 |
 |
Photos of Founder’s Day 2008 At Founder’s Day 2008, media mogul and philanthropist Ted Turner received the Ivan Allen Prize for Progress and Service, and other faculty, students, and alumni received Ivan Allen Legacy Awards. For a photo montage of the event, please link to the address below. http://www.iac.gatech.edu/newsletter/apr_08/iacfdpics http://www.whistle.gatech.edu/archives/08/apr/07/turner.shtml |
Photos of 2008 Sam Nunn/Bank of America Policy Forum The 2008 Sam Nunn/Bank of America Policy Forum focused on the topic of “Nuclear Nonproliferation and the Nuclear Renaissance.” For a detailed story of the event, please link to the address below. |
Bowman Receives Top BOR Award Kirk Bowman, associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), has received the Regents’ Hall of Fame Awards” for his significant contributions to public higher education in Georgia. The award notes that Bowman has been the driving force in the establishment of three separate interdisciplinary summer study-abroad programs in Latin America for students. He also has developed courses that focus on the comparative study of contemporary politics and Latin American politics. Students describe Bowman as an enthusiastic, provocative teacher who motivates students to think critically and to formulate logically reasoned opinions. Bowman, along with other outstanding USG faculty and alumni, was recognized at the Fourth Annual Regents Awards for Excellence in Education Celebration, held on March 29 at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta. “This event applauds excellence and achievement within the University System,” said Regent chard L. Tucker, who, as chair of the USG Foundation, hosted the program. “Tonight’s honorees all have contributed outstanding service to the University System of Georgia, their communities and the state of Georgia in the arena of public higher education, and we want to express our sincere appreciation for their work on behalf of the University System of Georgia.” For more, please link to the address below. |
Persons Wins Outstanding Teaching Award Georgia Persons, Professor of Public Policy and IAC Director of Special Projects, has won the 2008 Anna Julia Cooper Outstanding Teaching Award given by the National Conference of Black Political Scientists (NCOBPS). The award recognized Persons’ breadth of teaching experience, the depth of her commitment to mentoring and imaginative teaching methods. This award is named for Dr. Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964), the fabled administrator and teacher of the M Street School in Washington, D.C. and founder of the Frelinghauysen University for adult education, also in the nation's capital. Born a slave, she nonetheless secured her PhD in French from the Sorbonne. |
Professors Recognized as Innovators The Atlanta-based organization Inspiring Futures has named Ian Bogost, Assistant Professor of Literature, Communication and Culture, together with Jeannette Yen, Professor of Biology, as two of Atlanta’s Most Innovative Minds. Inspiring Futures is a networking organization that works to develop solutions to the region’s problems by enabling leaders and innovators to work together. |
IAC Faculty Honored by Institute At the Faculty/Staff Honors Luncheon in April, several members of the College faculty were recognized for their excellence in performance, teaching, mentoring, and research. Thomas H. Crawford, associate professor of Literature, Communication and Culture (LCC), received the Don Bratcher Human Relations Award, and John Krige, the Melvin Kranzberg Professor of History of Technology, was recognized as an outstand doctoral thesis advisor. Richard Barke, associate professor of public policy, received the Outstanding Service Award. In addition, Ken Knoespel, LCC Chair and professor, and Greg Nobles, professor of History, Technology, and Society and Director of the GT Honors Program, both were recognized for 25 years of distinguished service to the Institute. |
Grant Partners Languages with ROTC Training Phil McKnight, Chair of the School of Modern Languages, in partnership with Air Force, Navy and Army ROTC units at Georgia Tech, has received an ROTC Language and Culture Grant from the Institute of International Education. The grant covers three years with approximately $750,000 for “Advancing Critical Language Proficiency and Cultural Competence across Disciplines for ROTC students.” The grant addresses the nation’s need for more specialists in foreign languages and cultures with strength in the kind of technical education that Georgia Tech offers. The grant focuses on building new curriculum strength in Arabic, Korean, Russian and Chinese for both ROTC and other GT students, and will create two new signature faculty-led Language for Business and Technology (LBAT) programs in South Korea and in an Arabic speaking country, including in the latter a new extensive study/work abroad exchange program. Similar exchange programs for students in China, Russia and South Korea will be enhanced and developed further. New adjunct positions in Arabic and Korean will be created, and new tenure track lines in Arabic and Chinese will come on board in the fall semester 2008 to help provide energy and creativity in developing the programs. “The aim of this project is to establish a strong pool of engineers, scientists and technologically sophisticated liberal arts graduates with advanced communication skills in critical languages that will include a significantly greater number of students participating in the three ROTC command units at Georgia Tech than heretofore,” McKnight states. “Students will develop a serious orientation towards issues of national security, globalization, deep cultural and workplace awareness, and the skills of cross-cultural problem solving and conflict resolution.” Col. Sheri Andino (Air Force ROTC) and her colleagues Capt. Wayne Radloff (Navy ROTC) and LTC Nathaniel Farmer (Army ROTC) and their staffs will focus substantial energy on recruiting ROTC students into the programs and will have over $115,000 in student scholarships at their disposal for cadets and midshipmen who elect to participate. |
HTS Students Design Exhibit Students in seminar class HTS 4001 A, taught by Professor August Giebelhaus, have designed an exhibit for the Robert C. Williams Paper Museum at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology. The exhibit, entitled “How Do They Spend it?”, focuses on paper money from ten countries and the images on the money. How Do They Spend It? has the distinction of being the first ever exhibit in production by a group of students at Georgia Tech. The class meets once a week at the Museum, located on the Georgia Tech campus. Most of the students involved with the exhibition are majors in History, Technology, and Society. The intent of the seminar is to learn about the major topics in the field of museum studies, including both the theoretical and ethical aspects as well as the practical issues involved in the operation of a museum. For more information, please link to the address below. |
Saving the environment via the Bible Do we have a moral obligation to protect the Earth? A growing number of religious leaders think so, and they’re incorporating that idea into their faith. Bryan Norton, a philosophy professor in the School of Public Policy who specializes in environmental policy, was a panelist on a program sponsored by the Elachee Nature Science Center in Gainesville, Georgia entitled, “Stewardship and Sustainability: A Challenge for Faith and Science.” For more on the event, please link to the address below. http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/news/article/4859/ |
Testimony Presented to Armed Services Subcommittee On April 1, Seymour Goodman, professor of international affairs and computing and co-director of the Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy (CISTP), testified before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities. Goodman is chair of the National Research Council’s committee on Improving Cybersecurity Research in the United States. His remarks focused on the link between cybersecurity and net-centric operations; his complete testimony may be viewed at the link below. |
Fixing the Knowledge, One Conference at a Time At the second two-day conference on Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering, the audience heard from Professor Cynthia Friend (Harvard University), Professor Sue V. Rosser (Dean of Ivan Allen College, Georgia Institute of Technology), Professor Nancy Hopkins (MIT), and Jim Batterson (Women’s Health Initiative, Stanford) on a range of issues from women in leadership in science, to the impact of scientific patenting, and improving the way women access medical care. For more, please link to the address below. http://gotgender.blogspot.com/2008/03/fixing-knowledge-one-conference-at-time.html |
LCC Team Takes Second Life to a New Level First opened to the public in 2003, Second Life is still very much in the early adoption stage. Its designers had no grand scheme in mind other than to see what people would do with their creation. One of the most groundbreaking examples has come out of the Augmented Reality Lab in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC). The lab team created custom software that works within Second Life to blend locations in physical space with corresponding places in the Second Life virtual space. The result is real world interaction with virtual world objects and beings. “We're very much interested in using video games, not for their typical purpose of beating a high score, but as expressive platforms and performance spaces,” says Michael Nitsche, LCC assistant professor, who is part of the Augmented Reality team. “We wanted to create a new form of tele-presence and virtual performance.” The project enables the Augmented Reality team to take a real-world video feed and combine it with the avatars acting in Second Life. These performances are then recorded as videos called “machinima” (a portmanteau word that combines “machine” and “cinema”). “The result is that you can actually appear as yourself in your own body next to an avatar and interact. You can enter these worlds yourself,” Nitsche says. “That's very powerful.” For more, please link to the address below. http://universitybusiness.com/viewarticlepf.aspx?articleid=1023 |
Thomas Lux Celebrates New Popularity of Poetry Thomas Lux, the Margaret and Henry Bourne Professor of Poetry in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, believes that poetry is in the midst of a new wave of popularity. “Until the 1900s, poetry had a very large readership, but modernism came along and all of a sudden poetry got too obscure for people,” says Lux. “It made people feel stupid. These are great poets, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and people like that – but it turned a lot of people off for a few generations. Poetry became something that needed to be explained to people. It was like solving a riddle, and people were put off by that,” he says. Lux’s remarks are featured in an article in the Orange County Register earlier this month. He was in California to do a reading at the University of California, Irvine, as part of National Poetry Month. For more of his thoughts on the state of poetry today, please link to the address below. http://www.ocregister.com/articles/poetry-lux-people-2011807-says-poets#slComments |
| Ivan Allen College |