nyquist has since founded a for-profit company, NeuroTrainer, which utilizes the dual-task training component used in this research and has applied it to immersive virtual reality training games for elite athletes.

“Children with FASD often have significant behavior problems due to neurological damage,” says Christie Petrenko, a research psychologist at the University’s .

Petrenko and her colleagues found that parents of children with FASD who attribute their child’s misbehavior to their underlying disabilities—rather than to willful disobedience—tend to use pre-emptive strategies designed to help prevent undesirable behaviors. These strategies are likely to be more effective than incentive-based strategies, such as the use of consequences for misbehavior, given the brain damage associated with FASD.

The study included 31 parents and caregivers of children with FASD ages four through eight. Petrenko and her team analyzed data from standardized questionnaires and qualitative interviews that focused on parenting practices.

Petrenko says that the study, which is published in , shows that educating families and caregivers about the disorder is critical.

People with FASD often have problems with executive functioning, which includes skills such as impulse control and task planning, information processing, emotion regulation, and social and adaptive skills. As a result, they are at high risk for school disruptions and trouble with the law.

Parents who use pre-emptive strategies “change the environment in a way that fits their child’s needs better,” says Petrenko. “They give one-step instructions rather than three-steps because their child has working memory issues. They may buy clothes with soft seams if their child has sensory issues, or post stop signs to cue the child to not open the door. All of these preventive strategies help reduce the demands of the environment on the child.”

The study also shows that parenting practices correlate with levels of caregiver confidence and frustration. Families of children with FASD are frequently judged and blamed for their children’s misbehavior. Parents and caregivers who are successful in preventing unwanted behaviors have higher confidence in their parenting and lower levels of frustration with their children than parents who counter unwanted behaviors with consequences after the fact.

Petrenko says that evidence-based interventions for families raising children with FASD have been developed and show promise for improving outcomes for children and families. She and her team at Mt. Hope Family Center are continuing to further test these interventions and identify what strategies and approaches are most effective in getting evidence-based information to families.

The study was funded by a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Having Lasch come up in such conversations is not unusual, says Jeff Ludwig ’15 (PhD), whose dissertation serves as a biography of Lasch and his early career. Ludwig, who’s now the Director of Education at the in Auburn, says Lasch gets quoted often during election cycles but assuming how he would critique contemporary culture or politics is “tricky” business.

Q: Who was Christopher Lasch?

Ludwig: Christopher Lasch was one of the preeminent American historians and social critics of the mid and late 20th century. He was a professor of history at the URochester from 1970 until his death at age 61 in 1994.

Lasch wrote a number of highly influential and cited books on a number of issues—his interests were wide ranging. He was a public intellectual, meaning much of his work were commentaries on current affairs. Lasch always tried to engage with the widest possible audience.

As he described his role in an interview with Casey Blake ’87 (PhD): “A social critic tries to catch the general drift of the times, to show how a particular incident or policy or a distinctive configuration of sentiments holds up a mirror to society.” I think that Lasch did that exceptionally well, which explains his deep resonance 22 years after his death.

Q: Can you talk about Lasch and the University?

Ludwig: Before coming to Rochester at age 38, Lasch was job-hopping. He kept moving to better positions, never spent more than three or four years at any given university. He was at Williams College, Roosevelt University in Chicago, the University of Iowa, Northwestern, it looked like he was on the fast track to get to the top of the Ivies by his 40th birthday. Then he moved to Rochester in 1970 and never left. There was something about Rochester that clicked for him.

He came to Rochester at a time when Eugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman, the great historians of slavery and labor, were in the department. They had visions of building a strong department of scholars and students who were interested in social criticism. They subscribed to the idea that history could do real work in the world, be meaningful and engaged with the broadest public audience, and ultimately improve democracy.

But, sadly, all of that unraveled pretty early on in the midst of personality conflicts and feuding. Despite the setback and disappointment, there was still something about Rochester that appealed to Lasch, and to his family.

He had four children who seemed to be very happy here, which meant a great deal to him. So, he put aside his ambitions of being the best professor in the best department in the world, and decided to plant roots, just like he would write about— seeking a community of lasting bonds, forming attachments to specific people and specific places instead of to universal abstractions. And so he did.

Eventually, Lasch would reshape the department. He put Rochester on the map for different reasons than it was looking like it might have in the early 70s—as an epicenter for new radical scholarship and a crusading sort of history. Instead, Rochester became a really respectable university for graduate studies for cultural history and for more subdued history as social criticism.

Lasch attracted all sorts of interesting graduate students like labor historian Leon Fink ’71, ’77 (PhD), and intellectual historians Casey Blake and Kevin Mattson ’94 (PhD). He was a famously dedicated presence in the classroom; when he returned graded papers, each of his students received a mini-essay from him in response to their work. There are some really moving accounts of him by his students in the .

Q: Did Lasch have an iconic book or article?

Ludwig: His iconic work is a book that came out in 1979, The Culture of Narcissism. Although most historians, scholars, and intellectuals were well aware of who he was—he had published a number of important books and articles for nearly two decades by that point—this book made him a household name. The book, very famously, got bound up with President Carter’s “crisis of confidence” or “national malaise” speech, parts of which were taken from The Culture of Narcissism. Lasch, in fact, was invited to the White House to meet with Carter. The book and its author were even featured in a glossy spread in People magazine, which helped boost his readership. It’s a really difficult book, though, not nearly as easily digested as its popularity would suggest. He was surprised that it became a bestseller.

Q: What was Lasch’s argument in The Culture of Narcissism?

Ludwig: He looked closely at cultural changes sweeping through America in what he called “late capitalism.” Lasch examined a transformation of American selfhood and identity that, he thought, was being adversely transformed by the culture around it. As if the older foundations for defining selfhood were slipping away as Americans learned to embrace artifice, performance, and appearance over substance to survive in their economic order. Eventually the performance and the authentic blur past the point of distinction.

Though Lasch was a brilliant writer, it’s a very dense book, steeped in sociological theory. Ultimately, he diagnoses 1970s America as suffering from mass narcissism, self-involvement, bound up in the forces of an economic system, past its prime, and one quite exploitative, even soul-crushing, in its ability to strip the workforce of meaning and autonomy in their labor.

Q: So the book is a diagnosis. Does it offer a cure?

Ludwig: Sort of. It’s a criticism of Lasch that he was always identifying, as a critic, ailments and maladies and yet rarely offering solutions. You have to read between the lines. He was looking for alternatives to an American society in which both the left and right seem moribund.

What I think he was really pointing towards as an alternative, perhaps best articulated in his book The True and Only Heaven (1991) was what he called “counter progressive.” He believed that America was blindly taken with the idea of progress. That America was moving inexorably forward and always improving, that this present represented the best of all possible worlds. We had this optimism that we were on a linear path to better things and we didn’t really have to work to get there. It was a sort of ethos as driving force for consumer capitalism: More, more, more, bigger, bigger, bigger, better, better, better.

But Lasch was looking for something more local and rooted in place, which is why I think Rochester greatly appealed to him. Building small things, building from resources within the self that he thought had been eroded by big, consumer capitalism.

Q: Was this Populism?

Ludwig: Lasch outlines a form of populism that would start in small communities in his later books. He thought lower and middle-class people needed to take the country back from elites, but not with racist overtones, and certainly not with capitalist demagogues leading the way. Instead, with a petit-bourgeois radicalism more respectful towards democracy.

In the ‘60s, Lasch thought it would be sort of a socialist revolution, but he never wrote blueprints, like, “this is what a perfect world would look like.” What he was really interested in was pointing out, as a social critic, wrong turns, missteps, and problems.

Q: Do you wonder what Lasch would think of the current state of politics?

Ludwig: I met with Mrs. Nell Lasch, his widow, a couple of years ago and she said that she is often asked, “what do you think your husband would say about the X, Y, and Z that’s going on right now?” She always gives a version of this answer: “Kit [Lasch’s nickname] isn’t here to tell us and it’s tricky and dangerous to try to make assumptions based on what he wrote 20 or more years ago and fit it into modern debates.”

Lasch gets cited a lot during election cycles because much of what he had to say is still relevant—especially given the debate about the place of the privileged and of elites in American life. But, I always thought it striking that Nell said to me, “he’s not with us,” cautioning us against trying to find his voice in events that are well beyond his time by force-fitting him into modern debates. Even in his lifetime, people of all political persuasions—from radicals to far-right conservatives—could read into something from Lasch’s corpus of works that appealed to them. He’s been claimed by the left, right, and center, though in the end I think Lasch was advocating for a total paradigm shift away from these labels and the social order they buttressed.

Q: Lasch was a social critic over a span of forty years. Did his interests shift overtime?

Ludwig: That’s the thing that is tricky about Lasch. He never stayed on one topic for very long. His historiography shows that he was as interested in writing about race as he was about popular culture, and entertainment as much as sports. He was a celebrated writer for the New York Review of Books because they could hand him a subject and he would form an articulate, and often scathing and well thought out opinion of it. But that’s also why it took me 800 pages to just do volume one of his biography for my dissertation.

Jeff Ludwig’s dissertation is the first of a potential two volume biography of Lasch’s life, “Christopher Lasch: A Life Volume One: History as Social Criticism.”  Ludwig has published several articles on Lasch, and intends to co-edit a volume of Lasch’s under-published and unpublished work with Robert Westbrook, the Joseph F. Cunningham Professor of History at Rochester. 

Cerulli was recognized for her efforts toward empowering women.  She and Wendi Cross, associate professor of psychiatry and of pediatrics, partnered to create, implement, and test a curriculum for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Cerulli has worked internationally with colleagues in Russia, China, and Laos on addressing issues facing vulnerable women experiencing depression and violence with the World Health Organization.

The YWCA Empowering Women Award is given out annually to a woman who has continuously worked to improve the lives of women and children in the Greater Rochester community. Proceeds from the luncheon will go toward supporting over 1,000 women and children in the area through housing and emergency assistance.

Cerulli earned her JD from the University at Buffalo law school and her PhD in criminal justice at the State University of New York at Albany. She was formerly an assistant district attorney in Monroe County, New York, where she created a special misdemeanor domestic violence unit. She has worked on issues surrounding domestic violence and child abuse for more than 25 years.

Anthropologist Rupert Stasch will give the 54th annual Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, “Dramas of Otherness: ‘First Contact’ Tourism in New Guinea,” which explores the similarities in the exoticizing stereotypes that tourists and Korowai people create about each other.

The tree house-dwelling Korowai people live on the island of New Guinea in Indonesian Papua. Since 1990 they have been visited by over 50 film crews and thousands of tourists who are motivated by the idea that the Korowai are a “Stone Age society” living outside of global markets and history.

Stasch, a social anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, has worked for more than two decades among the Korowai people. His study, which draws on ethnographic research with tourists, guides, reality television crews, and the Korowai themselves, looks at what happens in actual social interactions between Korowai people and tourists. He finds that their interactions are highly patterned, and that the different participants care greatly about the others and are affected intensely by their encounters. At the same time, Stasch says, each group profoundly miscomprehends many aspects of the others’ experiences.

The October 19 lecture will be held at 7 p.m. in Lander Auditorium of Hutchison Hall on the University’s River Campus. The talk is free and open to the public.

The honors the memory of Lewis Henry Morgan, the distinguished 19th-century anthropologist and Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ benefactor. The lecture has been presented annually since 1963. It is one of the oldest and most prestigious lecture series in anthropology in North America. Duke University Press will publish a book based on Stasch’s lecture.

BHC incorporates a combination of evidence-based therapies and outreach support services to assist with basic family needs including food, clothing, and shelter,  and follow through on medical visits (for example, reminders, scheduling, and providing transportation). The seamless integration of the interventions provides young mothers with comprehensive services addressing parenting education, support in developing positive parent-child relationships, treatment for maternal depression, employment and educational support and any other needed support services.

Speakers at the graduation included United Way of Greater Rochester President and CEO Fran Weisberg and Monroe County Executive Cheryl Dinolfo.

“United Way is proud to work with Monroe County and Mt. Hope Family Center to support the Building Healthy Children program to help moms and children remain healthy, enhance their positive parenting practices and reduce the risk of child abuse and neglect,” said Weisberg. “And we’re so proud of these moms who have put in a lot of hard work to get to this exciting day.”

Over 200 mothers have graduated from BHC.  A collaboration of Mt. Hope Family Center, Strong Pediatrics, and Strong Social Work, the program is supported by the Monroe County Department of Human Services and the United Way of Greater Rochester.

Rochester has the highest rate of childhood poverty among comparable-sized US cities with over 50 percent of children living in poverty. High poverty rates are paired with extensive family and community violence. One of the focus areas of the Greater Rochester Anti-Poverty Initiative is trauma and this grant will support provision of evidence-based trauma care services and training in the community.

“The grant allows us to continue in our role as the only funded member of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) outside the New York City area,” said the center’s director Sheree Toth and the grant’s principle investigator. “We will continue active involvement in trauma training and evidence-based models of intervention at local, national, and international levels.” The Center has been a member of the NCTSN since 2009.

The grant will fund a new project named STRONGER (Supporting Trauma Recovery Opportunities and Nurturing Growing Emotional Resilience), and will build upon existing work with children and families in the child welfare system, given the high rates of traumatic stress across that particular population, and to other children and families across the community who have been exposed to violence or experienced stressful or traumatic experiences. STRONGER will also offer support for military-affiliated families who face stressors unique to this population.

“The immediate benefits of the grant will provide much needed trauma treatment and evaluation of interventions for traumatized children and families,” said clinical director Jody Manly. “The five-year project allows us to provide evidence-based trauma treatment to approximately 800 children and adults. We will also train diverse groups of providers and professionals about the effects of trauma on children and families, and disseminate best practices for the implementation of evidence-based interventions locally and nationally.”

STRONGER will build on existing collaborative efforts from a multidisciplinary team of community stakeholders, including such partners as Willow Domestic Violence Center and the Monroe County Department of Human Services, as well as military coalitions such as Help Base Greater Rochester and One Team One Fight, organizations who help support resilience in families dealing with military-related experiences, such as deployment.

“Traumatized children’s extensive needs place a significant burden on society, including social welfare, education, mental health, medical, and legal,” said Toth. “Provision and evaluation of effective trauma treatments possess important implications for policy makers as well as practitioners.”

Christie Petrenko, a research psychologist at the URochester’s Mt. Hope Family Center and an assistant professor at the Medical Center, has been involved in research and clinical interventions with children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) and their families for over 10 years.

According to Petrenko, prenatal alcohol exposure is the largest preventable cause of developmental disabilities in the United States. Children and adults with FASD struggle with lifelong learning and behavioral problems. Without appropriate support, individuals with FASD are at high risk for secondary conditions, such as mental health problems, trouble with the law, school disruption, and substance abuse.

Petrenko received her PhD from San Diego State University/University of California, San Diego Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology.

Q: What is Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD), and how is it different from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS)? How common is FASD?

A: The term fetal alcohol spectrum disorders represents the range of effects associated with prenatal exposure to alcohol. Fetal alcohol syndrome is just one of the diagnoses under this umbrella term.

It is currently estimated that FASD affect 2 to 5 percent of the population, which is equal to or greater than other developmental disabilities such as autism. Most people don’t realize just how prevalent FASD is.

Q: What are the most common symptoms of FASD?

A: Only a small percentage of affected individuals have the set of facial features—which includes small eye openings, thin upper lip, and flat philtrum (groove under nose)—and growth delays that are most associated with prenatal alcohol exposure. Both can diminish with age.

The symptoms that have the most significant impact are those that can’t be seen—those that relate to the central nervous system. The face forms very early during pregnancy, often before many women realize they are pregnant, but the brain forms and develops throughout the entire pregnancy and is at risk anytime from conception to delivery.

But there are multitudes of factors that contribute to individual outcomes: genetics, nutrition, pattern and amount of alcohol exposure, and other stressors. Therefore, children and adults with FASD can have varying degrees of neurological and behavior issues.

There are several areas that seem to be most significantly impacted across individuals. These include executive functioning, which includes impulse control and task planning, information processing, social skills, emotion regulation, and adaptive skills. As a result, individuals with FASD are at high risk for secondary conditions, such as mental health problems, school disruptions, trouble with the law, and substance use problems, especially as they enter adolescence and adulthood.

Q: How is it diagnosed?

A: FASD can be diagnosed from birth through adulthood. Diagnosis in infants and toddlers relies on physical measurements or evidence of neurological damage such as microcephaly, abnormal brain imaging findings, or seizures.

Most individuals with FASD are diagnosed during preschool or school age, when neurological issues become more apparent. Adult diagnosis, though, can be particularly difficult, given that obtaining a history of prenatal alcohol exposure grows increasingly difficult over time.

Unfortunately, there are very few clinics or knowledgeable providers in the U.S., resulting in many individuals going undiagnosed or misdiagnosed. As a matter of fact, there is now only one specialty diagnostic clinic for FASD in the state of New York, which is the one affiliated with the URochester.

Q: How is it treated?

Currently, there is no “gold-standard” treatment for FASD, and in most regions of the country, FASD is not recognized within most systems of care as a qualifying diagnosis for services such as special education, developmental disabilities, and mental health care.

Over the last decade, an increasing number of research studies have documented the value of interventions for children with FASD and their families, including helping child with self-regulation and cognitive control, academic skills, social and adaptive functioning, behavior problems, and parent training and family support.

Q: What can treatment offer?

A: Optimally, if children are diagnosed early and are provided with a nurturing home environment and appropriate services, many of the secondary conditions associated with FASD—mental health problems, school issues, trouble with the law, and substance use— can be prevented.

Treatment typically focuses on teaching affected individuals new skills while also adapting their environment to help them. Families may also need training to adapt their parenting strategies based on the neurodevelopmental strengths and weaknesses of their child. The ultimate goal is to teach the affected individual to build on areas of strength and interest, develop their own accommodations to support areas of weakness, and to seek out help when needed.

It is important to recognize that individuals with FASD vary widely in their functioning. Some individuals are able to live independently, attain full-time employment, and raise a family. Many, though, require at least some supports through adulthood, and others require a very high level of supports, including residential placements and services.

Q: What role does Mt. Hope Family Center and the Medical Center play for patients with FASD?

A: Mt. Hope Family Center and Kirch Developmental Services Center at URMC have partnered to be the only specialty diagnostic clinic for FASD in the state. Since 2014 Lynn Cole, the clinical director at Kirch, and I have offered a multidisciplinary diagnostic clinic for FASD.

We also include students in psychology, nursing, and pediatrics in the clinic to better prepare the next generation of providers. We have also developed a month family support program and regularly connect with families raising children with FASD through online supports.

Q: What are the biggest misconceptions?

A: There are so many misconceptions—especially about drinking alcohol during pregnancy and FASD. Despite the efforts at consistent messaging about the risks of drinking during pregnancy by federal agencies and organizations, most people—even professionals—have limited knowledge about FASD.

There is a general awareness that drinking during pregnancy can be harmful, but many have a limited appreciation for the scope of the problem. Some of the most common misconceptions include:

• FASD doesn’t affect my community.  FASD affect all communities where women consume alcohol. The CDC estimate over 3 million women are at risk for an alcohol-exposed pregnancy.
• Women who drink alcohol during pregnancy are to blame. There are many reasons women drink during pregnancy, but intentionally hurting their baby is not one of them. Most women who drink during pregnancy do not know they are pregnant, have been given incorrect information about the risks of drinking during pregnancy, or can’t stop due to addiction. The best approach to dealing with this is to increase knowledge about the risks of drinking during pregnancy and to provide supportive treatment to women.
• It’s OK to drink alcohol in later trimesters. Alcohol consumption at any point during pregnancy can interfere with brain development and can result in an FASD. All forms of alcohol can have detrimental effects.
• Individuals with FASD have intellectual disabilities. Only about 25 percent of individuals with FASD have an intellectual disability—an IQ less than 70. Many people with FASD have average or above intellectual abilities, but still struggle with executive skills, social communication, self-regulation, and adaptive skills.
• The behavior problems displayed by children with FASD are related to poor parenting. Families are often judged and blamed for their children’s behavior, which is often inappropriate for their chronological age. Often the child’s behavior is related to their disability rather than willful disobedience. Unfortunately, the standard approaches to parenting are often not a good fit for children with FASD due to the nature of their neurodevelopmental disabilities.

The most effective approaches to parenting for children with FASD emphasize positive behavior support with an emphasis on changing the environment to better meet the person’s needs in order to prevent the behavior.

Physicists love good symmetry—and that love is more than aesthetic appeal. One of the more important symmetries in all of science is the one between antimatter and matter.

Energy in the early universe was transformed into equal parts of matter and antimatter. Barring anything else, those equal parts should have destroyed each other and left us with no matter with which to make stars and planets, and people and dogs.

So physicists reason that something must have broken the matter-antimatter symmetry in the early universe, leaving us with a universe dominated by, well, stuff—one in which we (and dogs) can exist. The puzzle of how the matter-antimatter symmetry was broken is one of the great questions that particle physicists are trying to answer.

Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ graduate student, Konosuke (Ko) Iwamoto, updated the physics world on this question at the 38th biennial , in Chicago earlier this month.

Iwamoto presented the highly anticipated findings from the Japan-based T2K neutrino experiment collaboration concerning the minute differences in the oscillations of subatomic particles called neutrinos and antineutrinos. (Almost every particle has an antimatter counterpart: a particle with the same mass but opposite charge.)

The new results suggest that the matter-antimatter symmetry may have been broken by neutrinos. T2K’s experiments show that neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently—the imbalance may have disrupted the matter/antimatter balance. Though the results are not conclusive—there is a 1-in-20 chance that their results are a fluke—but physicists are excited about the findings and further data gathering from T2K and other experiments is underway.

“It is fabulous that Ko was chosen to present the findings of the T2K collaboration at ICHEP,” says Rochester professor of physics, . “ICHEP is the biggest international conference in particle physics and it was started in the 1950s by the then chair of Rochester’s physics department, Robert Marshak. Everyone still calls it the ‘Rochester conference.’”

T2K is a large, international particle physics experiment operating in Japan. In this experiment, an intense beam of neutrinos is produced at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (J-PARC), which is located on the east coast of Japan, approximately 100 miles north of Tokyo. 185 miles away, the beam detector is located deep inside a mine in the mountains of western Japan. Physicists involved in the experiment measure how the neutrinos oscillate from one of three types, or “flavors,” to another during the transit across Japan.

Professors and Manly lead the Rochester neutrino group on T2K. Members of the collaboration recently shared the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics “for the fundamental discovery and exploration of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics.”

Estimates suggest that 20 to 40 percent of parents who live together experience significant levels of distress in their relationships. And research shows that when parents have difficulties in their relationship it affects parenting. Ģš˝´ŤĂ˝ psychologists and Mt. Hope Family Center researchers and will explore why that happens thanks to a $2.9 million grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The grant will fund research to identify how conflict between parents spills over to influence interactions within the parent-child system.

“Conflict between partners is a normal occurrence in relationships, but conflicts that are overly aggressive, hostile, and prolonged make it more difficult for partners to be effective parents” says Sturge-Apple, who also serves as the dean of graduate studies in Arts, Sciences and Engineering. “If we can begin to understand why this happens, then we may have new avenues for interventions helping families experiencing problems.”

The investigation will be conducted at the University’s , which has a track record of supporting multifaceted longitudinal studies of high-risk families. The study will focus on parents and their three- to four year-old children over a three-year period. According to Davies, “Early childhood is a critical stage for understanding how couple relationship conflict trickles down to impact parenting and ultimately family and child functioning.”

The researchers aim to document the physiological, cognitive, and emotional processes which may link couple conflict with parenting difficulties and provide targets for clinical interventions and policy initiative designed to improve interparental relationships and family functioning.