University Times

Vince Mosesso, assistant professor of emergency medicine, received the Pennsylvania Emergency Health Services Council's (PEHSC) Emergency Physician of the Year award. The award honors an emergency department physician who has contributed to the advancement of EMS in Pennsylvania through active participation in education, prehospital studies, research, pilot programs and community health care programs. Mosesso, who started his EMS career as an EMT, continues to work with prehospital care providers as the prehospital medical director for the 54-member Tri-State EMS Alliance.

He earned his EMT certification in 1979 while attending Duquesne University. He became certified as a paramedic in 1981, earned his medical degree from Pitt in 1988 and went on to study emergency medicine through Pitt's affiliated residency program.

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Composer and professor Mathew Rosenblum, will have two works, "Circadian Rhythms" and "Maggies" (with pre-recorded texts spoken by his wife Maggie Lane) performed by the New York New Music Ensemble at the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, California, where Rosenblum has been invited to be a guest composer. The New York New Music Ensemble then will tour the West Coast performing Rosenblum's compositions at the Bing Theatre in Los Angeles, in Claremont and at the Fromm concert series in San Diego.

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Luis Lehner, a graduate of Pitt's Department of Physics and Astronomy, won the 1999 Nicholas Metropolis Award for outstanding doctoral thesis work in computational physics, presented by the American Physical Society. The award is named for the pioneer mathematician who, along with John von Neumann and others, developed the use of ENIAC, the first working digital computer, to solve complex problems in physics. Lehner, who received his Ph.D. from Pitt in spring 1998, was selected "for developing a method that significantly advances the capability for modeling gravitational radiation by making possible the stable numerical solution of Einstein's equation near moving black holes," according to the award citation. While at Pitt, Lehner worked on a team headed by Jeffrey Winicour that is trying to construct a computational model of gravitational waves from moving black holes. The work is associated with one of the "Grand Challenges" of physics and the development of the Laser Interferometric Gravity Observatory (LIGO), a project of the National Science Foundation, now under construction in Washington and Louisiana. Instruments like the LIGO will benefit from computational models, said Lehner, because detecting gravitational waves is an expensive and complex undertaking.