H&SS eNews, April 2006

Greetings from H&SS.

Whether you are a member of the media looking for a faculty expert on deadline, a student who wants to learn about the latest H&SS events, or an alumni who wants to catch up on campus news, this is a one-stop shop for H&SS news and events.

The H&SS eNews is a monthly electronic publication of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. The eNews is compiled and edited by Kelli McElhinny, director of media relations for H&SS. She can be reached at 412-268-6094 or kellim@andrew.cmu.edu. Contact Kelli to submit news about yourself and your fellow alumni, and to sign up for our newsletters.

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

For news about the entire university, be sure to check out the university’s home page or the Carnegie Mellon Today website.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Starting in May, the H&SS eNews will be distributed the first of every month. That means you will be receiving the next edition in about two weeks. When the first of the month falls on a weekend, the eNews will be distributed the following Monday. Thank you for noting this.

Alumni News

--Jonathan Barnes (B.A. Professional Writing, 1993) will speak to English students at 4:30 p.m. April 19 in the Gladys Schmitt Creative Writing Center in Baker Hall 260. Barnes is a freelance journalist who has written for several local and national publications, including the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Reuters, Newsday and The New York Times. He also maintains a blog, Barnestormin, which can be read at http://barnestormin.blogspot.com/.

Barnes’ talk coincides with the awarding of the Gladys Schmitt Scholarship, which this year goes to Senior Matthew Kopel. The scholarship is given every year, based on need, to the Creative Writing student who has made the greatest contributions in and out of the classroom.

--Steven M. Cherin (Bachelor, Small Business Management, 1981) has been named managing partner of Gefsky and Lehman, P.C, a Pittsburgh business law firm. In 1992 Mr. Cherin joined Gefsky and Lehman after practicing tax and corporate law with Buchanan Ingersoll, P.C. for eight years. He became a shareholder of Gefsky and Lehman in 1994 and was named Chief Financial Officer of the firm and a member of its Board of Directors in 2001. Cherin received his law degree in 1984 from Cornell Law School.

--Sharon Freeman (B.A. Psychology, 1974; M.S. Urban and Public Affairs, 1977) is interviewed in Walden, the alumni magazine of Walden University, from which she earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and decision science in 1998. Last year, the university named her its Outstand Alumna. To read the interview, go to http://www.waldenu.edu/c/Alumni_magazine/Features_6562.htm.

--Javier Grillo-Marxuach (B.A. Creative Writing and Literary and Cultural Studies, 1991) is a writer and producer on the hit ABC series “Lost”, and he has won an Emmy Award and a Writers Guild of America Award for his work on that show. Grillo-Marxuach also has written and produced for “Boomtown”, “The Pretender”, “Charmed”, “The Chronicle” “seaQuest” and “Jake 2.0”. His other writing credits include “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit”, “The Dead Zone” and “Dark Skies.” He also is the creator of the “The Middleman” comics series. For more information, go to http://www.radiofreejavi.com/.

--Karen Rigby (B.A. Creative Writing and English, 2001) has received a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center for the summer of 2006.

Student News

--H&SS has named Haley A. Vlach, a psychology major, the winner of the 2006 Gretchen Lankford Award. The award is presented annually to an outstanding H&SS senior who plans to pursue a career in teaching, in either K-12 or higher education. Vlach plans to attend graduate school at UCLA and ultimately become a psychology professor. Vlach is a member of Psi Chi, the national psychology honorary. She is also a teaching assistant for both an undergraduate research methods course and the Introduction to Psychology course. The award is named for Gretchen Goldsmith Lankford, a 1943 graduate of Margaret Morrison Carnegie College, which closed in 1973. Margaret Morrison was an all-women’s school that was one of the four original colleges in the Carnegie Institute of Technology, a predecessor of Carnegie Mellon. Lankford received a master's degree in public management in 1990 from what is now the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. Lankford met her late husband, Bill, while he was a doctoral student at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

--Rachel Wu has been selected as the H&SS recipient of the 2006 Carnegie Mellon Women’s Association Scholarship. Each year, since 1964, the Women's Association has awarded scholarships to outstanding women students.  Since 1996, these awards have been presented to senior women, rotating through all colleges of the university. This year the awards will be presented to one student from H&SS, the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Tepper School of Business. Wu is pursuing dual degrees in psychology and anthropology and history.

--Modern Languages Ph.D. candidate Yuki Yoshimura has been selected as the 2006 winner of the H&SS Graduate Student Teaching Award. A graduate of Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo with a B.A. in English and an M.A. in English Linguistics, Yuki came to Carnegie Mellon in the fall of 2001.  She is a doctoral student in her department's Second Language Acquisition program, and she will complete her dissertation this spring and graduate in May.  Since her arrival at Carnegie Mellon, Yuki has taught Elementary or Intermediate Japanese I and II each year, as well as during summer sessions. Her teaching has been uniformly well received as evidenced by strong end-of-semester ratings and by enthusiastic comments from students, fellow graduate students and faculty colleagues.

--Twenty-nine students in the Department of Modern Languages recently were inducted into Phi Sigma Iota, the national foreign language honor society. They were: Timothy Abraldes, Larissa Altman, Lacey Anderson, Tathagat Chaudhury, Nicole Cheberenchick, Esther Chen, Manlai Cheng, Michael Chow, Meredith Clark, Marciela DeGrace, Justin Dhingra, Marissa Diaz, Deborah Dubiner, Helen Gruner, Adam Hall, Jules Henry, Joy Ho, Nazli Kfoury, Alexander Knecht, Xiaorong Li, Carl Li, Katherine McKinney, Akiko Mitsui, Kakia Moto, Elizabeth Osius, Brandi Tish, Mary Warnock, Veronica Yusz, Yanhui Zhang.           

--Nine undergraduate and graduate history students participated over the April 1 weekend in the Western Pennsylvania Regional Conference and Undergraduate Forum of Phi Alpha Theta, the history honor society. The students garnered awards for their research as follows: First place, Jennifer Verbeke, undergraduate; Second Place, Oana Suditu, graduate; Marie Yetsin, undergraduate; Jimmy Song, undergraduate; Hamza Taha, undergraduate; Zenobia Bell, undergraduate; Mark Moynihan (B.S. History, 2005) graduated in December; Jamie Edwards, undergraduate; and Rebekkah Belferman, undergraduate.

College/Faculty News

--The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences has selected John R. Anderson, the Richard King Mellon Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, as the recipient of the inaugural Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science. The Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science, which carries a $150,000 award, is one of six prizes that are awarded every two years by the Alfred Heineken Fondsen Foundation to outstanding researchers selected by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Anderson, who has been on the Carnegie Mellon faculty since 1978, was selected to receive the Heineken Prize for his groundbreaking integrative theory of the computational operations underlying human thought processes. His research has led, among other things, to the development of computer-based tutoring systems, known as Cognitive Tutors, that are effective in helping students learn mathematics and computer programming skills. For more about the Heineken Prizes, go to http://www.knaw.nl/heinekenprizes/index.html.

-- A group of medical experts who attended a national avian flu conference last fall believe there is little chance the United States will be able to manufacture and stockpile enough vaccine or antiviral medication to stop a bird flu pandemic should the virus mutate into a form that can be spread easily from human to human, according to a survey led by researchers in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences. The results of the survey will be published in the June 2006 issue of the journal Global Public Health. The 19 medical experts who attended the Pandefense 1.0 meeting gave a median estimate of a less than 1 percent chance that the U.S. will have adequate stockpiles of vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent a pandemic within the next three years. The same experts gave a median estimate of 15 percent for the probability that the avian flu virus will mutate into a strain that can spread efficiently by human-to-human contact within that time. For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060317_flu.html.

--Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes, an associate professor of creative writing, has written his most daring and reflective poems to date for his third collection, “Wind in a Box” (Penguin Poets Paperback Original, April 4, 2006). Drawing on influences that range from Dr. Seuss and Amiri Baraka to David Bowie Hayes explores identity, race, culture and the dark side of American history. Hayes is the author of “Hip Logic” and “Muscular Music.” He is a past winner of a Whiting Writers Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Best American Poetry Selection and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. For more information, go to http://www.cmu.edu/cmnews/extra/060321_hayes.html.

--H&SS has named its 2006 Outstanding Service Award winners. This year's winners are Sharon Blazevich, administrative coordinator for the Information Systems Program; Jackie DeFazio, business manager for the Philosophy Department; and Janice Trygar, administrative coordinator for the Academic Advisory Center. The awards are given each year to H&SS staff who demonstrate exemplary performance, dedication, attitude and citizenship.

Events

--Bill Anthes, a visiting scholar in the Center for the Arts in Society, will give a talk at 4:30 p.m. April 25 in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall titled "Red Earth, Flat World: The Global Currency of Native American Art." The talk will explore the impact of globalization on Native American art and culture.

--Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon will speak before the Washington, D.C., Alumni Chapter at 6:30 p.m. April 25 at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW. His talk is titled "Carnegie Mellon and the Flattening World" and is open to all alumni, family and friends of Carnegie Mellon. The president's talk will focus on how the university is embracing globalization and helping students compete in an international marketplace. For more information, go to https://alumni2.tepper.cmu.edu/cmuEvents/signup.asp?id=877.

--Carnegie Mellon Trustee Larry Jennings (B.S. Mathematics, 1984; M.S. Industrial Administration, 1987) is hosting an alumni reception and discussion at 6 p.m. April 27 in Baltimore. The event will take place at the Suburban Club at 7600 Park Heights Ave. and will feature a presentation by Gloriana St. Clair, the dean of University Libraries at Carnegie Mellon, titled "Competing for Student Satisfaction." For more information go to http://alumni2.tepper.cmu.edu/cmuEvents/find-event2.asp#883.

--Margalit Fox, obituary writer for The New York Times, will give the inaugural Giler Humanities Lecture at 4:30 p.m. April 28 in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall. Fox has dispatched some of the leading cultural figures of our day, including Betty Friedan, Susan Sontag, the literary critic Wayne C. Booth and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur. She has also written the obituaries of many of the unsung heroes who have managed, quietly, to touch history, among them the lexicographer who wrestled the Oxford English Dictionary into the modern age, a textile conservator who washed Napoleon's nightshirt, and the home economist who invented Stove Top Stuffing. The Giler Humanities Lecture is sponsored by the Humanities Scholars Program and funded by Carnegie Mellon alumni Kim and Eric Giler. Kim Giler earned a bachelor's degree in English and Spanish in 1978, and her husband graduated in 1977 with a bachelor's degree in industrial management.

--Robotics Professor Jessica Hodgins (Ph.D. Computer Science, 1989) will speak to Rochester, N.Y.-area alumni on April 28 at the Green Lantern Inn at One East Church St. in Fairport. The evening will begin with cocktails at 6 p.m. with dinner at 7 p.m. Hodgins' talk is titled "Generating Natural Human Motion for Animated Characters and Humanoid Robots." For more information go to http://alumni2.tepper.cmu.edu/cmuEvents/find-event2.asp#884.

--Kathryn Linduff, the University Center for International Studies Research Professor in the Department of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, will speak at 5 p.m. May 1 as part of the "Aesthetics out of Bounds" arts histories lecture series, sponsored by the Center for the Arts in Society. Her research focuses on Eurasian and Chinese art history and archaeology. Roth will speak in McConomy Auditorium in the University Center. For more information, go to http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/mwitmore/aesthetics/speakers/may1.html.

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