AMERICAN.EDU/CAS/CONNECTIONS | SPRING 2012
From
Russia
with Love
Gaming
the
System
Being
Raoul
Middleman
Pedal
to the
Medals
Knockoff
Genes
Letter
from
the
Dean
On the Cover
Magazine Production
Raoul Middleman //
Loading Elevator.
1988 // Oil on paper
Publisher: College of Arts and Sciences //
Dean: Peter Starr // Managing Editor: Abbey
Becker // Writers: Abbey Becker and Josh Halpren //
Editor: Ali Kahn, UP // Designer: Nicky Lehming //
Webmaster: Thomas Meal // Senior Advisor: Mary
Schellinger // Send news items and comments to
Abbey Becker at casnews@american.edu.
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THOSE OF US WHO ARE LUCKY enough to work at universities like AU spend our lives
creating and sharing knowledge. In this issue of Connections, we are delighted to feature
some of the College of Arts and Sciences’ most passionate knowledge mavens—faculty,
students, and alumni, whose groundbreaking research has shaped both their discipline and
society at large.
The appointments of Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman as Distinguished Professors
attest to the value of the mark they’ve made at American University and in the broader
discipline of historical study. Economics professor James Bono is working to change air
travel as we know it by using statistical modeling and game theory to help NASA better
model the effects of increased airline traffic. Biology professor Kathleen DeCicco-Skinner
is testing how a particular gene can affect skin cancer development in mice in the hope of
developing new cancer treatments for humans.
The launch of the American University Initiative for Russian Culture gave life to Russian
ambassador Sergey Kislyak’s and donor Susan Lehrman’s conviction that sharing the
richness of Russian films, music, literature, and theatre will help American students see
modern Russia in a new light. Artist Raoul Middleman roamed the streets of the Baltimore
harbor and the Block for inspiration to paint the seedy reality of his hometown for his
exhibition, Raoul Middleman: City Limits.
Many AU students put their knowledge to work long before they walk at commencement.
Thanks to first-rate coaching by our faculty, four AU students recently brought home
top honors in a language competition for non-native Chinese speakers. While a public
history master’s student, Jen Jablonsky passed her love of history to others through her
internship at the Smithsonian Institution’s new National Museum of African American
History and Culture.
Others wait to get some life experience under their belt before making their mark, and they
find that their AU studies help them to make a real difference. Erik Taubeneck is using his
work in mathematics and statistics to help LivingSocial succeed in the competitive daily
deals market. Opera journalist Karyl Charna Lynn set aside a career in the sciences to
pursue her true passion for opera. And she established an endowed fund to ensure that AU
students who share that passion will be able to follow in her footsteps.
Happy reading,
Peter Starr
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences
AMERICAN.EDU/CAS/CONNECTIONS | SPRING 2012
Letter from the Dean
Distinguished Professors Named 2
Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman receive honors
Hitting a High Note 3
Alumna Karyl Charna Lynn funds new opera program
From Russia with Love 4
Initiative for Russian Culture fosters exchange and dialogue
Being Raoul Middleman 6
AU Museum director and curator Jack Rasmussen interviews Baltimore artist
Knockoff Genes 8
Biologist Kathleen DeCicco-Skinner studies link between a gene deficit and skin cancer
Gaming the System 9
Economist James Bono wins NASA grant to model airline behavior for policy making
Alumni Profile: Jen Jablonsky 10
The internship that launched a thousand interfaces
Alumni Profile: Erik Taubeneck 11
Numbers wonk creates metrics for measuring deal performance at LivingSocial
Pedal to the Medals 12
AU students win big at Chinese language competition
Achievements 13
humanities
Distinguished
Named
“Richard Breitman and
Allan Lichtman are extraordinary scholars, brilliant
teachers, and lifelong
advocates for social justice.”
—
­ Peter Starr
THE BOARD of Trustees
recently confirmed historians Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman as Distinguished
Professors. The title
honors those who have
received national and
4
international recognition
in their academic field.
“Richard Breitman
and Allan Lichtman are
extraordinary scholars,
brilliant teachers, and,
each in his own way, lifelong advocates for social
justice,” says Peter Starr,
dean of the College of
Arts and Sciences. “I
can think of no one at
this great university who
more thoroughly exemplifies our core values.”
Breitman says the title
by
Abbey
Becker
enables him to focus
more on research. “I
teach a little less and
I’m a little freer to explore
things on my own.”
That freedom to explore
is what got him to where
he is today. When Breitman came to teach at AU
in 1976, David Brandenberg, then department chair, told him he
could teach anything
he wanted (as long as
he got students)—with
one exception: he would
have to teach a course
on Nazi Germany. Breitman, a scholar of the
Weimar Republic, was
less than thrilled.
But in the process of
researching the subject
for his class, Breitman
encountered some gaps
Vanessa Robertson
Professors
and controversies that
piqued his interest. He
delved into the extensive
collection of Nazi-related
material at the National
Archives, which led to a
book, American Refugee
Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (University
of Indiana, 1988). Coauthored with colleague
Alan Kraut, it looks at
American policy and reactions to Nazi Germany
and the Holocaust.
While that project was
still underway, he came
across a story that led
him down a new path.
“Along the way, I encountered a mystery about a
German industrialist who
had leaked information
to the West about Nazi
plans during the war,”
arts
of students, and to uphold the ideals of our
very special university.”
Lichtman has written
numerous books, including five editions of his
critically acclaimed The
Keys to the White House
(Lexington, 2000), which
explains his system for
predicting and analyzing
American presidential
election results. Based
on this formula, he has
accurately called the winner of every presidential
election since Ronald
Reagan’s reelection in
1984. His most recent
book, White Protestant
Nation: The Rise of the
American Conservative
Movement (Atlantic
Monthly, 2008) was
named a National Book
Critics Circle Award
finalist for nonfiction.
A pioneer on the AU
campus, Lichtman served
as founding director of
the University Honors
Program. He taught the
first honors seminar on
U.S. presidential elections, as well as courses on women’s history
and women in politics in
the twentieth century.
Active in public affairs,
Lichtman is a regular
political commentator on
NBC, CNN, VOA, and
other U.S. and international networks, and he
is interviewed frequently
by print media. He has
served as an expert witness in numerous landmark voting and civil
rights cases. “My goal,”
says Lichtman, “has been
to fulfill the mission of
the university through
public engagement and
public service.” 
Hitting a
High Note
by
Abbey
Becker
Courtesy of Karyl Charna Lynn
Breitman says. “That he
had done so was known,
but his identity was not.
Using my growing knowledge of the National
Archives, I was able to
solve the mystery.”
His discovery led to
another book, released
before the other and
titled Breaking the
Silence: The German
Who Exposed the Final
Solution (Simon and
Schuster, 1986). It was
cowritten with renowned
scholar Walter Laqueur.
“Now,” says Breitman,
“I was stuck deeply in the
middle of the Holocaust
and Nazi Germany, and
I figured I might as well
go all in.” The result?
His seminal work, The
Architect of Genocide:
Himmler and the Final
Solution (Knopf, 1991).
Hired as director of
historical research for
the Nazi War Criminal
Records and Imperial
Japanese Records
Interagency Group, he
assisted in the declassification of some nine
million pages of government records. Those
records served as the
basis of his study, Official
Secrets: What the Nazis
Planned, What the British and Americans Knew
(Hill and Wang, 1998).
Allan Lichtman hopes
that he inspires young
scholars at AU. “For me,
this honor is a culmination of 38 years of hard
work and service at AU,”
he says. “I have endeavored to contribute to
the worlds of ideas and
actions, to convey knowledge and understanding
to nearly two generations
KARYL CHARNA LYNN, SOC/MA
’80, wants to ensure that students
interested in opera can find a
place at American University. She
recently allocated a portion of her
charitable estate plan to establish an endowed fund dedicated
to advancing the appreciation of
opera. The fund will provide support for faculty, programming,
and guest lecturers at AU.
While pursuing an undergraduate degree in chemistry at the
University of Pennsylvania, Lynn
discovered that it was her courses
in opera and symphony history
that excited her. Which got her
thinking that, perhaps a career
in science was not her dream.
Still, she enrolled in a doctoral program in biochemistry at
Columbia. Instead of completing the program, she moved to
Washington, D.C. While working
as a producer and correspondent
covering science and medical
topics for ZDF German Television, she got her master’s in film
and broadcast journalism at AU.
And that reset her course.
Since 1989, Lynn has worked
full-time as an operatic journalist.
She is currently the U.S. correspondent for Opera Now and the
author of six books on the subject.
Making a donation to American
seemed logical to Lynn. “Washington is home,” she said. “I support
the institutions here that are important to me and, as an alumna,
I wanted to be sure American
University is among them.” 
5
5
arts & humanities
From Russia
with Love
by
Josh Halpren
“We hope to expose American
students . . . to the enormous
variety and richness of
Russian culture.”
— Anton Fedyashin
“UNDERSTANDING a
country’s culture helps us
to understand its people.”
And that, says Susan
Lehrman, advisory committee chair and cofounder,
is the crux of AU’s Initiative for Russian Culture
(IRC). “Through greater
cultural awareness and
6
experience, students
can achieve broader
global perspectives and
a deeper appreciation
for different cultures.”
In spring 2010, Lehrman met with Sergey
Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United
States, and Peter Starr,
dean of the College
of Arts and Sciences,
to discuss establishing an initiative at AU
to connect American
and Russian students.
Ambassador Kislyak
shared his dream of a
collaborative student
program with Lehrman
when she was chair of
the Washington National
Opera Ball, held that year
at the Russian embassy.
Lehrman thought immediately of a link with AU.
“American University
was the perfect place
to house this initiative
because they already
had a robust Russian
studies program,” she
says. “Our initiative
enhances AU’s existing programs, as well
as future plans.”
The IRC takes its
mission beyond AU’s
campus and into the D.C.
community. Students in
the Consortium of Universities of the Washington
Metropolitan Area receive
invitations to events.
“It really is an unprecedented attempt by
an embassy to reach
out directly to American
students,” says Anton
Fedyashin, a history
professor and associate director of the IRC.
“Ambassador Kislyak is a
pioneer when it comes to
building these connections through young people. Through the initiative,
we hope to expose
American students from
all of the consortium universities to the enormous
variety and richness
of Russian culture.”
Eric Lohr, also in the
history department and
IRC director, emphasizes Russia’s influence
on world culture. “Every
Library of Congress. Imagelink Photography
Vanessa Robertson
arts & humanities
undergrad should be
familiar with the great
elements of Russian
culture,” he says, citing literary figures like
Dostoevsky and Tolstoy,
and composers, such as
Tchaikovsky. Russian
culture, he says, is
“a key part of a liberal
arts education.”
The initiative officially
launched in September
2011 with an event at
the Library of Congress.
Attendees included
nearly 250 students and
faculty from consortium
universities, as well as
representatives from
the State Department,
Congress, international
institutions, and think
tanks. The program
featured a screening
of We Are Jazzmen, a
Russian film chronicling
the rise of jazz in Soviet
Russia in the 1920s.
“Jazz is a very American form of music,” says
Fedyashin. “Exploring its
fate in the Soviet Union
from the 1920s to the
1990s provides a very
different perspective on
U.S.– Soviet relations
during the Cold War.”
The IRC intentionally
tries to dispel Cold Warera stereotypes of Russians, reinforced by the
arms race and McCarthyism, and present a
more accurate picture
of the Soviet experience
after World War II.
So far, students have
responded enthusiastically to course offerings on Russian culture.
Fedyashin reported that
Dostoevsky’s Russia,
Russian Film and Politics, and the Cold War
and the Spy Novel were
particularly popular and
reflected students’ interest in all things Russian.
“There is a sense,”
he says, “that they
haven’t heard the whole
story, or at least heard
it accurately. And these
courses, as well as IRC
events, help students to
build their knowledge
of a country that can
seem very distant.”
This summer, he
plans to take a group
of consortium students
to St. Petersburg for
an up close and personal exploration of
Dostoevsky’s work.
“Students will walk
where Dostoevsky
walked and count the
individual steps, just as
he did,” says Fedyashin.
“Reading and analyzing
Russian literature is extremely important. But
actually going there and
experiencing the country
and its culture can add so
much to the meaning and
context of these books.”
The IRC has enhanced
the breadth and depth
of AU’s Russia-related
arts activities—in musical
performances, museum
exhibitions, and theatre.
Department of Performing Arts professor Gail Humphries
Mardirosian created
Project ARTS and the
American-Russian
Theatre Symposium.
In 2006, Mardirosian initiated the first
exchange between AU
theatre students and
their counterparts at the
Russian State Academic
Volkov Theatre in Yaroslavl. Project ARTS, in
partnership with the Saint
Petersburg State Theater
Arts Academy, hosted
Alicia Ivanova, a professor at the academy, in
fall 2010. Students from
the academy visited AU
for a week in fall 2011
to participate in intensive
master classes and workshops with students here.
“The arts serve as a
connection, a conduit for
humanity,” says Mardirosian. “The remarkable
communication that
occurs between actors
is something that occurs
wherever you go.” While
it was amazing for each
group of students to
perform scenes for each
other, she says that the
most meaningful part of
the experience was the
challenge of working
with their foreign counterparts to perform
a scene together. “It
was remarkable how
they overcame the language barrier,” she
says. “There is something special about the
artistic experience that
brings actors together.”
This spring, Mardirosian will take a troupe
of AU students to St.
Petersburg to work
with academy students on a production
of Jane Martin’s collection of women’s monologues, Talking With.
The AU Chamber
Singers have tentative
plans for a Russian tour
in May 2013, during
which they would perform jointly with Russian
orchestral groups in
Moscow and around the
Ural region. This sort of
special cultural diplomacy, once the domain
of the State Department, is now possible
with help from Associate
Consultants for Education Abroad (ACFEA).
IRC founders Lehrman, Starr, and Kislyak
believe that the IRC has
the potential to foster
greater understanding
between American and
Russian students for
years to come. “The success of the Initiative for
Russian Culture,” says
Starr, “shows how deeply
committed students at
AU and in the greater
Washington area truly are
to understanding Russian
culture and building
connections between
our two countries.”
Fedyashin adds,
“We ultimately aim to
create a snowball effect.
As more students get
involved, the more we
can raise awareness
of Russian culture and
inspire students to truly
understand this extremely
important country.” 
7
arts
Being
The following
interview by Jack
Rasmussen, director and curator of
the American University Museum,
appeared originally
in the exhibition
catalog for Raoul
Middleman: City
Limits (January 2–
March 18, 2012).
Detail from Self Portrait. 1990. Oil on canvas
Raoul Middleman
8
Jack Rasmussen: My
first curatorial effort was
an exhibition of Grace
Hartigan’s recent work
in 1974 at the Watkins
Gallery of American
University. I went to her
studio in Baltimore to
see her recently figurative work. She had left
New York and come
to Baltimore, leaving
behind Abstract Expressionism, which was
really quite scandalous.
I remember she told
me at the time that the
best painter in Baltimore
was Raoul Middleman.
Raoul Middleman:
She was very generous to me. When I had
my first show at Maryland Institute College
of Art (MICA) in 1965,
she wrote the introduction to my catalog. I
actually worked with her
for many years as an
adjunct professor in her
Hoffberger program at
MICA. I was an artist in
residence there, as was
Sam Gilliam for a time.
To return the compliment, she had a terrific
sense of mastering the
space of the painting.
She had a real genius for
that. Her energy would
command and dominate the whole canvas.
But even though her
work changed when
she left New York, she
always had a figurative
base. I think her talent
was to take her immediate environment, the
Lower East Side at that
time, and translate the
edgy energy of that into
some sort of negotiable
space between abstraction and figuration.
JR: She must have seen
some of those qualities in you, though she
was never a narrative
painter the way you are.
RM: She responded to
Baltimore in her own way.
For me, it was the Block,
which was a burlesque
area on East Baltimore
Street. As a kid, I would
take the trolley car in
from the suburbs and
roam the streets with
the nightclubs and go to
the Gayety or the Clover
Theater across the street.
And then two blocks
south of that was the
harbor, and the harbor
had a grim, kind of funereal presence. The two
things juxtaposed were
the basis for a lot of my
work. The other big influence as a kid, of course,
was comic books­—
the lure and energy of
their projectile covers
and caped heroes.
JR: There is certainly
a very strong graphic
element to your work.
RM: Comic books were
like an extension of
Renaissance and Greek
art, in a way. You have
the heroes, you have the
Tintoretto space to make
the format more interesting, to shake it out of a
linear dullness. You look
up at something, you
look down on another
scene­—all these gods
and goddesses that circulate among the clouds
that occasionally come
down to earth to cause all
kinds of panic among us
mortals. Comics could be
seen as the dying gasp of
Renaissance morphology.
Then in Baltimore you
had the Block, which
was burlesque and jokey
and dealt with our carnal
interests, and on the
other side you had the
harbor, with all its flottage. As a kid, I used to
roam between these two
places. I remember one
foggy night exploring the
harbor with a friend of
mine. We wound up at
the end of Henderson
Wharf, sitting on top of
one of those boxcars,
which were themselves
on top of barges, drinking whiskey, talking about
becoming artists along the
lines of Charles Dickens,
ducking when the Coast
Guard came by with its
prying searchlights.
I think Baltimore has a
certain funky presence
in all its major artists.
You take somebody like
John Waters—there’s
a funky kind of arrogance and challenge
to conventions. You
find that as far back as
Mencken, in his prose
in the Sun. It’s a kind of
Baltimore tone, I think.
It has a squalid degeneracy about it that gets
transformed into an icon
of subversive glamour.
JR: I think of Baltimore
as the perfect antidote
to Washington, D.C.
RM: It is. Washington is
a corporate town while
Baltimore is a haven for
eccentrics and characters, loners, and misfits.
Most people think of
landscape as honeybees and flowers and
the circuitry of hurtling
clouds in the midst of
summer splendor. But
the harbor has another kind of beauty, with
the rot and decay in
which nature reclaims
man-made things.
I spent a lot of time
on the Block. We lived
for several years on the
Block above Boots’s
Show Bar and all the
barkers lining the street
out there. The burlesque
comedian was an inspiration to me, people like
Max Baron at the Piccadilly Club and Stinky
Fields. On the stage, you
have a painted burlap
backdrop that underscores the fiction, which
has its underpinnings in
radical poverty. In the
endless array of wacky
skits, it was the language
of the comics, which
transformed the vulnerability of the human condition into the hilarious
richness, which became
for me the essence of
burlesque theater.
JR: Tell me about your
technique. You actually
mix your dry pigments
from the earth right into
the oil medium on your
palette. I’m fascinated by how your technique is entwined with
your subject matter.
Detail from Madi. 2009. Oil on canvas
arts
RM: In the studio, you
have just the raw pigment, basic minerals
that come out of the
earth that you mix with
linseed oil. The image
comes through all this
muck of paint, through
its manipulation. A painting is finished when it
suddenly changes into
this glamorous richness,
an otherness, a painterly presence that hovers
above the fragile transience of the everyday.
Nonetheless, I like
a kind of visceral presence. The paint itself
should have authority.
I like the paintings to say
something about paint.
If I were writing for the
violin, I would like to
reveal something about
the instrument, as well
as the melody. The paint
should participate in the
transformation so that you
experience the paint, its
opacity and transparence,
its fluidity and its focus on
describing different properties of being. If a painting becomes too slick,
however, and goes too
quickly to the descriptive
image and forfeits the
presence of the paint,
I don’t like it as much. I
prefer somebody like Soutine, Rembrandt, Courbet.
My ambition has
always been to have a
sense of the body, the
body’s embrace on the
canvas, be part of the
image. De Kooning said
he only needed as far
as he could stretch his
arms out to paint. He
was bored with cosmic
space, a place to hang
stars on. He just wanted
what the body can hold
in its embrace. Painting
becomes, essentially,
a total portrait, a selfportrait, any painting is
that in a sense—a portrait
of the body and its nearest cohort, the paint. 
9
sciences
Vanessa Robertson
Knockoff Genes
“Understanding the genes that regulate
inflammation . . . helps us design drugs that
block the pathways that become overactive as
a cell turns into a cancer cell.”
—Kathleen DeCicco-Skinner
WHEN BIOLOGY professor
Kathleen DeCicco-Skinner was
a child, she preferred to spend
her days off in her father’s
microbiology lab at Catholic University. “I’d be streaking bacterial plates, eating soft-serve with
his grad students,” she says.
“We’d plan fun experiments.”
Her enthusiasm for research
has been going strong ever
since. In August 2011, DeCicco-Skinner was awarded
a $381,871 grant from the
National Institutes of Health
(NIH) to investigate, collaboratively with Jonathan Wiest at
NIH, the relationship between
skin cancer in mice and a
missing gene called Tumor
progression locus 2 (Tpl2).
“What we found out previously is, if we completely
knock the gene out of mice,
about 80 percent of those
mice develop skin cancer,”
she says. “What we’re trying
to figure out now is the mechanism behind this increased
tumorigenic potential.”
10
Her theoretical starting point
has some historical basis. About
200 years ago, German scientist Rudolf Virchow proposed a
link between inflammation and
cancer based on observations
of what he believed were inflammatory cells surrounding
isolated tumors. Virchow’s
hypothesis only resurfaced
with the onset of the millennium, when it launched a ton
of research around the link
between chronic inflammation and the development of
cancer. So, for example, if you
have hepatitis, which is inflammation of the liver, you’re more
likely to develop liver cancer,
DeCicco-Skinner explains.
Mice lacking the Tpl2 gene
show more inflammation than
normal mice—and this inflammation in the Tpl2-knockout
mice contributes to increased
susceptibility to skin cancer.
DeCicco-Skinner believes that
Tpl2 works as a skin cancer
tumor suppressor gene.
“We think it normally controls
by
Abbey Becker
your inflammatory response. So,
when the gene is absent, inflammation—and thus potential to
develop skin cancer—increases,” she says. “If you already
have a cell that’s been what we
call ‘initiated,’ meaning it has a
DNA mutation, the inflammatory
cells can give promoting effects
to that cancer cell, causing it
to grow quicker than normal.”
For the next three years,
DeCicco-Skinner plans to
conduct biological tests of
isolated skin cells taken from
these mice. Her goal is to identify what exactly causes such
high rates of skin cancer, which
could help launch new cancer
treatments down the road.
“Understanding the pathways better, and understanding
the genes that regulate inflammation,” she says, “helps us
actually design more sophisticated drugs that can then
go and block the pathways
that become overactive as a
cell turns into a cancer cell.”
To assist her in her research
at AU, DeCicco-Skinner has
enlisted a couple of her
undergraduate and graduate
students. Their role will be to
extract protein and RNA from
cells and examine the pathways that indicate inflammation
to identify which proteins are
altered when Tpl2 is absent.
DeCicco-Skinner emphasizes the importance of working
with students in the lab. “If you
involve them in actually doing
hands-on research, I think the
students get a lot more out of
that. They learn the intricacies
of designing experiments, analyzing data from them, coming
up with the next experiment or
the next question to ask.” 
EVER SPENT HOURS
stuck in an airport or on a
plane because of a flight
delay? Unfortunately, over
the next couple of years,
the problem is only going
to get worse. The Federal Aviation Administration
(FAA) expects demand
for air travel to skyrocket,
and with that will come
an increase in air traffic.
“We have lots of working, productive people
sitting on tarmac and
in airports all the time,
missing flights to important meetings,” says
economics professor
James Bono. “That’s
an enormous efficiency
loss for the economy.”
The FAA currently
administers the national
air space system for the
airlines at very low cost.
social sciences
Gaming
the System
Vanessa Robertson
by
Abbey Becker
As a result, the skies
continue to get more
crowded. “It’s a national
resource, and when more
and more people want
to use it, it gets more
clogged up,” says Bono.
“It’s a type of resource
where, if too many people
use it, it degrades the
quality of it. You have
to figure out how to,
through technology and
economics, organize the
entire system so that you
can service everyone,
and everyone’s happy.”
Bono, along with colleagues Juan Alonso of
Stanford University and
Philippe Bonnefoy of
Booz Allen Hamilton, won
a National Aeronautics
and Space Administration (NASA) grant for
$500,000, renewable
each year for up to three
years. The grant funds a
project to create software
that will enable NASA to
model airline behavior,
and thus develop policy
and technology, such as
advanced GPS systems,
to help airlines manage air traffic. Essentially, says Bono, NASA
wants to be able to “see
the effects of various
policies on the strategic
behavior of airlines.”
But the FAA has to
make a commitment to
adopt new policies—and
individual airlines won’t
invest in the new technology, called NextGen
Equipage, unless they all
do. “Ultimately, the quality of air travel is going to
depend on the interaction between the policy
“This is taking game theory into
the world of machine learning
and artificial intelligence.”
—James Bono
makers and the airlines,”
Bono explained. “How
can they sort out the
operation of the national air space system?”
Bono is responsible
for the technical side
of the modeling, which
employs game theory, a
mathematical approach
that predicts the strategic behavior of selfinterested entities when
they’re forced to consider each other’s goals.
“My job is to determine
what’s the best mathematical model of airline
behavior,” he says.
The grant proposal,
based on a paper by
Bono, Alonso, and Bonnefoy, modeled a cyber
attack on an electrical
grid. “If you’re the person who’s in charge
of the grid,” he says,
“you have to figure out
when somebody has
compromised the grid,
and you have to try to
mitigate the damage.”
The NASA project
takes that work a step
further. “This is really the
cutting edge of game theory,” explains Bono. “This
is taking game theory
into the world of machine
learning and artificial intelligence, which we should
have done a long time
ago. This is really taking
it into that world and joining it with economics.” 
11
alumni profiles
Jen
by
Abbey Becker
Courtesy of Jen Jablonsky
Jablonsky
“I now have experience with planning,
museum education, and public programming. It’s opened my eyes to so
much more that I could do.”
JEN JABLONSKY, MA pub-
lic history ’11, thought
she wanted a job with
the National Park Service.
But her internship with
the Smithsonian Institution’s new National
Museum of African
American History and
Culture shifted her trajectory. “I now have
experience with planning,
12
museum education,
and public programming, which I’d never
done before,” says
Jablonsky. “It’s opened
my eyes to so much
more that I could do.”
The museum’s internship program is an offshoot of a partnership
with American University. Initiated by Lonnie
Bunch, the museum’s
director and an AU
alum, the program offers
three intern positions:
two in curatorial affairs
and one in education.
During her term as an
education intern, Jablonsky’s responsibilities
have primarily involved
assisting with research
for a youth gallery that
will showcase children in
different historical periods. “We’re hoping to
represent every child in
the gallery, not just African American children,”
says Jablonsky. “We want
to show the diversity of
children in the different
eras of slavery, segregation, in 1968, and then
today, where children will
be able to create their
own contributions.”
Now, with her internship extended, Jablonsky has the opportunity
to broaden her scope of
work and experience.
The Smithsonian’s
National Museum of
American History is
teasing the public with a
series of short-term exhibitions for the African American museum, previews of
what’s to come when the
museum opens in 2015.
The current show, Slavery
at Jefferson’s Monticello:
Paradox of Liberty, runs
through October 12.
“I’ve been able to
do some writing for the
exhibit script, and my
work was included in the
final version,” she says.
“I never thought, as an
intern, that they would use
anything I wrote.” She
also helped to develop
classroom programs and
has written lesson plans.
During her previous
alumni profiles
Erik Taubeneck
by
Abbey Becker
Vanessa Robertson
internship with the
National Park Service,
Jablonsky says she most
enjoyed getting people
excited about history.
“It was about showing
them something cool,
then trying to find out
what they were interested in and getting
them engaged. It was so
rewarding to see it on
their faces,” she says.
She is still teaching
visitors about history,
but because her work at
the museum is behind
the scenes, she doesn’t
get the immediate feedback. “It’s different,” she
says, “because I have
to wait so long to know
if it’s helping people.”
While the internship
relates more to museum
studies, there’s overlap
with her public history
studies at AU. “When I
did readings in class, a
lot of times I would think,
why am I reading this?
One thing that has surprised me the most is that
people really are talking
about the things I was
reading or are mentioning the authors to make
a point,” says Jablonsky.
“I can say, oh, yeah, I
read that. I know what
they’re talking about.”
Although she’s been
with the African American museum for more
than six months and has
taken on more work and
responsibility, she’s still
in awe at the level of her
involvement. “Even when
I was just starting, they
gave me responsibilities
and let me participate in
meetings,” she says. “I’m
always amazed that they
still ask for my input.” 
“We use these metrics to see the
relative performance between
different cities, the size of a city
and its market, and other factors
to come up with a standard way to
measure how well a deal does.”
WHEN YOU CHECK your e-mail
each morning, your inbox is
probably flooded with offers
from daily deal sites. You can
thank, or blame, people like Erik
Taubeneck, BA economics and
statistics ’08 and MA mathematics ’10. He spends his days at
LivingSocial figuring out which
deals you will receive.
As a senior yield optimization associate,Taubeneck works
in the consumer business
optimization department doing
data analysis. “I look at past
performance and try to come
up with ways to predict future
performance, and to determine
what works and what doesn’t,
what we should run and what
we shouldn’t,” he explains.
He and his team create
metrics for measuring deal
performance in all kinds of
categories and make suggestions for specific markets.
“We use these metrics to
see the relative performance
between different cities, the
size of a city and its market,
and other factors to come up
with a standard way to measure
how well a deal does,” says
Taubeneck. “From that, we can
do things, like look at seasonality and day of the week, to
decide on strategies that help
us operate in the future.”
LivingSocial has to work
hard to distinguish itself in
such a crowded market, with
Groupon leading the pack. “Our
competitors are coming at us,”
he says. “They are growing
fast, so there’s an extremely
competitive aspect between
us and other competitors in
the space. We believe that
fine-tuning the way we look
at and measure performance
can only help the company
perform better in the future.”
Taubeneck spends most of
his time programming so he
can pull data to do analyses
and create reports. He’s also
using the problem-solving tools
he learned at AU. “With my
degree, especially with mathematics, the most useful thing I
learned was how to understand
a concept quickly,” says Taubeneck. “It’s the same thing at LivingSocial. I need to be able to
look at something, read through
a book to find what I need, then
take it apart and understand
how I can apply it very quickly.”
More specifically, he uses
machine learning and econometrics to measure and normalize deal performance. “The
most difficult part is not the
actual statistics and mathematics,” says Taubeneck, “but the
engineering required to obtain
and process the data, then publishing the results that will be
used throughout the company.”
When he finished graduate
school, Taubeneck didn’t
exactly have a vision of his
dream job. Mostly, he was
looking for a job that presented
interesting problems to work
on and solve. But being techminded, he thought he’d like to
work for a tech startup, and he
sees LivingSocial as a good fit.
“Erik has a great ability to
not only understand mathematics but also to see how
it is used in the real world,”
says his graduate adviser at
AU, Stephen Casey. “Working at LivingSocial gives him
a chance to use all the math
tricks we taught him at AU.”
It doesn’t hurt that LivingSocial’s workplace culture is a
lot more fun than his previous
job doing cleanup at Freddie
Mac. Otherwise, he said, the
actual job isn’t that different
and the approach is similar—
only now he’s calculating daily
deals instead of mortgages. 
13
13
humanities
Pedal
to
the
Medals
by
Josh
Halpren
“We’re a small program, but
because of that we can give
our students a lot of personal
attention and support.”
—Xiaoquan Raphael Zhang
WHEN ERIC MCCABE,
BA business administration ’14, discovered
an opportunity to flex
his Chinese skills, he
jumped at the chance.
The Jiangsu Cup, cosponsored by George
Washington University,
the International Cultural Exchange Center
of Jiangsu Province, and
the Institute for International Studies at Nanjing
University, challenged
undergraduate non-native
Chinese speakers to
prove their command of
the language in a multiround competition.
McCabe, president of
AU’s Chinese Language
Club, began studying
Chinese because of
his interest in global
business. “China is
a country that is only
going to become more
important,” he says. “If
we’re going to be able
14
to compete with China
economically, we have
to understand their language, and more importantly who they are.”
With just two weeks
to prepare for the Cup,
McCabe and his fellow
AU student participants
had their work cut out
for them.
The impetus behind
the effort was Xiaoquan
Raphael Zhang, who
joined the College faculty
as a professor of Chinese in September. “We
saw this contest as a
great opportunity for our
students to not only work
on their speech skills,”
says Zhang, “but to
interact with students of
Chinese from other area
universities and to learn
more about an important region of China.”
As their first challenge,
students had to submit
a recorded statement to
contest judges. Coached
by Zhang and several
other instructors in the
Department of Language
and Foreign Studies, four
of the five AU contestants
made it to the final round.
Finalists had to prepare a speech on a given
theme, the charm of
Jiangsu Province, to be
delivered at the contest.
“Jiangsu Province has
a rich, traditional culture and heritage,” says
Zhang. “It also represents one of China’s
most dynamic economies.
This contest was a great
opportunity for students
to learn about the unique
aspects of this very
important part of China.”
McCabe related the
story of how he lost, and
then found, a friend’s
passport in a Nanjing taxi
during a stint in China as
a high school exchange
student. “I think the
judges really appreciated the fact that I had
a personal connection
to the province,” says
McCabe. Evidently. They
gave him a gold award.
Bryan Yannantuono,
BA political science and
international relations
’13, won a silver award
for his speech. He says
that understanding the
Chinese language and
China as a nation is critical because “China is the
second largest economy
in the world, and they are
set to overtake the United
States as the largest
world economy by 2020.”
Tone is everything in
Chinese, says Yannantuono. The same word
in Chinese can have
very different meanings
depending on the speaker’s tonality. He credits
Svetlana Xu, his instructor at AU and a native
Chinese speaker, with
teaching him the nuances
of the language and how
to use tone effectively
to communicate to a
Chinese audience, and
also the importance of
understanding Chinese
culture and heritage.
“Professor Xu has
been one of the best,
most helpful professors
I’ve had at AU,” says
Yannantuono. “She really
makes sure that her students not only learn the
Chinese language but
about China itself.”
The other two AU
student finalists, Aaron
Turk, BA international
studies ’13, and Matthew
Wagner, BA international studies ’12, took
home bronze awards. “I
think the fact that all of
our students who competed in the final round
won awards says a lot
about the strength of our
program,” says Zhang.
“We’re a small program,
but because of that we
can give our students
a lot of personal attention and support.”
McCabe’s gold came
with a full scholarship
for a master’s at Nanjing
University, including full
tuition, housing, health
insurance, and a monthly
stipend. The sophomore
decided to forfeit the
prize, however, because
he will not be ready
to pursue a graduate
degree before the offer
expires. All is not lost,
though; he’s doubling
up on the silver prize
with Yannantuono. The
two will receive a fully
funded, eight-day tour of
Jiangsu Province through
the International Cultural
and Exchange Center.
As for the bronze winners, they will receive a
partial scholarship for a
four-week Chinese language program at Nanjing
University this summer.
The opportunity to
study Chinese in China,
says Zhang, will be exponentially beneficial for
these students. “Chinese
is a critical language to
know. It is also very different from English. Our
program helps students
to master the language.
But the opportunity to
actually go to China and
learn more about Chinese culture, economy,
and society will help
students to use the language as a tool for learning so much more.” 
achievements
Appointments
& Honors
RICHARD SHA (literature) received a National
Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to complete his book, Imagining the Imagination: Science
and British Romanticism, 1750–1832.
NAOMI BARON (language and foreign
studies) was invited to join the editorial board of
Discourse, Context and Media, a new journal published by Elsevier.
ANASTASIA SNELLING (SETH) was among
a group representing Kelly Miller Middle School
honored by First Lady Michelle Obama for efforts
to fight hunger, obesity, and disease among Washington’s youth.
SARAH IRVINE BELSON (SETH) is spearheading a partnership with City Year, through
which the School of Education, Teaching, and
Health will provide graduate education to a
cohort of corps participants.
DAVID ANDREW SNIDER (performing arts)
was selected for the National Arts Strategies’
Chief Executive Program and will spend 18
months reimagining cultural institutions and how
they can contribute to civil society.
RICHARD BREITMAN (history) and ALLAN
LICHTMAN (history) have been confirmed as
Distinguished Professors by the Board of Trustees. (See story p. 2)
KATHARINA VESTER’S (history) paper,
“Regime Change,” was awarded the Belasco
Prize for Scholarly Excellence by the Association
for the Study of Food and Society.
KATHLEEN FRANZ (history) was named
the 2011–2012 Goldman Sachs Fellow at the
Smithsonian Institution National Museum of
American History.
MONICA HAZANGELES, MA arts management
’96, and MOLLY SMITH, MA performing arts ’76,
were named on the Washingtonian magazine’s list
of Washington’s 100 most powerful women.
CONSUELO HERNANDEZ (language and
foreign studies) received the Antonio Machado
Poetry Accessit Award for “Polifonia sobre rieles.”
ROBERT JERNIGAN (mathematics and statistics) won a special award for the Best Evidence of
Inspiring Students at the Joint Statistical Meetings
in Miami Beach for his video, Through the Eyes of
a Statistician.
DAN KALMAN (mathematics and statistics)
was awarded the Beckenbach Book Prize by the
Mathematical Association of America for Uncommon Mathematical Excursions: Polynomials and
Related Realms.
ERIC LOHR (history) was awarded a National
Council for Eurasian and East European Research
fellowship for spring 2012.
BARRY MCCARTHY’S (psychology) book
Enduring Desire won the 2011 American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and
Therapists award for best consumer book of
the year.
PAMELA NADELL (history) is one of four members of the Historians Team and a consulting
historian for the media at the National Museum of
American Jewish History.
JEANNE ROBERTS (literature, emerita)
received an award from the Folger Shakespeare
Library for Outstanding Contributions to the
Innovative Teaching of Shakespeare in American
Classrooms.
Grants
& Research
JAMES BONO (economics) received a
$115,000 grant from NASA to develop models
and software to predict air carrier behavior.
(See story p. 9)
KATHLEEN DICICCO-SKINNER (biology)
received a $381,871 grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project investigating how the
Tpl2 gene contributes to skin cancer susceptibility.
(See story p. 8)
JEREMIAH DITTMAR (economics) received a
$143,910 grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking for a project, “Spillovers to Slavery: The Long and Short Run Economic Impacts
of Slavery in the U.S.A.”
DOUGLAS FOX (chemistry) was awarded
$158,476 by the National Institute for Standards
and Technology for the first year of a three-year
project, “Lignocellulosic Materials as Intumescing Flame Retardants for Bio-based Polymer
Composites.”
GREGORY HARRY (physics) received a
$12,028 grant from the California Institute of Technology for his project, “Coating Thermal Noise in
Advanced LIGO.”
ANASTASIA SNELLING (SETH) received a
$94,813 award from Kaiser Permanente for a project, “Community Voices for Health Initiative.” She
also received a $30,000 award from the USDA
Economic Research Service for another project, “Behavioral Economics-based Strategies for
Improving Consumption of Health Foods Provided
as a Part of NSLB School Meals.” Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Mid-Atlantic States gave
her a $20,000 grant for her project, “Food Waste
Data Collection Project.”
Publications
& Productions
MATT BOERUM (audio technology) released
his first solo album, Cold Hearted Disaster, in February 2012.
JONA COLSON (literature) published “Anne
Sexton’s ‘The Little Peasant’” in the Explicator. His
poem, “Doctor to Patient (II),” will be published in
the Potomac Review in spring 2012.
JOHN ELDERKIN (literature) wrote two songs
for the Arena Stage production of The Book Club
Play.
GINA EVERS (literature) published “When I
Miss My Mother” in Copper Nickel 17 and “Pomegranate” in Bloom.
KATE HAULMAN (history) published The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America
(University of North Carolina, 2011).
DAVID KEPLINGER (literature) released By and
By: The Copybook Songs of Issac P. Anderson,
based on lyrics by his great-great-grandfather. He
also published a co-translation of House Inspections (BOA Editions), a collection of prose poems
by Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen, with whom
he collaborated in 2010.
ADREA LAWRENCE (SETH) published Lessons
from an Indian Day School: Negotiating Colonization in Northern New Mexico, 1902–1907 (University of Kansas).
ERIC LOHR’S (history) Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens
during World War I has been translated and published in Russia by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie
(New Literature Review).
GAIL HUMPHRIES MARDIROSIAN (performing arts), NINA SHAPIRO-PERL (anthropology), and MYRA SKLAREW (literature, emerita)
contributed chapters to The Power of Witnessing:
Reflections, Reverberations, and Traces of the
Holocaust: Trauma, Psychoanalysis, and the Living
Mind (Routledge, forthcoming April 2012).
A composition by PAUL OEHLERS (performing
arts), Protolith, was selected by Ablaze Records
for inclusion on a new CD, Electronic Masters,
Vol. 1. The piece, premiered by Nobue Matsuoka-Motley at the International Community for
Auditory Display Conference, was accepted for
the 2012 University of Alabama–Huntsville New
Music Festival.
The Japanese translation of The Rich Get Richer
and the Poor Get Prison by JEFFREY REIMAN
(philosophy) was published in January.
15
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