The Counseling Center is excited to announce that our newest resource, the MindSpa is now open and available for use!

The MindSpa is a space within our center in which students can come to relax, de-stress, meditate, and learn techniques to regulate stress levels. Students can walk-in, or call and reserve our resources.  Some of the resources we offer include, but are not limited to:

-          Massage Chair (with pre-set massage programs as well as customizable massage settings)

-          Biofeedback equipment (helps students to gain greater awareness of physical signs of emotions and anxiety, with games/programs to help student regulate their reactions).

-          Light therapy

-          Aromatherapy

-          Hot tea

-          Meditation space

 If you have any questions, please contact myself, Dr. Alexis Melville (melville@umbc.edu) or call 5-2472

It’s not a secret that the Secret Service is in the dumps.

Last week the Director resigned, leaving us thinking – what’s next for the President’s bodyguard?

Well, we can probably guess what’s next. It’s likely to include a review of the agency and a lot of talk about new directions.

We can also expect history to repeat itself. After all, the Secret Service has had its blunders like everyone else. This won’t be the last time the agency says “oops,” but it shouldn’t excuse the unusual number of scandals in recent years.

Why do agents seem to always wear sunglasses?

The Supreme Court took a new approach to same-sex marriage Monday

It shut up. 

The nation’s highest authority for determining the meaning of the law has declined to comment on the issue- at least for now. 

No, they’re not just being lazy (at least we don’t think so). There’s several possible reasons for this decision. 

First, the SCOTUS tends to intervene primarily when lower federal courts disagree.

However, the the 4th, 7th, and 10th (and now 9th) circuit Courts of Appeal  all agree that same-sex marriage is legal. 

The only reason that the high court might have intervened was because each of the lower courts’ decisions came with a “stay” stating that the ruling would not take effect until the Supreme Court had the chance to hear the issue.

With the court’s decision not to take the cases, the stay has lifted.

A second reason for the Supreme Silence could be that the court concluded that such a divisive social issue should not be subject to a national ruling.

For a full and fascinating breakdown of the decision, check out one of our favorite sources over at the SCOTUS blog. 

While the court may be keeping quiet, we hardly expect the same from our loyal readers. So let us know: did the court do the right thing?

A few weeks ago, the HBO program Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (which is an excellent comedy/news/investigative journalism show that gets USDemocrazy’s full endorsement) tackled the subject of the US embargo on Cuba, condemning it as irrational, harmful, and ineffective.

Though it was a very funny and on-point segment, Oliver got one crucial detail wrong.

He criticized President Obama for renewing the embargo after calling it a failed policy in 2004. The problem? Rescinding the embargo without Congressional approval hasn’t been an option for any American president since 1996.

In that year, a standoff between Cuban-American activists and the Cuban government ended in two unarmed American planes being shot down. The incident prompted President Clinton to sign a law making the embargo permanent until the Communist government falls. A recent piece from The Atlantic tells the full story.

In his autobiography, President Clinton called the law “good election-year politics in Florida,” where Cuban-Americans (who largely support the embargo as a means to undermine Castro’s regime) are a powerful voting bloc.

In other words, don’t expect this policy of questionable wisdom to be reconsidered anytime soon.

It’s Oktoberfest! You know what that means…

Lots of Beer! Beer! Beer!… 

Often called in laymen terms “the German St. Patrick’s day”, Oktoberfest has long beer halls that are set at the fairgrounds in Munich, Germany running from late September and ending the first weekend in October.

But wait… shouldn’t all this talk of drinking raise the usual cautionary tales of dangerous underage drinking and drinking on campuses?

American culture tells a polar opposite story, glorifying the day-to-day binge drinking of college students, especially that of Fraternity and Sorority “formals”.

Classic movies like Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds come to mind and in more recent cinema; American Pie, Van Wilder, and The Neighbors all have a positive depiction of the barely sober youth lifestyle.

In the words of rapper J-Kwon, who strangely puts this discrepancy between American culture and policy toward underage drinking rather eloquently in his #2 billboard song Tipsy,

Teen drinking is very bad. Yo I got a fake ID though!

So what’s a millennial to do if you want to responsibly avoid the sauce until you come of age (while grappling with an embarrassing teetotaler social stigma)?

We all know the reality of college drinking; students are going to get their hands on some form of alcoholic beverage whether we like it or not and yes some will abuse it.

But maybe Oktoberfest could help temper the temptation to binge.

 The festival of Beer might provide an ample opportunity to teach a more “sober” way to

talk about the beverage.

Oktoberfest is not just about getting drunk but it’s about the beautiful taste of beer itself! The autumn season introduces a wide assortment of ales such as Märzen, Oktoberfest, Festbier, Pumpkin Ales, Imperial Pumpkin Ales, Pumpkin Spice Ale, Oktoberweissebier, and many more.

We’d like to see the American culture celebrate less binge drinking instead try a taste of the German culture of beer/ale.

Speaker: Dr. Subha Madhavan,
Director, Biomedical Informatics,
Innovation Center for Biomedical Informatics,
Georgetown University, Washington D.C
Date/Time: October 17, 2014 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: ITE 459

Abstract: The advent of the microarray technology in 2000 has paved the way for advanced translational research methods that use molecular markers such as microRNA, proteins, metabolites and copy number data. Our flagship web platform, the Georgetown Database of Cancer (G-DOC), was deployed in April 2011 to enable the practice of an integrative translational and systems-based approach to research and medicine in cancer. G-DOC is a feature-rich shareable research infrastructure that allows physician scientists and translational researchers to mine and analyze a variety of “omics” data in the context of consistently defined clinical outcomes data for cancer patients.

The popularity of next generation sequencing (NGS) grew exponentially in 2007 when a faster, more accurate and affordable sequencing throughput became a reality. Since then, the size and complexity of genomic data has increased many fold, making its analysis, management and integration increasingly challenging. Scientists today are using not only a combination of clinical, NGS and omics data for analysis, but also medical and pathology images for validation of analysis results. To drive hypothesis generation and validation of molecular markers for biologists and researchers, it would be convenient to have a “one--stop” system that can handle all these data types, including NGS and medical images, in one location. For this purpose, we expanded the G-DOC system to support NGS and medical images. Moreover, the success of G-DOC in the cancer realm has helped us realize the importance of such systems in the non-cancer world for complex diseases such as Alzheimer's, Duchene Muscular dystrophy, etc.

With the goal of improving overall health outcomes through advanced genomics research, we present G-DOC Plus, our web platform that enables the integrative analysis of multiple data types to understand mechanisms of cancer and non-cancer diseases for precision medicine. G-DOC Plus allows researchers to explore data one sample at a time, as a sub-cohort of samples; or as a population as a whole, providing the user with a comprehensive view of the data.

Biographical Information: Dr. Madhavan is the Director of Biomedical Informatics and Center Director. She leads several informatics efforts including the Georgetown Database of Cancer a tool for both researchers and clinicians to realize the goals of personalized medicine at GU, and the NIH caBIG In Silico Research Center for Excellence. She also directs the Informatics cores for NIH funded translational efforts. She is the PI on the Breast and Colon Cancer Family Registries data center that coordinates public health and epidemiology data across 12 sites in the US, Australia, and Canada. More recently, she has partnered with the FDA on the Center for Excellence in Regulatory Science program to develop evidence bases for pharmacogenomics and vaccine adverse event detection. She is also involved in a whole genome data analysis project with the Inova Translational Medicine Institute. Prior to joining Georgetown, Dr. Madhavan served as the Associate Director of Product and Program Management in the Life sciences informatics area at NCI's Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information technology. Her work at NCI involved bridging the gap between bench and bedside by enabling researchers and physician scientists to use cutting edge biomedical informatics solutions to identify better therapies for cancer. At NCI she led a group of scientists, physicians and software engineers in building REMBRANDT (REpository for Molecular BRAin Neoplasia DaTa) -- a database that hosts and interconnects clinical data points with various genomics datasets from large brain tumor clinical trials. This effort won the Service to America Award. While at NCI she also established the data coordination center for The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), which managed and analyzed high dimensional genomic data of approximately 100 TB over a period of 3 years. At Georgetown, she leads various informatics efforts including the caBIG In Silico Research Center for Excellence, and the Georgetown Database of Cancer. She also directs the Informatics cores for NIH funded translational efforts such as the Center for Cancer Systems Biology at Georgetown; and the Clinical Translational Science Award at Georgetown along with Howard University, the Washington Veteran's Affairs Medical Center, and MedStar Health Research Institute. She is the PI on the Breast and Colon Cancer Family Registries data center that coordinates public health and epidemiology data across 12 sites in the US, Australia, and Canada. More recently, she has partnered with the FDA on the Center for Excellence in Regulatory Science program to develop evidence bases for pharmacogenomics and vaccine adverse event detection. She is also involved in a whole genome data analysis project with the Inova Translational Medicine Institute. Dr. Madhavan has a master of science in Information Technology from University of Maryland and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Biological Sciences from the Uniformed Services University for the Health Sciences (Indo-US Collaborative program). -- See: http://icbi.georgetown.edu/Madhavan