Personal Mention

Vice President for Campus Affairs Michael Murphy has announced that Gina Casalegno, Don Coffelt and Lisa Krieg will each be assuming the title of Associate Vice President, consistent with their extraordinary leadership within the Campus Affairs Group and throughout the university.

• "Casalegno, associate vice president and dean of Student Affairs, has been an instrumental leader in the life of the campus since assuming the dean of Student Affairs position in 2010," Murphy said. He called her "a visionary and engaged leader who ensures through all she does that integrity, compassion and abiding personal commitment pervade the life of the campus and reinforce the exceptional vitality of our community for our students, as well as for our faculty and staff."
• Murphy said Coffelt, associate vice president and director of Facilities Management Services, "has been the driving force in optimally managing our constrained physical resources to maintain and enhance our growing campus in ways that facilitate our core vision while ensuring our commitment to efficiency, environmental practices and a safe and productive campus."
• Murphy praised Krieg, associate vice president and director of Enrollment Services, who also holds the role of director of Risk Initiatives, for having "a transformative impact in our Enrollment Services Division, leading a team that has embraced a core ethos of service and broad-based commitment to our students and their families, while cultivating collaborative partnerships throughout the campus." He said her recent leadership in assessing and facilitating institutional risk management "underscores her deep understanding of the breadth and depth of our mission and the external environments in which we operate."

CMU President Subra Suresh was the featured guest on the PNC Business Journal this past Monday on KQV Radio. President Suresh spoke about his vision for CMU and the university's impact on the region, among other topics. The interview will be rebroadcast at 1 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 16.

Psychology Professor Michael F. Scheier was recently recognized by two leading psychology journals for having two top-cited papers. Scheier’s 1985 landmark paper “Optimism, Coping and Health: Assessment and Implications of Generalized Expectancies” is the American Psychological Association’s Health Psychology journal’s fifth-most downloaded article during the past three months among papers published since 1982. The paper provides a theoretical rationale for understanding why optimism might be beneficial for health and describes an initial version of a scale measuring dispositional optimism that has become one of the most popular ways to test for optimism and pessimism. The other papers in Health Psycholgy’s top five were all published within the last 10 years, making Scheier and co-author Charles S. Carver’s work stand out even more. Scheier’s second paper, “Optimism,” with Carver and Suzanne C. Segerstrom, is one of the five top-cited papers published in the Clinical Psychology Review from 2009-2013. “Optimism” explains why optimists tend to fare better than pessimists economically, in relationships and with general well-being. It points out that the behavioral patterns of optimists appear to provide models for living that others can learn from. Learn more about Scheier.

Alan Russell will receive the President's Award from the Engineers' Society of Western Pennsylvania (ESWP) on Feb. 19 for outstanding contributions to the use of science and engineering to benefit the health care industry and patient outcomes. "This is a wonderful honor and a testament to the tremendous team of people across the region who work to use engineering to transform health care and provide better tools and methods to empower patients," said Russell, the Highmark Distinguished Career Professor at CMU, head of the newly created Disruptive Health Technology Institute (DHTI) and chief innovation officer of the Allegheny Health Network. Russell also holds appointments in CMU's Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES) and the departments of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering. Learn more about Russell.  

The book, “Alan Turing: His Work and Impact,” which includes a paper by Lenore Blum, professor of computer science, is the winner of the R.R. Hawkins Award, the top honor in the 2013 PROSE Awards, the American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence. Blum contributed her paper, “Alan Turing and the Other Theory of Computation."