Wednesday, February 26, 2014 VOLUME 33 / NUMBER 22 www.uicnews.uic.edu facebook.com/uicnews twitter.com/uicnews NEWS UIC youtube.com/uicmedia For the community of the University of Illinois at Chicago Photo: S.K. Vemmer Carly Harte and Andrea Heath check each other’s new look after their heads were shaved in a fundraiser for St. Baldrick’s Foundation Thursday. The roommates drove from Milwaukee to Children’s Hospital University of Illinois for the event, which benefits pediatric cancer research at UIC and elsewhere. More on page 3; watch the video atyoutube.com/uicmedia Bald and bold for St. Baldrick’s INSIDE: Profile / Quotable 2 | Campus News 4 | Calendar 12 | Student Voice 13 | Police 14 | Sports 16 Composer Steve Everett finds the Honoring UIC’s Researchers of Cai O’Connell’s once-in-a-lifetime Women’s basketball gets ready to right notes the Year Olympics assignment break the record More on page 2 More on page 7 More on page 11 More on page 16 2 UIC NEWS I www.uicnews.uic.edu I FEBRUARY 26, 2014 profile Send profile ideas to Gary Wisby,[email protected] Composer Steve Everett hits right notes with technology By Gary Wisby Princeton and a guest composer at Eastman School of Music, Conservatoire National Supérieur de Mu- Epilepsy. sique de Paris, Conservatoire de Musique de Genève The chemical origins of life. in Switzerland, Rotterdam Conservatory of Music A young prostitute who lived in and Utrecht School of the Arts in the Netherlands. New Orleans’ notorious Storyville His compositions have been performed in Paris, 100 years ago. Amsterdam, Singapore, Seoul, London, Cologne, These are some of the inspirations for Steve Ever- Tokyo and New York City (including Lincoln Center ett’s work in sound and music. and Carnegie Hall). Everett, new dean of the College of Architecture, A native of Atlanta, he has a bachelor’s and two Design and the Arts, is a prolific composer whose master’s degrees — in music theory and trumpet works have been performed in 27 different countries performance — from Florida State University, and throughout Europe, Asia and North America. he earned a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the He came to UIC last summer from Emory Uni- Urbana-Champaign campus. versity in Atlanta, where he presented more than 200 Everett started out as a math major, with the idea works of contemporary music as conductor of Tha- of becoming an architect or engineer, but his love myris New Music Ensemble. for the trumpet, double bass and Javanese gamelan “A lot of what I do is algorithmic composition” intervened. with the help of a computer, said Everett, professor of “In my second year of college, every day I was music. playing one of the three for five, six hours,” he said. “I don’t have to decide the next note. It’s based on “And every day I noticed that my music got larger the parameters I put in. I build a structural model, and my calculus less, so I changed my major to and the computer helps me realize the piece based on music.” that structure.” Everett taught at Kennesaw State University, near He recently finished “First Life,” commissioned by Atlanta, for 13 years. the Center for Chemical Evolution to commemorate At Emory, where he spent 25 years, he started a the emergence of the first microorganisms, 3.5 billion computer music studio, chaired the music depart- years ago. ment and served as interim director of the Fox “The question is, how did that happen? How did Center for Humanistic Inquiry, chair of the faculty it move from inorganic chemistry to organic chemis- council and president of the university senate. try?” Everett said. He also played trumpet for the Atlanta Sym- “I was asked to produce a musical performance to phony. help explain that — something that would be true to Along the way, he has studied indigenous music the science but also be a performance that had aes- in Bali, Java and India. thetic qualities and be educational.” Everett’s appointment as UIC dean became of- He took a biochemical research data stream and Photo credit: Muhammad Nafisur Rahman ficial Aug. 1. He lives in Streeterville, while his wife, routed it into a keyboard. Steve Everett, dean of the College of Architecture, Design and the Arts, uses a computer Yayoi, who does music analysis, remains in Atlanta, “I listened to pitches, with the data determining to help create his musical compositions. “I build a structural model, and the computer where she is finishing a research project and putting where the notes are,” he said. helps me realize the piece based on that structure,” he says. their house on the market. The result was a 75-minute composition with a When she rejoins Everett, she’ll teach in the de- string quartet, narration, live audio processing, surround- frey Loeb, head of the department of neurology and rehabilita- partment of theatre and music. sound diffusion and live motion-capture video projection. tion in the College of Medicine. “As a composer, I’m always looking for ideas as the impe- Another Everett composition is “Ophelia’s Gaze,” a cham- It involves EEG mapping of rats’ brains to study epileptic tus for creating some kind of patterns of sounds to generate,” ber opera based on Bellocq’s Ophelia, by Natasha Trethewey, seizures. he said. U.S. poet laureate and Emory professor. “We’re looking at the impact of sound triggers,” Everett “So I read a fair amount of poetry and look at a lot of “The poems are based on imagined thoughts and percep- said. paintings. I’m looking for any kind of source that might reso- tions of a young prostitute in New Orleans,” a mixed-race “We want to understand if sound can be an inhibitor of nate with me at some level.” woman named Ophelia photographed by E.J. Bellocq in 1912 epidemic seizures. Maybe there can be a sonic treatment for Performances of some of Everett’s recent compositions in the red-light district of Storyville. human seizures.” can be viewed on his website, steveeverett.org Everett is also working on a nonmusical project with Jef- Everett has been a visiting professor of composition at [email protected] quotable “A large proportion of the customer base of these “We don’t know why this works, but it opens up new “A lot of the people I’ve met in New York have stores is made up of people who are struggling avenues for exploring the generation of hot flashes.” always said true New Yorkers are Mets fans. So I’m economically, including many minority group excited to get a chance to see them all out there.’’ members. These same groups are those increasingly Pauline Maki, professor of psychiatry and psychology, and disproportionately affected by the adverse con- on her study that found a common nerve block treatment UIC graduate and Major League Baseball player Curtis sequences of cigarettes and other tobacco products.” for pain may provide relief for women with moderate to Granderson on his move from the New York Yankees severe hot flashes, Feb. 17 HealthDay News to the New York Mets, Dec. 10 USA Today Patricia Finn, chair of the department of medicine and president of the American Thoracic Society, urging dollar stores and other discount retailers to follow CVS in ceas- ing sales of tobacco products, Feb. 19 Chicago Tribune FEBRUARY 26, 2014 I UIC NEWS I www.uicnews.uic.edu 3 White House announces $70M grant to UI LABS By Jeanne Galatzer-Levy and StarLight, an international research and as well as the bi- education communications exchange facil- partisan support UI LABS, an initiative begun more than ity for high-performance networks, are criti- from federal, state two years ago by the University of Illinois cal for the Blue Waters Peta-scale computing and local officials that draws on expertise from its three cam- facility on the Urbana-Champaign campus across the U.S.,” puses, was awarded a $70 million grant from in achieving the necessary speed links and said UI LABS the U.S. Department of Defense to create capacity for digital manufacturing, said interim executive Digital Manufacturing and Design Innova- Mitra Dutta, vice chancellor for research. director Caralynn tion Institute, a research center in Chicago The workforce development part of the Nowinski, who for digital manufacturing technology. project, Dutta said, is largely based on UIC’s earned an MD and UIC’s role in the proposal focuses on its Learning Sciences Research Institute and MBA at UIC. strengths in computer visualization and tech- Project Lead the Way, a summer outreach UI LABS raised nical workforce development. program for high school teachers in the Col- more than $250 President Obama announced the invest- lege of Engineering. million in addi- ment Tuesday as part of his vision to rein- Similar programs may be developed as tional funds in its vigorate U.S. manufacturing by creating new federal agencies push for greater competen- bid for the center, jobs, encouraging economic development cy in new manufacturing techniques among including $16 mil- Photo: Lance Long/Electronic Visualization Laboratory and spurring future innovation. U.S. workers, she said. lion from the State The Electronic Visualization Laboratory, which creates projects like this visualiza- “This is a transformative opportunity to UI LABS brings together industry, of Illinois. tion of the International Space Station, will play a role in the new center. shape the future of American manufactur- academic, government and community “This new digi- ing,” said Warren Holtsberg, chairman of UI partners with more than 500 supporting tal lab has the potential to revolutionize the way Gov.