University News
The Mann Institute for Research and Development in Biomedicine Opens at the Technion
Last year, American entrepreneur and philanthropist Alfred Mann signed an agreement with the Technion for the establishment of an institute for research and development in biomedicine. Towards this end, he made an unprecedented donation of $100 million to the Technion. Last week, the institute was officially opened. The institute will focus on the development of knowledge created at the Technion in biomedicine, medical equipment and the life sciences.
Thus the Technion joins the University of Southern California, where Mann established a similar institute a number of years ago. It is Alfred Mann's intention to establish more than 10 such institutes in leading American universities. The Mann Institute at the Technion is the only one located outside the US. Alfred Mann confirmed that the driving force behind his decision to set up the institute at the Technion was his wife Claude. Her father, who was not Jewish, was sent to a Nazi concentration camp in Germany for helping Jews in France. Claude was born in the concentration camp. Since her childhood, she has had a deep and warm connection to the Jewish people. Last week, the Alfred Mann Institute at the Technion inaugurated a complex of laboratories in her name.
Alfred Mann said that he chose the Technion after years of having thoroughly checked out universities around the world and after he was convinced of the Technion's excellence. According to Mann, the uniqueness of the Technion in integrating medicine, science, engineering and technology ensures that the research institute will achieve impressive results and will quickly become one of the world's leaders.
Technion President Prof. Yitzhak Apeloig stated that, in establishing the institute, the American philanthropist was recognizing the Technion's uniqueness and its tremendous contribution to Israel's economy and strength, as well as the Technion's great inherent potential to develop science and medicine. He stressed that this represents "a step up" in the Technion's ability to develop and implement its researchers' inventions and knowledge. He expressed his confidence that not long from now, the engineering and medical inventions, which are the fruits of the Alfred Mann Institute at the Technion, will form the basis for setting up successful companies.
The board of directors of the Mann Institute is made up of six representatives of the Technion, appointed by the Technion President, and six representatives of the donor, including Alfred Mann. The director of the Mann Institute is Dr. Zeev Gilkis, former investment director of Comverse.
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Board of Regents Approves New Degree Programs for UGA Griffin Campus
Several new academic programs for the University of Georgia's Griffin campus were approved by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents at its meeting in Atlanta this week.
Three new undergraduate programs to be offered in fall 2007 were approved: a major in general business offered by UGA's Terry College of Business, a major in microbiology offered by UGA's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and a major in special education offered by UGA's College of Education.
These are upper-division programs for transfer students or those seeking a second bachelor's degree. Prospective transfer students need to have completed 60 transferable credit hours with a minimum 2.5 grade point average.
The regents also approved a master's degree program in agricultural leadership, to be offered by UGA's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences in fall 2007.
The Griffin campus, located 40 miles south of Atlanta, was founded in 1888 as an agricultural experiment station and today houses UGA faculty engaged in cutting-edge research in urban agriculture and food science and safety. Degree programs were offered there for the first time in fall 2005. With the approval of the new programs, UGA now offers seven undergraduate majors and two graduate degree programs in Griffin.
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Ooguri Appointed Fred Kavli Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech
Like many Japanese schoolchildren, Hirosi Ooguri read about the physicist Hideki Yukawa, who became Japan's first Nobel laureate in 1949 for predicting the existence of mesons, elementary particles that hold atomic nuclei together. Ooguri says, "I was very impressed by the power of mathematics in discovering how the universe works."
Today, "Ooguri is one of the leading theoretical physicists in the world," says his fellow string theoretician John Schwarz, the Harold Brown Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. The Institute has named Ooguri as its first Fred Kavli Professor of Theoretical Physics, a new professorship endowed by the Kavli Foundation.
String theory shows promise for unifying a theory of gravity with what physicists call the Standard Model, which successfully describes the other three of nature's four known fundamental interactions. Besides string theory, Ooguri has another long-term project: to help build an infrastructure for physicists exploring at the frontiers of high-energy physics. Specifically, he wants to develop the right mathematical language for quantum gauge theory, which describes how elementary particles interact.
Yet he now believes his two projects are converging, allowing physicists to choose suitable models from either string theory or quantum gauge theory. It could take physics half a century to develop these tools. "You need something analogous to the invention of calculus," he says. "My prejudice is that string theory is in the right direction."
Ooguri received his BA in 1984 and his MA in 1986 from Kyoto University. He earned his PhD at the University of Tokyo in 1989. He worked as an associate professor of physics at the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1990, followed by a four-year stint at Kyoto University as an associate professor of mathematical physics.
In 1994, Ooguri returned to the United States as a professor of physics at UC Berkeley. From 1996 to 2000, he was the faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He arrived at Caltech in 2000 as a professor of theoretical physics.
The Kavli Foundation was established in December 2000 by its founder and benefactor, Fred Kavli, a prominent California business leader and noted philanthropist whose foundation is currently actively involved in establishing major research institutes at leading universities throughout the United States and in Europe and Asia.
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Former Senator Frist to Join Princeton's Wilson School Faculty
Dr. Bill Frist, former U.S. senator from Tennessee, Senate majority leader and a Princeton University alumnus, will join the faculty of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs this fall.
He will be appointed for the 2007-08 academic year as the Frederick H. Schultz Class of 1951 Professor of International Economic Policy, with the rank of lecturer of public and international affairs. Frist will teach a graduate course in the Woodrow Wilson School on health policy during the fall semester and an undergraduate course on a similar subject in the spring.
Frist won election to the U.S. Senate as a Republican in 1994, pledging to serve only two terms and becoming the first practicing physician to serve in that body since 1928. His Republican colleagues unanimously elected him as the 18th majority leader in 2002, just eight years after his election and with less total time served in Congress than anyone ever to hold the position. Frist voluntarily stepped down as majority leader and left the Senate in January 2007 to return to Nashville as a private citizen.
Since leaving politics Frist has joined former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle to co-chair the ONE Campaign presidential initiative, ONE Vote '08, a bipartisan effort to make global health and extreme poverty foreign policy priorities in the 2008 presidential election. He also serves on the boards of the Hope Through Healing Hands Foundation, Africare, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Committee on Conscience, the Clinton Global Initiative's Global Health Working Group and the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project.
While at Princeton, Frist spent his junior and senior years specializing in health care policy and international relations at the Woodrow Wilson School, graduating in 1974.
His Wilson School experience led him to a summer internship in Washington, D.C., with veteran Tennessee Congressman Joe Evins, a Democrat. The then-dean of Tennessee's Congressional delegation counseled Frist that should he ever want to serve in Congress, he should first excel in a profession other than politics.
After graduating from Princeton, Frist earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School. He graduated with honors in 1978 and spent the next six years in heart surgery training at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Southampton General Hospital in England. His training culminated with his selection as chief resident in heart and lung surgery at Massachusetts General.
In 1985 Frist joined the team of heart transplant surgeon Dr. Norman Shumway at Stanford University. After completing his fellowship, Frist returned to his hometown of Nashville to serve as an assistant professor of surgery at Vanderbilt Medical School with a goal to create the region's first multi-organ, multidisciplinary transplant center.
Frist became the director of Vanderbilt University Medical Center's heart and lung transplantation program in 1986, and founded the multi-organ Vanderbilt Transplant Center three years later. Under his leadership, the center became recognized as one of the premier, full-service transplant facilities in the United States.
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Penn Receives Rockefeller Foundation Grant to Fund Fellowships to Rebuild New Orleans
The Center for Urban Redevelopment Excellence at University of Pennsylvania's School of Design has received a $2.2 million grant to fund fellowships to advance the redevelopment process in New Orleans. Penn fellows will work as project managers and collaborate with the Department of Planning and Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans and local officials.
The Center expects to recruit 15 fellows for new jobs with participating organizations including for-profit and non-profit development organizations, government agencies, financial institutions investing in affordable and mixed-income housing and other firms directly involved in the redevelopment process. The fellowship program will offer specialized classroom training, national site visits, and professional development and network-building activities to the fellows and other redevelopment professionals working in the New Orleans region.
The fellowship application and program information can be downloaded at http://www.upenn.edu/curexpenn/application_rfrf.htm. The program aims to place all fellows by September 2007.
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Grant of $10 Million from Hewlett Foundation Will Support The China Law Center of Yale Law School
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation has announced that it will donate $10 million to support The China Law Center of Yale Law School for five years.
From its inception in 1999, The China Law Center has focused on designing and carrying out in-depth cooperative projects between U.S. and Chinese experts on key issues of Chinese law and policy reform. In interaction with its teaching and research missions, the Center also works to strengthen the capacity of reformers in China, partnering with a range of Chinese institutions such as law schools, courts, administrative agencies and non-governmental organizations.
The grant, which will provide general support to the Center's programs over five years, is among the largest foundation grants ever made to a Yale Law School program.
