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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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