Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs & Provost
Provost’s Academic Update
September 18, 2006E. Thomas Sullivan
Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost
Julius E. Davis Chair in Law
Dear Faculty, Staff and Students,
Now that you are settling in to the semester, I want to highlight recent academic accomplishments here at the University of Minnesota. As Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, I will send to you occasional progress reports on major academic initiatives and highlight the recent achievements of a few of your colleagues as exemplars of academic excellence on the Twin Cities campus.
Transforming the U Through Strategic Positioning:
Update on Academic Recommendations
We have had a very busy and productive summer implementing strategic positioning task force recommendations. You'll recall that over 400 faculty, staff, and students participated on 34 task forces last year. We now are hard at work bringing task force recommendations to life. Following are just a few illustrative highlights of some of the transformations taking place. This transformative work will continue throughout this year and in the next several years to come.
Three new colleges officially opened their doors on July 1, 2006:
- College of Design (created from the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and the Department of Design, Housing and Apparel from the College of Human Ecology);
- College of Education and Human Development (created by bringing together the current College of Education and Human Development, General College, and the Department of Family Social Science and School of Social Work from the College of Human Ecology); and
- College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (created from the College of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Science, the College of Natural Resources, and the Department of Food Science and Nutrition from the College of Human Ecology).
The synergies created by this unprecedented collegiate redesign effort should enable these colleges to lead the way to meet many of the challenges we will face in the 21st century and to better prepare students for the futures they will help shape. And administrative efficiencies created by adopting best practice administrative strategies in these colleges will result in saving several million dollars over the next few years—dollars that will be strategically reinvested in academic initiatives.
Institute on the Environment
A Provost's Advisory Committee has spent the summer developing implementation recommendations for another proposal from last year's task forces — creation of a world-class, system-wide Institute on the Environment dedicated to problem-solving research on major environmental problems. The Institute will bring together multidisciplinary research teams to work on global environmental issues that have regional significance. The committee's report was received at the end of last week, and is available here for review and comment: http://www.academic.umn.edu/provost/interdisc/environment.html
Baccalaureate Writing Initiative
Another implementation steering committee has been working on the baccalaureate writing initiative proposed by last year's writing task force. The writing initiative will be implemented Fall Semester 2007 and will transform the way the University approaches writing instruction for all undergraduate students. The result will materially enhance the quality and distinctiveness of the undergraduate education provided by the University.
Campus-Wide Honors Program
The University also has adopted the recommendation to implement a prestigious and rigorous new campus-wide honors program. An implementation working group began work this summer designing an exciting new program that will begin welcoming students in Fall 2008.
Institute for the Advancement of Science and Technology
I will be appointing, later this week, a Provost's Advisory Committee to begin formulating implementation plans for the Institute. The Institute will be a world-class, system-wide initiative to focus on advancing cutting-edge science and technology research.
Congratulations to these faculty and staff on their new appointments:
- Kent Pekel has been named executive director of the newly created Consortium for Post-Secondary Academic Success, another initiative growing out of the strategic positioning effort.
- Rusty Barceló returned to the University this summer as Vice Provost and Vice President for Access, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs, a position created at the recommendation of last year's Diversity Task Force.
- Katherine Himes is the new Assistant to the Provost. Her background in neuroscience is a welcome addition to Morrill Hall.
Congratulations to award-winning University faculty, students, and alumni:
The quality of University faculty is evident in the number of national and international awards received during the past four months. Outstanding faculty are a key component of achieving the goal of becoming one of the top three public research universities in the world within the next decade.
- Professor Dennis Hejhal (IT) has been awarded the 2005 Eva and Lars Gärding prize by the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund, Sweden. Hejhal was recognized for his work on the Riemann hypothesis in the University's Supercomputing Institute.
- IT senior Alex Kosset has won a 2006 Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. The award will fund Kosset's current project: redesigning an educational robot with computer vision under the direction of Professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos (IT). Kosset, a mechanical engineering honors student, was one of 18 students from across the country to receive this honor. Additional information: http://www.AstronautScholarship.org
- Assistant professors Ashley James (IT) and William Schuler (IT) received the National Science Foundation Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. This is the nation's highest honor for researchers in early stages of their career. James and Schuler were among the 20 award recipients honored at the White House. Read more: http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=107118&org=NSF&from=news
- Assistant professor Gary Schwitzer (CLA) is one of seven recipients of the prestigious Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. Schwitzer won the award for creating HealthNewsReview.org. The grand prize will be announced later this month at the National Press Club.
- Associate professor David Treuer (CLA) was featured recently in the New York Times. The article explored his Native American heritage and two upcoming books that challenge the idea of Indian identity.
- Professor Harold Grotevant (CEHD) and Professor Dana Johnson (Medical School) have been named to the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute Senior Research Fellows Program. The Institute, known as the preeminent research, policy and education organization in its field, selected nine fellows for the program.
- Assistant professor Daniel Cronin-Hennessy (IT) has been named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, a highly competitive national fellowship awarded to exceptional new science faculty.
- Assistant professor Kevin Dorfman (IT) is one of the first two Americans to receive the competitive Career Development Award from the Human Frontier Science Program Organization in Strasbourg, France.
- Associate professor Douglas Ernie (IT) received the 2006 George W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Service based on his contribution to technology enhanced learning and undergraduate research programs.
- Professor Dante Cicchetti (CEHD) received the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology at the American Psychological Association Convention in New Orleans.
- Professor William Garrard (IT) received the John Leland Atwood Award from the American Society for Engineering Education Aerospace Division and the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was also elected chair of the National Council of Space Grant Consortia.
- Regents professor John L. Sullivan (CLA) was awarded the Philip E. Converse Best Book Award for his 1982 work Political Tolerance and American Democracy.
- Assistant professor Kathryn Peterson (CLA) won the national Carl Albert Award for the best dissertation in legislative studies.
- Assistant professor Christy Haynes (IT) was named a 2006 Searle Scholar. The program recognizes young professors who conduct biomedical research.
- Professor Vipin Kumar (IT) is one of four researchers who will receive the IEEE Technical Achievement Award. Kumar was recognized for his work on parallel algorithms, graph partitioning, and data mining.
- Professor Chris Macosko (IT) has been awarded the 2006 Fernley H. Banbury Award from the American Chemical Society for his work on micro- and nano-structured polymeric materials.
- Professor Robin Wright, Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs in the College of Biological Sciences, has been named a National Academies Education Mentor in the Life Sciences. Wright received the award after serving as a mentor at the 2005 National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology in Madison, Wisconsin.
- Professor Megan Gunnar (CEHD), Professor Kathryn Sikkink (CLA), and Professor Donald Truhlar (IT) were recently named University of Minnesota Regents Professors. Faculty must be world leaders in their field in order to be considered for this award.
- Professor Susan Wolf (Law School, Medical School) has been appointed the McKnight Presidential Professor of Law, Medicine and Public Policy. Wolf is founding chair of the University's Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment and the Life Sciences and founding director of the Joint Degree Program in Law, Health and the Life Sciences.
- Professor Zigang Dong (AHC) was named the McKnight Presidential Professor in Cancer Prevention at the groundbreaking ceremonies for the University's new Hormel Institute in Austin, MN.
Congratulations to all faculty and staff who have successfully secured new research grants in the past few months. Recent noteworthy examples include:
- A $100 million "space weather" grant from NASA to teams from four universities, including the University of Minnesota, to provide experiments and supporting hardware for a future NASA mission to study near-Earth space radiation.
- A $6 million award from the U.S. Department of Education to the University of Minnesota Institute for Global Studies to support three national resource centers that will foster U.S. global competitiveness and national security.
- A $1.22 million award from the National Science Foundation to the University's Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment, and Life Sciences. The Consortium will be evaluating oversight models in nanotechnology.
- A $500,000 gift from Medtronic, Inc. and the Medtronic Foundation to the University for the creation of the Medtronic Fellows in Biomedical Engineering Fund. In recognition of the excellence of the University's biomedical engineering program, the fund will help support new graduate students during their first semester.
- A $112,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the University of Minnesota's Stem Cell Institute to train researchers to work with human embryonic stem cells. The Institute is one of seven centers nationwide to receive this award.
It is evident to me that excellence flourishes among the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Minnesota. Today's institutional transformation will lead to a world-class future for the University of Minnesota. I look forward to the great progress we will forge together throughout the fall.
Sincerely,
E. Thomas Sullivan
Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost
Julius E. Davis
Chair in Law
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