Three graduates were honored by the Mount Mercy Alumnae Association at the recent Mercy Honors Dinner. Sister Mary E. Bendyna, class of 1979; Julia Hall, class of 1981; and Marianne Matuzic Myles, class of 1971, former U. S. ambassador to the Republic of Cape Verde, were this year’s Catherine McAuley Distinguished Alumnae Honorees. Deanna Kwiatkowski Russo, class of 1993, and Joanne M. Schwartzott, class of 1954, were Spirit of Mercy Honorees.

Two Roswell Park Cancer Institute researchers have been awarded a two-year, $650,000 grant by the National Institutes of Health to study a novel approach to treating breast cancer with tamoxifen. Gokul Das and Dr. Swati Kulkarni are co-lead investigators.

The study should provide screening guidelines to identify patients who are likely to be responsive to tamoxifen therapy. In addition, it will help avoid unnecessary exposure of patients with tumors unresponsive to tamoxifen. Tamoxifen is approved for the treatment of women diagnosed with certain types of early-and advanced-stage breast cancer. However, a large number of these women do not respond to the drug or develop a resistance to it. Several plausible reasons for such resistance have been suggested, although the mechanisms remain largely unclear. Das pointed out that this “study will be a major step toward personalized breast cancer medicine.”

Das, of Roswell Park’s pharmacology and therapeutics department, and Kulkarni, director of the Breast Cancer Risk Assessment and Prevention Program and the High Risk Breast Cancer Clinic at Roswell Park, submitted a joint grant application. Das will direct research operations, and Kulkarni will direct clinical operations for the study.

Douglas C. Neckers has been named the first Henry T. King Jr. Fellow at the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown. Neckers became involved in the center in 2001 and was elected to its board of directors in 2004.

King, a former Nuremberg prosecutor and dedicated adviser to the Jackson Center, died in May. His family donated his personal library and papers to the Jackson Center.

Neckers is a photo-scientist. He started the Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University in 1985 and subsequently led his colleagues to begin the first Ph. D. program in America in the field. Neckers has published more than 400 scientific papers in professional journals and 10 books, and he holds nearly 50 U. S. patents. He intends in his work to focus on the interaction between science/scientists and government. Scientists were largely apolitical in pre-World War II Germany and remained so until the Nazi regime created a totalitarian environment, where most aspects of society and industry were government-controlled.

Neckers said King was “a strong friend of the Jackson Center, and it’s a privilege to carry the King legacy forward. I’m deeply impressed with the Jackson Center, its professional staff and particularly with its dedicated group of community volunteers. The founders of the center, like their ancestors, have achieved a small miracle. The Jackson Center is a superb monument, memorializing the work of a truly distinguished native son.”

The center is located at 305 E. Fourth St., Jamestown.

John M. Violanti, research associate professor in the University at Buffalo’s department of social and preventive medicine in the School of Public Health and Health Professions, is first author on a new study published in the current issue of Archives of Environmental & Occupational Health that shows a “night beat,” overtime and a disrupted sleep pattern can harm police officers’ health, adding to increased risk of heart disease and stroke. Research was supported by a grant to Violanti from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Researchers obtained day-by-day data on shift work and overtime hours from payroll records.

“Information from this study could help guide further investigation into health of first responders,“ Violanti said, “not only of police officers, but firefighters, emergency medical technicians, nurses, physicians, air traffic controllers and the military. Results of this study, and possible future prospective studies, may add to our existing knowledge of the associations between shift work and cardiovascular health in high-risk occupations.”