University News
New President of Oxford's Trinity College Elected
Trinity College has announced the election of Sir Ivor Roberts KCMG as the next President of the College. He will take up office in September 2006 following the retirement of the Honourable Michael Beloff QC.
Sir Ivor has been HM Ambassador to Italy since 2003. His distinguished career has included ambassadorial appointments in Dublin and Belgrade as well as varied diplomatic posts in the UK, the Lebanon, France, Luxembourg, Australia, Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides) and Spain. He speaks fluent Italian, French and Spanish and passable Serbo-Croat. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Linguists and lectures widely on international relations and geopolitical issues.
Educated at St. Mary’s College Crosby, he won a Gomm Scholarship to Keble College Oxford (where he is now an active Honorary Fellow). More recently he spent a sabbatical year in 1998-1999 as a Senior Associate Member of St. Antony’s, writing and lecturing on his experiences in the former Yugoslavia.
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HKUST Opens Business Education Center in Beijing
The School of Business and Management of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology ( HKUST Business School) opened its Beijing Center in Financial Street in Beijing. The School will provide the much-needed international executive training to the burgeoning financial industry following China’s accession to the WTO.
HKUST is the first and only academic institution invited by Financial Street Holding, the developer of the district to set up an executive education center there. The Beijing Center will be supported by the Beijing International Financial Training Center which coordinates executive development matters for Financial Street.
The Beijing Center will leverage on the research and academic excellence of the HKUST Business School, which has been consistently ranked top in the Asia Pacific by London’s Financial Times in its MBA, EMBA and executive education rankings. The Center opening follows on heels the latest annual global executive education survey by Financial Times which for the third consecutive years ranked the School the top provider of customized executive education in the Asia Pacific. The paper last year described the School as “...one of Asia’s youngest but most respected business schools.”
The Beijing Center features purpose-built executive training facilities, including a classroom with a capacity for 50, break-out rooms, a lounge area and offices. It will organize both customized programs for companies and programs for open enrollment. It has already reached an initial agreement with accounting firm KPMG to offer programs for executives in the financial industry. Details are expected to be announced in due course.
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NTU and ST Engineering Establish R&D Center in Singapore
Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Singapore Technologies Engineering (ST Engineering) have jointly set up a center to boost research and development in intelligent systems in Singapore.
The Intelligent Systems Centre, or IntelliSys, is the first centre to be set up jointly by both parties. Based in NTU, IntelliSys aims to provide strategic leadership in Singapore and beyond in the areas of core technologies underlying intelligent systems, as well as innovation and applied research for the development of intelligent systems.
The study of intelligent systems is focused on reasoning technologies. Examples include neural networks, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithms, hybrid methods and intelligent agents.
Applied research in intelligent systems can provide the impetus for innovation in various industries and enhance their competitive advantage. When applied, intelligent systems can, for instance, lead to smarter and better home appliances for the home electronics sector, and more intelligent airplanes for the transportation industry.
IntelliSys seeks to be a hotbed for intelligent systems advancement and a source of technology innovation and transfer. It will create technology platforms from which multiple applications can be spawned off to industry, providing industry not just with technological solutions for application-specific problems but innovative products, systems and solutions as well.
IntelliSys is currently working on eight research and development projects with local and international members of industry and research centres that will benefit diverse applications from flight control systems to artificial intelligence in gaming.
NTU and ST Engineering signed an MOU to set up IntelliSys in July 2003. Both parties jointly contributed $6 million, in kind and in cash, to set up the center.
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Vanderbilt Kennedy Center Receives $100,000 gift from the Dan Marino Foundation
Reaching out to children with autism and their families is what the Dan Marino Foundation is all about. The foundation recently expanded its impact through a gift of $100,000 to the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. The gift, the first major donation the foundation has made outside of its home base of South Florida, will create Dan Marino Foundation Fellowships and Dan Marino Foundation Discovery Grants and will support the center’s outreach programs.
Dan Marino Foundation fellows will be pre- or post-doctoral trainees who are mentored by a Vanderbilt Kennedy Center investigator. The fellowships will encourage top researchers to continue on a career path to investigate autism and related neurodevelopmental disabilities.
Dan Marino Foundation Discovery Grants will provide Vanderbilt Kennedy Center investigators with seed funding for novel and innovative research ideas.
The mission of the Dan Marino Foundation is to impact autism by supporting integrated treatment programs, outreach services and disease research for children with chronic illnesses and developmental disabilities.
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Distinguished Education Scholar Joins University of Chicago
Stephen Raudenbush, one of the United State’s leading scholars on advanced methodology of education research, will join the University of Chicago as the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Sociology and Chair of the new Committee on Education.
The new Committee on Education to be headed by Stephen Raudenbush will bring together distinguished faculty from several departments and schools considered to be among the best in the world into common research projects, seminars and training programs. The committee will engage faculty and graduate students from such areas as public policy, sociology, social service administration, economics, business, mathematics and the sciences to collaborate on the most critical issues affecting urban schools.
The University’s Center for Urban School Improvement operates the University of Chicago Charter School, which has a highly successful North Kenwood/Oakland campus and will open this fall a new campus in the former Donoghue School.
Raudenbush’s distinguished career has earned him widespread recognition for his scholarship. He has received several awards from the American Educational Research Association, including the Raymond B. Cattell award for early career achievement in educational research in 1993 and the Palmer O. Johnson award for the most outstanding paper in the AERA journal in 2003. He also received the Robert Park Award from the American Sociological Association Community and Urban Sociology Section for outstanding work in community and urban sociology.
Raudenbush is best known as a quantitative methodologist and is an expert on hierarchical linear models, an advanced research technique that allows researchers to evaluate data from school performance more accurately.
He is scientific director of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, an ambitious study of how family, neighborhood and school settings shape the academic learning, social development, mental health and exposure to violence of children growing up in Chicago. His research pursues the development, testing, refinement and application of statistical methods for individual change and the effects of social settings, such as schools and neighborhoods. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Education and a member of the U.S. Title I Independent Review Panel.
He received an Ed.D. in Policy Analysis and Evaluation Research in 1984 from Harvard University. He has been a member of the University of Michigan faculty since 1998, where he is a professor in the School of Education.
The Lewis-Sebring Family Foundation recently established the Lewis-Sebring Professorship. Charles Lewis, chairman of the foundation, is a member of the University’s Urban Education Initiative’s Policy Board. Penny Bender Sebring, president of the foundation, is the founding co-director of the Consortium on Chicago School Research, one of the main components of the Urban Education Initiative.
This endowed chair is part of the foundation’s $5 million commitment to the Urban Education Initiative. The other components are endowed funds for the Consortium on Chicago School Research and the Center for Urban School Improvement, two other major elements of the initiative. The consortium’s Sebring-Lewis fund will support its data archive. As a result of this commitment, two positions also will be named for the foundation: the Lewis-Sebring Executive Director of the Center for Urban School Improvement and the Lewis-Sebring Convener of the Urban Education Initiative.
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Breakthrough in Geomechanics Research Recognized by Royal Society
A research breakthrough by a University of Nottingham professor that will have important implications for engineering design involving rolling and sliding contact such as road railway foundations has been unveiled in a prestigious journal.
The outcome of new the new research by Professor Hai-Sui Yu, Director and founder of the University's Nottingham Centre for Geomechanics and Deputy Head of the School of Civil Engineering, has been reported in the Royal Society's flagship journal Proceedings of the Royal Society Series A.
His scientific paper, Three-Dimensional Analytical Solutions for Shakedown of Cohesive-Frictional Materials Under Moving Surface Loads, outlines how the research solved an outstanding fundamental problem in the field of engineering mechanics under variable loads. Shakedown is a concept used in engineering mechanics to describe the situation when the permanent deformation of a structure under variable loads ceases to occur after a number of load cycles.
The research has particular applications to design of pavements and rail tracks in highway and railway engineering, as these structures are constantly subjected to variable, moving traffic loads. Design for these structures needs to ensure that they will shakedown under given traffic loading conditions.
The shakedown solution derived by Professor Yu provides a fundamental basis for developing an innovative and cost-effective methodology for designing and evaluating pavement and railway foundations.
This new design methodology, which is currently under development at the Nottingham Centre for Geomechanics with financial support from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), will represent a significant advance on current design procedures that are largely empirical and lack a rigorous theoretical basis.
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New Computing Cluster To Help Scientists Reconstruct The Tree Of Life
A new supercomputing cluster designed for the phylogenetic research community has been installed at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC). The Cluster, a 16 node, 8-way Fusion A8 by Western Scientific, features a total of 128 Opteron processors each with 4 GB memory, for a total of 0.5 TB memory. The cluster was purchased with a grant from the National Science Foundation in support of the CyberInfrastructure for Phylogenetic Research project, a collaboration of biologists, computer scientists, statisticians and mathematicians at 19 institutions whose goal is to understand the evolutionary relationships between all living organisms.
SDSC is home to CIPRes’ Central Resource, a team of biologist/programmers implementing a new generation of software tools and databases in support of the National community of Phylogenetics researchers. The SDSC team creates production software releases and tools for database access and data deposition that are publicly available. The project is designing new data formats and data storage techniques and uniting these with new high end computing architectures to speed the prediction of evolutionary relationships. The cluster acquisition represents novel architecture that can provide additional computational muscle required by scientists.
“The goal of the CIPRes project is to push the size limits of phylogenetic reconstruction from evolutionary trees of 100 to 1,000 species to 100,000 species and more,” said SDSC project leader Mark Miller.
Researchers within the community will be able to access the new cluster system through an allocation process. Formal announcement of the policies and procedures for obtaining such an allocation is scheduled on September 1, 2005, and will be posted on the CIPRes website.
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Scientists Discovers How Flames Burn
Scientists have discovered compounds nearly ubiquitous in fire that have amazingly eluded detection in spite of 150 years of research on how flames burn.
According to a paper in the journal Science on its Science Express Web site (May 12), co-authored by a Cornell University professor, enols, technically in the family of alcohols, are part of the chemical pathway that occurs when a wide variety of fires burn. Craig Taatjes, a combustion chemistry researcher at Sandia National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and lead author of the paper. Terrill Cool, professor of applied and engineering physics at Cornell, is a co-author.
Scientists who study combustion never expected to find enols in flames, and until now their detection was obscured by another related compound that shares the same mass and has long been known to exist in fire. A new technique for studying the compounds in flames has allowed researchers to distinguish between these molecules and has made the discovery possible.
While the researchers don't know where the discovery will lead, it offers new directions in efforts to reduce soot and other pollutants in flames, improve fuel cells, and model planetary atmospheres and interstellar chemistry.
Enols have a structure that includes properties of both alkenes and alcohols, hence the name (enol). The simplest alkene is ethylene (C2H4), a gas that is produced in nature as a plant hormone and is also a major chemical feedstock (the starting point for manufacturing other substances). The primary commercial use of ethylene is the production of polyethylene, a common plastic. When a hydroxyl group (OH) replaces a hydrogen atom in ethylene, it becomes an enol called ethenol (CH2CHOH), also known as vinyl alcohol. Ethenol exists only as a transient or fleeting species in chemical reactions, but altered, stable forms of ethenol (polyvinyl alcohol) are main ingredients in latex paints, hair sprays, shampoos and glues.
Hundreds of chemical species form and turn into other products when fires burn. Enols are one of these intermediary species. To study fire chemistry, researchers use computer models to simulate chemical reactions during combustion. Now, models must be modified to include enols. Also, by understanding the chemistry of burning from beginning to end, researchers may be able to alter pathways and reduce pollutants, such as soot, that come out of flames.
Astronomers have observed ethenol in interstellar space. The new enol findings could provide clues as to how complex organic molecules form in interstellar space.
A common technique used to determine the components in fire involves taking a sample of the chemicals in a flame, giving them an electrical charge and timing how long it takes for the electrically charged molecules, called ions, to reach a detector. Heavier ions take longer, so researchers calculate a molecular mass based on timing. Scientists use the results to make models of chemical reactions that occur during combustion.
Until now, scientists who study combustion never suspected enols existed in flames. They knew of another closely related molecule (called an isomer) that shares the same composition and mass, is also an intermediary, but has a different structure, which alters its physical and chemical properties
The researchers applied a new technique that reveals both the structure and the mass. The technique relies on the fact that forming ions from different isomers requires different amounts of energy. By making the ions with photons, or particles of light, tuned to specific energies, isomers can be distinguished.
Other than Taatjes, Cool's co-authors include other researchers from the Sandia National Laboratory, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, the University of Science and Technology of China and the University of Bielefeld ( Germany).
