With sadness we announce the sudden death of Bonnie Thrasher, instructor in multimedia journalism, who was completing her 22nd year on the faculty. She was known to many across campus as adviser to The Herald. Always dedicated to students, she recently accompanied a group on her annual trip to the College Media Association meeting in New York for interaction with campus media practitioners and journalism professionals. The College of Media and Communication issued this statement.

Dr. Frances Hunter, associate professor of English, organized Dylan Day on April 11 as part of Delta Symposium XXI, and she also will give a presentation on "Dylan, the Delta and Creativity." Hunter is editor of "Professing Dylan," a collection of 14 essays by professors who teach Bob Dylan's work in college and university classes. The book includes articles by six individuals who will present at the symposium. She will use the book for her Bob Dylan poetry course this fall.

An article co-authored by Dr. Cristy Phillips, assistant professor of physical therapy, is published in Physical Therapy Journal. For "The Link Between Physical Activity and Cognitive Dysfunction in Alzheimer Disease," Phillips and colleagues evaluated pre-clinical and clinical studies to determine physical activity effects on learning and memory in Alzheimer's patients. They conclude physical activity contributes to a significant improvement in cognitive function and can impose a disease-modifying effect.

Dr. John Mello, associate professor of marketing and director of the Center for Supply Chain Management, is the author of "Keys to Demand-Supply Integration," a paper published in Foresight, a leading futures studies journal that caters to academics, practitioners and policy makers. The paper examines how companies currently are using internal and external collaboration to improve demand-supply integration, in turn achieving increased customer service with reduced inventory.

Dr. Xiuzhen Huang, associate professor of computer science, is corresponding author for an article recently published in PLOS ONE, an international, peer-reviewed, online publication. Two students in the molecular biosciences Ph.D. program, Daniel Johnson and Cody Ashby, are joint first authors, and Dr. Carole Cramer, professor of biology, was involved in the research with two other institutions. "SPARCoC: A New Framework for Molecular Pattern Discovery and Cancer Gene Identification," is online.