here was the story about the “pure Mongolian” great-grandfather who came to Mississippi at the turn of the century to work on the railroad and ended up marrying a black woman. There were personal stories—some bitter, some ironic, some about the struggles of being a black man living in the old South.

Sandra Jackson-Opoku’s father was not a writer, but he told some remarkable stories. “There were so many of them, some true, others out of the folk traditions of African-American culture,” she says of the fanciful tales Roscoe Jackson, Sr., often told her when she was a little girl.

Today, Jackson-Opoku, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English’s Creative Writing Program, is telling a few stories of her own. The award-winning author, poet, and journalist has written two highly acclaimed novels and is working on two others. Her latest release, Hot Johnny (And the Women Who Loved Him), has been called “engaging” by The Washington Post and “a breathtaking page-turner” by the Chicago Sun-Times.

The book chronicles the life of John Wright, whose character is based loosely on a legendary lover in African-American folklore, Joe the Winder, or Jody. “Jody was a character who was imagined through other people’s eyes,” says Jackson-Opoku. “I wanted to tell his story that way: how Johnny was seen and perceived through the eyes of all of the different women who helped shape his life—his girlfriends, his wives, but also other women, such as his sister and grandmother.”

But it is her first novel, The River Where Blood Is Born, that put Jackson-Opoku on the literary map. Published four years ago, the book follows one family’s roots across two centuries and three continents, stitching together stories of African and African-American daughters. She worked on the book for 21 years and was inspired to write the novel after spending a year in Nigeria and other surrounding African nations as a college exchange student.

“I kept voluminous journals in which I recorded my encounters, experiences, and impressions, and the people I met in Africa,” says Jackson-Opoku. “When I returned I thought I could do something with those journals. My original idea was a nonfiction piece, a travelogue of my experiences as a young African-American woman traveling through Africa for the first time.

“But over the years it grew,” she continues. “It evolved from my own personal experiences to things that I wanted to interpret to other people’s experiences. It grew into fiction and short stories and eventually evolved into a novel.”

In her work, Jackson-Opoku is known to use multiple plots and characters, many of whom are created from her father’s vivid stories, as well as from her own real-life experiences, such as the disheveled Yoruba woman, wearing only a black, nylon slip, with whom she shared a jitney ride in Nigeria.

“I was curious about her appearance,” says Jackson-Opoku. “That image haunted me for many, many years. I never spoke to the woman, but I wanted to create a voice for that character.” Which she did in The River Where Blood Is Born, basing a chapter on the woman called “Lady in the Slip.”

Currently, Jackson-Opoku is working on two new books, Gettin’ in the Wind, a collection of short stories about the encounters experienced by a group of black women as they travel throughout the world, and s, the story of a white musician and the black people who shaped and influenced his life.

She accomplishes all this while raising a teenage son and daughter, and teaching fiction-writing courses to graduate and undergraduate creative writing students. “I encourage my students to find and develop their own creative voices,” says Jackson-Opoku. “Sometimes my students complain that I have them read too much. But it’s arrogant to think that you can become a writer and you don’t have to read. Being a writer means more than just writing. It’s reading, researching, and analyzing the elements that go into the structure of a story. And that’s what I love doing.”

very day, large quantities of ballast water from all over the world are discharged into United States waters. Carried by ships to provide stability, this ballast water often contains nonnative plants, animals, bacteria, and pathogens that have the potential to displace native species, degrade native habitats, spread disease, and disrupt human social and economic activities.

In response to this growing ecological concern, scientists from the University of Miami’s College of Engineering and Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science have been selected by the United States Coast Guard to design, build, and test a full-scale prototype that takes a new approach to ballast water management.

“We were considered competitive for the project because of the quality of the research staff on the project from UM, which tipped the scale in our favor,” says Tom Waite, associate dean and professor of environmental engineering in the College of Engineering, who designed the new system.

Waite is one of a few research engineers in the world to design and build a filtration-based ballast water treatment system. While in Singapore in 1999, he designed and built a similar prototype filtration system, which is still operating. It represents the world’s only dockside ballast water treatment facility treating seawater.

The new ballast water treatment system uses filtration and UV-irradiation to remove invasive aquatic species from ballast water aboard ships before they reach their port of call. The system pumps in sea water, routes it into a series of pipes, one of which separates biological organisms like zooplankton and phytoplankton through a hydroclone filtration system, then passes the water through a UV radiation system, killing bacteria.

The prototype treatment facility is currently located off one of the docks at the Rosenstiel School in Virginia Key, Florida. The new system is being tested to determine its efficiency under a variety of water quality conditions, such as turbid waters. Results from the tests will guide the Coast Guard in setting future standards for shipboard ballast water treatment systems.

For some time now, psychologists have known that a major traumatic experience, like sexual assault, violent crime, or a life-threatening accident, can have profound and long-lasting psychological effects on its victims. But how survivors respond to different types of treatment that seek to alleviate such post-traumatic effects as flashbacks, nightmares, overwhelming fear, and general irritability and stress, remains subject to investigation.

For the past two years, researchers at the Psychological Services Center at the University of Miami have been comparing the effectiveness of two treatments for trauma patients who suffer from what has been coined by psychologists as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). An estimated 13 million people are disabled by this disorder, making it the fifth most common psychiatric problem in the country. The condition, if untreated, can last for years.

Gail Ironson and Blanche Freund, directors of the Trauma Treatment Program at UM, collected and analyzed data from 22 patients who completed at least one active trauma treatment session after three preparatory sessions. The patients were randomly assigned to one of two treatments: Prolonged Exposure (PE) or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).

PE treatment encourages people with PTSD to confront their experiences by exposing them to the source of their trauma until they learn to overcome their fears. In EMDR, patients perform rapid side-to-side eye movements, reporting related memories, feelings, and thoughts that emerge during the movements. The procedure continues until troubling emotions or related body sensations no longer accompany the memory.

Ironson and Freund’s initial findings have shown that both PE and EMDR are effective in reducing PTSD and depression symptoms, which were maintained at a three-month follow-up. Results of the study will appear in the January 2002 issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology. Future studies will seek to identify the characteristics that make some people benefit more from one treatment over the other.

They donned T-shirts, shorts, sunscreen, and sneakers. They waved American flags by the hundreds in an unwavering display of patriotic spirit. And by the time they completed walking the three-mile loop around the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus, they had accomplished what they set out to do: raise money for heart research and education.

Led by former Hurricane football quarterback, 1992 Heisman Trophy winner, and current UM Alumni Association president Gino Torretta, an estimated 7,000 walkers, some of them heart disease survivors, participated in the annual Miami-Dade County 5K American Heart Walk.

University employees, families, friends, and citizens, as well as corporate and civic groups, canvassed the UM campus to help raise funds to support research in the American Heart Association’s mission to fight heart disease and stroke.

“By participating in the walk, Americans help themselves by taking the first steps toward a heart-healthy lifestyle, and help others by raising more than $23 million nationally to support lifesaving research, programs, and education,” says Michael Muchnicki, Miami-Dade County American Heart Walk co-chairman and CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

UM is the county’s second-largest recipient of American Heart Association (AHA) dollars annually. In 2001, the University received $1.4 million. This support funds programs such as the Miami-Dade Stroke Coalition, led by Alejandro Forteza, associate professor in the School of Medicine’s Department of Neurology and chief of the Stroke and Clinical Cerebral Vascular Diseases Division.

AHA funding also supports cellular-level research. “AHA dollars are helping us examine why young, otherwise healthy patients find themselves with an enlarged heart that is unable to pump and deliver blood properly,” says UM cardiologist Nanette Bishopric. In addition, thanks to AHA funding, several laboratory studies are looking at basic mechanisms of the heart muscle to find proteins and other factors that, if manipulated, could improve function or avoid disease.

“Baptist Health Systems has long been a friend to the University of Miami School of Nursing,” says Dean Diane Horner. “We are grateful for their continuing support.”

For nearly 40 years, UM nursing students have participated in clinical nursing experiences at Baptist Hospital and South Miami Hospital. The school and the hospitals will explore collaborative research projects such as pain management, innovative nursing care delivery models, and utilization of technical advances in nursing.

“This multiyear gift is intended to clearly recognize that the current nursing shortage will be a long and difficult one. A key part of the solution is the expansion of our local universities and colleges in nursing education,” says Fred Messing, chief operating officer and executive vice president of Baptist Health Systems.

The technology, created by Alexander Iliev and Michael Scordilis, is being licensed to BitzMart, Inc., a Chicago-based company at the forefront of digital property distribution and protection, as a result of BitzMart’s acquisition of Watermark Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of UTEK Corporation.

The demand for technology that prevents the unauthorized copying and distribution of recording artists’ work is enormous, especially because music is increasingly downloaded from the Web instead of being purchased in stores.

Unlike other digital watermarking technologies that are created by converting copyright information into seemingly random and imperceptible digital “noise,” the UM researchers’ technology is based on a completely new psychoacoustic principle. The researchers were able to process stereo audio and deliberately alter the timing relationship between the channels, thereby creating a third “masked” channel that can contain new, inaudible information. Special reader software can then detect and decode the embedded information.

“As the recent experience has shown, intellectual property distributed via the Web is becoming a driving force today, so the need to protect it is fast becoming a top priority,” says Scordilis, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. “Our digital watermarking technology is an effective way of combating copyright violations.”

Says Iliev, scientist and software specialist for information technology, “This is a powerful tool, which will bring many new possibilities for audio, like closed captioning, song lyrics, musical scores, images for dramatization, or narrative speech.”

More than 400 guests gathered recently for the opening reception of The Pathway to Greatness: Building the University of Miami, 1926-2001 at the Lowe Art Museum, where UM President Donna E. Shalala, left, and Executive Vice President and Provost Luis Glaser unveiled a historical collage created by prominent South Florida artist Erika King to commemorate the 75th Anniversary. Curated by noted historian and UM alumna and trustee Arva Moore Parks, the exhibit features historic photographs, paintings, and artifacts that chronicle the University’s and City of Coral Gables’ history. The exhibit runs through February 10, 2002.