Archive for September, 2011

Global innovation and entrepreneurship program joins GSB

September 16th, 2011

The Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SPRIE)has joined the Graduate School of Business, where it will expand and enhance the depth and reach of global content for the school’s academic programs and research.

SPRIE is focused on understanding the development and practice of innovation and entrepreneurship around the world. Current research focuses on the dynamics and sustainability of Silicon Valley and high-technology areas across Europe and Asia.

Previously housed at Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, SPRIE is led by faculty directors WILLIAM F. MILLER and HENRY S. ROWEN, as well as MARGUERITE GONG HANCOCK, associate director.

Miller, a former Stanford provost and the Herbert Hoover Professor of Public and Private Management, emeritus, at the business school, is also a professor emeritus of computer science at the Stanford School of Engineering. He was CEO of SRI International, where he established a spin-out and commercialization program.

Rowen is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Edward P. Rust Professor of Public Policy and Management, emeritus, at the business school, as well as former president of the RAND Corporation. He is an expert on international security, economic development, and high-tech industries in the United States and Asia.

“We are very pleased to join the Graduate School of Business and look forward to collaborating on international and interdisciplinary research and conferences relevant to business students, executives and government leaders from around the world who are focused on leading innovation and creating value,” said Miller.

Read the full announcement on the Graduate School of Business website.

Stanford names its next class of Athletics Hall of Famers

September 14th, 2011

DON GRIFFIN (men’s basketball), MHAIRI MCKAY (women’s golf), JAY MORTENSON (men’s swimming), ALEX KIM (men’s tennis), DON SHAW (volleyball), STAN SPENCER (baseball), TRISHA STEVENS (women’s basketball), KERRI WALSH (women’s volleyball) and BOB WHITFIELD (football) will be inducted into Stanford’s Athletics Hall of Fame.

In addition, the Athletics Hall of Fame will pay special tribute to the late LLOYD MCGOVERN, who was one of the co-founders of the Hall of Fame and served as its first curator when it opened its doors in 1994.

The formal ceremony will take place on Friday, Nov. 11.

Read the full announcement on the Athletics website.

SLAC Today editor a familiar Stanford face

September 13th, 2011

Michael Peña

He’s baaack! And that’s a good thing. MICHAEL PEÑA, formerly a staff affairs writer and assistant editor of Stanford Report, joined the SLAC National Accelerator Center’s Office of Communications Aug. 22, as the new editor for SLAC Today and the recently launched SLAC News Center. Peña, who wrote the popular “Cardinal Chronicle” column that appeared on the back page of the print edition of Stanford Report, brings 14 years of experience working in newsrooms and university communications.

After the print edition of Stanford Report ended in spring 2009, Peña moved to Baltimore, where he spent a year and a half as a science writer and communications specialist for a bioethics institute at Johns Hopkins University.

The SLAC Communications team also includes BRONWYN BARNETT, who recently joined that office as deputy director. Barnett, who earned an MA in journalism from Stanford, did a stint as a science writing intern at the Stanford News Service.

Read the full announcement about Peña in the Sept. 12 issue of SLAC Today.

 

Stanford seniors named Glamour magazine’s Top Ten College Women

September 12th, 2011

When she was a Stanford sophomore, JACQUELINE ROTMAN was featured in The Dish after the winners of MTV’s America’s Next Dance Crew presented her with a check to support Everybody Dance Now!, a program for youth in Santa Barbara that Rotman started when she was 14.

Recently Rotman, a rising senior, was named one of Glamour magazine’s Top Ten College Women, for her continued work on behalf of low-income kids across the country. A public policy major, Rotman told Glamour she hopes to study at Oxford and to establish an organization that will shape global policy on poverty, human rights, justice and the environment.

ERICA FERNANDEZ, also a rising Stanford senior, has been speaking out about environmental issues since she helped stop a proposed liquified natural gas pipeline near her coastal town of Oxnard, Calif., when she was a teenager. In 2009 Fernandez won the Jane Goodall Global Youth Leadership Award, and she has spent time in Mexico working to prevent deforestation. Fernandez, who is pursuing a double major in urban studies and Iberian and Latin American cultures, plans a career in environmental law.

“My ultimate goal as an environmentalist would be that not only a couple of people are considered environmentalists but the whole world considers themselves environmentalists,” Fernandez says in a video profile on the Glamour website.

Read more about Rotman, dubbed The Ambassador, and Fernandez, The Advocate, on the magazine’s website.

Filled to the rafters

September 11th, 2011

Photo courtesy The Stanford Daily

The voices of the Peninsula choral community and a standing-room-only crowd filled Stanford Memorial Church on Sunday, Sept. 11, 2011. Led by Schola Cantorum, an 80-member chorus based in Mountain View, and in partnership with the university’s Office for Religious Life and Department of Music, singers and musicians from throughout the Bay Area paid tribute to those who lost their lives in and those who responded to the terrorist attacks 10 years ago. Gregory Wait, conductor and music director of Schola Cantorum and the director of vocal studies in the Stanford Department of Music, conducted the performance of Mozart’s Requiem in D minor.

Still popular after all these years: HumBio turns 40

September 8th, 2011

The Program in Human Biology, which was a pioneer in interdisciplinary studies, celebrates its 40th anniversary this fall. According to a story in the September/October issue of Stanford magazine, it is the largest undergraduate major.

“Smiles expand on the faces of Professor CAROL BOGGS, the program director, and KATHERINE PRESTON, associate director, when they note that after four decades, the HumBio family now encompasses some second-generation students. Senior exit surveys indicate that about 45 percent of human biology majors plan to go on for a medical degree and more than half into some area of medicine. But that doesn’t seem to be what generates word-of-mouth about the program. Undergrads who are searching for a long-term academic relationship hear a buzz about a place where a bit of magic happens: Intellectual discovery becomes linked with self-discovery.”

Read the full story on the alumni magazine’s website. You also can watch this video titled “How I became a HumBio major” on YouTube.

 

Rick Banks on Facebook Open Office Hours

September 7th, 2011

Recently, RALPH RICHARD BANKS, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford, welcomed questions about his new book, Is Marriage for White People? How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Us All. In this video, he responds to many of those questions.

 

Clever with names? Computer Science could use your help

September 6th, 2011

If you’re good at coming up with names (for children, pets, software, etc.), then the Computer Science Department is seeking your suggestions. Researchers are stumped by the task of finding a name for their ambitious new software/video approach to teaching, as described in a recent story in the Aug. 16 issue of Stanford Report. The existing name is CourseWare.

Some of the suggestions so far, forwarded to The Dish by research scholar CORNELIA LIEGL, include ProfOnDemand, uni-verse and currigo (CurriculumGo).

Also: DisCourse, TeleCourse and CourseMate.

Just guessing here, but another suggestion, ECWISM, might be a little hard to pronounce. (It stands for Educational Content with Integrated Social Media.)

Ideas? CourseWare has created an online form for you to submit your own. The deadline, which originally was Sunday, Sept. 4, has been extended a week.

For those interested, CourseWare developers also invite you to participate in a user test of the new system.

Historian Allyson Hobbs on the Great Migration

September 1st, 2011

Last May, C-SPAN came to campus to tape a lecture given by ALLYSON HOBBS, assistant professor of history at Stanford, as she taught her course Freedom Now: African American History, 1865-1965.

The topic of that day’s lecture was the Great Migration, the movement of millions of African Americans from the South to the North and the West between 1910 and the ’70s.

Hobbs’ lecture provides a sweeping examination of the historical, economic and social factors that brought about the Great Migration and the opportunities and challenges it spawned. She ended on a personal note, showing a photo of her father as a young boy of 4 after he had moved with his family to Chicago from Augusta, Ga. Her father went on to study at the University of Illinois, became a military captain and then an engineer for NASA and IBM.

“His parents’ decision to move to Chicago enabled him to live a very comfortable life,” Hobbs told her students. “He would have survived, but he may not have flourished in the ways that he did. And as a daughter of the Migration, I might not have the wonderful opportunity that I have today to teach brilliant students like you.”

Hobbs’ lecture, which originally aired July 30 as part of C-SPAN’s Lectures in History series, will be rebroadcast Monday, Sept. 5, at 1 p.m. Pacific Time (4 p.m. Eastern Time) on C-SPAN-3.

You also can watch the full lecture or a preview on the C-SPAN.org website.