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KUDOS
Bartke has made pioneering contributions in the areas of male reproductive physiology, the relationship of growth hormone to longevity, and behavioral and hormonal effects of chronic marijuana use. Besides appearing in top scholarly journals, his research has been chronicled in such publications as The New York Times. A native of Poland, Bartke joined the Physiology Department in 1984 and won SIUC’s Outstanding Scholar award in 1987. Funding for his research has come from such sources as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. He is a past president of the Society for the Study of Reproduction and the American Society of Andrology and a founding editor of the Journal of Andrology. —Paula Davenport, Public
Affairs
• An Ecuador native who wants to use his graduate education in agribusiness economics to help his country has won the SIU Alumni Association’s annual outstanding thesis award. Ernesto Valenzuela, who finished his master’s degree in December 2000 on a Fulbright scholarship, received the award last April. Valenzuela’s thesis focused on America’s regional trade patterns, attempting to explain factors that affect trade and to assess their relative importance. Using a new statistical model, he divided the country into six regions, then analyzed how exports were related to such things as wages, personal income, and shipping distances. He found that, contrary to popular belief, distance generally hinders trade. SIUC researchers working on a rural development project funded by the Illinois Council on Food and Agricultural Research have incorporated Valenzuela’s data and research methods into their study documenting and analyzing the role of agriculture, agribusiness, and non-farm activity in economic development. (See the Spring 2001 Perspectives cover story.) A paper based on Valenzuela’s thesis was presented in fall 2000 at the annual meeting of Science Association International’s North American region. —K. C. Jaehnig, Public
Affairs
• An anthropologist who studied the effect of aging on the blood sugar levels of rural Maya women has won SIUC’s Outstanding Dissertation award. Penelope McLorg, now an adjunct assistant professor of anthropology at SIUC, received the award for work showing that the older women she studied could process glucose effectively. That finding contradicts previous assumptions about age and glucose regulation and has implications for researchers who study diseases such as diabetes. McLorg’s study of aging and glycemia focused on 60 women, ranging in age from 40 to 85, who lived in 16 villages in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. After gathering information on the women’s physical characteristics, diet, and activity levels, McLorg obtained and analyzed samples of their blood. She found that the older women did not have higher blood sugar levels, even though many of them were overweight—a condition that often goes along with poor glucose regulation. Moreover, a comparison of their personal information with similar data on women from industrialized nations suggested that lifestyle plays more of a role in the ability to regulate blood sugar than age does. Douglas Crews, an Ohio State University anthropologist who serves on the editorial boards of several of the field’s leading journals, thinks these findings will significantly influence debates about the role of glucose in the biology of aging. "Dr. McLorg’s work is on a par with that of the first researchers to complete cross-cultural studies of blood pressure variation showing that the increase of blood pressure with age, so common in our own populations, does not generally occur among members of more traditional living societies," he wrote in a letter of support. "Such cross-cultural comparisons greatly advanced our understanding of cultural influences on physiological variation over the life span." —K. C. Jaehnig, Media & Communication Resources
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