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GIT Awarded $4.75 Million U.S. Department of Education Grant The Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP) and Atlanta's Shepherd Center have been awarded a $4.75 million Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) grant on wireless technologies aimed at enhancing the lives of people with disabilities. This second five-year grant, awarded from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research under the United States Department of Education, supports the continuation of the innovative wireless activities undertaken during the first five years of the Wireless RERC. |
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GT Institutionalizes ADVANCE Grant The Provost's Office declared its intention to continue funding a program that supports the research, retention and advancement of women faculty in science and engineering courtesy of a five-year, $3.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Mary Frank Fox, Professor, School of Public Policy (SPP), has been selected as one of six professors who will serve a five-year term and receive annual funding to assist with research activities that develop, sustain, and advance women faculty Institute-wide through the ADVANCE Program for Institutional Transformation. According to ADVANCE Program Director Carol Colatrella, Professor, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, has an interest in faculty development as well as an understanding of the issues that women faculty face during the tenure review process. The ADVANCE program also worked to extend the scope of family-friendly practices — stopping the tenure clock and building a daycare facility — to help faculty balance commitments to family and work. |
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Family Weekend a Huge Success The Annual Georgia Tech Family Weekend reception at Ivan Allen College, which took place on Friday, October 6, was a great success, with approximately 150 students, parents and faculty attending. Faculty representatives from every school were present to interact with parents and current students, and members of the IAC advising staff were available to interact with potential students. |
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International Film Series Begins Georgia Tech announces two international film series this fall featuring French and African films. Beginning October 18, five French films and three African films will be shown in the original French or African languages, and all with English subtitles. All films begin at 7:00 p.m. and will be shown in the Architecture Auditorium, 247 Fourth Street, N.W., on the Georgia Tech campus. The screenings are all free and open to the public. The full schedule and directions are available online at www.film.gatech.edu/series.htm. The curators of the French Film Series are Stephanie Boulard, School of Modern Languages; Angela Dalle Vacche and Rodney Hill, School of Literature, Communication and Culture. The French Film Series is sponsored by French Cultural Services, Georgia Tech School of Modern Languages and Georgia Tech School of Communication, Literature and Culture. |
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Murray Among 100 Most Influential Women in Electronic Gaming Janet Murray, Professor, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC), has been named as one of the top 100 women in games by Next Generation. The women who make up this list are impacting not only making and marketing games, but are also exploring games as social commentary, as art, as educational tools, as a story-telling medium, and as the leading form of entertainment in our world today. According to
the author of article, Fiona Cherbak, women have the advantage of understanding what types and genres of games female consumers will want to play as company strategies are being built up around female players and their game play preferences. |
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Li Assumes Presidency of Chinese Economists Society Hiazheng Li, Professor, School of Economics, assumed the presidency of the Chinese Economist Society (CES) on September 1, 2006.
His new duties include organizing a major conference in China, organizing sessions at the annual conference at the American Economic Association (AEA), administering the Short-term teaching program selecting scholars from the US to teach modern economics in China (with financial support from the Gregory Chow Endowment Fund), and improve and reform internal structure and mechanisms of CES.
The mission of the CES is to promote scholarly research on China and other transitional economies, to foster academic exchanges, and to promote market-based economic reforms and open-door policies in China. |
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Breznitz Appointed Member of the Economic Vision and Strategy Team Danny Breznitz, Assistant Professor, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs (INTA), has been appointed member of the Economic Vision and Strategy Team, U.S. - Israel Science and Technology Commission of Israel's Ministry of Industry, Trade, & Labor, effective September 21, 2006. As a member of this team, Breznitz will help reshape Israel's Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy, at times of political and economic turbulence worldwide, and Israel's changing position in the new global system. |
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Liberia Receives Pledge from Microsoft at GT Lecture  While a guest of the Ivan Allen College on
September 13, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
held discussions with representatives from Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft, the Open Society Institute, the World Bank, and other stakeholders in rebuilding Liberia's devastated integrated communication technology (ITC) infrastructure. Dr. Badshah, Senior Director for Community Affairs Division at Microsoft, made the pledge on behalf of Microsoft's billionaire owner, Bill Gates,
to build ten community technology centers across Liberia. Badshah says Microsoft is in preliminary talks about helping Liberia to develop its technology base. |
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Korea Initiative Makes 2006 Strongest Year Ever The Korea Initiative was founded in 2002 by Dr. John Endicott, Director of the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy (CISTP) at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, as a broad-based program to educate students and the public on Korean history, politics, and security issues. This year, the Korea Initiative experienced significant growth with the convergence of several programs that allowed students, faculty, and members of the public to immerse themselves in multidisciplinary Korean studies. The success of these programs is due in large part to the generosity of the Korea Foundation, which has made three separate grants to Georgia Tech since 2003 totaling over $100,000. The courses continue to remain popular among students and provide them with opportunities to become expert on Korean and Northeast Asian security issues and study language and culture. In addition, a major Korea Conference will take place November 1-2, 2006, at the Wardlaw Center, which will be open and free to the public. Please RSVP to Angela Levin by October 30, 2006. |
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Science and the Gender Gap In an article in Newsweek (September 25), Dean Sue Rosser stated, "The U.S. needs as much scientific and technologic brain power as it can get. It makes no sense to exclude half the population." Decades after women began scaling the corporate ladder, female physicists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers are still struggling to find their place at the nation's major research universities. Although women now earn about half the graduate degrees in math and chemistry, for example, they hold only about 10 percent of the faculty jobs in those fields, the article stated. |
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Centuries-old Partnership Binds China and Iran Together The San Francisco Chronicle (September 18), quotes John Garver, Professor, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, as saying that both China and Iran, "are proud, ancient non-Western civilizations that 'deeply resent perceived contemporary Western presumptions of superiority.'" Although China no longer provides assistance to Iran to help develop Tehran's weapons program, it still provides assistance to the country involving two-way trading totaling $6 billion in the first half of 2006. China has also committed $3 billion this year to help increase yields from Iran's oil fields. Stretching back centuries, the relationship between the two is not only about oil, as neither country wants the U.S. to become the dominant power in the Middle East, "Neither likes the fact that the United States is a sole global superpower," Garver says. |
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Walsh Paper Analyzes Human Gene Patenting Controversies When it comes to gene patenting, policy makers may be responding more to high-profile media controversies than to systematic data about the issues. In the September issue of Nature Publishing Group, John Walsh,
Associate Professor, School of Public Policy (SPP) and his co-authors offer an analysis of human gene patenting controversies. Although policymakers and advisory groups have long recognized the moral and ethical concerns associated with human gene patents, such concerns have only rarely led to concrete proposals for reform. Walsh and his colleagues found evidence that the combination of a lack of empirical evidence of problems and a mismatch between the problems and proposed solutions may explain why there has been little actual policy change. |
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Knoespel Presents Talk on Newton Kenneth Knoespel, Professor and Chair, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, (LCC), presented a talk entitled “Newton's Alchemical Work and the Creation of Economic Value” on September 11, 2006, at the American Chemical Society's 232nd national meeting in San Francisco. The talk was a part of a session dedicated to scholarship based on the unpublished manuscripts of Sir Isaac Newton, most of which are housed at the University of Cambridge and in the Edelstein Center at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. For the past 15 years, Knoespel has studied both collections, some portions of which weren't available to scholars until the 1970s. |
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Wang Declares Taiwan and China Must Unite Writing for the The Christian Science Monitor, Fei-Ling Wang, Professor, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, observes that China's rise in power increasingly depends on the successful political transformation of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in the direction of the rule of law and democracy. Key to catalyzing this change is the democratic Republic of China (ROC) on the island of Taiwan. But, rather than viewing Taiwan as a viable force of political opposition and a model of successful political change, Wang says China sees the ROC as just a local regime taking refuge under foreign protection and seeking independence. |
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Creating Poetry That's Safe for Engineers Thomas Lux, the Bourne Chair of Poetry and Director of the Poetry at Tech program, was featured in an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (September 24). Lux states that he offers a presentation every year called "Engineering a Poem," which is designed to
"diminish the stereotype of the poet as some dreamy bozo who wanders around and then all of a sudden gets struck by inspiration" In addition to five or six big reading events, the program offers in the Spring, free workshops to 15 aspiring poets in the community including community outreach programs that involve workshops in public schools throughout the metro Atlanta area. More and more of the next generation of engineers and computer scientists at Georgia Tech are reading and writing poetry, notes President G. Wayne Clough in the article. "The pursuit of science and technology is just as creative a process as poetry and the arts," he explains. "Both require intensely creative people who can think outside the box, look at the same things everyone else sees and imagine something more, and put the pieces together in new ways." |
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Pearson Says NOVA Documentary Pivotal for African-American Scientists  In a symposium at the American Chemical Society in September, Willie Pearson Jr., Professor, School of History, Technology, and Society, commented on an upcoming NOVA documentary on chemist Percy Julian. Julian, who was African-American, developed a low cost method of producing cortisone, as well as a synthetic drug for the treatment of glaucoma, and a fire-fighting foam that saved thousands of lives during World War II. "Despite more than a hundred years of participation in science, there remains very little written about the African American presence in science," notes Pearson. "That Julian's story is to be featured on NOVA is a signal moment not only in scientific history but also in American history. A lot of people are not aware of how significant this is." The documentary is entitled "Forgotten Genius" and will air February 6, 2007 on PBS. |
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