Spectrum - Volume 17 Issue 01 August 25, 1994 - Achievers
A non-profit publication of the Office of the University Relations of Virginia Tech,
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Spectrum
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Achievers
Spectrum Volume 17 Issue 1 - August 25, 1994
Richard Gargagliano , hospital administrator in the Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center at Morven Park, has earned designation as fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives.
Certification as fellow in the 28,000-member ACHE represents a member's continued achievement in meeting high standards of professional development, excellence and leadership in the profession and is the highest distinction a member can achieve.
Darrin Medley, Rhoda Hutchison, David Robinson, Carol Davis, George Spradlin, Gary Allen, Roland Quesenberry , and Leslie Stevers graduated from the Culinary Skills Class, a six-week program developed by Culinary Services director, Rick Johnson, associate director Jim Riddle and three Culinary Services chefs, Thomas Vieli, Gary Fitting , and Josh Pittman. The class focused on basic culinary skills and included classes on roasting, sauteing, production of stocks, garnishing and other food-preparation related subjects. These skills will be used in the Culinary Services dining facilities to prepare new upscale items that have been added to the fall menus.
Deet's Place, Virginia Tech's coffee, pastry, and ice cream shop recently won a first-place award in the Loyal E. Horton Dining Award contest sponsored by the National Association of College and University Food Services (NACUFS). The award recognizes the imagination and creativity behind a specialty shop concept as well as the marketing strategies used to promote the facility.
Holli Drewry, Nancy Hymes, Carol Price, and Laura Worley prepared the presentation and submitted the award for Culinary Services. Virginia Tech will be recognized at the National NACUFS conference held in Kansas City, Kansas.
Lisa M. Cacciapaglia was recently promoted to assistant director of residence education. She has worked with Residential and Dining Programs as an area coordinator since 1991.
Lynne A. Nystrom, news director for the College of Engineering, has won awards in the National Federation of Press Women's 1994 sweepstakes competition. Nystrom won second place for a college publication and honorable mentions for an annual report and direct-mail fundraising literature.
Jafar J. Nader of Student Health Services has completed continuing medical education requirements to retain active membership in the American Academy of Family Physicians, the national association of family doctors.
Timothy W. Luke , professor of political science, presented a paper titled "Identity, Meaning, and Globalization: Space- Time Compression and De- Traditionalization" at the Conference on De- Traditionalization at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.
Luke also joined political scientists from Norway, Germany, and the United Kingdom on a panel at the International Society of Political Psychology in Cambridge, Mass. He presented a paper, "Ecological Populism or Bureaucratic Greens: The Limits and Pitfalls of Liberal Democratic Responses to the Environmental Crisis."
John Carroll, head of computer science, attended the conference of the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer- Human Interaction, the major international conference on human- computer interaction. In collaboration with Mary Beth Rosson , also of computer science, he presented two papers. The first was a case study of design history, "Raison d'Etre: Capturing design history and rationale in multimedia narratives," done in collaboration with IBM and InterMedia Enterprises. The second was an approach to evaluating the usability of computer systems, "Comparative usability evaluation: Critical incidents and critical threads," done in collaboration with Rutgers University and the Educational Testing Service. Carroll and Rosson also presented a formal demonstration of the Raison d'Etre system. In conjunction with the conference, Carroll co- organized a workshop on design rationale with a professor from City University, London, and a scientist from Rank Xerox EuroPARC.
Carroll gave an invited talk at the Graphics Interface'94 Conference, the annual conference of the Canadian Human- Computer Communications Society, in Banff, Alberta, Canada. The talk was titled "Putting metaphors to work." It was based on a paper written jointly with Rosson in which they extend the conceptual use of metaphors in the design of human- computer interactions to more direct uses in designing and implementing the software that underlies these interactions.
Tomas Hudlicky, professor of chemistry, is a co- principal investigator on a recently funded NIH program project titled "Mechanism of the Anesthetic Action." Headed by E. Eger of the University of California, San Francisco, the project addresses the fundamental research into how inhalation anesthetics work. The grant is for $3.5 million for five years, and the Virginia Tech group ( Hudlicky, Josie Reed , and Milos Hudlicky ) receives $826,000 and is charged with designing novel perfluorinated hydrocarbons for evaluation by the five groups (UCSF, Stanford, University of Colorado, Oxford University, and Virginia Tech).
Tomas Hudlicky also chaired one session and gave an invited lecture on "Enantioselective Synthesis of Alkaloids and Carbohydrates via Chemoenzymatic Methods" at the 19th IUPAC Symposium on the Chemistry of Natural Products in Karachi, Pakistan. A.A. Leslie Gunatilaka , research associate, presented an invited lecture on work of his and David G.I. Kingston 's, professor of chemistry, titled "Mechanism- based Isolation and Structures of Some Anticancer Natural Products."
Tomas Hudlicky was elected chair of the 1998 Gordon Research Conference on Biocatalysis, which is held every two years at Kimball Union Academy, Meriden, N.H. He gave a plenary lecture at this year's conference titled "Synthesis of Carbohydrates and Derivatives from Arene cis- Diols: Old and New Metabolites of Dioxygenase- mediated Degradation of Aromatics." Two students, Michele Stabile and Bryan McKibben, and postdoctoral fellow Andrew Thorpe gave invited posters in the area of Hudlicky's research on the conversion of aromatic compounds to sugars and other pharmaceuticals through environmentally benign protocols.
Charles Walcott and Karen M. Hult , associate professors of political science, have had their article "White House Organization as a Problem of Governance: the Eisenhower System" published in Presidential Studies Quarterly .
Edwin D. Cooke III , graduate student in geography, presented a paper on "Geochemical Factors that may contribute to cardiovascular disease of African- Americans in the Enigma Belt of the Southeastern United States" at the second annual National Association of African- American Studies Conference at Virginia State University.
David Jacobsen , associate professor of music, was selected as the first recipient of the newly instituted Music Professor of the Year award from the Service Committee of Delta Omicron Professional Music Fraternity. The award is to be presented annually to a faculty member chosen by the music students in recognition of outstanding personal contributions to the department and demonstrated support of student activities.
Larry T. Taylor, professor of chemistry, served on the program committee for a Joint Army- Navy- NASA- Air Force Safety and Environmental Protection Subcommittee and Propellant Development and Characterization Subcommittee Workshop on "Environmentally Benign Cleaning and Degreasing Technology" at Naval Surface Warfare Center at Indian Head, Md. The workshop was to provide a forum for the exchange of technical information and ideas on environmentally benign cleaning and degreasing methods applicable to propulsion and munitions operations and activities.
Allan Yousten , professor of microbiology, recently organized and chaired a conference on "Biotechnological Applications of Entomopathogenic Bacteria" at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Travel of 10 U.S. participants was funded by a National Science Foundation grant to Yousten. Participants from Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and the Pan American Health Organization also attended. Yousten also attended and presented two papers at the Brazilian national meeting on biological control at Gramado, Brazil.
The Virginia Tech Public Relations Student Society of America was named Outstanding Chapter for the Mid- Atlantic District and also Outstanding Fund Raiser. The student team also won the Mid- Atlantic District segment of the national PRSSA Bateman competition for developing a proposed solution to a hypothetical public- relations case problem.
Marshall Fishwick , professor of communication studies, chaired a panel at the National American Studies Conference at Yale University.
Matt McAllister, assistant professor of communication studies, was selected as Advisor of the Year for his advising duties at WUVT.
"Virginia Tech News," a newscast of the communication studies students at Virginia Tech, won honorable mention at the National Broadcasting Society/Alpha Epsilon Rho convention in New York City.
An interview of I.J. Good of Virginia Tech's statistics department is now in the American Statistical Association's Distinguished Statistician videotape archives. The videotape was produced by the Virginia Tech's statistics department.
Paul T. Jedrzejewski, a graduate student in chemistry, was a Student Honoree at the Fourth Annual Kenan Analytical Award Symposium in Charleston, W.Va. Jedrzejewski gave a presentation titled "Evaluation of the Particle Beam Interface for Coupling Packed- Column Supercritical Fluid Chromatography with Mass Spectrometry." The symposium is sponsored by Union Carbide Chemicals and Plastics Co. Inc.
An article by Timothy W. Luke , professor of political science, has been included along with essays by Vaclav Havel, Thomas Berry, Gary Snyder, and Lewis Lapham, in The Graywolf Annual Ten: Changing Community . His article is titled "Community and Ecology." Luke also published an article, "Marcuse and Ecology," which he delivered as the keynote address at a conference at the State University of New York- Buffalo on Marxism as an Intellectual Tradition. The article appears in Marcuse: From the New Left to the Next Left , edited by Luke and John Bokina with the University Press of Kanasas.
Harold Burkhart, the Thomas M. Brooks professor of forestry, was selected by an international committee to receive the Distinguished Statistical Ecologist Award by the INTECOL Statistical Ecology Group at the International Congress of Ecology on Aug. 22 in Manchester, England. The award recognizes his outstanding contributions to the development of basic concepts and applications of statistical ecology.
Burkhart has done pioneering work on modeling the dynamics, growth, and yield of forest stands.
John Seiler, associate professor of forestry, has been recognized as a successful innovator in science, mathematics, and engineering education by the National Science Foundation. He was invited to attend a national conference of innovators in undergraduate education in Washington, D.C.
Bob Shaffer, associate professor of forestry, is the new vice president/president-elect of the Virginia Forestry Association. He is only the fourth person not employed by the forest industry to hold this position in the 1800- member association since its founding in 1943.
Bob Shaffer and Mike Aust, assistant professor of forestry, took first place in the technical writing competition of the Southeastern Technical Division of the American Pulpwood Association for their paper, "Cost/benefit comparison: voluntary U.S. regulatory BMP's."
Bill Stuart, associate professor of forestry who developed the latest prototype logging rig, successfully defended a five-year project proposal on forest harvesting. His work for integrating forest use with landscape impact sensitivities is known nationally and internationally.
Jim Burger, professor of forestry, received a singular award for research from Gamma Sigma Delta, the honor society of agriculture.
Wolfgang Glasser, associate dean for research and graduate studies in the College of Forestry and Wildlife Resources, presented a scientific paper, "Structural Materials from Naturally Occurring Polymers," at the 208th American Chemical Society national meeting in Washington, D.C., Aug. 21. Glasser discussed how biochemically engineered materials could be designed on the basis of naturally occurring polymers and thus be biodegradable. Last spring he was invited to review the curriculum at the University of Malaysia. Glasser also visited Thailand to participate in the "Royal Project on Food Processing" and to visit King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Thonburi in Bangkok, where he observed several different demonstration development projects on food processing, bio-gas and waste treatment technology, and food processing additives.
George Stern, the Earle B. Norris Research Professor Emeritus of Wood Construction, was honored by the faculty and administration of Vyatka State Technical University in Kirov, Russia. He was elected as an honorary council member for his collaborative activities on behalf of Virginia Tech with the Russian university.
Richard E. Sorensen, dean, and Norrine Bailey Spencer, associate dean for undergraduate programs, Pamplin College of Business, offered a session at a conference, "TQM on Campus," in Memphis, Tennessee. Their presentation focused on the college's project on relations with undergraduates, a project which evolved from Virginia Tech's partnership with Westinghouse Corporation and on-campus meetings on TQM or total quality management in which both Sorensen and Spencer participated.