Foote Farewell

The End of an Era

hen President Edward T. Foote II announced his upcoming resignation in a statement issued to the University community on January 21, the end of an era was at hand.

By the time he steps down in June 2001, Foote will have ended an enormously successful tenure of 20 years, during which he elevated the University of Miami to new heights of academic excellence and record levels of fundraising and student applications. Already he has become the senior major university president in the nation.

Since his arrival in 1981, new schools have been added, including architecture, communication, and international studies, as well as new academic centers, making the University of Miami the largest, most comprehensive private research university in the southeastern United States. Foote also introduced long-term strategic planning, decreasing the number of students while raising admissions standards and expanding the faculty. Implementing the residential college concept, a tradition first established at universities in England, was yet another initiative of Foote's. He launched an ambitious fundraising campaign, which ended in 1990 with $517.5 million in commitments, including endowments for 45 chairs in various academic disciplines.

Foote will stay on as University chancellor until 2003. This position will allow him to assist in the transition in leadership.

"To countless students, alumni, and friends who have so enriched Bosey's and my lives, thank you for being part of the University of Miami family," said Foote in his announcement. "To the trustees, the faculty, the administration, and the staff, we express our heartfelt thanks for being allowed to help in the building of a great American university."

In what is being touted as an important "mission that will have a profound effect on the University's future," a 15-member committee appointed by Board of Trustees Chairman Carlos M. de la Cruz, Sr., is conducting a search for Foote's successor.

"This is an exciting and challenging period, giving us an opportunity to define new directions, lay the groundwork to acquire additional resources, and allow our excellent University to continue the quest for academic quality that characterized President Foote's two decades of service," says de la Cruz.

The presidential search committee includes nine trustees and six faculty members representing a wide range of constituencies and academic disciplines. Charles E. Cobb, Jr., a trustee since 1975 and a former chairman of the Board of Trustees, is chairing the committee. Cobb was U.S. ambassador to Iceland from 1989 to 1992 and served on the selection committee that brought Foote to the University.

For updates on the presidential search, visit the web site www.miami.edu/presidential-search.

Professor Improves Sports Safety

Speedy Recovery

ouped-up engines roar with lightning speed around the raceway, when suddenly, the worst happens. A driver loses control, flipping his car violently with an explosion of debris before terrified spectators.

Enter Stephen Olvey, codirector (with retired racing driver Emerson Fittipaldi) of the Miami Project International Motorsport and Vehicular Injury Research Center at the University of Miami. As director of medical affairs for Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART), he and his team of physicians and paramedics arrive at the scene literally as a wayward car skids to a stop, performing emergency care initially on the race track.

"In the old days, an ambulance would double as a hearse," says Olvey, who supervises and sets up on-track medical facilities at CART races. "We have brought safety of the sport out of the dark ages."

For years Indianapolis-born Olvey has combined his two greatest passions--auto racing and medicine--in an effort to reduce injury on the raceway. He has coordinated a widely used team approach to safety and a complete emergency medical system in motor sports. In working closely with other doctors, engineers, and race car designers, Olvey has helped develop a car that is capable of high-speed impacts without harm to the driver.

"We've made the cars as safe as possible with modern-day technology," says Olvey, who has won numerous awards for his significant contributions to auto racing. "We're now looking at constructing better barrier systems, which would significantly decrease the forces involved in a crash and have much overplay into highway safety."

In addition, Olvey will carry over his research on violent head injuries to help design better protection for the United States Air Force and all sports that require helmets.

Predicting Hurricane Forces

Sudden Windfalls

ust hours from the United States coastline on October 4, 1995, Hurricane Opal suddenly strengthened. Its winds shot up from 110 mph to 135 mph in a mere 14 hours. Similar sudden and unexpected intensification just before landfall happened with Hurricanes Allen and Camille--leaving barely enough time to warn people, and almost no time to evacuate.

Now, a Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science professor has identified the probable cause of those sudden intensifications and, perhaps more importantly, mapped some of the hot spots where this season's hurricanes are likely to strengthen dramatically just before landfall.

The cause, associate professor of meteorology and physical oceanography Lynn K. "Nick" Shay says, are "warm core rings," where warm water extends down to a depth of 100 meters or more.

The discovery, which is the result of a joint effort between Shay and Peter Black of NOAA's Hurricane Research Division, could save lives and millions of dollars spent on unnecessary evacuations by helping more accurately predict how powerful a storm will be when it strikes land.

"This is the heat. This is the energy source," Shay says. "It's like a big fuel injector in the middle of the ocean."

Warm ocean temperatures fuel hurricanes. Normally, though, surface temperatures of 26 degrees centigrade or higher only extend down about 30 to 40 meters. A passing storm draws some energy from the warm water as it travels, stirring and mixing it with cooler water from below and lowering the temperature of the surface water. The now-cooler surface water then provides less energy for the storm, keeping it from intensifying much further.

In a warm core ring, however, the warm water goes much deeper. It doesn't cool that much when a storm passes because it doesn't mix with cooler water from below. A hurricane passing over one of the rings, which are 180 to 220 kilometers in diameter, gets a rich, deep source of energy that, coupled with the right atmospheric conditions, can suddenly turbocharge a hurricane and turn a minimal storm into a monster.

"Ultimately," Shay says, "what we are aiming for is to be able to say that when it encounters this ring, you may be looking at a category four or five storm."

The rings develop every 11 to 14 months at the top of a warm-water current that loops up into the Gulf of Mexico from the Caribbean Sea. Then, typically, they drift westward at one to four kilometers per day over a period of several months until they break up along the Mexico or Texas coast. Another one forms in the northern Atlantic, off the coast of Maine.

Last summer, Shay and Black mapped a detailed three-dimensional grid of the ring in the Gulf. They also are using historical hurricane tracking information to determine whether warm core rings could account for the sudden intensification of past storms. "Hurricane Camille became such a killer storm as it traveled right up the throat of the area we mapped," says Shay. "These processes have a similar yearly cycle. If a storm takes that path, perhaps we could predict its strength, invaluable for forecasting."

LASIK Surgery Improves Vision

A Cure in Focus

ignificant advancements in the field of ophthalmology over the last decade have yielded some extraordinary modern-day miracles of medical science. This is mostly due to the discovery of a "cure" for its most common ailment, impaired vision.

In refractive surgery, or the correction of vision, modern science is enhanced by technology through the use of lasers. The most advanced procedure is laser in-situ keratomilieusis (LASIK), which reshapes the cornea to correct nearsightedness, farsightedness, and even astigmatism. Thousands of these procedures are performed annually at the University of Miami Bascom Palmer Eye Institute.

"LASIK surgery is a solution for so many people who are tired of wearing glasses and can't wear contact lenses," says William W. Culbertson, a cornea specialist for Bascom Palmer's Refractive Surgery Center. "It's painless, takes about 20 minutes, and usually restores good vision by the next day."

The procedure really is easy on the eyes, says Culbertson. "In terms of any serious complications, the procedure is as safe as wearing contact lenses," he says.

While not everyone will experience perfect 20/20 vision, says Culbertson, almost all see well enough to function without glasses no matter what their refractive error was previously.

Though routine insurance will most likely never cover the procedure since it is considered cosmetic, it continues to grow in popularity, he says. "But," he contends, "the cost is relatively inexpensive when you consider that you're actually paying for a miracle--of modern science, of course."

Studying the Effects of Architecture

Designing Remedies

ack in the "good old days," houses were built with front porches that encouraged neighbors to socialize and create long-lasting friendships. Everyone knew each other, and every neighborhood parent was involved with the parenting of children, especially on the playgrounds. But in recent years, new construction has produced a built environment with homes and streets lacking the very places that inspire people to socialize. What kind of effects has this type of architecture had on human relations? Is it the root of some of today's societal ills?

University of Miami psychologists and architects seek to answer these questions in a new study funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation through its Substance Abuse Policy Research Program. In collaboration, these researchers will develop a body of knowledge that may be able to influence future urban policy regarding neighborhoods and other built environments as either a risk or deterrent for adolescent drug abuse.

"There are many reasons why kids get arrested for drug abuse, from availability of drugs to the economics of the neighborhood. But we may be overlooking some factors that affect a lot of children," says José Szapocznik, professor and director of the Center for Family Studies at the School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and principal investigator in the study. "We hope that as a result of our research we will be able to inform parents and the public at large about urban environments that are most helpful for raising well-adjusted children and other environments that offer risk for deviant and antisocial adolescent behavior."

Drug abuse is being used in this study as a marker of things gone wrong. Records from the Miami-Dade Juvenile Assessment Center will be referenced to find all drug-related arrests that have occurred in the county involving adolescents. Then, investigators will narrow their search and identify youths living in East Little Havana who have been arrested for drug-related crimes. Researchers will map out and study the characteristics of every building and street in East Little Havana, comparing their findings to the areas where the arrested juveniles live. These comparisons will help conclude how architectural features relate to rates of substance abuse and arrests.

Finally, the researchers will compose a comprehensive package of information to disseminate to the community and to a number of zoning and redevelopment policy makers. Little Havana was chosen as a precursor for this study because researchers from the Center for Family Studies and Center for Urban Studies have been conducting investigations in that community since 1972.

"There are a lot of ideas as to what makes a better neighborhood, but not enough research to support these ideas with evidence," says Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the School of Architecture, director of the Center for Urban Studies, and co-investigator in this study. "With this grant we will develop a set of studies to determine if the concepts of New Urbanism, which prescribe traditional neighborhood designs as a remedy for societal ills, are supported by our findings."

Teaching Underwater Robots to Think

Unmanned Exploration

magine underwater robots probing the ocean depths--scanning an oil pipeline, mapping a sunken ship, or charting unexplored terrain--without human intervention. These are just some of the potential uses for the cutting-edge work of engineering professor Shahriar Negahdaripour.

Using a unique visual recognition approach, Negahdaripour is enabling deep-sea remotely operated vehicles (ROV) to "see" and "remember" their surroundings and, using that information, to "think" through tasks. With vision and image processing software that he developed, the University professor hopes to free ROV operators from the countless hours they now spend controlling the vehicles.

"We are developing a number of technologies that will provide intelligence for these vehicles," says Negahdaripour, who directs the University's Underwater Vision and Imaging Laboratory. "This means that they will have some capability to function on their own without continuous supervision by a human operator."

Similar technology is used in the Mars Rover, the robotic explorer that NASA uses to examine that planet's surface. But an underwater ROV faces more difficult conditions as it floats freely, with no exact way of measuring the distances it travels. In addition to the crushing pressure of the water in deep-sea exploration, ocean currents and updrafts may buffet an ROV. And visibility can vary from almost clear to nearly nonexistent because of silt, seaweed, or other matter.

Perhaps most important, though, is not how the ROV "sees" its surroundings, "but how it uses that information," says Chris Hillenbrand, program manager of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. "Negahdaripour's algorithms are the breakthrough science. It's the use of the image, in real time, the vehicle positioning, and the navigation."