Carnegie Mellon University

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February 16, 2012

Personal Mention

Fred Gilman, dean of the Mellon College of Science, has been elected chair of the AURA Management Council for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). The council will oversee the final stages of the design and then the construction of the LSST, which is being built by a consortium of universities and national laboratories including Carnegie Mellon. Read more.

CIT recently announced several awards, which will be presented on March 30. Professor Larry Biegler will receive the CIT Outstanding Research Award, Professor Erik Ydstie will receive the CIT Phillip L. Dowd Fellowship and Professor Nick Sahinidis will receive the Steven J. Fenves Award for Systems Research.

Carnegie Mellon School of Art has announced the appointment of Liz Keller as director of pre-college art programs, where she will work to develop Saturday and summer pre-college programs and related outreach initiatives. Keller worked at The Mattress Factory since 2006, most recently as director of education.

Jim Daniels, the Thomas Stockham Baker Professor of English, will be on "The Poet and The Poem from the Library of Congress" with Philip Levine, the 18th Poet Laureate of the U.S. on Feb. 22. "The Poet and the Poem" series is in its 35th year on public air and is nationally distributed by NPR. You can also listen to a podcast of Daniels’ readings and career retrospective at http://www.loc.gov/poetry/poetpoem.html.

An Android app developed by ETC student Sivakumar Loganathan called Carnatic Raga, which helps listeners learn melodic modes used in Indian music, was featured in the Times of India.

At the invitation of Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl, Lenore Blum, professor of computer science and director of Project Olympus, joined other Pittsburgh business and development leaders in Washington, D.C., Tuesday afternoon for a meeting with Obama administration officials about job creation. Blum, a member of Ravenstahl’s PowerUp Pittsburgh initiative for increasing the region's innovation economy, said the meeting with the White House Business Council included Mark Doms, chief economist for the U.S. Department of Commerce, and Todd Park, chief technology officer for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "The main take-away message was the Pittsburgh is very much on the White House's radar in terms of high tech, manufacturing and health IT," she said. In particular, the city is seen as a leader in health IT, which will play an increasingly important role in implementing federal health care reform. The White House meeting was one of a series with leaders from various cities organized by the group Business Forward. Project Olympus is part of Carnegie Mellon’s Greenlighting Startups initiative.

Raymond E. Haynes, director of athletics and physical education at Carnegie Mellon from the late 1960s until he retired in 1975, died on Feb. 11. He was 96. Haynes also was a physical education instructor at CMU. He was a member of several health and physical education associations and was inducted into the Western Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame.