Noteworthy
Press

Knoespel Appointed Interim Dean
of Ivan Allen College

Dr. Ken Knoespel, Professor and Chair of the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, will serve as interim dean of the Ivan Allen College. The announcement of his appointment was made May 18 by Georgia Tech Provost Gary Schuster who stated, “Dr. Knoespel's expertise as an administrator and knowledge of the College led to wide support for his appointment.” Knoespel officially assumes leadership of the College on July 1, 2009 and will work for several weeks with current Dean Sue Rosser to effect a smooth transition.

Dr. Knoespel is McEver Professor of Engineering and the Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech and has served as Chair of the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture since 2003. He was Associate Dean of the College from 2000-2003 and served as Interim Dean from 1998-1999. He will lead the College until a new dean is named.

Read more about Ken Knoespel

Schuster Hosts Farewell for Dean Rosser

Colleagues, faculty, and staff from across Georgia Tech attended a May 28th farewell reception for Dean Sue Rosser hosted by Provost Gary Schuster. Laudatory remarks were made by Schuster, Inman Allen, son of the College’s namesake and representing the Ivan Allen College Development Council, incoming Interim Dean Ken Knoespel, Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) Director Steve Cross, and Associate Dean Susan Cozzens who spoke on behalf of the Dean’s office staff.

Rosser will continue with the College through late July, working with incoming interim dean Ken Knoespel to transition responsibilities. In August, she will assume the position of Provost at San Francisco State University.

Nunn Meets with Obama on Reducing
Nuclear Proliferation

On May 19th, President Barack Obama said, “America must take the lead in reducing the spread of nuclear weapons.” Obama’s comment followed a meeting in the Oval Office with former Secretaries of State George P. Shultz and Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry, and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn for whom the Ivan Allen Colllege School of International Affairs is named.

The discussion centered on steps needed to realize a world that is free of nuclear weapons. Pledging to continue to work together, President Obama called the statesmen “four of the most preeminent national security thinkers” in our nation today and said that their vision has “helped inspire policies of this Administration” on nuclear weapons issues. According to a report from the Associated Press, President Obama said that reducing nuclear proliferation will be one of the administration's highest priorities. Obama will discuss reductions in nuclear stockpiles with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during their July meeting.

Goodman Warns House Committee about "Tsunami" of Cyber Insecurity

On June 10, Seymour (Sy) Goodman briefed the U.S. House of Representatives' Science and Technology Committee and Research and Science Education Subcommittee during its hearing on "Cyber Security Research & Development." Goodman is a professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the College of Computing, and serves as co-Director of both the Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and the Center for International Security, Technology, and Policy (CISTP).

In his remarks, Goodman stated that "cybersecurity should be viewed as a broad societal issue, like auto safety or public health" and that "cyber protection will be an ongoing need, requiring continually improved responses to dynamically changing circumstances." He focused on two dimensions of cybersecurity: "what I fear is a coming tsunami of insecurity due to the spread of cellular telephones and other mobile devices" and their increased use for accessing the internet and conducting business, and the challenge of educating a professional workforce capable of achieving "safer and more secure cyberspace."

Read Goodman's full testimony.

Brown Briefs Congressional Staff, is Vice-chair of NAS Climate Policy Panel, and explains “Clean Coal” in Latest Energy Buzz

On May 13th, School of Public Policy Professor Marilyn Brown was one of four speakers who briefed Congressional staff on the Energy Efficiency Resource Standard (EERS). The session, sponsored by U.S. Representative John Lewis, focused on the impact that an EERS could have on job creation, consumer savings, and the reduction of global warming.

In March, Brown participated in the National Academy of Science’s America's Climate Choices Summit. As Vice-Chair of one of the four major panels for the initiative, she is leading the study and development of recommendations for Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change. Brown’s panel, along with three others, will release consensus reports in late 2009. In 2010, the Committee on America's Climate Choices will issue a final consolidated report. The recommendations will support congressional policymakers as they work on comprehensive climate and energy legislation.

Read Marilyn Brown’s energy insights in her quarterly Energy Buzz. In the new issue, Brown explains Clean Coal: Myth or Reality?

Rosser's Twelfth Book Highlights Marginalized Women's Health Issues

Johns Hopkins University Press has published Ivan Allen College Dean Sue V. Rosser’s newest book, Diversity and Women's Health.  A professor of public policy and professor of history, technology, and society, Rosser edited the anthology which presents cutting-edge research on women's health from a feminist perspective.

Rosser and contributors to this collection of essays show that, despite progress and expansion in the study of women's health, significant disparities exist in diagnosis and treatment among women because of their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and age from both medical and women's studies perspectives.

They argue that health care issues affecting diverse groups of women remain underfunded and understudied and must become a central part of the broader conversation on women's health in the United States.  In reviewing the history of feminist scholarship on health care, the volume shows how bringing a feminist perspective to biomedical research will address the health care needs of marginalized groups in the United States.

LCC's DiSalvo and Lukens exhibit "Smog is Democratic"

June 15th, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) opens a special exhibit at its Global Health Odyssey Museum. Consequential Matters is an investigation by Atlanta-based artists of the consequences of urbanization, technology, consumption, indulgence, and globalization. One of the three featured installations is Smog is Democratic by School of Literature, Communication, and Culture Assistant Professor Carl DiSalvo and Digital Media PhD student Jonathan Lukens.

Smog is Democratic explores particulate matter through the medium of visualization. DiSalvo and Lukens present particulate matter as a residue of life. "An investigation of particulate matter touches multiple concerns: pollution, the relationship between urban living and hygiene, the tension between scientific and artistic representations of information, and the desire to produce measurement techniques that gauge the threat of the unseen." The installation includes two large prints of data visualizations, a video of a data visualization, and twenty photographs.

Learn more about the exhibit which runs June 15 – September 11, 2009

Kim Paper Takes Prize for Examining Policy Implications of Internet Regulation

Before a gathering of more than 400 economists and industrial organization practitioners, a paper co-authored by School of Economics Assistant Professor Byung-Cheol Kim was awarded the first annual Public Utility Research Prize for the Best Paper in Regulatory Economics.

The $2,500 prize was given by the Industrial Organization Society at its annual conference held at Northeastern University in Boston April 3-5. Kim’s paper Net Neutrality and Investment Incentives (with Jay Pil Choi, Professor at Michigan State) “analyzes the effects of net neutrality regulation on investment incentives for Internet service providers (ISPs) and content providers (CPs), and their implications for social welfare.” Net neutrality means that all the packets of information sent through the Internet by CPs are treated equally by ISPs, rather than a fee-based approach. Kim’s paper was recognized for its important implications for regulatory policy, and also the Internet industry and users who must be eventually be affected by changes in current laws about net neutrality.

Faculty Profile – LCC’s Vinicius Navarro

Assistant Professor Vinicius Navarro joined the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture in Fall 2008. Originally from João Pessoa, a capital city in northeastern Brazil, Navarro earned his PhD in cinema studies from New York University. He has taught courses on film and television and has lectured extensively in Brazil and the United States.

What began as an interest in the concepts of sincerity and insincerity evolved to focus on performance, non-fiction cinema, and documentary. Navarro says, “I came to realize that once a person is in front of a camera, regardless of whether it is fiction or non-fiction, it is always a performance and the performance is what interests me.”

Navarro has written on performance in non-fiction cinema, and about documentary and experimental film and the intersections between filmmaking and the cultural history of the postwar era in the United States. He co-authored Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning (Rutgers University Press, 2010). The book explores expanding ideas of what constitutes documentary film-making and is unique in its examination of the aesthetics of a genre that is traditionally critiqued in terms of content. “Fictional films are viewed as the collective efforts of the director, screenwriter, cinematographer, and others. We have not examined the contributions of these roles, or even the performances of the subjects, in non-fiction films.”

In August, Navarro will present a paper, Eventful Sites: Watching Non-Fiction Online, at Visible Evidence, a non-fiction film conference in Los Angeles. Another work on global television formats (e.g.: templates for TV programs such as Dancing with the Stars that are sold all over the world) has been accepted for publication in a forthcoming anthology by Routledge.

HTS Student Exhibit Draws Upon
Interdisciplinary Skills

During the final weeks of the Spring 2009 semester, students in the School of History, Technology, and Society’s (HTS) “Introduction to Museum Studies” class opened a special exhibit. On display in the Neely Room of the Georgia Tech Library April 23 through May 29, The Art of the Book brought to life six elements of bookmaking: paper-making, watermarking, illustrations, marbling, book binding, and printing.

The exhibit was a semester long project for nineteen students under the guidance of Professor Gus Giebelhaus and Cindy Bowden, Director of the American Museum of Papermaking and Adjunct Professor in HTS. All of the students served as members of the curatorial committee for the exhibit and also on one of three other committees: design and construction; marketing and public relations; and education. Artifacts were culled from the permanent collection of Georgia Tech’s American Museum of Papermaking. The exhibit involved interdisciplinary skills from the variety of majors participating in the class; in addition to HTS majors there were students from International Affairs, Management, Aerospace, Chemical and Mechanical Engineering.

“Introduction to Museum Studies” will be offered again in Spring term, 2010. It will be co-taught by Ms. Bowden and HTS Assistant Professor Carla Gerona.