Four Seasons
celebrates a decade

Some bold ventures that count on public support often take a while to catch on. But that wasn’t the case with the Four Seasons Chamber Music Festival, which showed signs of success in its first year and is now celebrating its 10th. “Even in our first year, we generated so much community support that we felt we had a great thing going,” says festival director and School of Music professor Ara Gregorian (below).

The festival has grown to include outreach efforts into local schools and performances around the nation and overseas. New for this season is a “master teachers next generation concert,” in which visiting professional musicians team up with faculty, talented students and alumni to perform together.

Now consisting of five pairs of concerts, the festival concentrates mainly on compositions for strings and piano, occasionally for strings and a wind instrument. Gregorian says the repertoire of works for those ensembles is quite large and contains many pieces that appeal to A.J. Fletcher Recital Hall audiences. “We tend to focus on the existing popular repertoire, though we look to add diversity when we can. But we think this is what the audience enjoys most.”

In the festival’s early years, many guest artists “on the rise” came to Greenville to play; now, it’s so well known that “we are getting calls from managers and artists who want to come here to play. This shows that we are developing a national and international reputation,” says Gregorian, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Juilliard School and a doctorate from SUNY-Stony Brook.

“I certainly don’t think we’re done yet, and that’s intoxicating to me. This is as exciting now as it was in the first season.”





University People

Sylvia Brown ’75 ’78 was named dean of the College of Nursing on a permanent basis after serving more than two years in an interim role. She succeeds Phyllis Horns ’69, who was elevated to vice chancellor for health sciences. Brown has been a faculty member since 1976. During her tenure as associate dean, enrollment of graduate nursing students grew more than 250 percent. She is married to Dr. William Brown ’81, a Greenville obstetrician and gynecologist who graduated in the first medical school class at ECU.

Charles W. Calhoun was named the 2009 Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor, an award conferred annually upon a professor whose career exemplifies a commitment to and a love for knowledge and academic life. Calhoun has taught history at ECU for 20 years and is one of the nation’s leading scholars of late 19th century American political history. He has published nine books, with two currently in progress, and has authored nearly 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, papers, book reviews and book chapters. “What impresses me most about ECU is the sense of optimism that pervades the place; that this is a university on the rise, striving to make its mark rather than marking time,” says Calhoun.

Darla Liles, a cancer specialist at the Brody School of Medicine, is the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Eastern North Carolina 2009 Woman of the Year. Liles on her own raised more than $23,000 during a 10-week campaign for the society. A larger group she volunteered with raised more than $153,000 for the society. Liles raised the money through dinners, a silent auction and others.

Burrell E. Montz is the new chair of the Department of Geography in the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences. She comes to ECU from Binghamton University at the State University of New York, where she began her academic career nearly 30 years ago as a geography professor and most recently was department chair there.

Martha Keehner Engelke was named the Richard R. Eakin Distinguished Professor in the College of Nursing. Engelke, an assistant dean of research, is the first person to receive the professorship, which honors the former East Carolina chancellor. Her nationally recognized research concerns school-based case management of children with chronic illnesses.

Clinical professor of pediatrics Charles “Chuck” Willson is the new chair of the N.C. Health and Wellness Trust Fund Commission. He succeeds Gov. Beverly Perdue, who has chaired the commission since its inception in 2001. Willson has served on the commission since 2001. Created by the General Assembly to allocate a portion of North Carolina’s share of the national tobacco settlement, the HWTF has invested $199 million to support preventive health initiatives and $102 million to fund prescription drug assistance programs. Willson, who is a former president of the N.C. Medical Society, also serves as co-director of the Center for Children with Complex and Chronic Conditions.

George Wang, Gazan Bozai and Yuhong Wang from the Department of Construction Management received a $218,000 grant from the N.C. Department of Transportation to examine tire and pavement noise on state roadways. Their results will be included in a nationwide database on noise modeling for future comprehensive study on mitigating traffic noise.

Wayne Cascio, vice chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Sciences, Brody School of Medicine, and Research Triangle Park-based startup Entegrion have received a $100,000 grant from the N.C. Biotech Center to study the ability of freeze-dried platelets to help stop excessive bleeding during heart surgery or in patients taking anti-clotting drugs.

Suzanne Lazorick, an assistant professor of pediatrics and public health at the Brody School of Medicine, is one of 15 professionals selected nationwide to join the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Physician Faculty Scholars Program. The award of up to $300,000 helps outstanding medical school junior faculty members advance their careers. Lazorick will study an innovative middle school-based obesity intervention program in eastern North Carolina.