Crónicas de Artes y Ciencias

Crónicas de Artes y Ciencias.

Facultad de Artes y Ciencias / Oficina de Investigación / Crónicas de Investigación

CHRONICLES of RESEARCH @ UPRM

We are living in the era of autobiographies. Millions of people around the world are daily recording their autobiographical narratives on facebook, on blogs and YouTube, on reality television shows, and in the many memoirs that are being published. Auto/Biography Studies is the discipline that analyzes how and why individuals record their identity. A subfield of literary studies that has cross-disciplinary ties throughout the humanities and to the social sciences, Auto/Biography Studies is a text-based discipline that focuses on the analysis of the many facets of identity construction, including race, ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, religion, class, geography, and cultural norms. This is the area of research of   Ricia Anne Chansky, Assistant Professor of literature and writing in the Department of English. Dr. Chansky is the editor of the internationally renowned journal of scholarship, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.  It enjoys the highest ratings on the European and Australian journal ranking systems and was recently reviewed by The London Times as “inclusive, adaptable, and fresh.” As the editor of a/b, Dr. Chansky participates in multiple research projects and publications. She is currently editing an illustrated special issue, the first of its kind in the field, and is the convener of an international research symposium, “Auto/Biography across the Americas.”  Dr. Chansky’s recent scholarship has been dedicated to diasporic Caribbean literature, focusing primarily on moving towards a dialogic model for reading life narratives as a means of mapping Homi Bhabha’s “third space,” as well as to the impact of Web 2.0 narratives on literary “truth,” as explained by Philippe Lejeune. Chansky is also the editor of two forthcoming books: Auto/Biography across the Americas: Language, Translation, Truth, and Trust and The A/B Reader.  We learned last week that Dr. Chansky received the award for Intercultural Research Project Design in the Humanities from the Zentrum für Interkulturelle Studien (Center for Intercultural Studies) at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany for her research project, "Auto/Biography across the Americas: Reading beyond Geographic and Cultural Divides."  We wish to congratulate Ricia on her recent accomplishments.

Cancer is one of the most important causes of death worldwide. The treatment of hormone dependent breast, ovarian and prostate cancers is a challenge because the body develops resistance to the current pool of drugs available. The synthesis and design of new metallocene drugs – molecules that contain a metal atom in their structure - to target specific tumors associated with these cancers is the focus of research of Dr. Enrique Meléndez at the UPRM Chemistry Department. In the review article, “Metallocenes as target specific drugs for cancer treatment”, published as a special issue on the general topic of metals in medicine in Inorg. Chim. Acta 2012, 393, 36-52, Dr. Melendez visits several of the issues and challenges we face in the treatment of cancer.  In his research, he has designed a series of hormone vectorized metallocenes which exhibited high activity on breast cancer cell line and with encouraging results on mice studies bearing breast cancer. These findings are documented in a provisional patent US 61/536,072. Even more significant, patent US 8,101,783 has been awarded based on Dr. Melendez’s work in the synthesis and use of Ti-maltolate compound as antitumor agent for colon adenocarcinoma or colon cancer. We wish to congratulate Dr. Enrique Meléndez for the achievement.