H&SS eNews, February 2008

Greetings from H&SS!

The H&SS eNews is a monthly electronic publication of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University.

This edition of the eNews was edited and compiled by Anne Jackson.

The eNews will be temporarily on hiatus but we look forward to its return later this semester. In the meantime, please email your news to Joanne Ursenbach in the H&SS Dean’s Office.

For more H&SS news, go to our Web site, http://www.hss.cmu.edu/. For other Carnegie Mellon news, be sure to check out http://www.cmu.edu and http://www.cmu.edu/news/blog/.

For past eNews publications, please visit the H&SS eNews archive.

Alumni News

--Karen Russell (Casella) (B.S. in Social and Decision Sciences, 1996) has been working at Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) for over 11 years, and is currently working as a project manager developing software for the Air Force. In June, Russell is planning to go to Africa to climb Mt Kilimanjaro—at 19, 340 feet, the highest point in Africa, and the tallest free-standing mountain in the world. She will be climbing on behalf of the Voluntary Service Overseas' (VSO) Regional AIDS Initiative of Southern Africa (RAISA) program, whose projects support people living with HIV & AIDS. To learn more or to help support Russell, click to http://www.justgiving.com/mariarussell1.

Student News

--Romel Mostafa, a Ph.D. student in Social and Decision Sciences, has received a $20,000 Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Mostafa's dissertation title is "Economic Growth One Industry at a Time: Entrepreneurship in the Bangladesh Garment Industry." Mostafa and 15 other fellowship recipients were honored Jan. 4 at the American Economic Association's meeting in New Orleans.

--Zeb Girouard (Junior, Mathematical Science and Creative Writing), Sally Mao (Junior, Creative Writing and Professional Writing), and Joella Still (Junior, English) were winners in the ninth annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Writing Awards for poems written in honor the slain civil rights leader's vision and sacrifice. They read their works as part of the university’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration on January 21.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/08020/850426-35.stm

College/Faculty News

--Carnegie Mellon University has named Franco Sciannameo director of its Bachelor of Humanities and Arts (BHA) and Bachelor of Science and Arts (BSA) programs. Sciannameo had been interim director of the programs for the past 18 months. He is an active member of the university's Center for the Arts in Society. Sciannameo says, "I intend to develop a better understanding of what 'interdisciplinary' is for the students. I will frame the concept of interdisciplinarity within parameters suggested by the words creativity, fusion, energy and synthesis. I'd like to design new courses that question, research and develop the very issue of this subject." http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/January/jan7_bha-bsa.shtml

--Carnegie Mellon University joined the collaboration building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and is now among the 23 universities, national laboratories and corporations involved in constructing the world's most powerful survey telescope. An interdisciplinary team of researchers, including the Statistics Department in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences plan to work on the LSST. The project will result in one of the largest publicly available databases ever to be assembled. Working with the University of Pittsburgh, which has been a member of LSST since July 2007, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center - a joint project of Carnegie Mellon and Pitt - Carnegie Mellon hopes to contribute especially to the acquisition, storage and analysis of LSST data.
http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/January/jan8_lsst.shtml

--By combining methods of machine learning and brain imaging, a team of Carnegie Mellon computer scientists and cognitive neuroscientists has found a way to identify where people's thoughts and perceptions of familiar objects originate in the brain. An article in the Jan. 2 issue of PLoS One discusses this new method, which was developed over two years under the leadership of neuroscientist Marcel Just and Computer Science Professor Tom M. Mitchell. http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/January/jan3_justmitchell.shtml

--Carnegie Mellon University German Professor Stephen Brockmann has been awarded the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS). The highly competitive award is given annually to an exceptional scholar, who must be an American citizen or resident, in one of the institute’s three areas of research: policy studies, economics or culture and politics.


--Carnegie Mellon University Cognitive Neuroscience Professor Marcel Just and Computer Science Professor Tom M. Mitchell have received a three-year, $1.1 million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to pursue new breakthroughs in the science of brain imaging. Ultimately, this research could shed light on brain disease or conditions like autism, dyslexia or depression. In the first phase of their research, funded in part by an earlier grant from the Keck Foundation from 2005 to 2007, Mitchell, Just and their colleagues combined information from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans with machine learning algorithms that discern patterns of brain activity to show for the first time where thought processes about a particular object originate in the human brain. http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/January/jan28_keckfdn.shtml

--Paul J. Hopper, Paul Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, gave a seminar on "Projectability and the Emergence of Grammatical Constructions" to the Language and History Group at Oxford University on January 23rd.

-- Carnegie Mellon University will celebrate Black History Month throughout February with a variety of on-campus lectures, performances and art exhibits. Carnegie Mellon's Student Development Office coordinates all Black History Month events, which are open to the public. Activities began Friday, Feb. 1 with a Black Caucus Reception. Contact M. Shernell Smith at 412-268-9510 or mssmith@andrew.cmu.edu for more information on the following Black History Month events.

About the Quick Links