VP FOR RESEARCH NAMED. Professor Ronald Elsenbaumer has been named vice president for research. He had been interim vice president since November. Dr. Elsenbaumer joined UTA in 1991 as director of the Materials Science and Engineering Program. He later became chair of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, interim director of the NanoFab Research and Teaching Center and associate vice president for research. He began his new appointment April 15.

PARTNERS AGAINST CANCER. The University of Texas System will allocate $2.5 million to support research in cognitive neuroscience and cancer at UTA, the U.T. Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and U.T. Dallas. The research will concentrate on neuroimaging techniques and bring together engineers and psychologists from UTA, medical faculty from U.T. Southwestern, and neuroscientists and psychologists from U.T. Dallas. It will involve collaboration between a program in optical imaging developed by UTA engineers and the cancer imaging program at U.T. Southwestern. The funding will help purchase and operate imaging equipment for the diagnosis and therapy of cancer patients.

COMMUNICATION ON PATROL. UTA researchers have received a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to develop a wireless communications system for the Arlington Police Department. The system is expected to include wearable multimedia devices for police to transmit live video and audio while on patrol. Faculty in the Computer Science and Engineering Department are developing the system. "We want to go one generation ahead of Star Trek and provide not just audio but live video to create a fully pervasive communications system," said lead investigator Ishfaq Ahmad.

TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE. The American Journal of Nursing selected a textbook by nursing faculty Nancy Burns and Susan Grove as its 2003 Book of the Year in the nursing research category. Understanding Nursing Research, third edition, has become a standard for teaching nursing research and has been lauded by reviewers, researchers and educators. Drs. Burns and Grove have collaborated on two previous editions of the textbook as well as The Practice of Nursing Research, which was translated into Chinese and published in 2003.

PROTECTING THE PUBLIC. A team of researchers led by computer science and engineering Professor Sajal Das is working on a sophisticated software program to help the United States monitor, prevent and recover from natural and inflicted disasters. The five-year project, called Pervasively Secure Infrastructures, involves faculty at the University of Kentucky and Pennsylvania State University. The PSI framework can potentially be deployed in a variety of safety, security and surveillance instances, including transportation, public utilities, and public or private buildings and gathering places.

IN ELITE COMPANY. Biomedical engineering Professor Khosrow Behbehani has been named a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering. The honor is given to only 2 percent of professionals in the field. Individuals granted this title have made significant contributions to the theory or practice of medical and biological engineering. Dr. Behbehani, who directs the Biomedical Engineering Program, is a noted expert in respiratory and anesthesia device design and analysis.

WHAT'S ON YOUR MIND? Are women really better than men at reading people's minds? This is among the questions psychology Professor William Ickes answers in his new book, Everyday Mind Reading: Understanding What Other People Think and Feel. After a decade studying behavior in social interactions, Dr. Ickes and his colleagues developed a procedure for measuring how well people can read minds. They then used this procedure to study different aspects of everyday mind reading in research conducted over the past 15 years.