 |
 |
| PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS CURRENT STUDENTS ALUMNI & FRIENDS COMMUNITY FACULTY & STAFF | |
There will be intermittent cooling outages on the west side of Schrenk Hall through 2 p.m. today (Wednesday, June 27) due to repairs being made to ductwork. If you have any questions or concerns, contact Clarence Gregory at 341-4252.
For the second consecutive year, Bill Gaul has landed the top award on the ESPN The Magazine Academic All-America team. The UMR senior was selected as the "Academic All-American of the Year" in the at-large category for the second year in succession. He was one of two members of the swimming team to be selected to the top academic team, as fellow senior Andy Shelley was named to the third team.
More sports:
The office of the vice provost for graduate studies will open Monday, July 2. This office, in Room 118 of Fulton Hall, will be responsible for all issues relating to graduate studies at UMR. The new vice provost is Dr. Venkata Allada. Staff members include: Barbara Palmer (341-4141), Vicki Hudgins (341-4039), Roberta Cox (341-4128) and Vicki Gibbons (341-4892).
Deans' offices will continue to handle paperwork related to graduate studies until June 29. For more information about the office of the vice provost for graduate studies, call 341-4141 or email vpgs@umr.edu.
UMR Campus Procurement is now offering a procurement email list for any UMR or UM System employee interested in receiving notices or updates on procurement related issues. This list will allow UMR Campus Procurement Service to better distribute information to campus departments and end users. Users may subscribe by sending an email to listserv@lists.mst.edu with a message "subscribe procur-l John Doe" (John Doe is the subscribers name). For more information, call 341-4266 or email at umrpurch@umr.edu.
Dr. Bernard Amadei, professor of civil engineering, director of the Engineering for Developing Communities Program and founder of Engineers Without Borders at the University of Colorado, will be the keynote speaker for UMR's EWB Beans and Rice Celebration Banquet at 6 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 13, in the St. Pat's Ballroom of the Havener Center. Amadei is a Hoover Medal Award winnner. The award is presented by the American Society of Civil Engineers to commemorate the civic and humanitarian achievements of Herbert Hoover. The banquet is being held to celebrate UMR's EWB projects, completed and ongoing, and to recognize the parters and students who make it all work.
The Office of the Provost would like to invite the campus to an open house reception welcoming Dr. Thulasi Kumar to UMR as the new director of Institutional Research and Assessment. The reception will be held from 2-3:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 10, in the Carver/Turner Room in the Havener Center. Kumar will begin his new position at UMR on July 1.
Dr. Caroline Fisher, dean of the School of Management and Information Systems, made presentations to two universities in China during June. Fisher presented seminars based on the textbook she published to Beijing Institute of Technology and China Agricultural University. She also met with administrators of these and two other universities (University of Shanghai for Science and Technology and Zejiang University) to develop partnerships for UMR.
Writing tutors are available to assist undergraduate students with their writing assignments during the summer semester. Tutors are available Monday through Friday from 2-5 p.m. Students may make an appointment to work with a tutor by calling 341-4436 or they may just drop by the UMR Writing Center in 113 Campus Support Facility.
William L. Gillis, design engineer, physical facilities
Heather Herweck-Luckner, reading specialist, RPDC
Sandra Simmons, secretary, development
Colen Shawn McKinnon, custodian, physical facilities
The balloting period for the Strategic Plan has been extended one week. The revised final strategic plan is available for viewing on the provost’s web page along with an electronic ballot that faculty and staff members may submit to express their endorsement or non-endorsement of the overall plan. Ballots will be received through June 25, 2007.
With respect to the name change, have you asked yourself any of the following questions?
- What will happen to my computer as a result of the name change?
- When will my email address change?
- What kind of support can I expect to receive from IT during the name change process?
Watch the IT blog for answers to these questions and more.
Dr. Jerry Tien comments on the Chinese coal industry in the International Herald Tribune.
The Associated Press recently got the scoop on Explosives Camp.
Dr. J. David Rogers discussed the state of the levees in New Orleans with National Geographic.
A search committee to hire the next director of the Graduate Center for Materials Research is seeking nominations from internal applicants. The committee, chaired by Richard Brow, Curators' Professor of materials science and engineering, is leading an internal search to replace James Drewniak, the center's current director and professor of electrical and computer engineering, who is stepping down July 1. A complete position description is available online at http://campus.mst.edu/hrsinfo/employment/research/. The review of applicants begins June 21and will continue until the position is filled.
The UMR Brand Identity Team will host an open forum from 1:30-3 p.m. Thursday. The team will share information about progress to date on the name change and to share upcoming plans in the name change process. The session will be held in the Turner Room of Havener Center, and free 25-percent-off coupons from the UMR Bookstore will be given to the first 50 to attend, so show up early. For more information, visit the Name Change Conversations blog.
Dr. Donald C. Wunsch, the M.K. Finley Missouri Distinguished Professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMR, and Dr. S.N. Balakrishnan, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UMR, have been making several presentations in China this month.
Balakrishnan presented a plenary lecture at the International Symposium on Neural Networks on June 5. After the conference, he gave talks at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Xi'an Jiotang University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
Wunsch presented a tutorial on June 3 at the same conference, and also made research presentations at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation and Tsinghua University, both in Beijing. These institutions are among the elite engineering research universities in China.
Starting June 20, the entire eConnection will be available in the format you see here. Once the site is fully active, faculty and staff will no longer receive the entire eConnection via email. However, you will receive weekly emails – three emails per week when classes are in session – with headlines and links to updated eConnection items and calendar events. All submissions will also be handled through a link on the site (look to the right of this post).
The new and improved eConnection will organize information by category in a user-friendly manner (announcements, calendar items, lectures, UMR in the news, deadlines, etc.). All of the same information currently included in the eConnection will be available here at econnection.mst.edu.
While the UMR office of public relations feels the eConnection in its traditional format has been a big success, there are several reasons for this change, including the following:
-- The eConnection has become too big to organize without more technological assistance.
-- The current volume of submissions and eConnection-related correspondence by email is difficult to manage.
-- The vast majority of submissions must be edited for brevity, etc. (requirements on this new site will result in organized and streamlined submissions).
-- Problems with listservs have made it difficult for some employees to subscribe to the eConnection and sometimes subscribers are dropped unexplainably.
You will be able to access the new eConnection online any time you want (or regularly whenever you get a reminder by email). The site will be updated daily and timely events will always be pushed to the top (no need to resubmit items). Our new calendar feature will allow readers to see what is happening on campus that day and that week. The new eConnection will also be full of links, so you will be able to choose what you want to read more about and what you don’t. In this way, we hope to mitigate some of the messages you are currently receiving by email and avoid “spam-like” behavior.
The new eConnection, like the old eConnection, will contain information that is believed to be of interest to a diverse campus population. Urgent messages that have a direct impact on the campus at large will still be sent to all employees via email.
We’re looking forward to launching econnection.mst.edu. We hope you like it.