H&SS eNews, January 2007

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. 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.

Alumni News

--Peter C. Fusaro, (B.A. History, 1972) has launched Verde Venture Partners, an early stage private equity clean energy fund. Peter has recently written two more books: “Energy and Environmental Hedge Funds: The New Investment Paradigm” and “Energy and Emissions: Collision or Convergence.” He has also been selected for Who's Who in America for 2007.

--Jennifer Craythorne (B.A. History, 1994) has earned her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Florida.

--Tiffany Jastrzembski (B.S. Cognitive Psychology and Social History, 1998) earned her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Florida State University. Her dissertation was titled "The Model Human Processor and the Older Adult: Validation and Error Extension to GOMS in a Mobile Phone Task." Her doctoral work was supervised by Neil Charness (M.A., Ph.D. Industrial Administration, 1971, 1974). She is working as a postdoctoral fellow (awarded by the National Academy of Sciences) at the Air Force Research Laboratory, Performance and Learning Models Team, which is directed by Kevin Gluck (M.S., Ph.D. Psychology, 1997, 1999). She interned with this lab in the summer of 2005 and presented that work at the I/ITSEC Conference this year, where her group’s paper, "Knowledge Tracing and Prediction of Future Trainee Performance" won the Best Paper Award.

--Ryan Rasmussen (B.A. Professional Writing and Literary & Cultural Studies, 1994) has been promoted to Senior Technical Writer/Editor at USERS Incorporated, a financial services software firm. In October, his screenplay “Disaster Man” was a Second Rounder at the 2006 Austin Film Festival and Screenwriters’ Conference. He is currently writing a Viking epic informed by research he conducted in Scandinavia last summer. For more information, visit his blog at http://holyembersofdreams.blogspot.com.

--Jewell Parker Rhodes (B.A., M.A., D.A. English, 1975; 1976; 1979) has written a new book, “Porch Stories: A Grandmother’s Guide to Happiness,” which is a tribute to the grandmother who helped raise Rhodes as a child in Pittsburgh. Rhodes is the artistic director of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. Her previous books include “Douglass' Women”, which was awarded the 2003 American Book Award. For more information go to http://www.simonsays.com/content/book.cfm?tab=1&pid=521656.

--Karen Rigby (B.A. Creative Writing, 2001) has received a 2007 literature fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of “Festival Bone.”

ANNOUNCEMENT--The Social and Decision Science Student Advisory Council (SDS SAC) will be hosting a networking event for current SDS students with SDS alumni on Thursday, February 8, 2007. This event will be on the Carnegie Mellon campus. The specific time and location will be determined.

The SDS SAC surveyed students at the beginning of the semester and the top event that students were interested in was a networking event with alumni. Because half of the current SDS students took this survey, we think we will get a great student turnout for this event. We would love it if you could attend this event. We’re interested in hearing about your experience, what can be done with an SDS major, and what you’ve done so far.

If you would like to know more about the event or if you would be willing to attend, please contact Liz Mullen at emullen@andrew.cmu.edu.

College/Faculty News

--Steven Klepper, the Arthur Arton Hamerschlag Professor of Economics and Social Science, will be the director of the new Institute for the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technological Change. The institute will manage an initiative to infuse entrepreneurship and innovation-management courses throughout the university’s undergraduate curriculum. The $18 million initiative is being launched with $3 million in seed funding the Kauffman Foundation. Under the new plan, the university seeks to create a minor in entrepreneurship and innovation that spans the entire undergraduate program at Carnegie Mellon and to leverage relationships with new global partnerships to broaden and deepen the educational potential of those efforts. The new initiative will begin in close collaboration with the College of Engineering, where the plan is to begin reforming undergraduate engineering education and then disseminate it across campus. For more information go to http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2006/december/dec14_kauffman.shtml.

--The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has awarded Carnegie Mellon a $2.25 million grant for further development of the Open Learning Initiative (OLI), a collaboration of cognitive scientists, human-computer interaction experts and veteran faculty who create online versions of introductory-level college courses. The goal of the program is to make high-quality university instruction widely available over the Internet. The OLI courses provide real-time feedback, pinpoint students’ individual weaknesses and provide them with tutoring so they are able to work at their own pace. Courses currently available include chemistry, French, logic, causal reasoning and statistics.

During the 2005-06 academic year, Statistics Professor Oded Myer demonstrated that Carnegie Mellon students, learning statistics solely through the OLI course, performed just as well on exams as students who took the university’s traditional introductory statistics course. The next step will be to determine whether students using the OLI materials to augment conventional classroom instruction can complete a 15-week statistics course in half that time. For more information go to http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2006/december/dec14_OLI.shtml.

Events

--The winners of the eighth annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Writing Awards at Carnegie Mellon will honor the vision and sacrifice of the slain civil rights leader when they read their work as part of the university’s Martin Luther King Day celebration at 1:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 15, in Rangos Hall in the University Center. The writing awards are sponsored by the Creative Writing Program. The awards will follow Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon’s annual State of Diversity address, which starts at 12:30 p.m. For a complete schedule of Martin Luther King Jr. Day events at Carnegie Mellon, go to http://www.studentaffairs.cmu.edu/first%2Dyear/mlk/

--Four networking events will take place over the January winter break in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Seattle/Redmond. They are open to all Carnegie Mellon alumni as well as graduating seniors and graduate students. Recruiters seeking candidates for full time positions and internships are also encouraged to attend. Network Nights are informal cocktail receptions where current master's students, graduating seniors, and alumni of the seven colleges and interdisciplinary programs within Carnegie Mellon meet with regional employers to discuss job and internship opportunities. For more information and to register, go to http://alumni.cmu.edu/networknights/.

--Children’s book author Sue Stauffacher (B.A. Creative Writing and Professional Writing, 1983) will speak at 8 p.m. Jan. 31 in the Adamson Wing of Baker Hall as part of the annual Adamson Visiting Writers Series. Stauffacher is the author of the critically acclaimed “Donuthead” and “Harry Sue.”

--For a complete list of upcoming alumni events, go to http://alumni2.tepper.cmu.edu/cmuEvents/.

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