Payoff Season for Fifth- Year Seniors - Old Dominion University

VMASC’S Sokolowski Named
President-Elect of International Society
John Sokolowski, executive director of Old Dominion University's Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation
Center (VMASC), is the new president-elect of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS),
the world's premier M&S organization. SCS was founded in 1952, and has as its mission promoting the use of
modeling and simulation (M&S) in ever-expanding application areas through education, and providing a forum where
the scientific basis for its foundations can be enriched through education and research.
M&S involves the use of models and computer simulation in such arenas as virtual-environment
training, the study of complex systems and strategic decision making.
Sokolowski, who will serve as president-elect until June 30, 2013, then spend the next
12 months as the society’s president, said its mission lines up perfectly with what VMASC
strives to accomplish. “It’s certainly an honor to be able to serve this group,” he said. “It’s
probably the organization that’s been around the longest that has been focused on how
modeling and simulation can serve society.”
A California-based organization whose membership includes representatives of industry,
government and academia, SCS serves individuals and organizations in more than 150
countries. As part of its mandate, SCS sponsors conferences and publishes one of the
world’s leading modeling and simulation journals. Its primary focus, however, is on service.
That is why Sokolowski is especially pleased to represent the organization, and VMASC, for the next two years.
“It falls in line with what we’re doing here, looking at modeling and simulation from a multidisciplinary perspective,”
Sokolowski said. He added that one of the challenges the M&S discipline faces is that society at large doesn't
know just how important M&S is, in many domains.
Founded in 1997, VMASC is a multidisciplinary research center that emphasizes modeling, simulation and visualization
research, development and education. Its mission is to conduct collaborative M&S research and development,
provide expertise to government agencies and industry, and to promote ODU, Hampton Roads and Virginia as a center
of M&S activities. Annually, the center conducts approximately $10 million in funded research and focuses on these
M&S areas: transportation, homeland security and military defense, virtual environments, social sciences, medicine and
health care, game-based learning, M&S interoperability and system sciences.
Wary of Ticks? There’s an App for That
S pend a lot of time in the great outdoors? You may want to take along your iPhone. A team of researchers
including Daniel Sonenshine, the Old Dominion University professor emeritus and eminent
scholar of biological sciences, has developed an iPhone app useful to people who find ticks on themselves
or their pets.
TickID is free, and it's being made available just as the tick season is heating up across the country. The application
offers help to users in identifying what species of tick they're dealing with, and also advice about the
proper removal of ticks and the symptoms to look for in case a bite is a particularly bad one.
Sonenshine, an internationally known authority on ticks and tick-borne diseases, worked with researchers
at North Carolina State University in developing the app. They included entomologist Mike Roe and bioinformatics
expert Stan Martin, as well as students Anirudh Dhammi, William Blankenship and Joshua Cundiff.
In addition to having photos and descriptions of the male and female deer ticks, dog ticks and Lone Star
ticks, the app explains which diseases - such as Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis or Rocky Mountain spotted fever -
are transmitted by which species.
TickID for iPhones and iPads can be downloaded at the app store by searching “TickID.”
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