Wallenberg fellow to follow survivors in Ethiopia on their journey for justice
ANN ARBOR — Carly Marten was in Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia, for a summer project last year when she decided to attend a feminist film festival.(more…)
AUSTIN, Texas — Lucy, the most famous fossil of a human ancestor, probably died after falling from a tree, according to a study appearing in Nature led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — Researchers have debated for more than two decades the likely impacts, if any, of global warming on the worldwide incidence of malaria, a mosquito-borne disease that infects more than 300 million people each year.
Now, University of Michigan ecologists and their colleagues are reporting the first hard evidence that malaria does—as had long been predicted—creep to higher elevations during warmer years and back down to lower altitudes when temperatures cool. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — Brain drain is so severe in Ethiopia that the nation’s health minister has complained there are more Ethiopian doctors in Chicago than in his own country.
The good news is that the East African nation has one of the world’s fastest-growing economies and is recovering from the nightmare decades of civil war and famine. Tackling the health care crisis is high on the priority list of the government, which has opened 13 new medical schools in the last two years. But training the doctors is still a huge challenge. (more…)
Elizabeth Bradley started her career on the faculty at Yale in 1996 and currently serves in a variety of roles at the University, including professor of public health, faculty director for the Global Health Initiative and the Global Health Leadership Institute, and master of Branford College.
Her research focuses on strengthening health systems and has contributed important findings about organizational change and quality of care within the hospital, nursing home, and hospice settings. She has been involved with several international projects including research in China, Ethiopia, Liberia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
Bradley spoke recently about her work on campus and around the world, and the many other items on her “to-do” list. (more…)
ANN ARBOR, Mich.— Being the top dog—or in this case, the top gelada monkey—is even better if the alpha male is willing to concede at times to subordinates, a new study indicated.
Alpha male geladas who allowed subordinate competitors into their group had a longer tenure as leader, resulting in an average of three more offspring over his lifetime.
The findings, collected from data during a five-year period ending January 2011 through the University of Michigan Gelada Research Project, appear in the current issue of the Proceedings of The Royal Society. (more…)
Some 140 participants and 30 visiting faculty from more than 45 countries arrived at Brown to take part in the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI). The two-week program began June 11, 2012.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Some 140 participants and 30 visiting faculty from more than 45 countries arrived at Brown to take part in the Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI). Participants, who were chosen from a pool of more than 850 applicants, come from several countries, including Brazil, China, Nigeria, India, and Ethiopia.
The two-week program began Monday, June 11, 2012. Now in its fourth year, BIARI is centered around four two-week intensive institutes, convened concurrently by Brown faculty, in which participants and leading scholars in their fields share their research and develop new collaborative projects through sustained, high-level dialogue spanning disciplines and continents. This year’s institutes touched on global health and HIV/AIDS; theater and civil society; population and development; and climate change. (more…)
*Discovery of partial foot skeleton could mean hominin species lived side by side*
A new fossil discovery from Eastern Africa called the Burtele foot indicates Australopithecus afarensis, an early relative of modern humans, may not have been the only hominin to walk the plains and woodlands of what is now the Afar region of Ethiopia some 3.4 million years ago.
Researchers openly have questioned whether Au. afarensis, the species to which the famous fossil “Lucy” belongs, was the only living hominin during the late Pliocene of Africa. Lucy’s bones provided evidence that she and perhaps other early hominins may have walked upright, but whether or not she was the sole hominin species in her particular geologic time scale has been the subject of much debate. (more…)