Brian Dursum, director of the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, and Stella M. Holmes, president of the Brickellian Inc., announce a preview event for the exhibition West Encounters East’s Light and Shadows for ArteAméricas 2012. The event will take place at the Lowe Art Museum on Thursday, February 9 from 7 to 10 p.m.

West Encounters East is a project that rethinks the significance of cultural exchange, emigration, ethnicity, and diversity by identifying and engaging emerging and established Latin American artists of Asian heritage.

Writer Anna Kazumi-Stahl will discuss “The  Japanese Beauty of Shadows” and address Japanese sensibility and cultural aesthetic as it relates to light and dark. The curator of the WEE exhibition, Denise Mattar, former director of São Paulo Modern Art Museum and Rio de Janeiro Modern Art Museum, will tell the story of the Japanese  immigration to Brazil with an emphasis on this large population’s integration into the Brazilian art scene. She will also introduce and examine the works of seven Latin American artists with Asian heritage, including Cristina Sá, Takashi Fukushima, Yutaka Toyota, Kazuo Okubo, Megumi Yuasa, Valeria Yamamoto, and Guillermo Ueno. A reception will follow.

The Lowe Art Museum is located on the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus at 1301 Stanford Drive. For more information call Lizeth Servellon at 305-854-4959 or visit www.miami.edu/lowe.

The ArteAméricas fair of art from Latin America will take place from March 2-5 at the Miami Beach Convention Center.

Peter Buchwald, assistant professor of molecular and cellular pharmacology and director of the Drug Discovery Program at the Diabetes Research Institute, will present “A Hill Function-Based Cellular-Level Insulin Secretion Model for Avascular Pancreatic Islets” on Thursday, February 9 at 12 p.m. in the Rosenstiel Medical Science Building, Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology Conference Room 6018.

Tom Reh, professor of biological structure at the University of Washington School of Medicine, will present “Stem Cell Approaches to the Treatment of Retinal Degenerations” on Thursday, February 9, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. (reception at 5 p.m.) at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute’s Jose Berrocal Auditorium. For more information, contact Fabio Nascimento at 305-326-6046 or [email protected].

The Biostatistics Collaboration and Consulting Core in the Division of Biostatistics will conduct a Biostatistics Clinic on Thursday, February 9 from 12 to 1 p.m. in the Clinical Research Building, 1120 NW 14th Street, Room 989. Fei Tang, biostatistician, will present “Hypothesis Testing.” RSVP by February 8 to [email protected].

Ines Triay, former assistant secretary for the Office of Environmental Management in the U.S. Department of Energy, will speak on “The Environmental Legacy of the Cold War” on Thursday, February 9 at 3:30 p.m. in the Knight Physics Building, Wilder Auditorium, Room 112.

Triay, an alumna of the University of Miami’s Department of Chemistry, has dedicated her career to the safe, timely, and cost-effective cleanup of radioactive waste from the nation’s Cold War nuclear weapons production and research. In 2009, President Obama appointed her assistant secretary for environmental management.

The event, which is part of the 2012 Dr. Jimmie R. Nelson Lecture Series, is free and open to the public. For more information, contact [email protected] or 305-284-5531.