James Henry
Assistant Professor,
Chemical Engineering
Assistant Professor,
Chemical Engineering
LSU'S Biweekly Newsletter for Faculty & Staff
March 10, 2006 |
VOL. 22, NO. 13 |
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| James Henry Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering |
Research interest: Biomaterials, Biosensors, Tissue Engineering
What brought you to LSU? As a new assistant professor, the most important thing to me is the support of my colleagues. When I interviewed here, I really felt that this is the place where I belong.
What do you enjoy most about LSU? I love the atmosphere on campus. You really feel like you belong to something bigger. The sense of community is incredible.
The LSU Museum of Art, or MOA, in the Shaw Center for the Arts is presenting “William Beecher: A Fantastic Vision.” The exhibition opens at LSU MOA on Saturday, March 11, and is organized by the LSU MOA. The exhibit features 173 intricately and colorfully rendered paintings – a fraction of more than 600 works Beecher completed within the last five years of his life at the Villa Feliciana Medical Complex in Jackson, La.
The first major exhibition of works by this remarkable self-taught artist, “William Beecher: A Fantastic Vision,” presents a relatively unknown, yet highly accomplished artist whose work belongs to a subset of outsider art known as psychotic or schizophrenic art. Bold, bright and packed with images, his engaging compositions are untouched by formal training.
Like Beecher, self-taught artists frequently emerge from quiet corners in our own back yards. Lamentably, their life’s work, or large portions of it, often slips easily into oblivion after their death. The exhibition of Beecher’s work, owned entirely by the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, places the Baton Rouge community at the forefront of presenting an artist whose work is certain to be ranked among the best of its kind.
Along with the exhibit will be a series of speakers and programs:
The LSU MOA in the Shaw Center for the Arts is Baton Rouge’s premier art museum. Located in downtown Baton Rouge overlooking the Mississippi River, it presents rotating, historical and contemporary exhibitions. Selections from the permanent collection are always on display. The collection includes 17th- through 20th-century American and British portraiture, landscape painting, prints and decorative arts; pre-Civil War New Orleans silver; historical art from India, Japan and South America; and contemporary Inuit sculpture.
General admission to the museum for adults is $8. Seniors (65+), students and LSU faculty/staff (with I.D.) are charged $6. Children 5 to 17 are charged $4 and children under 5 are admitted free.
When the spring semester ends and students travel home for the summer, LSU’s campus gets a much-needed rest. However, there will be no resting for 35 LSU professors as they attend Communication across the Curriculum’s second annual Summer Institute to get training on communication-intensive courses. Following the institute, they will spend time during the summer further developing their courses so they can be certified as communication-intensive in the fall or spring.
“ Our first institute last summer was a tremendous success, and we hope to build on our experience with the second one,” said Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, Communication across the Curriculum director. “Eventually we hope to engage at least one faculty member from every LSU major in our institutes so that all undergraduates have the opportunity to practice state-of-the art communication techniques in their disciplines or professions.”
The goal of Communication across the Curriculum, or CxC, is to promote effective communication across the LSU campus and to outside audiences by encouraging critical use of written, spoken, visual and digital media as vehicles for learning and discovery, as well as for conveying information.
These tools are being integrated into existing classes by faculty members who volunteer to participate in the initiative and apply to have their courses certified as communication-intensive. Students then have access to these enhanced methods and will be eligible to apply for a special certification in communication to be awarded, along with their degrees, upon graduation.
“ Once the tools are developed and shown to the faculty, they’ll be very excited because it will further advance an agenda that they set for themselves a long time ago,” said Dean of the College of Art and Design David Cronrath, a participant in the 2005 Summer Institute. “I think CxC is an incredibly important initiative at LSU.”
CxC will hold its second annual Summer Institute Tuesday, May 30, through Friday, June 2. LSU professors from the College of Art and Design, College of Art and Sciences, College of Basic Sciences, E. J. Ourso College of Business, College of Engineering, College of Education and Honors College are already slated to attend.
“ The Summer Institute was great. I think this is a marvelous idea, and I recommend it to all of my colleagues,” said Carol O’Neil, professor of human ecology. “Our students will benefit from it tremendously. I think it brings us forward to the Flagship Agenda, and I think it does a lot of things for us.”
Last year, experts from LSU and consultants from MIT, Clemson, George Mason and the University of Missouri gave presentations and insight into teaching and designing communication-intensive courses.
“ I thought that the consultants that they brought in were particularly good because it really gave us not only some ideas that we could have, but we had one-on-one meeting time with them,” said O’Neil, a presenter and participant in the institute. “So in addition to their presentations, we could actually get together and target specific questions or problems that we would have in our programs.”
Once again, presentations by outside consultants and LSU faculty at the 2006 Summer Institute will focus on the four basic areas of communication – written, oral, visual and technological – but this year the LSU faculty presenters will have already taught a course certified as communication-intensive. Presentations will cover subjects such as scientific writing, informal and formal writing, use of PowerPoint, group assignment dynamics, digital portfolios, visual communications and blogs.
The criteria for certifying a course as communication-intensive were developed by an interdisciplinary team of 35 members of the faculty and staff at LSU. The certification includes eight sets of criteria, each involving some form of communication. To view the requirements, visit CxC’s Web site at http://cxc.lsu.edu.
The criteria and structure of communication-intensive courses have been designed to provide flexibility to fit the many disciplines across campus.
“ It’s not one shoe that everyone has to wear,” Cronrath said. “It says there’s a standard that you have to meet, but how you get to that standard and how you design your curriculum, organize you faculty or structure your college to make it happen is as varied as we are creative to think of ways to do it. Nobody is telling us that it’s this formula or none.”
The importance of teaching communication skills and involving communication into courses is stressed at all CxC events.
“ I think it’s a crucial thing that our students learn to write. One of the things that we learned at the institute is that was the number one thing employers looked for. That shows the importance of communication,” said O’Neil. “In my first course here, I told the students that communication skills were the most important things they’d ever learn.”
LSU’s entrepreneurship program was recently ranked as one of the Top 50 nationally recognized comprehensive programs by EntrePoint, an online entrepreneurship ranking Web site.
The Entrepreneurship Institute is an integral part of LSU’s E. J. Ourso College of Business, and has been previously recognized for excellence by Forbes.com and Entrepreneurship magazine.
According to the EntrePoint Web site, comprehensive programs like LSU’s “feature the greatest depth and breadth of resources, typically with a large contingent of experienced faculty whose teaching and research expertise specifically relates to entrepreneurship. There are often a dozen or more separate course titles covering everything from entrepreneurship, new venture development and small-firm finance to change and innovation, venture capital, and technology transfer.”
Schools with comprehensive programs have a dedicated entrepreneurial studies center, one or more specialty research institutes, business plan competitions, mentoring programs, an incubator or tech-transfer program, and both graduate and undergraduate programs in entrepreneurship, the site stated. LSU’s entrepreneurship program includes all of the above.
E. J. Ourso College Dean Robert T. Sumichrast cited the dedication of the faculty for the institute’s continued accolades.
“ We take great pride in having our stellar entrepreneurial education program recognized yet again,” he said. “With our top teaching faculty and resources such as the Louisiana Business and Technology Center and the nation’s number one small-business incubator, we are providing students with applied business abilities and invaluable entrepreneurial skills. This truly separates our program from all the rest.”
LSU is ranked alongside schools such as Duke University, The University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Notre Dame in EntrePoint’s rankings.
The Entrepreneurship Institute at LSU was formed to address the issues and challenges of entrepreneurship, family business and franchising. The Institute offers programs and activities such as educational seminars and workshops in an executive education format; university coursework; business planning, marketing and management consultation; and venture funding assistance, to give entrepreneurs effective management tools and problem-solving skills with a prime goal of job creation in Louisiana.
Walking through a maze of book shelves and seeing many busy volunteers pricing donated books can only mean one thing - the annual Book Bazaar is near.
The 30th annual Book Bazaar, put on by the Friends of the LSU Libraries, will be held Thursday through Saturday, March 16 - 18, at the 4-H Mini-Farm Building and the Nelson Memorial, next to the LSU AgCenter’s Parker Coliseum. Hours for the sale will be 9 a.m. - 7 p.m. on Thursday and Friday, and 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. on Saturday.
Proceeds from the bazaar help fund special purchases for the libraries’ collections and come from the sale of donated books, which will number more than 70,000 volumes. During the years, the Friends have raised more than $1 million for the libraries.
A silent auction will be held on a small number of highly valued collector’s books, including a 1930’s limited-edition Faulkner. The auction will be held during the hours of the sale and conclude at 3 p.m. on Saturday.
As always, there will be about three-dozen categories of books offered at the bazaar ranging from cookbooks and children’s books to religion and art. The books come in all forms and sizes, from hardback to leather bound and oversized to extremely small.
Three nationally acclaimed scholars will come together for a series of open lectures, luncheon talks and discussions March 12-15 at LSU for the 2006 Veritas Forum.
Tackling the question “What is Truth?,” this year’s speakers examine this theme from different disciplines. The Veritas lectures are designed to take a deeper look at the theme, always including a question-and-answer period following each lecture. All lectures are free and open to the public, except the luncheon speakers at the LSU Faculty Club. Those lectures require pre-registration and cost $10. To reserve seats for the luncheon lectures, visit www.lsu.edu/cfsn and select “2006 Veritas Forum” for the reservation form.
Author and speaker Os Guinness, who has written/edited more than 20 books, and has spoken at the White House and Capitol Hill as well as many universities around the world, including Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford, will lecture on Sunday, March 12, and Monday, March 13. On March 12, he will present “The Journey – A Thinking Person’s Quest for Meaning” from 6-8 p.m. in the Nicholson Hall Auditorium. On March 13, he will present “The One Unanswerable Objection to the Christian Faith – Christians” at the LSU Faculty Club luncheon from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. From 3 to 4:30 p.m., Guinness will discuss “One True God: Monotheism – The Glory or the Scandal of the West” in the LSU Union Vieux Carre Room. To wrap up the day’s activities, he will present “Time for Truth – Living Free in a World of Lies, Hype and Spin” from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Nicholson Hall Auditorium.
Mary Poplin, professor of education and former dean of the School of Educational Studies at the Claremont Graduate University, will speak on Tuesday, March 14. Her many publications include a book based on her volunteer work with Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity in India. She is the luncheon speaker from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the LSU Faculty Club with “Mother Teresa: The Difference Between Social Work and Religious Work.” From 3 to 4:30 p.m., she will present “Merging Social Justice and Accountability in Teacher Education” in the LSU Union Vieux Carre Room. From 7 to 9 p.m., she will discuss “What is the Truth? Social Justice and Education” in the Nicholson Hall Auditorium.
J. Budziszewski, professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, specializes in ethical theory, political theory and Christian theology with a special focus on natural law and moral self-deception, and has numerous publications, including six books. On Wednesday, March 15, he is the luncheon speaker from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the LSU Faculty Club with “Toleration and Moral Truth.” From 3 to 4:30 p.m., he will discuss “Playing Dumb: The Natural Consequences of Violating the Natural Law,” a talk co-sponsored by the LSU Department of Political Science and LSU Department of Philosophy & Religious Studies, in the LSU Union Vieux Carre Room. To wrap up the 2006 Veritas Forum, he will present “Natural Law, Moral Truth and Conscience” from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Nicholson Hall Auditorium.
The 2006 Veritas Forum is co-sponsored by an assembly of campus and local organizations. Campus sponsors include Baptist Collegiate Ministry, Campus Crusade for Christ, Canterbury Club, Chapel on the Campus, Christ the King Church and Catholic Center, Christian Faculty/Staff Network, International Quest, Late Nite College Ministry, Refuge, St. Alban’s Chapel and Student Christian Medical Association.
Community Sponsors include Christian Life Fellowship, the Baton Rouge Chapter of Christian Medical and Dental Association, The Cornerstone Chapel, First Presbyterian Church, Healing Place Church, Istrouma Baptist Church, Louisiana Family Forum and River Community Church.
The Veritas Forum originated at Harvard University in 1992 and has been hosted by more than 100 colleges and universities across the nation. The forum welcomes people of all faiths and backgrounds to explore questions, doubts and ideas about the issues presented. For a schedule of lecture times and locations, visit www.lsu.edu/cfsn or www.veritas.org/lsu or contact Sun Joon Jang, associate professor of sociology, at veritas@lsu.edu or 225-578-5348.