News of Note

Law Professor Lawrence A. Frolik Presents at Law and Society Association Annual Meeting

Pitt Professor of Law Lawrence A. Frolik, a national expert on legal issues facing older Americans, made two presentations at the 35th annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, an interdisciplinary scholarly organization committed to social scientific, interpretive, and historical analyses of law across multiple social contexts. 

A founder of the association’s newly formed “Aging, Law and Society” Collaborative Research Network, Frolik presented a paper on “Reforming the 401(k) – Reducing the Management Burden for Retirees” as part of the session Constructing Age: How Legal Structures Shape the Aging Experience, which he chaired. He also presented on “Rethinking the Theories of Guardianship Decision Making” in the Beyond Elder Law session.

Frolik has achieved a national reputation as a trailblazer in the field of elder law. He coauthored the treatise, Advising the Elderly or Disabled Client (Warren, Gorham and Lamont, 2d ed. 1999 with annual supplements) and Elder Law: Cases and Materials (LexisNexis, 5th ed. 2011), the first casebook on the legal problems of the elderly, among many other publications.

School of Information Sciences Professor Hassan Karimi Serves as Editor of Book on Advanced Location-Based Technologies

Hassan Karimi, a professor and director of the Geoinformatics Laboratory within Pitt’s School of Information Sciences, has edited Advanced Location-Based Technologies and Services, published by CRC Press of the Taylor and Francis Group on May 24. The book includes in-depth information about technologies, trends, and services related to location-based technology services, which are now in higher demand owing to the increased number of mobile device users.

Qrono, Inc., Led by Engineering Professor Steven Little, Receives National Institute of General Medical Sciences Grant

A small business technology transfer grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences has been awarded to Qrono, Inc.—a company led by equity holder Steven Little, professor and chair in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering within Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering. Little will use the grant to work toward improving treatment options for age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision loss among older adults. Because current treatments require monthly eye injections, patients do not often adhere to recommended medications. Little’s research in developing predictive modeling technology for long-acting injectable drugs will require patients to receive injections only a few times a year, enabling better treatment outcomes.

Law Professor Mary Crossley is Named Scholar in Residence for Public Health Fellowship

Professor of Law and former Pitt School of Law Dean Mary Crossley is one of six scholars in the nation to participate in Scholars in Residence, a fellowship program recently launched by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Network for Public Health Law. Designed to bring the expertise of legal scholars to assist public health agencies in tackling critical issues, the program also provides field experience to the scholars, who work with local and state health agencies on public health law issues related to chronic diseases, virus surveillance, and tuberculosis, among other topics.

Widely respected for her scholarship in disability and health law, Crossley will work with the San Francisco Department of Public Health to identify the most effective and innovative ways in which health officers can address the growing burden of chronic diseases through interventions targeting risk behaviors and the social determinants of health. Privacy laws and laws regulating the Internet are among the areas that Crossley will examine as she analyzes the legal questions raised by novel interventions.

Professor of Law Arthur D. Hellman Testifies Before U.S. House Judiciary Committee

Arthur D. Hellman, Pitt’s Sally Ann Semenko Endowed Chair and professor of law, was invited to testify at a hearing before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet. The subject of the spring hearing was “An Examination of the Judicial Conduct and Disability System.”

Hellman testified that the system of decentralized self-regulation that Congress established in 1980 “is sound and does not require fundamental restructuring. At the same time,” he said, “the experience of the past few years has revealed gaps and deficiencies in the regulatory regime that warrant attention.” He suggested statutory amendments dealing with three aspects of the system—transparency and disclosure, disqualification of judges, and review of orders issued by chief judges and judicial councils.

Hellman has achieved a national reputation as a scholar of the federal courts. He is one of the leading academic commentators on issues of federal judicial ethics, and his unique series of empirical studies on the operation of precedent in the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. courts of appeals have been used as a basis for policy decisions at both the federal and state levels.

Paper Coauthored by Professor Alex Jones Named One of Top 25 Most Influential Papers in Programmable and Custom Computing Machines Field

Alex Jones, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the computer engineering program within Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, has been recognized for writing one of the top 25 most influential papers in the history of the annual Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines. The international symposium, hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, celebrated its 20th anniversary in April. Jones’ paper, “A MATLAB Compiler for Distributed, Heterogeneous, Reconfigurable Computing Systems,” was published in 2000 and examines how to simplify the process of reconfigurable computer coding using MATLAB software, which is employed by engineers, scientists, and other users to analyze data, create algorithms, and produce models and applications.