Carnegie Mellon University

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October 27, 2011

Personal Mention

Janet Madelle Feindel (MFA'03), an associate professor in the School of Drama, served as dialect/voice coach for the Quantum production of "End of the Affair," directed by CMU adjunct instructor Martin Giles. CMU Associate Professor of Drama Joe Pino handled sound design and Todd Brown, lighting technologist in the Drama School, was responsible for lighting.

Allan Meltzer, the Allan H. Meltzer University Professor of Political Economy at the Tepper School of Business, has become the fourth person to receive the Truman Medal for Economic Policy.  Established in 2005, the Truman Medal for Economic Policy recognizes economists who have made extraordinary contributions to the formation of economic policy. Previous winners were Alan Greenspan in 2005, George Schultz in 2007, and Paul Volker in 2009. Meltzer is internationally recognized and respected for his insights on monetary and public policy, and he is considered to be the preeminent historian of the U.S. Federal Reserve, authoring the institution's definitive history in two volumes. 
 
Jeanne VanBriesen, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Center for Water Quality in Urban Environment Systems, spoke about "Water Infrastructure in a Digital Age'' at the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) annual meeting Oct. 16 at the JW Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C. Her talk was part of the Gilbreth Lecture Series, named for Lillian M. Gilbreth, the first woman inducted into the NAE.

Gérard Cornuéjols, the IBM University Professor of Operations Research at the Tepper School of Business, has received the most prestigious honor in the field of operations research as winner of the 2011 INFORMS von Neumann Theory Prize. He is being honored for his fundamental and broad contributions to discrete optimization, including his deep research on balanced and ideal matrices, perfect graphs and cutting planes for mixed integer optimization. Past faculty winners include Herbert Simon (1988) and Egon Balas (1995). The award ceremony will be held Nov. 13 at the INFORMS annual meeting in Charlotte, N.C.

Julia Schwarz, a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and David Klionsky, a recent master’s graduate in the Computer Science Department now at Microsoft, took first place in the Most Useful category of the UIST 2011 Student Innovation Contest. Watch a video of their app using a Microsoft Touch Mouse to move and resize windows.

ETC Executive Producer Don Marinelli was the keynote speaker at the 2011 Philadelphia CIO Executive Summit. He spoke about crafting an educational curriculum for the digital generation.

Newell R. Washburn, who is developing new experiential tools to teach technological innovation and entrepreneurship, will join more than 60 of the nation's brightest young engineers and educators Nov. 13-16 at the National Academy of Engineering's third Frontiers of Engineering Education Symposium in Irvine, Calif. This year's program focuses on teaching, project-based learning, active and self-directed learning, assessment of student learning and innovation in education. Washburn is an assistant professor of chemistry, biomedical engineering and materials science and engineering.