Archive for April, 2012

Four postdoctoral humanities scholars named Mellon fellows

April 17th, 2012

Each year the program brings four outstanding young scholars from outside the university who have earned their doctorates within the past three years to come to Stanford on two-year fellowships. This year’s fellows were selected from a pool of nearly 600 candidates.

Following are the 2012-14 fellows and the Stanford departments they will join. All of them will receive their doctoral degrees this spring.

Elizabeth Bennett

ELIZABETH BENNETT, Art & Art History, will receive her doctorate from the University of California-Berkeley. Her dissertation is titled “Economies of Valuation and Desire: How New Deal Photography Remade the Old Order Amish.”

Beatrice Kitzinger

BEATRICE KITZINGER, Art & Art History, will receive her doctorate from Harvard University. Her dissertation is titled “Cross and Book: Late Carolingian Breton Gospel Illumination and the Instrumental Cross.”

PAUL ROQUET, East Asian Languages & Cultures, will receive his PhD from UC-Berkeley. His dissertation is titled “The Soft Fascinations: Ambient Subjectivity in Contemporary Japan.”

ADENA SPINGARN, English, will receive her doctorate from Harvard. Her dissertation is titled “Uncle Tom in the American Imagination: A Cultural Biography.”

Adena Spingarn

The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities offers a rare opportunity for postdoctoral fellows in the humanities to receive funding, mentoring and teaching experience as well as the time and financial support to research and publish books and articles.

Fellows enjoy substantial time to pursue research, teach two courses each year in an affiliated Stanford department and participate in an active program of scholarly exchanges as a cohort, with Stanford faculty and with outside visitors.

Founded more than 30 years ago with a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the interdisciplinary program offers postdoctoral fellowships in all of the humanities disciplines on a three-year rotating basis.

The Mellon Fellows Program aims to foster fellows’ careers through close engagement with established scholars, including Stanford faculty associated with the program, internal fellows and visiting fellows at the Stanford Humanities Center.

The program invites major figures in the humanities to present public lectures and participate in small group sessions with the fellows, who gather throughout the year to present their research to one another and for professional development workshops devoted to pedagogy, publishing and mentoring.

Mellon Fellows have taught hundreds of Stanford humanities courses, created and published many books and articles, and been selected to join the faculty of prestigious universities.

Associate Professors R. LANIER ANDERSON, philosophy, and J.P. DAUGHTON, history, direct the Stanford Mellon Fellowship program.

—CORRIE GOLDMAN

The Humanities at Stanford

2012-13 International Knight Fellows selected

April 16th, 2012

Eight journalists from around the globe have been named International John S. Knight Journalism Fellows at Stanford University for the 2012-13 academic year.

These international fellows include, for the first time in the program’s 47-year history, participants from Lebanon and Portugal. U.S. Knight Fellows will be selected later this month and announced on April 30.

International Fellows will pursue independent courses of study and exploration aligned with the program’s goal of fostering journalism innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership. The projects this year’s fellows will undertake include development of an innovation incubator for Arab journalists, creating a press-freedom kit for journalists working under repressive governments and developing tools to help news consumers and journalists seek context in a 24-7 news cycle. During their stay, Knight Fellows also attend classes at Stanford and participate in special seminars arranged by the fellowship program.

The Knight Fellowships program received a record number of international applicants for this academic year’s class — 234, up from 222 the previous year. International Fellows were selected by Knight Fellowships Director JIM BETTINGER and Deputy Director DAWN GARCIA with assistance from the International Center for Journalists.

The 2012-13 International Fellows are:

  • MARIE-CATHERINE BEUTH, business journalist, Le Figaro, Paris, France. She will work to develop a tool to personalize the news experience for consumers seeking context in a 24-7 news cycle.
  • MARIA LILLY DELGADO, freelance correspondent, Univision TV, Managua, Nicaragua (Yahoo! International Fellow). She plans to create a training program and digital delivery service to help support journalists covering local news in regions outside of the capital.
  • ADRIANA GARCIA MARTINEZ, business editor, Thomson Reuters wire service, São Paulo, Brazil (Knight Foundation Latin American Fellow). She will work on a collaborative platform to promote the creation of entrepreneurial models for journalism in Brazil.
  • LI XIAOMING, blogs director, Phoenix New Media, Beijing, China (Enlight Foundation Fellow). He will explore web-based interactive journalism as a way to foster democratic values in China.
  • MUSIKILU MOJEED, managing editor, Premium Times Services Ltd., Abuja, Nigeria. He will work on a platform to connect Nigerian journalists with vital records and other resources for in-depth reporting.
  • ATTILA MONG, freelance writer and radio reporter, Budapest, Hungary (Lyle and Corrine Nelson International Fellow). He will develop an online “press freedom kit” that includes a database of media laws, best practices in legislation and a platform for journalists and media advocates.
  • MARIAM SEMAAN, head of production, RK Productions, Beirut, Lebanon. She will work to develop an innovation incubator for Arab youth to help shape the future journalism landscape through entrepreneurial projects.
  • NUNO VARGAS, executive media consultant, Porto, Portugal. He will explore the creation of a contextualized search tool to help journalists integrate photos, video and graphics with news chronologies.

Stanford ranks among the country’s ‘Healthiest Colleges’

April 13th, 2012

Stanford places second among Greatist.com's list of the Healthiest Colleges

The contenders range from Lewis & Clark University to Oberlin College to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. They are public and private, small, large and medium sized, urban and suburban. What they have in common is that they have placed on Greatist.com‘s list of the 25 Healthiest Colleges in the United States. The site describes itself as “the trusted health and fitness source for the young, savvy and social.”

For its Healthiest Colleges list, timed to coincide with high school seniors’ admissions decisions, the site says it “went through a rigorous scoring process,” taking nominations from readers through social media and perusing the web for mentions of the schools’ food, workout facilities and health-related programming. Its editors also looked at surveys from College Prowler and Princeton Review to narrow the list from nearly 100 to 25.

“From there, we scored each school individually on a 100-point scale that weighed food, fitness, health services and programming equally. Our scale took into account everything from accessibility (i.e., price, hours, etc.) to innovativeness (turns out rock climbing walls are actually pretty common — who knew!?) and paid special attention to the quality of those services,” the site noted.

Stanford fared very well in the process, coming in at No. 2. UCLA ranked No. 1. Greatist lauded Stanford’s varied dining options, gym facilities that are open late, the health center, athletic groups and the student BeWell program.

Seven Stanford faculty awarded Sloan Fellowships

April 12th, 2012
Eric Dunham

Eric Dunham is among this year's winners of Sloan Research Fellowships.

Seven members of the Stanford faculty are among the 126 U.S. and Canadian researchers to be awarded Sloan Research Fellowships for 2012. Recipients were drawn from 51 colleges.

The Stanford recipients are:

According to a press release from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the fellowships are historically awarded in seven scientific fields—chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience and physics.

Administered and funded by the Sloan Foundation, the fellowships are awarded in cooperation with the scientific community. To qualify, candidates must first be nominated by their peers and are subsequently selected by an independent panel of senior scholars. Fellows receive $50,000 to be used to further their research.

Visit the Sloan Foundation webpage for more information.

Economic debate: John Taylor and Larry Summers

April 11th, 2012

Two titans of the economic world, Stanford’s JOHN B. TAYLOR and Harvard’s LARRY SUMMERS, squared off in a debate last week on campus. It was the second debate for them (the first was at Harvard). The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research brought the two men together in Cemex Auditorium.

The topic was the ailing economy, and the question was whether government interventions had made things worse. Occasionally, they even agreed, though Summers was more supportive of intervention.

“One of the most difficult things to think about in regards to the crisis is to say things could have been worse – of course they could have been,” said Taylor. “It’s so hard to run through the factual process of interventions – if we hadn’t have caused the damage, we wouldn’t have needed the interventions.”

Summers talked about payroll tax cuts and tax rebates. “For the people in this room, an extra $1,000 means very little,” he said, “But for the vast majority of Americans that is not the case – for those on Social Security or unemployment insurance or those who take their pills every other day because they can’t afford to take them every day – people like that do not save their money: they need it.”
You can watch the debate on video:

‘Ask Stanford Med’ about innovation in health care

April 10th, 2012

On April 25, business and government leaders, entrepreneurs, academics and students will gather at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the 2012 Healthcare Innovation Summit. They will examine the forces shaping the future of health care and discuss practical solutions to some of our toughest health care problems. Panel sessions will explore topics such as the challenges and opportunities created by health-care reform, how to operationalize the promise of genomics and the idea of applying user-centered design to improve the impact and scale of new health care products and services.

To get the discussion started, the SCOPE blog asked STEFANOS ZENIOS, faculty organizer of the summit, to respond to your questions on health care innovation and entrepreneurship.

Zenios is the founding director of the Business School’s new Program in Healthcare Innovation. He is the lead author of Biodesign: The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies, a widely praised textbook on the entrepreneurial process for medical devices, and a co-founder of Konnectology.com, a suite of interactive guides for patients considering complex medical treatments such as kidney transplant.

Questions can be submitted to Zenios by sending a tweet that includes the hashtag #AskSUMed or posting your question in the comments section of the SCOPE blog posting. Questions will be collected until Friday, April 13 at 5 p. m.

Enterprising admits design class T-Shirts

April 9th, 2012

“They told me I could be anything. So I became a tree!” reads the front of a T-shirt designed by a handful of enterprising students who were recently admitted to Stanford’s Class of 2016.

According to BOB PATTERSON, director of admission, the students met on the Class of 2016 Facebook page. Orders are already coming in and the plan is to distribute them during Admit Weekend.

Profits will be donated to a charitable cause, which may include accredited non-profit organizations and scholarship funds for the Class of 2016.

Notah Begay gives back

April 6th, 2012

NOTAH BEGAY III came to Stanford to play golf, but he collected more than birdies during his stay.
Not only did he help lead the Cardinal to an NCAA Championship in 1994 and go on to win four tournaments on the PGA Tour, Begay earned a degree in economics and is putting it to great use.

In 2005. He founded the Notah Begay III (NB3) Foundation to promote better health and well-being for Native American youth. Begay, 39, is half Navajo, one-quarter San Felipe, and one-quarter Isleta and the only full-blooded Native American to play on the PGA Tour.

He founded NB3 to help fight childhood diabetes and obesity among Native American kids, and has raised more than $3.2 million through his annual NB3 Foundation Challenge Golf Event to support various programs. Former Stanford teammate and close friend Tiger Woods is a regular participant in the tournament.

Over the last three years, NB3 has reached more than 10,000 Native American children in 11 states through soccer, golf and health and wellness programs. Begay’s foundation helped the San Felipe Pueblo in New Mexico build the tribe’s first community park and soccer field.

Begay also started KivaSun Foods, a Native American company that sources products such as Native American bison, Pacific salmon, and sweet corn that tribes have sustainably farmed and fished for thousands of years. His dream is for KivaSun to become a “globally recognized brand and to reveal to a global audience what I have known my entire life: Native America’s respect for its surrounding and reverence for food produces some of the best products in the marketplace.”

Begay, who lives in Dallas with his wife and two young children, also established his own consulting business and designs golf courses. Begay’s third creation, his first signature design, Firekeeper Golf Course near Topeka, Kansas, was recently ranked the best new course in the country by Golfweek magazine.

“I always knew that having a Stanford degree as an athlete was going to serve me for the rest of my life,” said Begay. “It’s just the way the environment at Stanford encourages students to solve problems. That’s what life is and certainly business. I got be very close with the Stanford American Indian Organization and stay close with the program to this day.”

Read the full story by MARK SOLTAU on the Athletics website.

Stanford law lecturer appears on ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’

April 5th, 2012

THOMAS GOLDSTEIN, a lecturer in the Stanford Law School, appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart Tuesday, April 3. Goldstein, who has argued two dozen cases before the Supreme Court, is publisher of SCOTUSblog. He offered insights into the recent Supreme Court arguments on the Affordable Care Act and on other decisions.

Webcast: Bill Gates’ ‘View from Africa’

April 4th, 2012

BILL GATES just returned from Africa, where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been tackling a variety of health, education and agriculture issues. He plans to talk about what he’s learned at an event on Stanford’s campus this afternoon. Even though there are no more seats available, you can still catch the talk, titled “Getting Better: A View from Africa” via a live webcast today, April 4, at 4:10 p.m., Pacific Time. You can watch it from your desktop, laptop or mobile device, or view it on the big screen on the first floor of the Old Union. After a presentation, Gates will participate in a Q&A with university PRESIDENT JOHN HENNESSY and the live audience.
Here’s the link: https://www.livestream.com/billgates