March 28, 2008
Rice University: Three Graduate Specialties at Rice Rank Among Top 10 Nationally
Three specialty areas of graduate study at Rice University that ranked among the top 10 nationally in last year's U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Graduate Schools” made the top 10 again this year. Rice’s computer programming language specialty in computer science is ranked ninth. The atomic/molecular/optical specialty in physics tied for ninth with the University of California–Berkeley. These two science specialty rankings are based solely on nominations by department heads and directors of graduate studies at peer schools. Rice is also tied for ninth with Case Western Reserve University in the biomedical/bioengineering specialty. This ranking is based on assessments by department heads of the specialty in engineering schools. The department heads could not rate their own schools.
Source: Rice University, Texas
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March 27, 2008
U.S. News & World Report Ranks the SMU Cox MBA Programs Among the Nation's Best Working Professionals and Full-Time Programs All Receive High Marks
U.S. News & World Report released today its annual ranking of the nation’s top graduate programs. SMU Cox is pleased to announce its Professional MBA program (PMBA) moved up three slots from last year to #9 – the highest ranked program in Texas. The Cox Executive MBA program (EMBA) ranked #15. And the Cox full-time MBA ranked #44 – tied with Vanderbilt, and the school that moved up on the list more than any other ranked. "While these rankings support the overall quality of our programs for full-time students and working professionals, we continue to remain focused on academic excellence," said Albert W. Niemi, Jr., dean of the Cox School of Business. "Year after year the bar continues to rise in terms of the quality of a Cox education, and we will stay true to the school’s mission by continuing our emphasis on the overall excellence of the program and providing an outstanding experience for our students.”
Source: Southern Methodist University, Texas
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March 26, 2008
Argosy University Appoints New Dean for the College of Education
Argosy University President Craig Swenson, Ph.D. announced the appointment of Cynthia Kuck Ph.D. as Dean of the College of Education. Dr. Kuck will be responsible for new program development and will oversee the process of achieving National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) status for the College of Education. She will assume her new role May 12, 2008. "We are excited to have Dr. Cynthia "Cyd" Kuck join our Argosy University team and take us to the next level in growth and excellence in our College of Education," said Dr. Swenson. "Dr. Kuck has a demonstrated ability to develop creative, high quality programs that will ensure the highest quality of learning experience for our students." Dr. Kuck brings 35 years of experience in education with 18 years in higher education focused on new program development, certification and accreditation. She was Dean of the College of Education at Concordia University. Dr. Kuck earned a Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Chicago in Public Policy Analysis, School Administration, and holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Concordia. Her career in higher education at Concordia included roles of dean and chair of the Department of Leadership, program coordinator of three graduate programs, urban school's facilitator, and professor of science education and school leadership. In addition, she has been a leader in numerous research studies and has authored numerous articles on education and learning. "Dr. Kuck brings new energy, ideas, resources and experiences that will allow us to enhance our education program and provide the kind of academic experience our students seek," said Kathryn Tooredman, Ph.D. vice president Academic Affairs, Argosy University.
Source: Argosy University
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March 26, 2008
Argosy University Appoints New Dean for the College of Education
Argosy University President Craig Swenson, Ph.D. announced the appointment of Cynthia Kuck Ph.D. as Dean of the College of Education. Dr. Kuck will be responsible for new program development and will oversee the process of achieving National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) status for the College of Education. She will assume her new role May 12, 2008. “We are excited to have Dr. Cynthia “Cyd” Kuck join our Argosy University team and take us to the next level in growth and excellence in our College of Education,” said Dr. Swenson. “Dr. Kuck has a demonstrated ability to develop creative, high quality programs that will ensure the highest quality of learning experience for our students.” Dr. Kuck brings 35 years of experience in education with 18 years in higher education focused on new program development, certification and accreditation. She was Dean of the College of Education at Concordia University. Dr. Kuck earned a Ph.D. from University of Illinois at Chicago in Public Policy Analysis, School Administration, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Concordia. Her career in higher education at Concordia included roles of dean and chair of the Department of Leadership, program coordinator of three graduate programs, urban school’s facilitator, and professor of science education and school leadership. In addition, she has been a leader in numerous research studies and has authored numerous articles on education and learning. “Dr. Kuck brings new energy, ideas, resources and experiences that will allow us to enhance our education program and provide the kind of academic experience our students seek,” said Kathryn Tooredman, Ph.D. vice president Academic Affairs, Argosy University.
Source: Argosy University
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March 26, 2008
Carnegie Mellon University: Tepper MBA Students Mentor City High Students
Approximately 50 MBA students from the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University will team up with 150 10th-graders from City High, a downtown Pittsburgh charter school, on Friday, March 28, to guide them through a rite of passage familiar to business students: the business case competition. Now in its fifth year, the event challenges students from City High to spend a day developing competing business plans. Tepper School MBA students will work with the high school teams as both mentors and hosts. This year’s competition involves developing strategy for a video game company.
“A lot of us realize it’s important to give back to the community,” explains Darren Sabom, a second-year Tepper School student and Community Outreach Coordinator for the school’s MBA class. “We’re pretty lucky to be getting a great education in business school.” The event began when City High was only two years old. Tepper School alumnus Eddy Jones, who was then an MBA student, volunteered with the school, which emphasizes career readiness for inner-city teens. He came up with the idea of helping students learn how to prepare for a business case competition, a standard activity for most MBAs.
“It opens up educational and career windows that they may have never thought of before,” says City High teacher Maureen Anderson of the high school students. “Working with someone who is young, highly educated and continuing their education has a really powerful impact.” Past competitions used fictitious firms, but this year students will compete to develop strategy for a real company. The City High students will be looking at a software platform from Etcetera Edutainment, a Pittsburgh-based company headed by Carnegie Mellon alumnus Jessica Trybus. Sabom says teams of 10 students will have a chance to develop a marketing strategy for an interactive game that they will play during the day. Each team will present their strategy to a panel of judges from 2:30 to 3:30 p.m. at the Tepper School.
Source: Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
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March 24, 2008
New Six-Story Building Planned at D'Youville College
D'Youville College will begin construction of a new six-story, 93,000 square foot academic building in May. It will be located on the corner of Connecticut and Fargo streets, currently the site of a college parking lot. The $20 million structure will house classrooms, laboratories, student service, faculty, and college operation offices, conference rooms, and also include facilities for a planned pharmacy program. Designed by Cannon Design of Grand Island, it will feature modern mosaic precast, brick and glass panels, cultured stone and brick on the exterior with appropriate street landscaping on the Connecticut Street side. "The building will be designed to allow the addition of features such as a connector and other amenities in the future," according to Donald G. Keller, vice president of operations at the college. Parking that will be displaced by the new facility will move to college lots on Connecticut and West Avenue adjacent to the college. The building will accommodate the increase in students the college has seen during the past decade. In addition to a growing student body of U.S. students, more than 800 Canadians out of approximately 3000 enrolled students currently attend the private college. "The college has no plans for any major new buildings for the foreseeable future." Keller said. D'Youville, currently celebrating its centennial, has invested more than $70 million in its West Side campus over the past 12 years.
Source: D'Youville College, New York
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March 20, 2008
Carnegie Mellon University: Team From Tepper School Wins Life Sciences Track in McGinnis Venture Competition
The winners of the 2008 McGinnis Venture Competition, which awarded more than $140,000 in cash and business services, included teams from the host Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University and the University of Manitoba, Canada. Each winner picked up a total of $20,000 in cash and another $25,000 in business services donated by several Pittsburgh-area law firms experienced in venture-backed business development. “Our aim is to give the teams the best advice we can, from the top people in the fields of venture and angel investing and entrepreneurship, to enable their best chances at successfully launching their company,” said Arthur Boni, director of the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School, which sponsors the competition. The Tepper School team of Alberto Gandini and Salman Mukhtar won in the Life Sciences track, by pitching a business called Tropical Health Systems, which aims to cure malaria with medical device that purifies infected red blood cells using a magnetic filter. The University of Manitoba team of Erin Yanchycki, Stephen Chamaa and Daniel Kozier won in the Technology Track with Civitech, an early stage company developing system of wireless sensors for monitoring environmental conditions in buildings. Their first product aims to monitor moisture inside building walls to prevent growth of mold. Yale’s team of Stuart Murray, David Mueller and Jamie Spivey won in the Sustainable Track with Ideal Energy, a plan to install small wind turbines on customer’s property and sell customers the generated electricity at a 10 percent discount to prevailing utility rates. A team from the University of Louisville, Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, won the elevator pitch competition, a separate award of $2,000 cash, with Partum Group LLC, a medical device to help physicians monitor the birth process. The Tepper and Manitoba teams also were awarded berths in the Moot Corp® Competition at the University of Texas at Austin. The McGinnis Venture Competition continues to expand internationally. This year, one quarter of competing teams came from outside the U.S., including teams from India, China, Germany, Columbia and Canada. Helping to fuel the international growth is Tepper School alum Sarosh Kumana (MSIA, 1977), who sponsored the Sustainable Technology Track again this year. Kumana, founder of the Foundation for a Sustainable Future (www.sustainable-future.org), helped sponsor the Al Gore Sustainable Technology Venture Competition in India, which produced the two Indian teams competing in the McGinnis competition. In its fifth year, the McGinnis Venture Competition attracts teams from the world’s top MBA schools to compete for prizes that include cash and legal services from Pittsburgh’s top venture-minded community. The annual McGinnis Venture Competition is made possible by an endowment from Gerald E. McGinnis, a successful entrepreneur and founder of Respironics Inc., and more than 20 Pittsburgh-area and national sponsors, including law firms and venture capital firms.
Source: Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
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March 18, 2008
Colorado School of Mines Receives $5.9M for Energy Research Funding
Colorado School of Mines will receive $5.9 million in funding for four out of 19 energy research projects selected by the Department of Energy's Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America (RPSEA). Funded under RPSEA's Unconventional Resources Program, the projects will focus on increasing the supply of domestic natural gas and other petroleum resources. “With this set of large competitive research awards to Mines, the RPSEA program has signaled that we will continue to grow our national leadership in unconventional fossil energy research," said Dag Nummedal, director of the Colorado Energy Research Institute (CERI).
Mines selected projects are: An Integrated Framework for the Treatment and Management of Produced Water
(Jorg Drewes, Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, PI) Additional Project Participants: Kennedy/Jenks Consultants, Argonne National Laboratory, Stratus Consulting, Eltron Research and Development, Chevron, Pioneer Natural Gas, Marathon, Triangle Petroleum, Anadarko, Awwa Research Foundation, Stewart Environmental, Southern Nevada Water Authority, Veolia Water, Hydration Technology, Petroglyph Operating Co. Application of Natural Gas Composition to Modeling Communication Within and Filling of Large Tight-Gas-Sand Reservoirs, Rocky Mountains (Nicholas Harris, Department of Geology and Geological Engineering and CERI, PI) Additional Project Participants: U.S. Geological Survey, University of Oklahoma, University of Manchester, Fluid Inclusion Technology, Permedia Research Group, Williams Exploration and Production Co., ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Newfield Exploration, BP, Anadarko Comprehensive Investigation of the Biogeochemical Factors Enhancing Microbially Generated Methane in Coal Beds (Junko Munkata-Marr, Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, PI) Additional Project Participants: University of Wyoming, U.S. Geological Survey, Pioneer Natural Resources, Pinnacle Gas Resources, Coleman Oil and Gas, Ciris Energy, Inc. Reservoir Connectivity and Stimulated Gas Flow in Tight Sands (Dag Nummedal, CERI, PI) Additional Project Participants: University of Colorado, Mesa State University, iReservoir, Bill Barrett Corporation, Noble Energy, Whiting Petroleum Corporation, ConocoPhillips
Funding for the projects is provided through the "Ultra-Deepwater and Unconventional Natural Gas and Other Petroleum Resources Research and Development Program," authorized by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. RPSEA is under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory to administer the program. RPSEA is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit consortium with more than 130 members, including 25 of the nation's premier research universities, five national laboratories, other major research institutions, large and small energy producers and energy consumers.
Source: Colorado School of Mines
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March 17, 2008
Arkansas State University: College of Humanities and Social Sciences to Present Forum on Clinton Presidency
Arkansas State University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, in conjunction with the Department of Political Science, presents its spring forum on Monday, March 31, at 7 p.m., in the Centennial Ballroom, Reng Student Services Center/Student Union, 101 North Caraway Road, Jonesboro. The forum, “The Clinton Presidency…an Arkansas Legacy,” will be moderated by Janis Kearney, author and presidential diarist, and it will include brief presentations by several participants who served in the Clinton administration. Presenters will speak about their roles in the administration and speak about their individual perspectives on what the Clinton presidency meant and continues to mean for the state of Arkansas. The individual presentations by participants will be followed by a short list of prepared questions and will end with an open question-and-answer session with the audience. This presentation is free and open to the public. Author and presidential diarist Janis Kearney is spending the 2007-2008 academic year at ASU, where she is teaching a special-topics course in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ department of Political Science, “The Clinton Presidency” and an Honors special-topics course, “Storytelling, News, and Arkansas.” One of 19 siblings who grew up in Gould, a small town in southeast Arkansas, her parents, James and Ethel V. Kearney, were sharecroppers. Kearney earned her BA in journalism from the University of Arkansas, and continued her education at UALR, earning 30 hours toward an MPA. Kearny purchased the Arkansas State Press newspaper in 1987 from civil rights legend Daisy Bates, publishing the weekly newspaper until 1992, when she took a sabbatical to work in the Clinton-Gore presidential campaign as director of minority media outreach. In 1993, Clinton’s White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers asked her to join the White House press office, and Kearney worked there until 2001. Kearney’s books include “Conversations: William Jefferson Clinton, From Hope to Harlem,” and the acclaimed memoir, “Cotton Field of Dreams.” Other participants, all former members of the Clinton administration, will include Kay Goss, Bob J. Nash, Ken Smith, and Stephanie Streett. Kay Goss currently serves as director of emergency management and crisis communications for SRA International – a leading provider of technology and strategic consulting services and solutions to clients in national security, civil government, and health care and health care markets. Ms. Goss served as associate FEMA director in charge of national preparedness, training, and exercises during the eight years of the Clinton administration. Bob J. Nash currently serves as deputy campaign manager for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. Nash is former vice chairman of ShoreBank Corporation in Chicago; he also served as President Bill Clinton’s director of presidential personnel for six of the eight years of the Clinton administration. In this role, Nash was responsible for recruitment, vetting, and hiring of Clinton appointees to the White House and the federal government. He served two years as undersecretary for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), heading up the rural development agencies of the USDA. Ken Smith, currently executive director of the Arkansas Audubon Society, has overall responsibility for the state’s restoration and protection of watersheds and other habitats important to birds and other wildlife, as well as oversight of environmental education, citizen involvement in science, and public education. Smith was appointed by President Clinton in 1993 to serve as deputy chief of staff to Bruce Babbitt, Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior. Then Smith was appointed assistant secretary for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service – where he developed policy for the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Stephanie Streett, currently executive director of the William J. Clinton Library Foundation in Little Rock, has served in that role since leaving the White House in 2001. Streett served for eight years as director of scheduling for Clinton during his presidency. In that role, Streett was responsible for all aspects of planning and scheduling President Clinton’s domestic and foreign travels, hiring and scheduling staff, and working closely with various White House office directors, in addition to working with the president’s chief of staff in coordinating his domestic and foreign meetings and travel schedules.
Source: Arkansas State University
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March 14, 2008
New Director Named at Plymouth State University's Center for the Environment
Acclaimed ecosystem researcher and scientist Dr. Patrick Bourgeron is the new director of Plymouth State University's Center for the Environment. A native of France, Bourgeron comes to PSU from the University of Colorado Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, where he has served as research Fellow since 1997. He has nearly 30 years experience in environmental research, planning, land use policy and teaching in the U.S., France, Canada and Africa. Bourgeron believes the Center for the Environment's (CFE) expertise can serve the public, the University and the state. "A regional, comprehensive University that strives for excellence can help many constituencies achieve their goals," said Bourgeron. "We will involve the public, scientists and environmental organizations in our work." PSU President Sara Jayne Steen is confident Bourgeron will help the CFE continue to be a key resource for the region. "Dr. Bourgeron is a well respected scientist, collaborator, and leader. We can expect to see wonderful partnerships generating exciting work that will benefit New Hampshire," said Steen. Bourgeron said his work as the senior ecologist with the Nature Conservancy in the Pacific Northwest will help him in his new role at the CFE.
"I have experience working toward the public good, beginning with input from constituencies like the public, the state and non-governmental organizations," Bourgeron said. "Establish a long-term vision and use science, knowledge and action to achieve it." University Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Dr. Julie Bernier said Bourgeron brings an excellent record of achievement to the CFE. "We are so pleased to welcome Dr. Bourgeron," said Bernier. "His experiences will complement well the expertise of those already in the Center. In his first week he has already shown us that we made the right choice," said Bernier. Former CFE director Steve Kahl is remaining at PSU as a research professor to continue his work with external partners, graduate student research and securing grant funding for new research and outreach.
Established in 2004, the goal of the Center for the Environment is to address the science, policies, culture and economics of the natural environment in northern New England through research, education and collaboration. The Center focuses on applied environmental problems and engages local communities and organizations in environmental demonstration projects that integrate the natural and human environments.
Source: Plymouth State University, New Hampshire
