Personal Mention

Andreea Deciu Ritivoi has been selected to lead CMU's English Department, a renowned leader in professional, technical and creative writing as well as rhetoric and literary and cultural studies. Effective July 1, Ritivoi, professor of English, will succeed Chris Neuwirth, who has served as department head since 2009. “Professor Ritivoi will be a wonderful leader. She is fully credible in all three areas in our English Department: creative writing, literary and cultural studies and rhetoric,” said Richard Scheines, dean of CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “She has begun to branch out into digital humanities, a nationally growing field in which Carnegie Mellon is poised to be a natural leader, and she has already done excellent work on globalization and identity, as well as the role of art in social controversy. Andreea is an interdisciplinary scholar in the finest tradition of Carnegie Mellon.” Learn more.

Statistics Professor Brian Junker has been playing banjo with other string instrument enthusiasts every week at the Schenley Park Visitors Center. Junker’s weekly jam session on any given Thursday from noon to 1 p.m., includes an engineering manager from Apple’s CMU offices, a paleobotanist and educator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and a visual artist from the South Hills. The group provides lively background music for the lunch crowd. You can listen to Junker and other members of the Thursday group play their music Saturday, March 28 on WRCT radio during a morning family entertainment show called the “Saturday Light Brigade." Learn more.

A former Carnegie Mellon post-doc, Euan Wielewski, now a faculty member at the University of Glasgow, was one of 210 early career researchers invited to present to the British Parliament as part of SET for Britain, a poster competition in the House of Commons. Wielewski presented research that he conducted as a post-doctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon and Cornell universities under the guidance of Carnegie Mellon Physics Professor Robert Suter. The research focuses on using near-field High Energy Diffraction Microscopy (HEDM), a technique developed by Suter, to determine the likelihood that materials used to make parts for jet engines would fail. Learn more.