November 1, 2002 |
VOL. 19, NO. 9 |
| Calendar |
| Exhibits |
| FYItems |
| Job Ops |
| People at LSU |
LSU Boyd Professor Isiah Warner has received a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute that will assist LSU and the state of Louisiana to become a model for mentoring disadvantaged students from elementary school through graduate school.
Warner has been named one of 20 Howard Hughes Medical Institution Professors from across the nation in the first year the institute has given the award.
He will receive $1 million over the next four years to develop a program that will integrate research, education and peer mentoring, with the ultimate goal of increasing the number of science, math, engineering and technology students going on to graduate school.
The program challenges science educators to bring as much innovation and creativity into teaching science as they use doing research in the laboratory. Institute President Thomas R. Cech said “HHMI seeks to develop a cadre of scientist-educators who will become leaders in undergraduate teaching as well as research. The HHMI Professors and their teaching strategies will serve as models for fundamental change both on their own campuses and elsewhere, helping to support and encourage research universities in their efforts to enhance undergraduate education.”
This is a tremendous honor for one of LSU's best educators and most distinguished scholars,” said Kevin Smith, vice chancellor for Research and Graduate Studies. “It is a fitting reward for the excellence of Isiah's research and teaching, and particularly for his dedication to the well-being and progress of minorities through the U.S. education system. One needs only to look at Isiah's track-record to see where he thinks LSU and the nation can do a better job. I just can't think of a more deserving person to receive this significant honor, both for Isiah and for LSU.”
Warner plans to use the grant money to implement a “mentoring ladder,” which will involve faculty, postoctoral fellows, graduate students, undergraduates, secondary school teachers and students. An annual mentoring symposium will be held to disseminate the results of the program and reward those who have made outstanding achievements.
Because the Baton Rouge area is more than 50 percent African American, Warner said he expects a high percentage of minority students to participate in the program.
In order to assess the outcome of the program, Warner and his collaborators will compare participants in the plan with students who did not participate. At the end of the study they will co author a mentoring book to spread the results of their work to the public.
Warner, who is a native of Bunkie and a graduate of Southern University, has been the recipient of a number of awards and recognitions. Among them are the Year 2000 Eastern Analytical Symposium Award for outstanding achievements in the field of analytical chemistry; the 1997 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring; the 2000 American Association of Analytical Chemists’ Lifetime Mentor Award; and the 2000 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching/CASE Louisiana Professor of the Year Award.
“I am deeply honored to receive this award,” Warner said. “I thank the dean of my college, Harold Silverman, for nominating me for this great honor. Although I am being singly-identified for this award, I will be working closely with several of my colleagues, particularly Dr. Saundra McGuire, Dr. Su-Seng Pang, Dr. George Stanley and Mrs. Albertha Lawson to achieve the goals of the proposal submitted to HHMI.”
HHMI is one of the world’s largest philanthropies, with laboratories across the United States and grants programs throughout the world. Its headquarters and conference center are located in Chevy Chase, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. HHMI endowment in early 2002 was approximately $11 billion.
Through its undergraduate biological sciences education program, HHMI has awarded $476 million since1988 to colleges and universities to enhance life-sciences education, notably by expanding undergraduate research opportunities, adding new courses and faculty and reaching out to the K-12 education community.
For more on HHMI, go to http://www.hhmi.org/news/091802.html.
Jim Gray, distinguished researcher and manager of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center, visited LSU for a recent Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecture that explored the developing possibilities of database astronomy.
Viewing time on world-class telescopes is at a premium, but all the data from that viewing time is stored in computers, Gray said. Optical, infrared, spectroscopic, X-ray and radio data, as well as information on an object’s speed, orbit, luminosity and other things can be made available to researchers who may be looking for things other than what the original viewer was looking for. “The idea is to take all this data that’s on the World Wide Web and make it searchable – just like you would search for something with Google,” he said. “The computing science community has levels of technology that should make it easy to store and search data.” For the past four years Gray has been working on an online virtual observatory, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, http://skyserver.sdss.org/en/, which contains data from about 50 observatories.
Another developing area of virtual astronomy is whole-sky surveys.
“A new generation of telescopes is doing surveys of the sky to study the statistical distribution of matter in space and learn about the early universe. There are about 12 surveys of the entire sky going on right now in many different wavelengths,” he said.
This approach will work not only for astronomy, but also for most other branches of science, as was reflected in the title of his talk, “On-Line Science: The Worldwide Telescope as a Prototype for the New Computational Science.”
“This is an archetype for a lot of other scientific disciplines – genomics, for instance, or chemistry.”
Gray was the fourth Turing Award speaker to come to the LSU campus. The Turing
Award is often referred to as the Nobel Prize in computing.
A priest in a remote village in the south of France discovers four old parchments buried in the altar of his church and shortly thereafter comes into a substantial amount of money. Theories abound about what he found and how it made him rich, but the nature of his discovery remains a mystery. But in Michael Bowman’s “Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned: The Rennes-le-Chateau Mystory,” the secret unfolds.
The work is an original piece, which centers around the true story of the priest. Conceived and directed by Bowman, the production is told through the “mystory” method of performance.
Audiences are invited to partake in the Rennes-le-Chateau mystery beginning at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 6 through 9 and Sunday, Nov. 10 at 2 p.m. Admission is a suggested donation of $5.
“The Mystory,” Bowman said, “combines history, mystery and the idea that, in that act of telling a story, it becomes my story. Instead of taking the traditional researcher’s stance of objectivity, mystorians include their own quest as part of the story.”
“Blood of the Sacred” takes the audience into a labyrinth of conspiracies, revisions of well known stories, and paranoid and paranormal fantasy. The theories of the priest’s fortune share a strange blurring between mythology and reality.
“When the original mystery disappears, all that’s left is confusion,” Bowman said. “What interests me about this story is the way it dramatizes the disturbing similarities among historical research, mythology or fiction, and paranoia as ways of making sense out of the confusion.”
A student cast of mystorians, whose own investigations of the mystery will inform what happens in the show, have been assembled, and much of the script for the piece was developed with the cast and production staff in rehearsals.
Bowman is an associate professor of performance studies in LSU’s Department of Communication Studies. He performed his own mystory, “Killing Dillinger,” as a solo performance two years ago in the HopKins Black Box, in Chicago and at Southern Illinois University. He wrote and staged the show based on his intersections with infamous gangster John Dillinger, who came from the same small town in Indiana where Bowman was raised.
The mystorian, Bowman said, pays attention to coincidences. Mystorians also present their research in non-traditional forms. A historian might write an objective essay, and a documentary filmmaker might assemble evidence and include a confident, voice-over narrator. Mystorians unsettle these conventions and emphasize spectacle and speculation.
For more information, please contact the Department of Communication Studies
at 225 578-4172 or visit the Black Box Web site at www.artsci.lsu.edu/spcm/black_box.
Each year the University recognizes and rewards the outstanding work of its faculty. The Office of Academic Affairs is pleased to announce the call for nominations for six separate awards.
1)The LSU Distinguished Faculty Award (10 awards) recognizes faculty members with sustained records of excellence in teaching, research, service, and/or any combination of the three. Any full-time faculty member who has not received this award previously is eligible. In addition to monetary award of $1,000 each recipient will receive a commemorative LSU watch from the LSU Alumni Association. 2)The LSU Foundation Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award (1 award) recognizes a faculty member with superior graduate-level teaching and related activities. Any full-time faculty member who teaches graduate courses and demonstrates distinguished teaching over a period of several years, and has not received this award previously, is eligible and the recipient will receive $1,500.
3)The H.M. “Hub” Cotton Award for Faculty Excellence (1 award) recognizes a faculty member with a distinguished record of teaching, research, administration, public service, or any other outstanding contributions to the University. Any full time faculty member who has not received this award previously is eligible. The recipient will receive $1,000.
4)The LSU Alumni Association Faculty Excellence Award (4 awards) recognizes faculty members for outstanding teaching, research, and/or service. Any full-time faculty members who have not previously received the award and are from any of the following colleges/schools if at least one-half of their teaching assignments are at the undergraduate level are eligible. The eligible colleges/schools are Agriculture, Art and Design, Arts and Sciences, Basic Sciences, Business Administration, Education, Engineering, Honors, Mass Communication, Music and Dramatic Arts, School of the Coast & Environment, and University College. Each recipient will receive $1,000.
5)The BPAmoco Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching (1 - 2 awards) recognizes a faculty member(s) who has demonstrated superior teaching skills at the undergraduate level. Any full-time faculty member is eligible who has taught undergraduate courses over a period of several years and has not received this award previously at LSU. Each recipient will receive $1,750.
6)The Tiger Athletic Foundation President’s Award (1-4 awards) recognizes a faculty member for extraordinary classroom teaching as demonstrated by an impact on and involvement with students, a scholarly approach to teaching and learning, and contributions to the profession of teaching. Any full-time faculty member who has not received this award previously is eligible. Each recipient will receive $1,000.
A faculty member may be nominated for only one of the above listed awards per year. Nominations may be initiated by individual faculty members, department chairs/heads, or deans/directors. Items of supporting documentation for each award are listed on the attached table. Although individuals are not expected to provide all of the indicated documentation, nomination packets should be as complete as possible. The standard Faculty Award Nomination Cover Sheet must be used, and all materials must be bound.
All nomination packets must be channeled through the nominee’s department chair/head (who may add comments) then to the dean/director. Deans/Directors will review all nominations for their faculty members, add their own comments, and forward an original and three copies of each nomination to the Centers for Excellence in Learning and Teaching no later than Jan. 6, 2003.
Nominations will be received by a special committee appointed by the Chair of the Advisory Council for the Centers for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. Recipients will be recognized at the annual Faculty Awards Reception on May 13, 2003, at the Lod Cook Alumni Center. This event is open to the university community.
Arrangements to peruse sample packets may be made by calling the Centers for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, 578-1135.
According to program protocols, original nomination packets for award winners are retained as public documents by the Centers for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. All other original packets will be returned to the nominators. Working copies made for use by the selection committee will be destroyed.
For more information regarding these awards refer to the Policy Statement
7, Academic Honorifics. If you have any questions regarding the process, call
Joseph Hutchinson or Sandi Guillot at 578-1135.
The LSU Rural Life Museum will present its seventh annual Harvest Days, Nov. 2 and 3.
The educational event will interpret life in 19th century rural Louisiana with living history demonstrations by 20 renowned artisans and will focus on agricultural and domestic activities common on plantations and farms at harvest time.
Activities, such as processing the harvest, will be shown by grinding sugar cane and cooking cane syrup, as well as grinding corn at the gristmill. Hostlers will do field work using mules to pull 100 year old plows, hay rakes and sickle mowers. Other artisans will be on hand to demonstrate brick making, woodworking, spinning, weaving, open hearth cooking and candle making. A blacksmith will repair tools and others will demonstrate bow and arrow making, constructing muzzle loading firearms and tanning animals hides.
Old-fashioned games, mule-drawn wagon rides and other hands-on activities will be available for children. On Nov. 3, Southern Vintage Band will perform period music while Southern Vintage dancers teach antebellum dances. Barbeque dinners will also be available for a nominal charge.
The event will run from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and regular museum admission will be charged. The Rural Life Museum is located at 4650 Essen Lane at I-10.
For more information, call 765-2437.
LSU faculty, staff and students have an opportunity to tour the newly renovated Cox Communications Academic Center for Student Athletes during the Open House, Wednesday, Nov. 13 and Thursday, Nov. 14, from 1 to 4:30 p.m.
Inside the 54,000 square-foot facility, visitors will notice such features as the center’s 14 private computer rooms and 45-station computer lab, which will be open to all students. There are study areas designed for specialized learning and classrooms available for private or group study.
In addition is a 1,000-seat auditorium, complete with individually wired seats for enhanced interaction in daily classes, presentations and lectures by distinguished guests; the 2,800 square foot Deumite Library; the Bengal Belle Study and the Eric Hill Athletic Communications Studio, which provides interviewing and public relations training for student-athletes.
There is also academic support space for LSU’s student-athletes, which
includes tutor rooms, a life skills and career resource center, as well as a
library and computer lab.
Photo Gallery |
 |
| Melissa Luke from the Capital Area United Way explains the campaign to department coordinators. The United Way campaign will run until Nov. 27. To donate to the University’s campaign contact your department coordinator or Donna Torres at 578-1623 |
 |
| Internationally known speaker Chief Arvol Looking Horse, with Chancellor Mark Emmert, highlighted the LSU Native American Student Association’s celebration of Native American heritage month. November is officially designated National American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month, but LSU’s Native American Student Association will begin their commemoration on Oct. 25, with a visit from Chief Looking Horse, a noted activist for peace and various Native American causes. Looking Horse, the highest ranking religious leader in the Sioux Nation, has traveled around the world praying for peace, working with the likes of Bishop Desmond Tutu and the Dali Lama. At the age of 12, he became the youngest Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe, a responsibility passed down for 19 generations in the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota Nations. |