“We are very fortunate to have had such a positive response to the idea of a Staff Council at Tech. From the information sessions conducted over the summer, to the nominations and elections this past fall, staff are very much eager to participate,” said Christie Stewart, associate director of Campus Recreation and vice chair of the Staff Council. “We could certainly not have done this without the support of Tech’s leadership as well as the greater community.”  

The following staff members, listed by Job Classification and Compensation System (JCCS) category, will begin their initial term on the Georgia Tech Staff Council at the beginning of the spring semester.

Administrative and Professional: 8 seats

• Rick Clark - Director, Undergraduate Admission
• Debbie Dorsey - Director of Administration, Student Affairs
• LaJauna Ellis - Executive Assistant to the Dean, College of Engineering
• Alex Gutierrez - Marketing Specialist, Parking and Transportation
• Melissa Moore - Director of Communications, Campus Services
• Gerri Naramore - Director of Financial Administration, Office of the Provost and Executive VP for Research
• Laura Pusateri - Manager of Special Events and Protocol, Institute Communications
• Craig Womack - Director of Undergraduate Programs, Scheller College of Business

Skilled Trades: 5 seats

• Jeffery Bridges - AC Mechanic II, Facilities Management
• Bill Halabi - Area Maintenance Manager, Facilities Management
• Tommy Little - Associate Director of Building Services, Facilities Management
• Garry Lockerman - Area Maintenance Manager, Facilities Management
• Deborah Miller - Custodian II, Facilities Management

Scientific and Research: 2 seats

• Stephen Holbrook - Physician, Stamps Health Services
• Brandon Shaw - Fire Safety Specialist, Environmental Health and Safety

Information Technology: 1 seat

•  Leslie Hall - Senior Business Analyst, Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS)

Development: 1 seat

• Meredith Schnepp - Development Associate, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts

As with the appointed Staff Council, this elected Staff Council is charged with serving as a conduit for views that represent the greater staff population and provide insight to the executive and senior leadership on how decisions regarding policies, procedures, and investments affect this segment of the campus community.

 “The staff at Tech deserves a voice elected by their peers to help carry their message and have a positive impact on campus.” said Dwayne Palmer, lead information technology project manager in the Office of Information Technology and chair of the appointed Staff Council. “There is work to do moving forward and we all can and should participate – even if you are not an elected council member.  All staff members at Tech are encouraged to get involved and help make a difference.”

Currently, the Staff Council has formed the following committees through which they will make recommendations to Tech’s executive leadership:

• Employee Engagement
• Employee Health and Well-being
• Campus Physical Environment
• Compensation and Benefits
• Communications

For complete information on the Staff Council, including information on the newly elected council and how you can get involved, visit www.staffcouncil.gatech.edu. All questions may be submitted to staffcouncil@gatech.edu.

The new program allows students to pursue any bachelor’s degree at Tech, followed by one year of coursework at Emory School of Law. Once students complete coursework at both institutions, they will receive both degrees. The program was approved at the meeting of the Faculty Senate on Nov. 18.

“This is ideal for students who decide early on that they want a career path which will require expertise in law,” said Steven Girardot, associate vice provost for Undergraduate Education. 

Tech has already seen demand for legal education among undergraduates on campus. Current offerings include a pre-law certificate and a minor in law, science, and technology offered by the School of Public Policy; a law and ethics program in the Scheller College of Business; and, for the first time this year, a pre-law section of the GT1000 first-year seminar course. 

Students will be able to apply for the law master’s program during their junior year and will be required to take either the Law School Admission Test or an internal exam from Emory for admission. Applicants also will be interviewed by Emory faculty and asked to sit in on an Emory law class session, at which point they may be offered a provisional acceptance. Students will then continue into their senior year to complete their undergraduate degree requirements at Tech, along with five to seven credit hours of law classes at Emory. Performance in these classes will be evaluated prior to an official acceptance from Emory, where students will spend two semesters to complete the master’s degree.  

Participants in the program will receive a discounted tuition rate from Emory, which will charge the equivalent of Tech’s out-of-state rate rather than its own rates, equating to a scholarship of around $10,500 per year. In addition, six credits of law courses will be counted as free electives toward the bachelor’s degree. 

Students will be able to specialize in areas such as intellectual property, environmental law, real estate, architecture/construction, and mergers and acquisitions. The master’s degree does not qualify students to practice law, nor is it a pathway to a juris doctor degree, but is meant to supplement their professional pursuits with legal studies.

“We expect this to give students a leg up on certain career paths, particularly those where legal expertise will enhance their skills,” said Girardot. “It will give them a technical understanding and the ability to develop professional knowledge of legal principles and issues.” 

The program is designed to support Tech’s strategic plan as well as build on its existing partnership with Emory, which includes the joint Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the cross-registration program that lets students enroll in Emory classes while at Tech.

“We’re both elite universities, right next door to each other — it’s a great opportunity to strengthen our collaboration to the benefit of our students,” Girardot said. 

While the program has been approved by Georgia Tech and Emory Law faculties, the final step in the approval process will be review by the Board of Regents and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges. 

Other Senate Notes

The Student Regulations Committee (SRC) approved changing the deadline for withdrawal from a course from the 50 percent point of completion in the semester to the 60 percent point. This allows students two additional weeks to determine whether or not to withdraw from a course and aligns the single-course withdrawal deadline with the deadline to withdraw from all courses for the semester, which was already set at 60 percent. 

Changes were also approved to wording in the policy regarding student email accounts. The policy now states that students must have a Georgia Tech email address and check it once a day, but not that they must have a Georgia Tech email account.

The last SRC item approved was a change in academic renewal for readmitted students, who now can receive renewal after three years of absence from Tech, rather than five. The Board of Regents recently changed its policy to allow flexibility in this area, so Tech chose to respond in kind. Academic renewal signals the initiation of a new grade-point average and allows students who earlier experienced academic difficulty to make a fresh start on their academic record.

The Arts Advisory Board has been instrumental in establishing a Challenge Grant of $150,000 to inspire further charitable gifts specifically for the acquisition of art through the newly created Art Acquisition Fund. The Challenge Grant will match dollar-for-dollar gifts to support the acquisition of art for the campus and accelerate a permanent collection of enduring quality for the Georgia Tech community to enjoy. It will serve as the funding source for the eight sculptures in the exhibition curated by John Henry, the internationally acclaimed, Chattanooga-based sculptor.

“We are grateful for the support of the Arts Advisory Board in the establishment of an Arts Acquisition Fund that will allow Georgia Tech to acquire a large portion of the Engineered Art collection, and acquire additional pieces as the opportunity presents itself,” said Board Chair Sonny Seals. “The Arts Advisory Board has accomplished a lot in a short period of time. It should be noted that a substantial portion of the board are not Tech alumni – they are friends of Tech who understand the importance of the arts to the Institute as we embrace a more arts-centric student experience.”

The Engineered Art exhibition is part of Arts@Tech, an initiative to enhance the Georgia Tech community by fostering programs and events spanning the arts spectrum – at the intersection of technological innovation and creative expression. Arts@Tech is an outcome of the Institute’s Strategic Plan.

“Last year was the first in which the Arts@Tech initiative started to drive activity on campus,” said Aaron Bobick, chair of the faculty-led Council of the Arts. “The Engineered Art sculpture exhibit explicitly announced to the community that there is a deep interest in the role of art in fostering both reflection and creativity in all that we do.”

Provost Rafael L. Bras added, “I am thrilled to be able to keep some of the sculptures exhibit. It is a great additional step in the promotion of creativity among our students.”

The students talked with farmers and volunteers about the crops, planting schedules, harvest requests, visitor demographics and other data crucial to the daily operation.

Urban agriculture, the students realized, is a complex undertaking. Their challenge is to create a streamlined data management system for the farm and move them away from pencil and paper. Ideally, this system will allow the farm to increase productivity and move toward financial sustainability.

The student team is one of five working with non-profits and government agencies as part of the Data Science for Social Good internship program, sponsored by Georgia Tech and Oracle.

Sixteen students from around the country are participating in a 10-week paid internship program showing non-profits and government agencies how they can use data to tackle social and societal problems.

The program allows students to solve real-world problems instead of relying on sample data sets, said Ellen Zegura, the program director.

It also educates local non-profits on the need for better data systems, said Zegura, a professor in the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.

“We are connecting those who collect data with the people who know how to turn the data into something meaningful that can have a positive impact,” she said.

The projects deal with safety, criminal justice, transportation and sustainability. The student teams are collaborating with the Atlanta Police Department, the city’s Community Courts, Cycle Atlanta, Georgia Tech Office of Information Technology and Truly Living Well.

Georgia Tech is piloting the program this year and hopes to grow it next year. The Atlanta internship is modeled after a similar program the University of Chicago started last year.

Raj Bandyopadhyay, principal data scientist with Pindrop Security, heard about the Chicago program at a conference and led the charge to bring it to Atlanta.

“So often when people hear of big data, they don’t understand how it can be used to improve their lives,” he said. “We are showing future data scientists how they can use their skills to address social issues.”

More than 80 students applied for the internship. The selected students come from eight colleges including: Carnegie Mellon University, Southern Methodist University, Emory University and Georgia Tech.

Umashanthi Pavalanathan, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Georgia Tech, is working with 911 data collected by the city. They are looking at the response time between calls and how to best use the dispatchers.

“I’m so used to dealing with abstract concepts and situations that it’s exciting to work with real clients on real issues,” she said. “You get a good feeling knowing that what we’re doing can help save somebody.”

Students from all five projects will present their findings and recommendations during a public demonstration and reception scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. on July 17 at Atlanta Tech Village. More information about the event and internship program can be found here: http://dssg-atl.io

The internship ends July 18, although the data will continue to reap benefits.

“The effort was down-to-earth,” said Katz, assistant dean for Finance and Administration in the College of Computing. “It was all about people talking from the heart.”

From recounts of being stereotyped with regard to political affiliation because of color, to carrying around the burden of hiding an upbringing in poverty behind the mask of white, able-bodied maleness, the stories were all touching and deeply personal.

“People’s willingness to share a lot of personal stuff through storytelling really encourages free conversation,” said David Leonard, director of Academic and Research Technologies in the Office of Information Technology.  

This year, the free conversations revolved around the topic Inclusion Means Everyone is In – everyone – including the white male.

Chuck Shelton, managing director of Greatheart Leader Labs, delivered the keynote address. He explained that “if we’re going to use a word like inclusion with integrity, it means we need to behave inclusively consistently.” 

Cheryl Cofield, co-chair of the Diversity Roundtable Planning Committee, gets that, which is precisely why the decision was made to address this “audacious topic.” Cofield calls it audacious because, she says, it’s bold enough to prompt discussion around “the white male” in the context of diversity and inclusion.

“If we want to be authentic about inclusion, then we have to include white men,” Cofield says. “If white men feel they’re not welcome in this work of diversity and inclusion, that means I have work to do.”

Speaking to the work that has been done so far, Chief Human Resources Officer Scott Morris says when he attended his first Diversity Roundtable three years ago, the feedback he shared with Committee Co-Chair Pearl Alexander was, “I think it could’ve been a little more inclusive.” His reaction to this year’s Roundtable: “I look out at the crowd today, and I think it is.”

Morris went on to say that, while the Institute is not exactly where it needs to be with its diversity and inclusion efforts, “We are definitely inclusive in terms of who we have in the conversation, and that’s a really good thing.”

The Frederick Law Olmsted Symposium assembled six experts in sustainable urban infrastructure to talk about the man and the concepts he created. It was the start of a conversation about who can best advance the ideas of sustainability in our cities and suburbs as the new Olmsted Chair in CEE.

“The speakers were carefully selected to touch on different, but complementary topics related to the research and teaching we envision the chair holder doing,” said Reginald DesRoches, Karen and John Huff School Chair and professor in CEE.

DesRoches and Ellen Dunham-Jones, professor of architecture and urban design in the College of Architecture, are leading the search committee for the new chair holder. 

Though the Olmsted chair will be housed in CEE, the position will serve as a link for faculty and research in engineering, economics, and the College of Architecture.

“We strongly believe that the most critical advances occur at the intersection of disciplines,” DesRoches said. “The problems that will be addressed by the Olmsted Chair are at the interface of the built environment, natural systems, and social systems.”

The new Frederick Law Olmsted Chair in CEE is made possible through a gift from Jenny and Mike Messner, a 1976 civil engineering graduate of Georgia Tech. Their vision is that the person selected for the teaching and research position will instill Olmsted’s concern for engineering urban spaces with long-term public benefits in his or her students and academic pursuits. 

"It's not yet clear what kind of connections between Architecture and Civil Engineering this professorship will forge, but there are certainly many possibilities having to do with the integration of sustainable and healthy infrastructure, the design of cities, the design of green infrastructure, multi-modal boulevards, and public spaces," Dunham-Jones said. 

Looking to Olmsted’s Legacy

Monday’s speakers set the stage for the needs in sustainable urban infrastructure and how Olmsted’s legacy could help address them.

“Olmsted’s real genius was in figuring out what was needed to solve a problem and then assembling the people and resources necessary,” said Douglas Allen, professor emeritus in the School of Architecture who opened the symposium. “Along the way, Olmsted attempted to do what any good poet does: he tried to tag poetic language to regular language. So a sewer becomes a parkway.”

That was one of Olmsted’s ideas: a new kind of street that accommodates many modes of travel, “piggybacked onto the concept of a park and a sewer system,” Allen said.

“[Olmsted’s] own education was unorthodox,” said another speaker, Frederick Steiner, dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. “But his singular brilliance and scope of accomplishment is worthy of this [endowed chair].”

Howard Frumkin, dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Washington, said following Olmsted's example means designing the built environment to give people what studies have shown makes them happy: clean air, quiet, short commutes, contact with nature, beauty, and “third places” — areas outside of home and work where people can go to be social and enjoy life.

“Human well-being should serve as the north star on our trek toward sustainability,” he said.

Health is also a piece of that well-being, according to Richard Jackson, chair of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health. He noted that a 20-year-old’s lung function is a good predictor of how long he or she will live. Likewise, the quality of parks in an area can predict how long people in that area will live.

“If you want people to walk, you have to give them a place they want to walk,” Jackson said.

Of course, it requires public investment and political will to change cities’ approaches to streets, parks, and other parts of the urban landscape.

Any bold idea that transforms how cities are using land is bound to be controversial, according to Diane Davis, a Harvard professor of urbanism and development. And since cities are constantly changing, the politics of sustainability is also always shifting. So it comes down to leadership, she said.

“Mayors are key players in transforming the urban landscape,” Davis said in her presentation. "But designers have to help. They need to be able to think like politicians and help the politicians think technically."

Congress for the New Urbanism’s incoming President and CEO Lynn Richards said both designers and politicians need to think in terms of building infrastructure that meets multiple needs. Cities can’t just spend billions of dollars installing pipes to handle storm water. Those projects need to have other benefits for the community as well, she said.

In cities where no land remains to create new green space, maybe that means thinking about using projects to connect existing parks across a region, Richards said, drawing parallels with Olmsted’s linear parks. Maybe it means making our streets places for people rather than just cars, she said, and making our built environment feel more like parks.

Some communities are starting to experiment with those kinds of ideas, turning urban roads back into something resembling the parkways Olmsted created to accommodate all kinds of transportation modes.

The term these days is “complete streets,” which Elizabeth Macdonald defined as providing for multiple forms of movement and gathering while also providing for urban greening.

Macdonald, an associate professor of urban design at the University of California, Berkeley, said it’s possible for more communities to build urban parkways like Olmsted’s.

“No [user] gets everything [they want], but everyone gets a lot,” Macdonald said. Designers don’t have to solve every possible problem, she said, which just leads to designing bad streets.

Cario comes to Tech from The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was named director of Student Engagement last year. She has served as the director of Special Artistic Initiatives for the past four years, as well as the director of Operations and Facilities for the past seven years.

“It is an honor to welcome Madison Cario to the arts leadership team,” Bras said. “My conversations with her make me confident that under Madison’s leadership Arts@Tech will continue to use the arts on campus to strengthen the research and study areas in significant ways. I want to take the opportunity to thank Joe Bankoff, chair of the Nunn School for International Affairs, for leading the search. My appreciation extends to all the members of the committee.”

The primary charge of the Office of the Arts is to enhance the creativity of Georgia Tech students and faculty through engagement and participation in performing and visual arts experiences. There are various opportunities for the Office of the Arts to connect with the both the academic and student communities of the Institute. Georgia Tech has a culture of innovation throughout its campus, and there is a need to connect and use the arts on campus to strengthen the research and study areas in significant ways. The new Office of the Arts Director will actively seek out these connection points to find opportunities for creative expression.

The director is responsible for the Arts@Tech initiative’s operation, financial performance, and programming, including the operations and programming of the Ferst Center, a role formerly under the then director of the Ferst Center for the Arts.

Cario said she is looking forward to her new role.

“I cannot imagine a more exhilarating and inspiring place to be than here, right in the middle of the intersection of arts and technology,” Cario said. “With creative competency essential to global competitiveness in the 21st century, Arts at Tech is, simply put, the right idea at the right time.”

In her roles with The Annenberg Center, Cario created strong connections with student performing arts groups through several initiatives to increase student participation and sense of belonging at the Center. She altered By Local programming — a performance series designed to bring local artists to campus — to favor more innovative, process-oriented work. She also supported experimental cross-genre work with artists interested in collaborating with students, and utilized non-traditional spaces for performance resulting in higher student attendance.

Georgia Tech’s Office of the Arts reports to Schafer, vice president for Student Affairs.

“I am pleased to welcome Madison Cario as the new director of the Office of the Arts,” Schafer said. “In addition to her background in the performing arts, Madison has great experience working with student engagement in the arts. I’m looking forward to seeing the impact she will have on Georgia Tech students and faculty.”

Cario holds a Master of Science in Environmental Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Arts in Rhetoric and Communication, Summa Cum Laude, from Temple University.

This week, the Georgia Tech student chapter of the American Society for Engineering Education (GT-ASEE) will host INSPIRE², its second annual workshop designed to equip graduate students with new tools and techniques to engage students in the classroom.    

“We realize we’re talking to graduate students who aren’t yet in a position to design revolutionary classrooms, so we’re focusing on small changes you can apply yourself in class,” said Scottie-Beth Fleming, a doctoral student in aerospace engineering and former president of GT-ASEE.

What began as a one-day event last year has doubled to two this year. Day one will feature Michael Prince, a professor of chemical engineering at Bucknell University who professes to be “interested in almost any question that has to do with how engineering students learn” and whose research focuses on enhancing classroom experiences.

Day two will include presentations from an array of Tech faculty who are piloting new teaching methods in their classrooms or have expertise in learning sciences. Presenters include Bonnie Ferri, Joe LeDoux, Wendy Newstetter, Caroline Noyes, Amy Pritchett, Dia Sekayi, Don Webster and Damon Williams.

A panel of graduate students, all of whom have completed the Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning’s (CETL) Tech to Teaching program, will talk with their peers about their experiences as instructors of college courses.

All presenters will discuss active learning, focusing on student-centered classroom organization.

As a national organization, ASEE takes learning research and applies it to the classroom. GT-ASEE was founded in 2011 by graduate students and aims to create a community of students interested in enhancing classroom experiences through teaching and scholarship. Newstetter also serves as the organization’s advisor.

“I didn’t recognize the importance of the intricacies involved in effective classroom design when I first started my Ph.D. program,” Fleming said. “Learning about the scholarship of teaching and learning got me involved with and excited about the future of engineering education. I now hope to incorporate contributions to engineering education in my end thesis.”

The workshop is free to attend, thanks to support from Graduate Education and Faculty Affairs, the Student Government Association, CETL, Georgia Tech Student Foundation, and Campus Services Buzzfunds. Nearly 100 are expected to attend this year. 

“We have incredible clinicians at Emory, brilliant engineers at Tech, and tremendous entrepreneurial resources through VentureLab, the Advanced Technology Development Center, and FlashPoint,” said Erik Reinertsen, an M.D./Ph.D. student at Emory and Tech and managing director of Forge. “Atlanta will be a leader in this space.”

Forge builds on a history of productive collaborations between clinicians and engineers in Atlanta, but with a human-centric focus.

“It’s driven by the graduate and medical students,” said Yogi Patel, a Ph.D. student in bioengineering. “We focus on startups, people, and learning through doing. Our colleagues in Silicon Valley and Boston have helped us understand that people are more important than specific technologies.”

Forge aspires to bring other lessons learned from those colleagues into the Atlanta medical community.

“We hope to instill elements of the Silicon Valley culture into medicine: big vision, pay-it-forward mentorship, and a get-it-done attitude,” said Evan McClure, an Emory M.D./MBA student and Forge director of finance and operations.

Forge has already hosted pitch nights, workshops, and networking events, and is planning its first Healthcare Hackathon for the fall, all with the aim of connecting innovators and clinicians to existing resources.

“Healthcare innovation in Atlanta is growing quickly, but suffers from fragmentation,” said Reinertsen.

Though graduate students and entrepreneurs are spearheading Forge — under the guidance of academic leadership from Emory and Tech — undergraduates, faculty, postdoctoral scholars, residents, and fellows are encouraged to participate.

Forge is looking for work spaces on both the Tech and Emory campuses. More information is available at forgeatl.com.

Georgia Tech is renowned for transforming real-world challenges into teachable moments. Such was the case with the planning for the Engineered Biosystems Building (EBB) – currently under construction on 10th Street – a project that in turn led to the development of the 2013 Stormwater Master Plan.

The concept of stormwater management at Georgia Tech was envisioned as the “Eco-Commons” as part of the 2004 Campus Master Plan Update and 2006 Landscape Master Plan, and further refined during the 2011 Landscape Master Plan Update.

According to Jason Gregory, educational facilities planner with Capital Planning and Space Management, the Eco-Commons is a series of campus green spaces that follow the historic alignment of now buried streams, which also follow the alignment of the combined sanitary sewer lines. Restoring the historic streams would be costly and impractical; however, creating spaces that replicate the function of the streams is possible. This includes rain gardens, infiltration cells, bio retention areas, interconnected cisterns, and an increase in tree canopy coverage to mitigate stormwater runoff.

“A significant component of the Eco-Commons plan and Stormwater Master Plan is the large retention pond that is proposed near the EBB site,” said Gregory. “When planning for the EBB project, we quickly realized we needed to know exactly how large to make the pond and therefore needed to know how much water the system would generate and be captured. This is what prompted us to begin development of the plan.”

Why the Plan Matters

“The Stormwater Master Plan supports Georgia Tech’s sustainability mission and conserves water while protecting our primary drinking water source, the Chattahoochee River,” said Howard Wertheimer, director of Capital Planning and Space Management. “By developing the Stormwater Master Plan, we can provide additional educational and research opportunities with measurable results and performance metrics, as well as provide a recreational amenity for our campus community.”

Wertheimer said that in addition to setting the example for how to deal with stormwater at a regional level, the plan will provide a roadmap for the Eco-Commons infrastructure, allowing the Institute to reduce potable water use, reduce combined sewer overflows, and exceed the city’s stormwater regulations in a meaningful way.

Educational Opportunities

A unique aspect of the Stormwater Master Plan is the incorporation of an “educational overlay,” which provides an opportunity to update and enhance the current curriculum and stormwater-related course offerings.

Students in the Urban Stormwater Planning course taught by Professor Tom Debo (City and Regional Planning) served as part of the team that studied and validated the findings of the Stormwater Master Plan. Debo’s curriculum focuses on stormwater management, and the development of the stormwater model at Tech has provided a tool to measure the effectiveness of stormwater systems and test different alternatives.

“We also engaged [Research Engineer] Ramachandra Sivakumar in the College of Architecture’s Center for Geographic Information Systems to incorporate the stormwater model in the campus GIS data,” said Gregory. “And we had assistance from Ching-Hua Huang in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) in studying the quality of the water in the various cisterns on campus. We are optimistic that there are many other opportunities to engage CEE and other colleges and schools to take advantage of Georgia Tech as a living learning laboratory.” 

—written by Dan Treadaway, Institute Communications

Nor is designing and implementing a new, wholly innovative teaching model with which to replace it. 

Yet increasingly, that is what faculty members on Tech’s campus are choosing to do, specifically by adopting what’s called an "inverted" — or "flipped" — classroom model. This model asks students to view pre-filmed lectures at home, then treats class time as a dedicated problem-solving workshop.

Donald Webster, associate chair and professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, began teaching the inverted course concept back in the fall of 2012.

“Even as a professor with a lot of experience, [it was] a little terrifying, definitely a leap of faith,” Webster said. “But problem-solving — that’s how students learn.”

Encouraged by fellow faculty members, Webster spent six months planning the design and schedule of his new model. In spring 2013, he launched his first inverted course, a fluid mechanics class, known as CEE 3040.

It was a learning experience.

“A lot of things went really well, some things changed,” Webster said. But from the start, he said, it was “vital that as an instructor, I was thoughtful about the setup of the course and how students accessed information.”

For example, at first, his class sessions relied purely on group work. But in his second iteration of the fluid mechanics course, he began to work example problems at the start of the class.

Classroom Environs

The dynamic of Webster’s fluid mechanics classroom looks something like this:

Before coming to class, students view a handful of short lecture videos, which typically average eight to 11 minutes in length. Once in class, Webster begins by demonstrating a practice problem, after which the students work in groups of two to tackle additional problem sets.

Students can raise their hands for help, and either Webster or a teaching assistant will come over to help demystify the problem area.

Tables designed for two people reflect the course’s emphasis on paired learning. Limiting group size to two students encourages engagement and openness because, as Webster said, “There’s nowhere for a third student to hide or sit on the sideline.”

Wheeled chairs, however, allow groups the flexibility to maneuver around and collaborate with students at other tables. When this happens, students effectively become one another’s learning resources, acting as teaching assistants to their peers.

Student Experience

Student feedback on this model has been overwhelmingly positive. Webster attributes this to two factors: the active problem solving, which lets students see if they’ve truly grasped the concept; and the control enabled by the videos, which students can pause, rewind or rewatch.

Diane Jlelaty, a third-year civil engineering student, agrees with that assessment. She has taken two inverted courses taught by Webster, a dynamics course and, this semester, a fluid mechanics class.

In her view, any technically heavy course can benefit from the inverted format, specifically for the increased opportunity to practice problem solving.

“On exams, we’re not asked to describe theory, we’re asked to perform question problems,” she said. “There’s a lot of difference producing a solution yourself, since it has to come from your own understanding of the materials, and learning via lecture.”

Jlelaty, who will work in an applied computing mechanics lab in Switzerland this summer, recommends the inverted course model to all students.

“If it’s ever even a question, take it without a second of hesitation,” she said. “I’ve never felt so good about a course as I do this one.”

Of the less positive feedback from students, most seems to stem from surprise that they had enrolled in a flipped course. Currently, the OSCAR registration system lacks indicators to denote which teaching model a class will follow. Instructors using the inverted model generally announce their intentions on the first day of class. To find out ahead of time if a class will follow the inverted model, students can email the professor of the course in question.

Other challenges for students have been related to class format, grading, and the level of engagement from the professor, all of which varied based on the class and instructor.

Lessons Learned

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. In Webster’s third semester teaching the inverted course, student results on the midterm didn’t meet expectations — which, he said, could have shaken his faith in the whole model.

But after a firm talk with the class, he readministered the exam, and scores were remarkably better than those earned by students in a regular lecture format.

Now in his fourth iteration of the inverted fluid mechanics course, Webster continues to refine his design. He has begun to require attendance, having seen that students who come to class perform remarkably better on exams.

Wendy Newstetter, director of Learning Sciences Research for the College of Engineering, said the situated feedback enabled by the inverted model allows for just-in-time teaching tailored to student needs.

“When you first flip, the classroom setting becomes a window on the problems students are having on a grand scale, and that’s a moment we’ve never had before,” she said. “It’s eye-opening.”

The purpose of the QEP is to enhance the quality of student learning outcomes and the environment of learning. The QEP is directly related to the Institute’s strategic plan. It will have a detailed implementation plan and a budget for five to 10 years of
support.

According to Mary Shoemaker and Rachit Kansal, co-chairs of the Sustainability Committee of the Student Government Association, students are increasingly aware of the challenges of sustainability and are acting on their desires to positively impact the world around them through available curricular and co-curricular activities.

However, to date, there is no coordinated curricular effort in this area.

This QEP will not only fill this void, it  will also immerse students in learning opportunities where they work on sustainability-focused problems drawn from the community, businesses, and government. The capabilities that they develop in the process will translate to productively working, living, and leading in any complex, multisystem, multistakeholder, and multicultural setting. The plan will also help Tech operationalize its strategic plan vision and its mission.

“This QEP will enhance foundational classroom instruction and curricular opportunities,” said Beril Toktay, professor and Brady Family Chair in the Scheller College of Business, and co-author of the QEP. “It will focus on the establishment of experiential and contextual learning opportunities that emphasize connections between the real world and subject matter, such as project- and problem-based learning, service learning, entrepreneurial opportunities, internships, and co-ops. We look forward to developing a set of external partnerships to achieve this.”

Another important element of the QEP will be the creation of a supportive and engaged campus culture.

“A successful QEP will result in Georgia Tech graduates who have a deep understanding of the societal impacts of economic value creation and the needs of communities they live and work in,” said Ellen Zegura, professor of computer science in the College of Computing and co-author of the QEP. “This depth of understanding will not be attained when it is sought as an ‘add-on.’ Rather, the interdependence of economic and societal value must be integrated as part of our students’ core education, and our students must be challenged to work on relevant problems that cut across disciplinary boundaries.”

The QEP aims to help students, who are already sought-after for their disciplinary expertise, to become creators of joint environmental, social, and economic value throughout their lives and careers.

Reaffirmation is the process by which Tech must prove to a review team from peer institutions via the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) that the Institute is qualified to continue to award academic credit. SACSCOC, the regional body for the accreditation of degree-granting higher education institutions in the nation’s southern states, works closely with the U.S. Department of Education. The QEP is due to SACSCOC by December 2014. More than 80 percent of the onsite accreditation review in March 2015 will focus on the QEP.

Five QEP concept papers were presented to the QEP Advisory Committee in February, followed by another round of consultation. The Committee selected two proposals, which were merged to create one QEP.

“What makes the intersection between contextual learning and sustainability so exciting as a QEP is that it lends itself to defining clear learning objectives and to institutionalizing a growing interest among all students,” said Colin Potts, vice provost for Undergraduate Education. “They want to use their skills and knowledge to make a difference in the world — directly and personally in ways they can empathize with — and the QEP gives us an opportunity to focus that excitement and passion in an academically productive way.”

Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs, said the Institute is a great institution that can only get better through this process.

“The SACSCOC reaffirmation process should be used to take stock of all that we are doing well and identify all that we can do better,” Bras said. “We have the advantage of being able to build on a visionary strategic plan and several years of discussion, analysis, and implementation efforts. The selected QEP reflects those efforts. I am confident that like past QEPs — focusing on the International Plan and Undergraduate Research — this QEP will make the Georgia Tech educational experience even better.”

Tech’s official reaffirmation process began last June and will continue through the end of 2015. Catherine Murray-Rust, vice provost for Learning Excellence and dean of Libraries, is Tech’s accreditation liaison and is responsible for overseeing the reaffirmation process.

“The research portal has made it possible for me to directly access my finances and for the first time I can interact with financial administrators in a coherent way,” said Michael Stilman, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing. “It gives us a common language!”

This new application is just one of the ways that Georgia Tech is addressing the strategic plan goal of relentlessly pursuing institutional effectiveness. Instead of logging into dozens of different databases, researchers can visit MyResearchPortal to access all of the information they need.

“Think of it as being like a Grand Central Station for all your research information,” said David Moore, director of finance for the College of Sciences. “From contracting and compliance, to all the various other stages of research — MyResearchPortal is a one-stop-shop.”

MyResearchPortal brings together financial information on funds from different sources including federal, state, foundations, and industry. Users only have to log in once to find funding activity, subagreements, Institutional Review Board and other protocol expirations, pending proposals, deliverables, project balances, effort reporting, and cost sharing status.

Also, users can customize their MyResearchPortal experience such that information is displayed the way they want to see it.

“MyResearchPortal was developed based on feedback from the Georgia Tech faculty as one means to help reduce administrative burden,” said Steve Cross, Executive Vice President for Research. “So, as you use the tool, be sure to let us know if there are any new features that would be useful to you.”

To start your MyResearchPortal experience, and share your feedback, visit myresearch.gatech.edu today.

Team Sanivation received $20,000, a free U.S. patent filing by Georgia Tech’s Office of Technology Licensing and a spot in this summer’s class of Flashpoint, a Georgia Tech startup accelerator program.

“We are so thankful for the support and encouragement we have received from everyone,” said team member Erin Cobb, an industrial design major from Atlanta.

“We are exposing an issue that is considered taboo and we are excited to give this important issue more attention,” she said.

The other team members are: Jasmine Burton, industrial design major from Dunwoody, Ga.; and Brandie Banner, civil engineering major from Alpharetta, Ga.

The team also won the $5,000 People’s Choice Award.

Their Safi Choo Toilet is a safer, cleaner way of using a toilet to replace the pit latrines often found in the developing world and refugee camps. The device has received preliminary support from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Second place went to the Sucette Smart Soother, a modernized pacifier designed to fit more naturally with a baby’s mouth and growing dental structure. The pacifier changes color when the baby has a fever.

The team received $10,000 and a free U.S. patent filing.

“We worked so hard and went through so many prototypes,” said team member Will McAllister, a biomedical engineering major from Charlotte, N.C. “It’s exciting to get this recognition and support from the judges.”

The other team members are: Rachel Ford, a biomedical engineering major from Powder Springs, Ga.; and Esteban Ongini, a biomedical engineering major from Miami.

The InVenture Prize is an annual contest that rewards undergraduate students for big innovations that aim to solve the world’s problems.

Nearly 560 students signed up for this year’s contest – the largest ever. The group was narrowed to the six teams who competed in the finale, which was broadcast live on Georgia Public Broadcasting.

For more information: http://inventureprize.gatech.edu

That’s why the Strategic Technology Investment Committee was tasked with creating an Institute Information (IT) Master Plan in 2013.

“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time since the Olympics we’ve created a campuswide IT master plan,” said Jim O’Connor, vice president of the Office of Information Technology (OIT). “We need a plan like this in place to ensure that the IT investments we’re making are strategic and effective.”

Since last summer, faculty, staff, and students have provided input regarding what they thought should be included in the plan. The document addresses IT needs up to five years from now and touches on the following key themes:

• Provide effective services to facilitate student success and learning outcomes both in and out of the classroom.
• Investigate, support, and implement changing methodologies in learning, teaching, and research.
• Support the successful outcomes of research activities by enhancing and sustaining the systems needed for research and innovation.
• Maintain a scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure that meets the changing and transformational needs of a globally connected and innovative research institution.
• Unify and streamline enterprise systems through more effective use of technology in a manner that is sustainable, secure, and user-friendly and reduces administrative overhead.
• Cultivate transparent technical leadership and governance to effectively guide information technology decision-making and strategic investments.

To learn more about the plan, the campus community is invited to attend one of two town halls that will be held in March. The first is scheduled for March 24 at 1 p.m. in Room 152, Clough Commons. The second will be held on March 27 at 10:30 a.m. in the Student Center Theater.

For more information, contact Robert Gerhart, project leader for the plan, at rgerhart@gatech.edu.

Five QEP concept papers were presented to the QEP Advisory Committee on Feb. 11. Another round of consultation will be held on Feb. 18.

Reaffirmation is the process by which Tech must prove to a review team from peer institutions via the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC) that the Institute is qualified to continue to award academic credit. SACSCOC, the regional body for the accreditation of degree-granting higher education institutions in the nation’s Southern states, works closely with the U.S. Department of Education.

Tech’s official reaffirmation process began last June and will continue through the end of 2015, with the on-site visit scheduled for March 2015. The Compliance Certification and the QEP for Student Learning are the two main components of the effort through which Tech reviews all policies, procedures, and programs, and chooses a special high-impact project for the next five years.

The purpose of the QEP is to enhance the quality of student learning outcomes and the environment of learning. The QEP also should be directly and traceably related to the Institute’s strategic plan. The QEP will be a funded mandate, and once selected, will result in a detailed implementation plan and budget for five to 10 years of support. More than 80 percent of the onsite review will focus on the QEP.

“For an idea to succeed as a QEP, it requires widespread buy-in from the campus community,” said Colin Potts, vice provost for Undergraduate Education. “SACS is serious about the need to show we’re enhancing student learning. It would be obvious if we put forward someone’s pet project or solutions in search of problems. So, we went about the task by inviting concept papers last year from teams representing at least three colleges. Nearly 100 authors were actively involved in the crafting of responses (that’s about 10 percent of faculty). And the concepts all traced directly back to the strategic plan — which was the result of deliberations by thousands of faculty, staff, and students over a period of a couple of years.”

The Student Government Association and other student constituencies are being consulted and will be fully involved in the refinement and definition of the QEP, according to Potts.

“There are already obvious tie-ins to many student societies, majors, and labs, as well as outreach to external organizations,” he added. “I’m confident that the QEP that emerges will reflect the ‘One Georgia Tech’ message.”

The QEP will be defined by early March and is due to SACSCOC by December 2014. The current QEP Advisory Committee will grow and change in membership once a QEP is selected. By September 2014, Tech will provide a self-study of its compliance — 95 core requirements and principles — encompassing the spectrum of activities on campus. The gathering of this information will be managed by a Compliance Steering Committee of campus administrators.

“The purpose of the reaffirmation process, which justifies all the time and effort by the hundreds of people involved, is to make Georgia Tech a better, stronger institution of higher learning,” said Catherine Murray-Rust, vice provost for Learning Excellence, dean of Libraries, and Tech’s SACS accreditation liaison. “In addition to a clear reaffirmation of accreditation by SACSCOC at the end of 2015, our goal is to have a very clear action agenda for improvement, which is aligned with the strategic plan.”

“There is a single upper-level mechanical engineering (ME) class focused on tribology. But since my interest lies in the chemical and physical properties of these lubricants, pursuing an ME track would not be right for me,” said the second-year chemical engineering student. “My interest is actually a mix of three majors — chemical engineering, ME, and materials science engineering.”

Enter the interdisciplinary X Degree program, an idea that got its start during the strategic planning process a few years ago.

“While existing majors are, and will continue to be, the core of our educational mission, some students and employers are looking for the particular skills that come from managing one’s own curriculum and designing an interdisciplinary program of study,” said Richard Barke, chair of the X Degree Committee. “Most of Tech’s peer institutions offer some version of an X Degree, although our version would be uniquely Georgia Tech.”   

During fall semester, the committee took its next step toward implementation and offered a pilot version of the gateway course to introduce students to the program.

The course was taught by Barke; Amy Pritchett, associate professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering; and Colin Potts, vice provost for Undergraduate Education.

Nine students from Tech's Honors Program, including Yogan, enrolled in the course, which met once a week for three hours.

“I enrolled because I have an interest in space policy and regulations,” said Anna Woodmansee, a third-year aerospace engineering major. “I liked the idea of being able to combine aerospace engineering and public policy, especially in a course taught by faculty from both areas and before grad school.”

Early in the semester, students were divided into two teams and presented with a problem to solve related to security at Grant Field. They identified resources, interviewed relevant personnel, and presented findings to campus security and Georgia Tech Athletic Association officials.

For the second half of the semester, students focused on developing their individual programs of study.  

“Through the course, we were able to evaluate the utility of a problem-based learning exercise as an introduction to independent interdisciplinary learning,” Barke said. “And doing this helped improve our advisement approach for students as they choose and develop programs of study.”

When asked for feedback on what could be improved, students said that the problem-based learning portion of the course could be longer and that there should be more time for designing their programs of study.

“A degree program like this is important because with so many great programs at the Institute, and a need in society for people who can bridge the gap between disciplines, students will be not only be able to study within multiple disciplines, but emerge from Tech with a particularly relevant set of skills for today’s workforce,” Woodmansee said.

In addition to piloting the course, a white paper outlining the program structure and implementation process has been reviewed by faculty, students, and leadership. In the months to come, the final degree proposal will be submitted to the Institute Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, and the program could be in place as early as spring 2015, Barke said.

“The X Degree is a great example of the Georgia Tech strategic planning ecosystem in progress,” said David Frost, professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and chair of the Strategic Planning Advisory Group. “What started in the original Institute strategic plan as the X College has evolved, under the superb leadership of Richard Barke, with broad participation of individuals from various units across campus into a concept that captures the entrepreneurial spirit of Georgia Tech. It is not a degree that will necessarily be for everyone, but for some, it will be the key step on a path that leads to transformative ideas and solutions.”

Questions? Contact Barke at richard.barke@pubpolicy.gatech.edu.
  

The group was created by President Bud Peterson in May and charged with providing advice and recommendations on matters pertaining to the alignment, effectiveness and impact of the Strategic Plan released in August 2010. They delivered an overview of findings to leadership last month.

"We set out to meet with campus academic leaders, administrative leaders and project champions to assess the activity and enthusiasm for implementing the goals outlined in Tech's strategic plan," said David Frost, professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and chair of the advisory group. "What we heard was that the document continues to be the foundation for a lot of unit-level planning and new initiative development."

In its initial report, the vision, mission, and overall goals of the Strategic Plan remain unchanged. It did recommend that some of the objectives be revised to better reflect the Institute's priorities and future goals.

"The advisory group's assessment was a good indication that the main ideas articulated in strategic plan developed by the Georgia Tech community are still sound," Peterson said. "In 2010 we developed a very forward-looking plan. Our task now is to see that we continue our momentum toward achieving those very ambitious goals."

As a standing committee, the advisory group will continue to meet in the spring. Among its priorities are to improve the process by which new projects are identified and funded and how to effectively inform the campus of progress on the Plan's five goals.

“Students do great things that can be quite invisible,” said Ellen Zegura, a professor in the School of Computer Science who taught a Computing for Good (C4G) course this semester. The expo will focus on projects students have done this semester in a number of colleges and schools and will also include participants in this semester’s C4G courses, which in the past presented at their own expo.

Andy Pruett, who’s pursuing a master’s in human-computer interaction, will be there with his team, which created Food Mapper, an open and accessible platform that lets users map food sources in places where they are scarce (sometimes called “food deserts”). Tackling the project from a service learning perspective served as a motivating factor in several ways.

“When the project hits challenging spots, knowing that you are working to serve and volunteer can be a source of pride and drive,” Pruett said. “The clients for these service learning projects can be emotionally dedicated to their work, and it’s rewarding to know simple solutions can often make a significant difference for nonprofits and service providers.”

The expo is the first event organized by the newly formed Service Learning and Community Engagement Council (SLCE), a group convened as part of the Strategic Plan Service Learning and Legacy Project, for which Zegura is a co-chair. It aims to build on current service learning activities on campus and promote social entrepreneurship and civic engagement in the Tech curriculum. 

Efforts have an emphasis on undergraduate education but also affect the graduate experience, particularly in the case of cross-listed courses such as C4G that may be taken by both undergraduates and graduates. The SLCE plans to pursue a course designation for service learning course offerings. Around 10-15 courses have already been identified, and others would likely be added in the coming years.

In the meantime, the expo is intended to showcase what’s already being done and the momentum that exists for this type of learning.

“Outreach by Tech students to the surrounding communities is important for the profile of the university,” Pruett said. “Knowing that the quality of the end result matters beyond the scope of the course is a positive and compelling reminder that details matter, decisions matter, communication matters, and execution matters. This soaks through the team, makes work more enjoyable, and makes small wins very rewarding.”

In addition to the expo, the SLCE is working on a concept paper as part of the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) for Georgia Tech’s Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) reaccreditation. The QEP is intended to have broad application that enhances student learning or the learning environment. Tech’s International Plan and Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program were both part of the QEP in Tech’s last reaccreditation.

Around 30 projects will be on display, with their creators, at the Tech4Good expo this Wednesday, Dec. 4, from 4–6 p.m. on the first floor of the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons.

“Students think that they need to have an amazing idea before they can become an entrepreneur, but that isn’t true,” said Paul Freet, principal at VentureLab and a member of the Startup Gauntlet teaching team. “You don’t need an idea or an invention to be an entrepreneur. You just need a passion.”

Whether through student organizations such as the Scheller Society for Entrepreneurs (SSOE) and Startup Exchange; administration efforts such as the Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship (ILE) and VentureLab; or on-campus incubators and competitions such as Flashpoint and the InVenture Prize, students across campus are parlaying their passions into entrepreneurial enterprises more than ever before.

No matter where students are in the entrepreneurial process, Tech has a campus organization, program, or competition to support them and their venture.

Identifying Opportunities

For students who want to explore their options and meet other would-be entrepreneurs, there’s the interdisciplinary Startup Exchange, a kind of “supergroup” for supporting ventures with a social mission. Startup Exchange maintains an open co-working space in the Library called The Exchange, and organizes and sponsors programs such as Hack@Tech, StartupChicks and Startup Semester, one of the first student-run pre-incubator programs in the world

Of all Startup Exchange programs, Startup Semester is considered the most rigorous.

“Startup Semester aims to take in students with teams and an idea and turn them into entrepreneurs,” said Chintan Parikh, a computer science major and director of Startup Exchange. Students can expect a clearly defined curriculum, weekly meetings, and a competitive environment. Its last cohort had teams go on to win the Georgia Tech InVenture Prize, interview at YCombinator, present at Startup Riot, and join the StartEngine incubator in Los Angeles.

And while many student entrepreneurial ventures involve an innovative product design or hands-on engineering process, students in the College of Business are equally as engaged, honing their start-up savvy through the Scheller Society of Entrepreneurs (SSOE), where networking is emphasized.

“I decided to start SSOE because of the need for an entrepreneurship organization within the College of Business, and because of the questions I had heard from my peers regarding how to find internships and networking,” said founder Christine Proctor, a fourth-year business administration student. “I also wanted to bring students together that shared a passion for innovation and hard work to discuss their dreams and hear helpful advice from local successful entrepreneurs.”

SSOE is open to undergraduate and graduate students, alumni, professionals, and faculty of all majors and industries. It’s designed for anyone who is interested in entrepreneurship, has started their own business, wants to start their own business, or wants to work for a startup or in an entrepreneurial niche of a larger company.

Preparing to Take Action

Both SSOE and Startup Exchange seek to help students identify opportunities for entrepreneurship regardless of whether they already have an idea or not. Other campus programs help students develop innovative ideas or promising opportunities into actionable ventures.

VentureLab, recently ranked second worldwide among university incubators, serves budding entrepreneurs by offering startup support for projects initiated through Georgia Tech research, the Georgia Tech Startup Competition, and Startup Gauntlet.

Open to all students, Startup Gauntlet is a bootcamp for those who want to develop a business model based on prospective customers’ needs, a useful exercise before launching a business.

“Startup Gauntlet is looking for students that are motivated, want to be entrepreneurial, and want to learn,” said Freet.

Participants in the six-week course are encouraged to make assumptions about how the consumer thinks and behaves and then test those assumptions on at least 10 potential customers every week. They must then analyze the results and create a business model that matches their customers’ needs and wants.

Launching Your Venture 

For ventures that are ready for launch, campus competitions offer students a unique avenue through which to acquire funding, develop relationships with entrepreneurial mentors, and learn more about the final phases of the commercialization or implementation process. 

But it’s not just about making money. Entrepreneurship at Georgia Tech is also about improving the human condition.

The Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship (ILE) was created in the Scheller College of Business in 2006 to support entrepreneurship and encourage members of the Tech community to take the economical, social, and environmental impacts of their actions into consideration when making business decisions.

ILE offers a number of programs to support this mission, but its most visible is the Ideas to SERVE competition (I2S), which takes place every spring semester and is open to all students who have an early-stage product or service idea that is geared toward social entrepreneurship.

Kristen Daniel won Best Domestic Solution at this year’s I2S competition for her idea for The Pentorship Program, which connects inmates interested in entrepreneurship with successful entrepreneurs.

“I figured since inmates didn’t have access to the Internet, I could recruit seasoned entrepreneurs to become pen pal mentors,” said Daniel, who's pursuing a master's of business administration, of her Pentorship Program. She believes that providing entrepreneurial resources to inmates can help them make the transition upon release.

Other campus competitions include the Georgia Tech Startup Competition and InVenture Prize, both of which take place spring semester. At InVenture Prize, undergraduates compete for thousands of dollars, free patent filing, and a spot with Georgia Tech’s Flashpoint startup accelerator program. 

Additional Resources

On a campus where an entrepreneurial spirit thrives, and where a strategic goal is for graduates to possess that spirit, new opportunities to innovate and collaborate come up every week. A list of opportunities is available at startup.gatech.edu. 

Students interested in learning more about how universities nationwide are promoting entrepreneurship can read this report by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which mentions Tech’s Flashpoint program for facilitating university-industry collaboration.

Other resources include Entrepreneurship Magazine and Entrepreneur.com.

That’s why increasing the number of endowed chairs and professorships across the Institute is a priority for Campaign Georgia Tech. When the campaign wraps up at the end of December 2015, the goal is to have endowed 100 new faculty positions. With just under 26 months remaining, that number stands at 78.

Here’s a look at just a handful of the men and women who have been named to endowed positions funded during the campaign:

• Henrik Christensen, Distinguished Professor of Computing, was appointed to the KUKA Chair in Robotics in 2006. The chair was endowed by a $1.5 million grant from KUKA Robotics, a global leader in robot manufacturing. Christensen, who came to Tech from the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, later became the director of the Institute’s Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines.
• Pinar Keskinocak, the Joseph C. Mello Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE), serves as co-director of the Health and Humanitarian Logistics Center along with Özlem Ergun, recently named Coca-Cola Associate Professor, and Julie Swann, the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Associate Professor — both also in ISyE. Keskinocak’s research focuses on supply chain management, with an emphasis on resource allocation, and she is actively engaged in health care and humanitarian logistics. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in industrial engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, and a Ph.D. in operations research from Carnegie Mellon University. Joseph C. Mello, HS 1980, established the professorship within the Stewart School to support faculty in the field of health care delivery operations. Mello is the CEO of Davita Inc., the largest independent provider of kidney dialysis services in the United States.
• John Krige, the Melvin Kranzberg Professor in the History of Technology in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, has published widely on science, technology, and the post-World War II reconstruction of Europe. Krige was originally trained in his native South Africa as a physical chemist and went on to earn a second Ph.D. at the University of Sussex, specializing in the history and philosophy of science. He became the Kranzberg Professor in 2000. In 1958, Melvin Kranzberg was a groundbreaking scholar who cofounded the Society for the History of Technology. He earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, was awarded a Bronze Star for his service during World War II, and joined Tech in 1972 as the Callaway Professor of the History of Technology. The Institute created the chair in his honor after he retired in 1988, and it became fully endowed during Campaign Georgia Tech.
• Younan Xia was appointed the first Brock Family Chair and GRA Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2011. Mary R. and John F. Brock III, ChE 1970, MS ChE 1971, established the chair with additional support from the Georgia Cancer Coalition and the Georgia Research Alliance. Xia came to Georgia Tech from Washington University in St. Louis where he was the James M. McKelvey Professor of Biomedical Engineering. His research focus areas include nanomedicine, analytical chemistry, drug delivery, imaging, and tissue engineering. A fellow of the Materials Research Society, Xia received the Director’s Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health.

For more information about Campaign Georgia Tech, click here.

The recruitment and retention of preeminent faculty members across all of its colleges and schools is vital to Tech’s future. It is one of the central goals of the Institute’s long-term strategic plan — and a key to Tech becoming the best in teaching, research, and application. So, it is no surprise that building a world-class faculty is also one of the top priorities of Campaign Georgia Tech.

The target for faculty support in the campaign, which began in July 2004 and is scheduled to conclude at the end of 2015, is $150 million — the majority of which will be committed to various levels of endowed faculty positions. Thus far, 76 of these positions have been endowed against a goal of 100.

“The faculty and the students are the university. They are two inseparable parts of a successful whole: good faculty attracts good students and vice-versa. To be successful in retaining and attracting the best scholars, against stiff competition, we must recognize excellence. In academia, there is no better way to reward the best than with a named chair that recognizes accomplishment and provides discretionary resources to take the risks that lead to breakthroughs in teaching and research,” noted Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs who holds the K. Harrison Brown Family Chair.

For more information about Campaign Georgia Tech, click here.

At a Sept. 19 town hall, audience members heard from representatives of the Enterprise Data Management (EDM) Task Force, assigned the responsibility for creating an Institute-level strategy for the management and delivery of timely, reliable data.

Its work corresponds with the fifth goal of Tech’s strategic plan regarding the pursuit of institutional effectiveness.

“Data is an asset, and we want to take a stewardship approach to managing it,” said Sandi Bramblett, executive director for Institutional Planning and Research and Decision Support Services and one of the project’s champions.

Audience members were asked to share their own recommendations on the issues EDM needed to tackle. Clarifications regarding data definitions (for example, simplifying the myriad ways to identify students) as well as policy decisions for improving data sharing across units were among those commonly cited.

“We want to create a framework that will provide accurate and consistent data, as well as reliable tools, that will inform good decision-making for campus users,” said Lori Sundal, director of Enterprise Information Systems in the Office of Information Technology and second project champion.

Building upon two years of discovery and input from all areas of campus, Georgia Tech is partnering with North Highland Consulting to assist with building its strategy. North Highland’s previous higher education clients include Emory University, the University of Colorado, and Vanderbilt University.  

EDM and North Highland representatives will spend the rest of the semester meeting with stakeholders to assess the current state and develop a roadmap for process improvement. The North Highland team will will work with the project leadership team and subject matter experts as required.

Here is a timeline for developing the EDM roadmap:

• Sept. 20-Oct. 11: Meetings with individual stakeholders to assess current state.
• Oct. 14-Nov. 11: Compilation of a future state and roadmap.  
• Nov. 11-Dec. 6: Validation and enhancement with steering committee/stakeholders’ input.
• Week of Dec. 2: Presentation to stakeholders.

Project updates will be available on the EDM website. Questions? Contact Bramblett.

The SEI goal is to complement the significant amount of energy research that is happening on campus by encouraging and supporting activities with a clear thought leadership emphasis on energy issues. This SEI program solicits proposals directed toward these aspirations, with a particular emphasis on activities where external funding is difficult to obtain, yet that are important in terms of promoting one of the following three SEI goals: 

1. Developing and nurturing the energy research community across the campus and in the state.
2. Growing the resource base for Georgia Tech energy research.
3. Growing the thought leadership projected by Georgia Tech.

SEI seeks to facilitate activities that define frameworks, develop roadmaps, and convene thought-leaders around complex energy issues. Proposals that link-up groups across different colleges are highly encouraged, such as those that integrate technical discipline expertise with system analyses or economics/policy/business aspects. 

Proposals could span activities ranging from a few hundred dollars up to a maximum of $40,000/year (direct costs and no tuition charged), and can span time ranges from one day up to two years. Second year funding for any two-year proposals will be influenced by PI efforts to engage external resources by the end of the first year.

Further details, including submission deadlines, are available at www.energy.gatech.edu/rfp.

Reaffirmation is the process by which Georgia Tech must prove to a review team from peer institutions, via the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), that the Institute is qualified to continue to award academic credit. SACSCOC, the regional body for the accreditation of degree-granting higher education institutions in the nation’s southern states, works closely with the U.S. Department of Education.

The formal kickoff for the 10-year reaffirmation of Tech’s accreditation began in June 2013. The process will continue through the end of 2015, with Tech’s onsite visit scheduled for March 2015.

“This is an important process through which we review our policies, procedures, and programs in compliance certification,” said Catherine Murray-Rust, vice provost for Learning Excellence, dean of Libraries, and Tech’s SACS Accreditation Liaison.  

By September 2014, Tech will provide a self-study of its compliance — 95 core requirements and principles — encompassing the spectrum of activities on campus. The gathering of this information will require time and effort on the part of hundreds of people campuswide, and will be managed by a Compliance Steering Committee of campus administrators. During last month’s Institute Address, President G.P. “Bud” Peterson thanked faculty and staff in advance for their engagement in the project.

The compliance certification is an opportunity for Tech to identify institutional weaknesses or problems and correct them, Murray-Rust said. 



“I view the compliance part of this process, at best, like moving from one house to another,” she said. “It takes a tremendous amount of work, and if you do it well, you recalibrate your life and your belongings. You review all aspects of your stuff and how you live, toss out or give away what you don’t need, pack what is left up carefully, and move. At least for a brief period, you are aware of your assets and your liabilities.”

Tech must also provide a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) to improve the quality of student learning outcomes and the environment of learning. It should be directly and traceably related to Tech’s strategic plan. The QEP will be a funded mandate and will result in a detailed implementation plan and budget for five-10 years of support.

“The QEP presents an opportunity for campus to select an academic goal that will impact student learning,” Murray-Rust said.    

The plan is due in December 2014. There will be a process to submit focused proposals. There is a QEP Steering Committee in place that will grow and change in membership once a QEP is selected.

“The Quality Enhancement Plan is the part of the compliance certification that most directly involves faculty,” Murray-Rust said. “Faculty need to be engaged in determining the best project and creating the plan that generates wide impact on campus, including assessment and programmatic support.”

These are just two examples of Tech’s “positive momentum” that President G.P. “Bud” Peterson mentioned during his annual Institute Address last Thursday.   

“When we launched our strategic plan three years ago, we introduced an ambitious vision — we wanted ‘What does Georgia Tech think?’ to be a common question asked by those in research, business, the media, and government,” he said. “Initially, I didn’t think it fit Tech’s style, but I’ve come to realize that those five words summarize our potential impact.”

The teaching of massive open online courses (MOOCs) is one area where Tech has shown thought leadership.

“We started offering MOOCs a year ago, and so far, we’ve had more than 400,000 students enroll in 14 courses,” Peterson said.

He added that students studying on campus are also benefiting from the MOOCs. For example, many faculty members are embracing the flipped classroom model where lectures are provided online and class time is reserved for discussion and activities.

Tech also continues to become a more established innovation hub. On Aug. 27, the AT&T Foundry opened in Tech Square — which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Additionally, Peterson mentioned that this year, Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center was ranked by Forbes as one of 12 business incubators that are changing the world.

As another way to engage students and faculty in the innovation process, the Institute has launched TechStarter, the world’s first peer-reviewed, university-based, crowd funding platform for science and engineering research projects.

During the address, Peterson also touched on the following:

• As part of the Arts@Tech initiative, campus is currently hosting the 15-piece international sculpture exhibition Engineered Art.
• Tech is in the midst of its 10-year reaffirmation process by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
• A Strategic Plan Advisory Group has been created to provide advice and recommendations to Institute leadership regarding the continued implementation of the plan. More information about the strategic plan is available at www.gatech.edu/vision.
• Campaign Georgia Tech has raised $1.25 billion toward a December 2015 $1.5 billion goal.

Peterson closed the address by unveiling Tech’s latest public service announcement — which features a portion of Selby’s Convocation speech.

To read Peterson's speech in its entirety or watch footage of the address, click here.

Internationally acclaimed, Chattanooga-based sculptor John Henry is the curator for the exhibition. His work, “La Tour,” the 50-foot tall steel piece located on the Instructional Center lawn near Boggs Chemistry Building, is also included in the exhibit.  

The Whistle recently spoke with Henry  about his approach to sculpting.  

Here are his thoughts:

“My general philosophy about sculpture is, in the words of Herman Rusch who was a naïve sculptor from northern Wisconsin, ‘I just like to make things. I’m a builder.’ And that’s really what I am… a builder.

I came from a line of builders. I had a great uncle who went around the country building barns for people. My grandfather built things and tilled the soil. My father built homes and developed land, and he also made furniture.

Then I came along and upset the apple cart a little bit because nothing I make anybody really needs! There’s a whole different philosophy about that because some people think they need it a lot. I’m very thankful for those people.

Sculpture is about building things for the environment in which you live. I think sculptors need to understand their environment. They need to understand the society in which they live.

It’s important that I make things that have a certain connection with architecture and the man-made environment we live in, like this campus, which is a very good example.

I’m not too interested in what is called ‘site-specific sculpture’ because sites change. You can [create] something incredibly specific for a specific place. Chances are, 20 years from now, that site will change. It will have a different use. And, if your piece is too specific, it doesn’t mean anything anymore.  

I think it’s very important to make things that can change with time, can have new meanings, and can take on other meanings that you haven’t even thought about now. That’s my philosophy about sculpture.”

“Engineered Art” is part of Arts@Tech, an initiative to enhance the Tech community by fostering programs and events spanning the arts spectrum at the intersection of technological innovation and creative expression. Arts@Tech is an outcome of the Institute’s strategic plan.

“About five years ago, we started offering the dinners to give both faculty and students the opportunity to talk about topics that are interesting to them, in an informal setting,” said Brett Hulst, assistant director of Housing and the Freshman Experience. “The goal is for our students to feel more comfortable talking with faculty, and the dinners are just one way we address the component of the strategic plan that encourages increased faculty and student interaction.”

The time commitment is minimal for those interested in participating.

For example, Cindy Zapata, an assistant professor in the Scheller College of Business, has hosted a dinner, and said that it only took about two hours of her time to prepare.

“It’s up to the faculty member to think of a topic he or she is passionate about — whether it’s a hobby or a current event — and come up with a few discussion questions,” said Holly Shikano, coordinator of residential academic initiatives for staff and community development in Residence Life. “After that’s done, all you have to do is navigate to the building the night of the dinner and hang out with our students.”  

Charles Liotta, a Regents Professor emeritus and chair in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has also hosted a dinner. He chose to speak about his experiences with students over many years at Tech and his love for chemistry.

Liotta’s advice to any colleagues interested in participating in the program?

“Don’t do all of the talking,” he said. “Be sure you engage in give-and-take
conversations.”

Shikano is also looking to organize a few dinners at the beginning of the semester that focus on this year’s First-Year Reading book, Living with Complexity by Don Norman.

Those interested in leading a discussion on the book should email her by July 30. Anyone interested in hosting a dinner on another topic should let Shikano know by Sept. 6.

That’s why the Strategic Technology Investment Committee (http://epmo.gatech.edu/stic) has been tasked with creating an Institute Information Technology (IT) Master Plan.   

“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time since the Olympics that we’ve created a campuswide IT Master Plan,” said Jim O’Connor, vice president of the Office of Information Technology (OIT). “In the past, we’ve had unit-level IT plans that support the Institute’s strategic goals, but our Strategic Technology Investment Committee recognizes the value of an Institute-wide approach to leveraging our IT investments.”

Town halls — open to anyone interested in attending one of the three sessions — will be held this Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to introduce the project to campus and generate discussion. Attendees will hear about the project’s goals and objectives and how they can participate in the process.

“We are looking for input from the campus community to help us understand how technology is impacting the campus and how future technologies will support Tech’s mission,” said Robert Gerhart, IT manager for the College of Architecture and project leader for the master plan.

The plan is meant to address IT needs up to five years from now and aims to answer questions such as:

• How do we align IT services and operations with the business, 
academic, and research needs of Tech’s community? 
• How do we manage technological change in a way that capitalizes on opportunity, mitigates risk, and adds value to the community in a manner that is planned, efficient, and quantifiable?
• How do we create an infrastructure and a support structure that rapidly and effectively adapts to 
evolving technologies and their uses?

In addition to the town halls, the committee is interviewing faculty, staff, and students to get input and will conduct a campuswide survey in the fall.

“The town halls, interviews, and the survey are unique opportunities to offer your thoughts on how the IT community can help support your unit’s strategic goals,” O’Connor said. “You can help us understand what investments and services help you contribute to making Georgia Tech the ‘technological university of the 21st century.’”

For more information, contact Gerhart.

The 12 sculptures installed last week are part of "Engineered Art: An International Sculpture Exhibit at Georgia Tech," a 15-piece international exhibition by various artists that is on loan to the Institute until June 2014. Three more sculptures will be installed during the next few weeks, including a soaring 50-foot steel piece titled “La Tour” by the internationally acclaimed, Chattanooga-based sculptor John Henry, who also is the curator for the exhibition.

Henry is known for his large-scale public sculptures. Since the early 1970s, he has produced monumental works of art for museums, cities, and public institutions across the United States, Europe, and Asia.

Henry’s style has been described as “huge, welded steel drawings.” He arranges linear and rectilinear elements that appear to defy gravity. Many of his works suggest a snapshot of arrested motion, where flying or tumbling elements are frozen.

As the sculptures were being installed, students stopped to ask Henry questions. “A number of students asked ‘what does it do?,’” said Henry. “That’s an interesting question because people usually ask ‘what is it?’”

The location of each sculpture was chosen to complement Georgia Tech’s lush and open green spaces.

The sculpture exhibition is part of Arts@Tech, an initiative to enhance the Georgia Tech community by fostering programs and events spanning the arts spectrum at the intersection of technological innovation and creative expression. The initiative is an outcome of the Institute’s Strategic Plan.

“There is a pent-up desire by students to engage in the arts as evidenced by our tremendously talented musicians and the participation in the recent Art Crawl and Festival. The arts are expressions of creativity and result from the same design processes that our students follow, whether designing policies or instruments. This exhibit will promote conversation, debate, and appreciation of the creative spirit while making our beautiful campus even more interesting.” said Rafael L. Bras, Georgia Tech provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs, who helped bring the exhibit to campus.

The sculpture exhibition is free and open to the public. Descriptive plaques for the pieces will be installed soon. Official unveiling celebrations are planned for next fall.

“We have made a great deal of progress toward the goals articulated in the strategic plan,” President Peterson said. “I am confident that under the leadership of Provost Bras and this group we can continue to do so.”

The purpose of the newly formed Strategic Plan Advisory Group will be to serve as a forum for the continued discussion of strategic issues and to provide counsel to Institute leadership on the alignment, effectiveness, implementation and impact of the Strategic Plan.

“The notion of what constitutes the technological research university of the 21st century continues to evolve,” Bras said. “For example, three years ago very few people were talking about massive open online education, but it is now one of the foremost topics in higher education. We are looking to this advisory group to help ensure that our aim is true.”

The Strategic Plan Advisory Group will meet for the first time next week. Initial members will serve one- to three-year terms, working toward a rotation of alternating two-year terms:

• Gisele Bennett – Director, Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory
• Michael Best – Associate Professor, International Affairs
• Kim Cobb – Associate Professor, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences
• Mark Demyanek – Assistant Vice President, Environmental Health & Safety / Facilities Management
• Jim Fortner – Associate Vice President, Financial Services
• David Frost – Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering
• Ron Johnson – Professor of the Practice, Industrial & Systems Engineering and Managing Director, Tennenbaum Institute
• Fatimot Ladipo – Assistant Director, Federal Relations

The group’s specific responsibilities will include reviewing proposals related to the Strategic Plan, identifying gaps or changing priorities, recommending resource needs, and communicating progress to the campus community.

Investments have since been made in several efforts to fulfill the SPISC’s final recommendations. This year, the Institute has provided supplemental funding of approximately $2 million from both state and Georgia Tech Foundation resources to augment new work undertaken by units across the Institute, made possible through the prioritization of their own budgets. Projects are moving forward, embedded in the operating units responsible for piloting new ideas. The following links provide more information on the projects and activities the EVPR’s Office is heavily involved or taking a lead.

2010-2011 Strategic Initiatives

• Be the “Innovation Institute”
• Pursue Globally Significant Grand Challenges Using the Campus and Region as a Test Bed for Research and Application
• Explore Collaborative Partnerships
• GT Journey

2011-2012 Strategic Initiatives

• Strengthen Industry-Focused Research and Translational Activities
• Energy and Sustainability
• Redefine and Re-energize Life Sciences, Health Sciences, and Biology at the Institute Level
• Policy@Tech
• Ivan Allen Institute for Advanced Studies

On April 12 and 13, the Institute hosted the TechArts Festival, a two-day event that showcased the creative spirit at Tech through student and faculty projects.

The festival was coordinated by the Office of the Arts at Georgia Tech in conjunction with the Georgia Tech Council of the Arts, which were both created in response to the Institute’s strategic plan priorities.

“The idea for the festival came out of the TechArts task force, which formed a couple of years ago to explore the role of the arts on campus, as outlined in the strategic plan,” said Aaron Bobick, chair of the Council of the Arts. “This festival is a way to bring greater visibility to the arts activities at Georgia Tech and to strengthen the culture of the arts at Tech.”

Events were free and open to the public and included works that showcased the convergence of art and technology and works that were solely artistic in nature. Highlights of the festival included:

• The Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition;
• Automaton: A contemporary dance project featuring a dancing robot and live local dancers;
• A student poetry reading featuring student work; 
• Japan, Age and Gender: A photography exhibition by Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Colin Potts;
• Public Power: An exhibition by graduate architecture students featuring the design and construction of a public performance space on the Atlanta Beltline; and
• A Georgia Tech Jazz Ensemble performance with guest artists Dimitri Vassilakis on saxophone and Dan Wall on piano.

For a detailed schedule, visit www.arts.gatech.edu.

The recommendations were evaluated over the summer, and more than $2 million in investments have been made in several efforts consistent with the SPISC’s final recommendations. Projects are moving forward, embedded in the operating units that have been charged with piloting or initiating new ideas.

A report summarizing selected activities where the Office of the Provost is heavily involved or taking a lead is now available via PDF. Project updates include:

• Revitalizing Undergraduate Education
• The Burdell Initiative: Collaborative Interdisciplinary Design
• Online Education
• Globalization of Our Education
• Technology and Law
• Leadership Development, Education, and Research
• Tech Arts and the Arts at Georgia Tech
• Ivan Allen Institute

Two and a half years later, “Designing the Future,” a document created to guide Georgia Tech to its 150-year anniversary in 2035, is beginning to bear fruit.

"By engaging students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends, we created a shared vision of success," said President G. P. "Bud" Peterson. "Georgia Tech's 25-year strategic plan was designed to be a living document, and together we are making significant progress on our five strategic goals. As we continue to translate the plan into action, our strength comes from the ongoing collaboration and innovation for which Tech is so well known."

In fall 2011, a steering committee was charged with shepherding the development and implementation of 16 institutional projects, each one reflecting one or more elements of the Strategic Plan. Those 16 projects—led jointly by both faculty and staff on topics ranging from undergraduate education, technology transfer, research innovation and campus operations—demonstrate a forward-thinking approach, worthy of the Tech motto “Progress and Service.”

Members of the executive leadership team evaluated each project’s final report along with the recommendations last May, and allocated funds to support the continued development of these initiatives.

“Several of the initiatives are fully developed,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “Others are moving forward, embedded within the operating units that have been charged with piloting or initiating new ideas. With thanks to the task force co-chairs and the steering committee for their diligent work, we have the framework for pursuing an enriched undergraduate experience and transformative interdisciplinary research.”

Tangible evidence of this sentiment abounds. Investments in the Engineered Biosystems Building and Technology Enterprise Park demonstrate an institutional commitment to re-energizing Tech’s approach to life sciences. Continued growth of the faculty has already had an impact on both research priorities as well as classroom instruction, and initiatives such as the startup accelerator Flashpoint are helping to position Tech as an institution synonymous with innovation and economic development.

“As these initiatives continue to mature, they will help to create new fields of study, solve new kinds of problems and create new opportunities,” Bras said. “Twenty-five years is an unusual planning horizon, but it enables us to think broadly about the type of institution we want to be.”

“The strategic plan begins by reminding us that, ‘As leaders, designers, and innovators, our role is not only to solve problems, but also to shape our world,’” said Scott Morris, chief human resources officer. “Our ability to do that depends in part upon our efforts to engage our workforce and to continue to distinguish the Institute as an employer of choice. This task force considered an important question: How can we build a great place to work?”  

Last spring, the team — which was co-chaired by Morris and Archie Ervin, vice president for Institute Diversity, and included graduate students, faculty and staff — was charged with assessing Tech’s environment, conducting an inventory of current programs, identifying gaps and recommending changes.

The task force researched national best practices and met with deans, other leaders, and University System of Georgia personnel. From this, the following seven focus areas were identified:

• Connect communities and increase camaraderie.
• Develop the people who work at Tech.
• Facilitate the transition of new faculty, staff, graduate students and their families into the Institute.
• Assist with work-life demands.
• Help faculty and staff balance family care responsibilities.
• Promote financial security.
• Encourage healthy life choices.

“We hope that faculty and staff will read this report and provide comments that will help the Institute better understand how we can build upon our momentum in making Georgia Tech a great place to work,” Ervin said.

Click here to read the full report.

Developed by a faculty task force earlier this year, the finished report draws on Tech’s tradition of global engagement in the advancement of three key objectives:

• Expand the world’s footprint at Georgia Tech;
• Extend and leverage Georgia Tech’s impact around the globe; and
• Embrace and support globally engaged students. 

Yves Berthelot, who served on the task force and was named vice provost for International Initiatives in August, will oversee the execution of the strategy. 

“By growing our ecosystem of education, research, and innovation at a global scale, we increase opportunities for students and faculty, both in Atlanta and around the world, and we contribute to shaping the global knowledge enterprise,” Berthelot said. 

The task force was created and charged by Steve McLaughlin, who served as the vice provost for International Initiatives from 2007 until assuming leadership for Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in September. 

“Georgia Tech’s Strategic Plan emphasizes the importance of global engagement of our students, faculty and staff in not just reaching out around the world, but bringing the world to Atlanta,” McLaughlin said. “The Global Positioning Strategy serves as a roadmap for our engagement in an increasingly global, competitive, and resource-constrained world.” 

One of the five main goals of the Institute’s current strategic plan is to expand Tech’s global footprint and to ensure that it is graduating good global citizens. Among the nation’s most highly internationalized technological universities, Georgia Tech reports nearly 40 percent of its undergraduate students graduate with international work, study or research experience, preparing them for leadership roles in a globalized society. Almost 1,000 students representing 26 majors are currently enrolled in the International Plan.

The Georgia Tech Research Corporation received the grant, and will work with the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U), the College of Sciences and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts to develop the innovative online learning courses.

“These Gates Foundation awards address one of higher education’s most pressing problems: bending the cost curve and improving learning outcomes for introductory courses,” said Rich DeMillo, director of C21U. “The Georgia Tech courses being funded by these grants all represent innovation in pedagogy, teaching and technology. If we are successful, courses like these will be a shift in both quality and cost for the vast majority of American college students.”

Professor Rebecca Burnett and Assistant Professor Karen Head in the School of Literature, Media and Communication will lead First-Year Composition 2.0. School of Physics Professor Michael Schatz will offer Your World is Your Laboratory: College-Level Introductory Physics, and School of Psychology Professor Emeritus Anderson Smith will lead Introduction to Psychology as a Science.

“MOOCs are an exciting innovation. They hold great promise but are not without challenges, and we are still discovering their full potential,” said Dan Greenstein, director of Postsecondary Success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “We believe having diverse options for faculty and students that meet a wide array of learning needs and styles can enhance student engagement, improve educational outcomes and increase college completion rates. We are eager to learn from and share the data that will be generated from these investments in MOOCs.”

Earlier this year, Georgia Tech announced a partnership with Coursera to offer online courses. Currently, registration is open for eight courses led by Georgia Tech professors. The courses have a combined enrollment of more than 140,000 students. The first class, Computational Investing, Part 1, began in October.

The plan will recommend ways that the county can take advantage of its many economic development strengths, including Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport; transportation and logistics assets such as access to air transportation, an extensive rail network, and Interstate highway connections; location at the center of the metropolitan Atlanta area; a strong core of established industry; a growing four-year public university, and a water system with sufficient capacity.

“What stands out about Clayton County is its strong future potential,” said Jason Chernock, project manager with the Community Innovation Services group at Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute. “The county has all of the physical pieces for economic development. It needs a unifying vision, strategic plan and consensus on how to implement the plan. Our job will be to bring people together to find the common ground.”

The county’s last comprehensive economic development plan was produced more than a decade ago, and a lot has changed since then. Like many communities, Clayton County has faced the loss of jobs from the recession, a slowdown in development and declining real estate values.

“This will be a comprehensive strategic planning process that will involve a lot of research, a lot of public engagement, a lot of interaction with community leaders, and the facilitation of a plan,” Chernock explained. “The plan will include everything from mission and vision statements, goals and objectives, benchmarks, to information on roles and responsibilities.”

A steering committee will guide the effort, led by co-chairs Yulonda Beauford, president and CEO of the Clayton County Chamber of Commerce, and Larry Vincent, chairman of the Development Authority of Clayton County. The committee will include representatives from county’s municipalities, as well as numerous private- and public-sector entities that will play a role in the county’s future economic development. The planning process will also include an opportunity for public input.

Also represented on the steering committee is Clayton State University, a unit of the University System of Georgia with approximately 7,000 students and nearly 200 full-time faculty members.

“As a comprehensive, publicly-supported university, we believe Clayton State must serve as a steward of place,” said Thomas Hynes, president of Clayton State University. “Whether through contributing to a more educated workforce; sharing faculty and student knowledge resources in management, small business and entrepreneurship, logistics, health care, archival research; or advancing the arts and social sciences, this economic analysis will help our shared work in the county and the region.”

The eight-step planning process will include facilitating a steering committee, organizing a kick-off meeting, reviewing recent initiatives, interviewing stakeholders, hosting community forums, engaging Clayton State University, performing a target industry analysis, and developing the strategic plan. The work is expected to be completed by the end of calendar 2012.

“The development of this strategic plan is a positive step forward for economic growth and prosperity in Clayton County,” said Yulonda Beauford, president and CEO of the Clayton County Chamber of Commerce. “This process will be collaborative and involve all sectors of the community. By working together, we will strengthen our business competitiveness and future sustainability for our county.”

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“Georgia Tech is all about creativity and design,” Bras said. “That creativity is expressed in a variety of contexts, ranging from product development, to architecture, to policy formulation, and everything in between. So it is only natural to invest in developing opportunities that will encourage creativity in the arts.”

Both the office and the council were part of recommendations made by the TechArts task force as part of the Institute’s strategic plan implementation efforts.

“Our students, staff and community are hungry for outlets of artistic expression and appreciation,” Bras said, citing last year’s Clough Art Crawl — that drew 150 submissions. “The Council of the Arts, supported by the Office of the Arts, will ensure that the Institute nurtures, appreciates, collects and creates the very best of the arts.”

The Office of the Arts will oversee the Ferst Center for the Arts and will be led by George Thompson, current director of the Ferst Center. The office will advocate for, promote and facilitate arts partnerships on campus and between Tech and the community.

“Part of a well-rounded education includes musical, visual and written arts, and the Office of the Arts will help the campus community easily identify arts opportunities,” Thompson said. “We will be a resource for creative research and academic and performance collaborations on campus and will manage a new campus-wide, arts-focused website, among other things.”

The office will be complemented by an internal Council of the Arts, to be chaired by  Aaron Bobick, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing who also co-chaired the TechArts task force. The committee will be comprised of representatives from a variety of schools and departments. Thompson will also be a part of the group to facilitate collaboration between the Office of the Arts and the council.   

“The Council of the Arts will be the faculty entity that inherits the mandate of the TechArts initiative and will continue to push for innovation and development in education, research, performance, exhibition, community outreach and student arts activities,” Bobick said. “The council will impact the campus both through organizing faculty- and student-centric efforts and by coordinating activities with George and the Office of the Arts to promote the arts at Georgia Tech.”

In addition to the Council of the Arts, a committee comprised of alumni and other community leaders with strong ties to the Institute is being formed to support fundraising for future arts initiatives.

Effective August 1, Lieuwen will become executive director of Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute. There, he expects to be a "systems integrator," bringing together the many elements of Georgia Tech science, engineering, computing and policy research to address the planet's most pressing energy challenges.

"We want to work on the problems that really matter," he said. "We want to do the fundamental science and be great engineers and great scientists, but we want to address real-world problems that will serve society."

Georgia Tech operates a broad range of energy-related research initiatives, including power generation and distribution, power electronics, fuel production, water management, materials, transportation, sustainability, urban systems and atmospheric sciences. Beyond these interdisciplinary strengths, a key differentiator for Georgia Tech is its ability to collaborate with industry.

"One of the things that industry respects about us is that we not only develop the fundamental science, advancing our mission as an education institution, but we also tackle the tough applied problems that they face today," he said. "We are building strong linkages to leverage our strengths to build on the science and engineering base we already have."

The Strategic Energy Institute is playing a vital national and international leadership role in developing energy solutions and transitioning them to the marketplace, said Steve Cross, Georgia Tech's executive vice president for research.

"Energy cuts across almost everything we do as a society, affecting national security, the economy, our environment and quality of life," Cross said. "Through the Strategic Energy Institute, Georgia Tech is bringing its considerable resources to bear on energy challenges, in collaboration with partners in industry and government."

Lieuwen, who also has a faculty appointment in Georgia Tech's George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech in 1999. He specializes in low-emissions combustion and energy systems.

"I get to make fire and to make noise for a living, which is a lot of fun," he admitted. "A lot of what I do is to focus on combustion as applied to gas turbine systems, which are important for power generation facilities as well as aircraft engines."

Lieuwen emphasizes that human behavior — as expressed in policy and sustainability issues — is a key part of energy solutions.

"My natural inclination as an engineer is to look for an engineering solution — such as higher efficiency — to an energy problem," he said. "But decisions people make about energy play a key role in affecting issues such as air quality. We need advanced technology for that, but we also need to address the human side of that."

In addition to leading his own research program, Lieuwen has been part of planning Georgia Tech's new Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions (CNES) Building, which will serve as the headquarters for the Strategic Energy Institute when the building opens this fall. Lieuwen has also served on the sustainable energy task force, a strategic initiative that focused on charting a new course for Georgia Tech's energy programs.

Beyond his appreciation for the outdoors, Lieuwen is a self-proclaimed "soccer dad" who has four daughters ranging in age from 18 months to 11 years.

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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu); Abby Robinson (404-385-3364)(abby@innovate.gatech.edu) or Kirk Englehardt (404-894-6015)(kirk.englehardt@comm.gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

During the April 25 event in the Global Learning Center, the Strategic Plan Implementation Steering Committee heard from the co-chairs of 10 different projects, who reported on the progress of the past nine months and offered a set of near- and long-term recommendations for moving beyond talk and into action.

Reports mark the end of a phase in each project’s cycle, but not progress toward its realization. The Strategic Plan Implementation Steering Committee will break for the summer and reconvene in the fall. It is expected that additional projects will be added for the group’s consideration. 

Videos for each of the presentations, along with additional project information resources, are available at www.gatech.edu/vision/projects. 

TechArts, a campuswide initiative inspired by Georgia Techs strategic plan, highlights three events during the week. The initiative is co-chaired by Aaron Bobick, professor and chair of Interactive Computing, and Gil Wienberg, associate professor of Music and director of the Music Technology Center.

“With TechArts, our goal is to both push the boundaries of research and innovation in art and technology and to enhance and nurture the creativity of the entire community here at Tech,” Bobick said.

Read on to learn the details of each event:

• Drawn Together, Feb. 13, 7 p.m., Stubbins Studio Gallery. This exhibit is the culmination of a collaboration among digital artists The Open Ended Group and students and faculty from the Center for Music Technology and the College of Architecture. Drawn Together will allow participants to interact with artificial intelligence agents to create unforeseen and original drawings and musical responses. The Open Ended Group’s works for stage, screen, gallery, print and public space have been exhibited around the world. This exhibit is free to the public.
• 2012 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, Feb. 16 to 17, Klaus Advanced Computing Building Atrium. This annual competition will showcase the world’s best new ideas in musicality, design and engineering. “The Guthman competition isn’t only about technology — it is an extraordinary demonstration of engineering and computing,” said College of Architecture Dean Alan Balfour, executive sponsor of the TechArts initiative. Both the reliminary and final performances are free and open to the public. RSVP here.
• Pianist Jade Simmons in Concert, Feb. 18, 8 p.m., Ferst Center. This concert will be the culmination of Simmons’ year-long “ARTech” residency, produced by Ferst Center director George Thompson. She will perform a solo with Collide, which includes saxophonist and electronic musician Jonathan Sanford and percussionist Craig Hauschildt. The program includes Simmons' version of the composition “Bafana,” for four human musicians and Tech’s improvising robotic musician, Shimon, as well as new work created during the residency that features sound collected by Tech students through the Urban Remix mobile app. Tickets for faculty and staff are $14, while student tickets may be purchased for $10. Regularly priced tickets are $28.

The goal for next year is to offer a full-fledged TechArts-sponsored festival that will feature everything from community-based art to professionally commissioned installations that “push the limit of arts and technology,” Weinberg said.

“Art and technology are more entwined than ever before,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “If Georgia Tech intends to define the technological research university of the 21st century, we have to find ways to incorporate the arts into everything we do, from research to our curricula. These events are the first major step that TechArts is taking to accomplish this.”

TechArts, a campuswide initiative inspired by Georgia Tech’s strategic plan, will produce three events during the week. The initiative is co-chaired by Aaron Bobick, professor and chair of Interactive Computing, and Gil Wienberg, associate professor of Music and director of the Music Technology Center.  

“With TechArts, our goal is to both push the boundaries of research and innovation at the boundary between art and technology and to enhance and nurture the creativity of the entire community here at Tech,” Bobick said.

Read on to learn the details of each event:

• Drawn Together, Feb. 13, 7 p.m., Stubbins Studio Gallery, College of Architecture. This exhibit is the culmination of a collaboration among digital artists The Open Ended Group and students and faculty from the Center for Music Technology and the College of Architecture. Drawn Together will allow participants to interact with artificial intelligence agents to create unforeseen and original drawings and musical responses. The Open Ended Group’s works for stage, screen, gallery, print and public space have been exhibited around the world. This exhibit is free to the public.

• 2012 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, Feb. 16 to 17, Klaus Advanced Computing Building Atrium. This annual competition will showcase the world’s best new ideas in musicality, design and engineering. “The Guthman competition isn’t only about technology — it is an extraordinary demonstration of engineering and computing,” said College of Architecture Dean Alan Balfour, executive sponsor of the TechArts initiative. Both the preliminary and final performances are free and open to the public. RSVP here.
• Pianist Jade Simmons in Concert, Feb. 18, 8 p.m., Ferst Center. This concert will be the culmination of Simmons’ residency at the Ferst Center. She will perform a piece of musical art with Collide, which includes saxophonist and electronic musician Jonathan Sanford and percussionist and composer David Skidmore. Simmons will also play her own version of the composition “Bafana,” which is for four human musicians and Georgia Tech’s improvising robotic musician, Shimon. Tickets for faculty and staff are $14, while student tickets may be purchased for $10. Regularly priced tickets are $28.

The goal for next year is to offer a full-fledged TechArts-sponsored festival that will feature everything from community-based art to professionally commissioned installations that “push the limit of arts and technology,” Weinberg said.

“Art and technology are more entwined than ever before,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “If Georgia Tech intends to define the technological research university of the 21st century, we have to find ways to incorporate the arts into everything we do, from research to our curricula. These events are the first major step that TechArts is taking to accomplish this.”

Co-chairs for 11 of the 16 projects in active development were present for the Jan. 23 event, each providing a broad overview of the challenge as well as some preliminary recommendations for advancement on a range of subjects that include undergraduate education, technology transfer and campus culture. Active projects were selected from more than 130 white papers that were submitted in response to Tech’s 25-year strategic plan.

“When you consider the number of projects and the number of people involved in each one, you begin to notice the significant percentage of our faculty and staff who are engaged and invested in bringing our strategic plan to life,” Provost Rafael L. Bras observed. “It is very encouraging to see the vast representation from our community planning for Georgia Tech’s future.”

Formed and charged last August, the Strategic Plan Implementation Steering Committee is comprised of faculty, staff and students, each of whom is assigned as a liaison to one of the projects under development. Each was on hand, together with members of the senior leadership team, to listen to the presentations and prompt some early discussion.

“The opportunity for the steering committee to hear the progress of individual teams in a concentrated, one-day session was most valuable since it allowed potential for inter-team collaboration or perhaps even consolidation opportunities to be explored,” said School of Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor David Frost, a member of the Strategic Plan Implementation Steering Committee. “Many of the teams focused on developing just the vision and framework for their project at this stage and appropriately did not get buried in details of resources needed.”

Several presentations related to what Bras referred to as “the concept of how [Georgia Tech] educates the student.” Of these, Frost noted substantial student involvement during the preliminary phase.

“Initial teams were made up of predominantly faculty/staff members, but teams either added student members to the team or utilized approaches to garner significant student input into team activities,” he said. “This was a refreshing development since it clearly showed a desire to be connected to a major stakeholder group.”

The steering committee will continue to provide feedback and support to project teams during the next few months as co-chairs refine their proposals for an April 25 event, during which they will submit final action plans.

To review active projects and presentations, click here.

“I think some people have concerns about a degree program where students play a major role in designing the curricula, because they think students will be unsupervised and the degree program won’t be as rigorous,” said Richard Barke, chair of the committee. “But what we’re looking to create is a program that offers flexibility within certain constraints and still emphasizes a challenging curriculum.”  

The logic behind the X degree — which was originally known as the “X-College” — is that it would serve a small group of students interested in a unique educational experience and who would excel in a degree program that didn’t restrict them to one major’s requirements.

“This program would be designed for those few students who have had five different majors and still haven’t found the ‘right’ combination of learning opportunities — not students who are looking for an easy way out of taking certain classes,” Barke said. “The program will seek students who are highly motivated to be creative and ‘unboxable.’”

The committee is focusing on the following design principles, which will serve as the foundation for the degree:

• It will be flexible. Students will have a hand in designing their own curricula but will be supervised every step of the way by faculty members.
• It will encourage greater faculty-student interaction and require students to share their ideas and innovations with other students and external communities.
• It will be rigorous. “We want employers and graduate schools to continue seeing Georgia Tech graduates as some of the top in the nation,” Barke said. “But our definition of what constitutes a ‘rigorous’ program may need to evolve.”
• It will be assessment-friendly. The program will rely on constant feedback from students and faculty members, and eventually employers, regarding which aspects of the program are working and which aren’t, so it needs to have assessable objectives.
• It will be innovative. “This program needs to be agile,” Barke said. “It should regularly evolve based on creative ideas from students and faculty, and even employers.”

“For some time, our students have asked the administration to offer some kind of self-directed learning options,” said Provost Rafael L. Bras. “The X degree concept will complement existing degree programs to reflect the rigor of a Georgia Tech education while preparing students for creative careers.”  

In the weeks to come, the committee will be submitting a draft proposal to Tech’s colleges and schools and encourages each unit to share ideas and feedback.

For more information, contact Barke.

To guide the institutional efforts going forward, a newly formed Strategic Plan Implementation Steering Committee has been charged with overseeing the implementation of the current plan-related projects, such as those mentioned above, as well as future projects.

“This committee will ensure that we stay on track to achieving the strategic plan’s vision of Georgia Tech defining the technological research university of the 21st century,” added Steve Cross, executive vice president for research.   

The standing committee reports directly to President G. P. “Bud” Peterson and will be co-chaired by Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs; Cross; and Steve Swant, executive vice president for Administration and Finance. The group includes the following members from across campus:

• Sandi Bramblett, executive director, Institutional Research and Decision Support

• Hugh Crawford, associate professor, Ivan Allen College

• Steven French, professor, College of Architecture

• David Frost, director, Georgia Tech- Savannah

• Charles Isbell, associate dean, School of Interactive Computing

• Norman Marsolan, director, Institute of Paper Science and Technology

• David McDowell, Regents’ Professor, School of Mechanical Engineering

• Pat McKenna, associate vice president, Legal Affairs and Risk Management

• Julie Swann, associate professor, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering

• Lisa Sills, principal research scientist, Georgia Tech Research Institute

• John Stein, dean of students

• Chet Warzynski, executive director of Organizational Development (ex-officio)

• Michael Warden, vice president of Communications and Marketing (ex-officio)

During the group’s initial meeting on July 29, co-chairs outlined responsibilities for the team including ensuring that the strategic plan’s vision, mission and goals tiatives, overseeing and guiding project leaders and teams in developing implementation plans, and evaluating and communicating accomplishments and progress to the campus.  

“Implementing the strategic initiatives the campus community has adopted will further Tech’s role as transformational leaders,” Bras said.

The co-chairs have encouraged the group to think big.

“We need to be smart and realize that we do have limited financial resources,” Swant said. “However, we have to think about the big picture. Ten years ago, we put forth a $1.2 billion capital plan. When we initially shopped it, people laughed. Now, because of that plan, we have Tech Square and the Bio quad. We have accomplished everything in that plan, and then some.”

The partnership stems from one of the 10 institutional strategic initiatives, set forth last year, that grew out of Tech’s new strategic plan.  

“During the strategic planning process, one issue that kept coming to the forefront was the connection between technology and law,” said Marie Thursby, co-chair of the initiative’s task force. “Law is not part of Tech’s core mission, but it plays a large role in the development and commercialization of technology. We have already built a strong relationship with Emory, so exploring the expansion of our partnership in these areas became a priority.”

A task force that includes four Tech members and four Emory members was formed to research a potential law/technology degree program. Tech team members include Thursby, professor in the College of Management; Mark Allen, Regents’ Professor and executive director for the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology; Ty Herrington, professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture; and Bruce Stiftel, chair of the School of City and Regional Planning.

The group met several times last spring to discuss potential degree programs and hopes to provide a formal proposal to senior leadership at both institutions by the end of fall semester.

“We have focused on programs at the graduate level but will continue to investigate the possibility of some joint bachelor of science/juris master or juris doctor programs,” Thursby said.

For more information, contact Lynn Durham, assistant vice president.

This is the logic behind the new First Day Lecture initiative being launched the week of Aug. 22. The initiative is just one of several projects that the Student Government Association (SGA) has in the works to improve student-faculty relationships, including the new Student-Faculty Expectations Agreement.

“We were trying to find a way to foster a conversation in the classroom among faculty and students,” said Undergraduate Student Body Vice President Austen Edwards, who helped develop the initiative. “And doing this can really help build the classroom culture.”

There are no instructions on what to say and the initiative is not mandatory — faculty members are simply encouraged to take time on the first day of class to share a bit about their research, experience and anything else they feel inclined to tell students.

The idea, which goes hand-in-hand with strategic plan Goal 1 relating to increasing faculty-student interaction, originated from conversations among the Student Advisory Board for Undergraduate Research, the SGA Academic Affairs Team and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Student Advisory Board about ways to facilitate student-faculty interaction.

John Tone, associate dean of Ivan Allen College, was approached by the college’s student advisory board, which wanted to pilot the idea at the college last spring.

“The students knew that faculty members were doing research, but they didn’t always know what it was,” he said. “They thought it would be beneficial for the faculty members to tell a little bit about themselves when classes started, which might lead to opportunities to work with faculty on research projects.”

Since the pilot, Tone has heard from students whose professors took the time to share a little about themselves on the first day of spring classes.

“Several students said that this introduction actually led to them feeling more connected in class,” Tone added.  

Email Tone your questions.

“At Georgia Tech, we recognize that all accomplishments comethrough people,” said Scott Morris, associate vice president of HumanResources. “We are so pleased to be recognized for our efforts to support anddevelop an outstanding workforce.”

Georgia Tech was recognized in four out of twelvecategories: confidence in senior leadership; job satisfaction; facilities,workspace and security; and work/life balance.

The results, released in The Chronicle’s fourth annualreport on the academic workplace, are based on a survey of approximately 44,000people at 310 institutions, including 245 four-year colleges. Honor Rollrecognition for four-year colleges was given to the 10 institutions in eachsize division that were cited most often across all of the recognitioncategories.

For example, relating to the facilities, workspaces andsecurity category, during the past 15 years, Georgia Tech has constructed andrenovated many campus facilities that serve as a vital backdrop for providingan innovative live, learn and work environment, including a significantinvestment in the human and ecological landscape.

The campus has also increased its focus on sustainability, establishingbuilding standards for environmental stewardship, sustainable design and energymanagement and requiring that all building and renovation projects be designedand built to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold standards.

“We are absolutely honored to have been selected for thisrecognition, but we are not content to rest on our laurels,” said Morris. “Ourgoal is to be recognized in each of the twelve dimensions outlined in thesurvey.”

Two other Georgia colleges were included on the 2011 HonorRoll. Brenau University, Gainesville, Ga., was recognized in the small, four-yearcategory, while East Georgia College in Swainsboro, Ga., was recognized in thesmall, two-year category.

According to The Chronicle, the assessment process had twocomponents: a questionnaire about institutional characteristics and afaculty/staff questionnaire about individuals' evaluations of theirinstitutions. The assessment also included an analysis of demographic data andworkplace policies at each participating college or university. Thequestionnaires were administered online in March and April of this year.

Survey respondents were asked to respond to 60 statementsusing a five-point scale, ranging from "strongly agree" to"strongly disagree." They were also asked to rate their satisfactionwith 18 benefits, respond to two open-ended questions, and answer 15demographic questions.

“Great Colleges to Work For” is one of the largest and mostrespected workplace-recognition programs in the country. The Chronicle workedwith ModernThink LLC, a human-resources-consulting firm that has conductednumerous “Best Places to Work” programs involving more than 4,000organizations.

The new programs stem from the findings of an innovation task force, co-chaired by Associate Vice President for Research Ravi Bellamkonda and College of Computing Professor Merrick Furst, that was created to support the strategic plan. The task force recommended a number of transformational changes in the Institute’s approach to innovation, including new or expanded programs designed to provide both education and resources to campus innovators.

“Innovation is one of the Institute’s primary strategic goals, so it’s essential that we provide the Tech community with the support they need to develop and ultimately commercialize their research and ideas,” said Stephen E. Cross, executive vice president for research.  

The new initiatives include:

• Georgia Tech Integrated Program for Startups, GT:IPS:  GT:IPS combines a streamlined licensing program with organized support for faculty and student inventor-entrepreneurs. The program consists of two components: GT:IPS Facilitation and the GT:IPS License. GT:IPS Facilitation is a graduated program of support, information and education for new company founders, while the GT:IPS License offers the same terms to all Georgia Tech startups in the same field and provides the startup with transparency into the Georgia Tech Research Corporation’s (GTRC) licensing processes. This program will accelerate the formation of robust Georgia Tech spin out companies and broader participation in entrepreneurship among faculty and students.

• A new program designed for early stage for-profit, not-for-profit and policy startups that are both internal and external to Georgia Tech will be officially announced soon. Through a competitive application process, the program will offer 12 to 20 startups the opportunity to tap into Georgia Tech’s entrepreneurial expertise and funding support provided through Georgia Tech’s Edison fund and an investment fund managed through Imlay Investments. The pilot program will be co-directed by Merrick Furst and Nina Sawczuk, general manager of the Advanced Technology Development Center. Information on the application process and opportunities to contribute to the investment funds will be available within the next few weeks.

• Bio-impact Commercialization Team (BCT): The BCT is a focused, institutional commitment to translational research in biomedicine. A team with expertise in the bio-medical device space will work closely with faculty members and the venture capital community to facilitate translational research and commercialization. The BCT will focus specifically on translational research and development projects funded by the Wallace Coulter Foundation. This team is part of a larger effort to unify work at Tech and various health care strategic partners.

The new programs will complement the following existing initiatives at Tech:  

• InVenture Prize: The InVenture Prize is an innovation competition where Georgia Tech undergraduate teams create inventions that are judged by a panel of experts. The competition was broadcast live in March 2011 with seven finalist teams competing for more than $30,000 in cash prizes, patent filings funded by GTRC and a “People’s Choice” award, sponsored by NCR Corporation.

• TI:GER: The award-winning TI:GER Program is a partnership between Georgia Tech and Emory University School of Law that brings together PhD, MBA and law students to learn about the challenges of commercializing innovative technologies. As it approaches its 10th anniversary in 2012, TI:GER is now expanding to global entrepreneurship and has become an established part of the entrepreneurial education of graduate students on both campuses.
• Business PlanCompetition (BPC):Operated by the College of Management and the Institute for Leadership andEntrepreneurship (ILE), this annual competition marks its11th year fostering entrepreneurship among Georgia Tech students and recentalumni. Sinceits inception, more than 650 participants have received approximately $570,000in cash and services. Each year several teams launch companies to taketheir product concepts to the market. Eight of the past winning teams have beenaccepted into ATDC. 
•  Ideas to SERVE(I2S): I2S is a competition ofideas where creativity, imagination and the use of technology are appliedinnovatively to solve community and social issues and sustain theenvironment.  Started as a specialtytrack of the BPC in 2009, I2S has quickly grown into a separate eventcontributing to Georgia Tech’s portfolio of programs fostering entrepreneurship.The program is open to Georgia Tech students and recent alumni.

• University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP): The UIDP is an activity of the National Academies that works to demonstrate innovative approaches to research engagement and to improve relationships with private industry for research and commercialization of inventions. Associate Vice President for Research Jilda Garton serves as the president of the UIDP.

• Georgia Tech Fund for Innovation in Research and Education (GT FIRE): GT FIRE aims to facilitate planning for large extramural proposals — those that are of strategic value to the Institute and have more than $500,000 in direct costs per year — and to provide support for feasibility studies of transformative ideas in research and/or education. Faculty submitted 42 transformative proposals this spring, of which three research-related ideas and four education-related ideas were selected for funding.

• Technology and Law: Georgia Tech is engaged with the Georgia State University College of Law’s Center for Law, Health and Society and its Intellectual Property Advisory Board in the analysis of policy at the intersection of law and technology, particularly in emerging healthcare digital technologies. Ivan Allen College Associate Professor Roberta M. Berry leads the collaboration for Georgia Tech.

• Georgia Tech VentureLab: This program provides comprehensive assistance to faculty members, research staff members and graduate students who want to form startup companies to commercialize the technology innovations they have developed. As a one-stop center for technology commercialization, VentureLab provides a clear pathway from laboratory innovation to the commercial market. VentureLab specialists help transform innovations into early-stage companies by assisting in business plan development, connecting the innovators with experienced entrepreneurs, locating sources of early-stage financing and preparing the new companies for the business world. The program has fostered, on average, one new spin out each month over the last three years.
• GT Edison Fund: Making small investments into very early-stage technology startups that have a strong connection to Georgia Tech, this fund makes use of charitable contributions targeted by alumni and friends of the Institute.

“While each existing center will continue to be responsible for its own specific programs, IEN will provide a single point of entry for industry and government organizations that seek to leverage Georgia Tech’s intellectual capabilities and a projection point for greater thought leadership in this significant research domain,” Cross said. “From a practical standpoint, we can also maximize cost efficiencies by sharing equipment and facilities, while more effectively utilizing current personnel to facilitate more rapid expansion of the research.”

The IEN will be led by Executive Director Mark Allen. Under his leadership, the new center will focus on integrating existing center personnel and equipment into the Marcus Nanotechnology Building and other nearby spaces.  

According to Cross, IEN builds on the vision and leadership established by Nanotechnology Research Center Director James Meindl, who has positioned Georgia Tech as a global leader in this area.

“Georgia Tech applauds his dedicated leadership and insight, which will both play a key role in the Institute’s renewal of related NSF-funded programs,” Cross said.

Patterned after the highly successful Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, which is comprised of 15 different research centers, IEN will include the following centers and research programs:

• Center for Compound Semiconductors
• Center for MEMS and Microsystems Technologies
• Georgia Electronic Design Center
• Georgia Tech Quantum Institute
• Georgia Tech Research Institute’s research in microelectronics and nanotechnology
• Interconnect Focus Center
• Interconnect and Packaging Center

• MaterialsResearch Science and Engineering Center (Epitaxial Graphene)

• Microelectronics Research Center
• Microsystems Packaging Research Center
• University Center of Excellence for Photovoltaics Research and Education

“Our bold aspiration is to develop a world-renowned epicenter for electronics, nanotechnology and related materials research,” Cross added.

Tech students have long had the ability to register forclasses at other area colleges through the Atlanta Regional Council for HigherEducation (ARCHE). This group is comprised of a host of area colleges anduniversities and allows students to take classes not offered at Tech that willhelp them reach their academic or career goals. Senior Vice Provost Anderson D. Smithhopes that with both presidents promoting cross-registration at theirrespective institutions, it will be easier for students to identify courses ofinterest that would not otherwise be available to them. 

“This is about strengthening the relationship between Emoryand Georgia Tech, and it makes sense since we both attract outstanding, high-quality students,” Smith said. He also noted that because Tech already providestransportation to Emory with a shuttle every two hours, it makes sense forstudents enrolling in courses outside of Georgia Tech to do so at Emory.

Cross-registration is open only to junior, senior andgraduate students. Students may only takecourses at Emory that are not offered at Tech during the specific term forwhich they’re registering. Full instructions for cross-registration areavailable from the Office of the Registrar; Emory also makes itscross-registration rules available online.

Students may choose from a variety of Emory courses ontopics such as global health, religion, photography or drama, and can peruseEmory’s course catalog online. Academic advisors can assist students indetermining which courses qualify and how cross-registration would fit intotheir academic timelines.

Continued and enhanced partnership with Emory fits into Georgia Tech's strategic plan as it encourages collaboration with learners outside of Tech and enriches the student experience — a strategy of the plan's first goal to be among the most highly respected technology-focused learning institutions in the world.

The new eProcurement system, BuzzMart, will go live on Feb. 21, replacing Tech’s PeopleSoft campus requisition.

“The shift to BuzzMart, which has been in the planning stage for more than a year, is consistent with goal five in the Institute’s strategic plan,” said Rosalind Meyers, vice president of campus services. “BuzzMart will streamline the procurement and payment process, eliminate paperwork and allow Business Services to focus on value-added, strategic activities rather than transactional activities.”

The new system will offer the following benefits:

• 24/7 Internet-based access
• One-stop shopping experience
• Real-time processing
• Student and affiliate access
• Electronic approval and workflow
• No end-of-the-month reconciliation or invoices to organize

“From the user point of view, it’s all about customer service,” Meyers said. “BuzzMart will get an order placed faster, delivered faster, eliminate the excess paperwork that the PCard requires and it can be accessed from any computer.”

When the system is launched, many of the top Tech vendors, including Staples and Hewlett Packard, will be featured in BuzzMart as catalog suppliers. The prices in the catalogs reflect Tech’s negotiated rates, and additional vendor catalogs will be introduced over time.
Purchasers will now be designated one of four roles.

“Shoppers” can access BuzzMart and add items to a shopping cart. “Requesters” are responsible for reviewing cart contents and entering accounting information. Requesters are allowed to self-approve orders that are less than $3,000. All others must be approved by the “spend authority approver” and/or a “financial approver.”    

Currently, the system is being piloted by Housing and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  

“BuzzMart gets you the goods and services in a more efficient, effective manner. The ability to generate custom reports far exceeds the previous system,” said Bob Canada, the leader for the Housing Department pilot. “It will be the one-stop shopping system.”

Employees must go through training to access BuzzMart. Training will be based on the four roles. Face-to-face training is available for all roles, while on-demand, Web-based training is also available for shoppers and spend authority approvers.

Training is ongoing and will be incorporated into the administrative system’s training schedule as a regular offering after the system is in production.

This program teaches Georgia Tech graduate studentsto be strong leaders who can readily communicate their research agendas beyondthe pragmatics of scientific techniques and experimental outcomes.

So far, 16 students have completed the training andthis year, 15 students are enrolled.

 “Ultimately success is dependent not just ontechnical skills, but also one’s ability to lead by setting the agenda andhaving the self-confidence to execute at a high level,” said Professor ofBiomedical Engineering Ravi Bellamkonda who conceived the program in 2008 aspart of an National Institutes of Health T32 Training Grant.

The program consists of an off-campus, followed byseven mentored meetings where participants explore four central concepts:self-awareness, leadership motivated by service to others, values-basedleadership and the power of the individual as an agent for positivechange. 

Developed in collaboration with WendyNewstetter, director of Learning Sciences for the Coulter Department andProfessor Terry Blum, director of the Institute for Leadership andEntrepreneurship, the Georgia Tech Graduate Leadership Program appears to bethe first program of its kind designed specifically for graduate students inengineering.  

Similar to thePetit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, IPaT will catalyze researchactivities, create new economic development opportunities, and addressimportant societal problems. It will support various college research centersthat collectively pursue transformations in healthcare, education, consumermedia, and other complex human enterprises by integrating advances inhuman-centered computing, architectural and digital design, policy, and systemscience and engineering.

"IPaTwill create an innovation crossroads where Georgia Tech faculty, students,industry partners, government partners and other stakeholders meet toco-innovate, collaborate and pave the road for Georgia Tech research that addressescomplex societal challenges,” stated Cross. “IPaT will focus onengaging the Tech community and our external partners in far-reachingleadership goals through its investment in unique research platforms, throughour living laboratories and datasets, through partnership with Georgia Tech'sEnterprise Innovation Institute (EI2), and through alignment with the many ongoingresearch activities on campus.”

The Institutefor People and Technology will be led by Executive Director Beth Mynatt, Collegeof Computing professor and former director of the GVU Center. Mynatt is arenowned researcher in human-computer interaction, health informatics andubiquitous computing. She is a member of ACM's SIGCHI Academy, is a Sloan andKavli research fellow and serves on Microsoft Research's Technical AdvisoryBoard. She has published more than 100 scientific papers and recently chairedthe CHI 2010 conference, the premier international conference in human-computerinteraction. Prior to joining the faculty in 1998, she was a member of theresearch staff at Xerox PARC, working with the founder of ubiquitous computing,Mark Weiser. Mynatt earned both her master’s and PhD in computer science fromGeorgia Tech.

"I'm thrilled that Beth has agreed to lead the Institute forPeople and Technology," said Cross. "Her vast understanding of the complexitiesinherent in today's social and business institutions and the transformativerole of technology in those enterprises is a critical foundation for this newinstitute. Moreover, her track record in bringing together diverse stakeholdersto accomplish difficult interdisciplinary and translational research and toprovide solutions for today’s challenges is a prized asset for leading aninstitute that will connect so many parts of the Georgia Tech community."

The IPaTleadership team includes Deputy Director Jeff Evans, deputy director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI)Information and Communications Laboratory. In addition to being a graduate ofGeorgia Tech, Evans has been a research engineer for GTRI for more than 20years, directing more than 70 successful external sponsored research programsin networked systems, performance applications and emerging wireless services.He has collaborated extensively across campus in leading and supportingresearch efforts in the Georgia Centers for Advanced Communications Technology (GCATT) and several interdisciplinary centers, establishingnetwork-based platforms and test beds to support a wide range of researchefforts. Evans will continue the development of technology convergence testbeds for IPaT, and his leadership will promote a broad set of researchopportunities for a diverse group of government and industry interactions withGeorgia Tech.

Ron Hutchins(OIT), Bill Rouse (ISyE/COC), and Renu Kulkarni (GTRI/EI2) will also play importantleadership roles. IPaT will be supported by EI2’s Strategic Partners Office.

IPaT willbring together many notable, cutting-edge and renowned research activities,including: 

• the Health Systems Institute;
• the Tennenbaum Institute;
• the College of Computing’s GVU Center;
• the College of Architecture’s Center for Music Technology;
• the College of Architecture's Digital Building Laboratory;
• the Interactive Media Technology Center;
• the Center for 21st Century Universities;
• GTRI’s nationally recognized expertise in applied research and systems development;
• the Ivan Allen Institute for Advanced Studies; and
• Future Media, a campuswide, collaborative initiative focused on transforming the way content is created, distributed and consumed.

 Theseexisting centers represent every college at Georgia Tech as well as GTRI andEI2.

Earlier this month, Provost Rafael L. Bras announced the creation of a committee that will review options and formulate strategies for the creation of an X-College, one of the ideas that sprouted from the yearlong strategic planning process.

“The X-College Initiative grew from the very strong recommendations from students and faculty in the strategic planning process that Georgia Tech needs to increase student-faculty interaction and allow more flexibility in curricula,” said Richard Barke, an associate professor in the School of Public Policy and chair of the X-College planning committee. “For example, the X-College is considering whether to allow students — with strong faculty guidance — to compose programs of study that focus on particular ‘grand challenges’ facing society, using knowledge from a wide range of relevant fields. The committee is investigating how to achieve these goals while balancing disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning, maintaining the traditional rigor of a Tech education, innovating in learning techniques and educational technologies, and respecting the expectations of graduate schools and employers.”

The vision is broader than student-designed degrees, however. An X-College experience should also serve to challenge faculty to experiment with learning techniques, balancing core instruction with problem-based approaches. Other opportunities could lie in developing alternatives to regular courses taught in semester-length blocks.

“For some time, our students have asked the administration to offer some kind of self-directed learning options,” Bras said. “The X-College concept should be developed to reflect the fundamental importance of a rigorous Georgia Tech education, to complement existing degree programs and academic units, and to prepare students for creative careers.”

Committee members include:

• Richard Barke, Public Policy (chair)
• Sabir Khan, Architecture
• Ravi Bellamkonda, Biomedical Engineering
• Colin Potts, Interactive Computing
• Rich DeMillo, Computer Science
• Monica Halka, Honors Program
• Jason Freeman, Music
• David Collard, Chemistry 
• Mike Schatz, Physics
• Stylianos Kavadias, Management
• Becki Grinter, Interactive Computing
• Usha Nair-Reichert, Economics
• Lisa Yaszek, Literature, Communication and Culture
• Bert Bras, Mechanical Engineering
• Ayanna Howard, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Nicholas Robson, undergraduate student
• Rob Parrish, graduate student
• Elliotte Creel, undergraduate student

Earlier this month, Provost Rafael Bras announced the creation of the International Advisory Group, a faculty committee that will serve to support and advise both the provost and the vice provost on issues related to Georgia Tech’s strategy for global engagement.

“In Tech’s strategic plan, a stated goal is the expansion of our global footprint and influence,” said Steve McLaughlin, vice provost for International Initiatives and chair of the advisory group. “Not only will this foster research collaborations and promote economic development both at home and abroad, but also ensure Georgia Tech graduates good global citizens who are prepared to assume leadership positions with multinational institutions.”

The International Advisory Group will meet at least once per quarter with the agenda centered on pending issues and advice/assistance in shaping our global engagement. Immediate tasks for this group include finalizing Tech’s Global Strategic Plan and developing a set of guidelines for reviewing Institute-level opportunities for international partnership.

Inaugural members of the International Advisory Group include:

• Godfried Augenbroe, Architecture 
• Vicki Birchfield, International Affairs 
• Aaron Bobick, Interactive Computing 
• John-Paul Clarke, Aerospace Engineering 
• Andrei Fedorov, Mechanical Engineering 
• Merrick Furst, Computer Science 
• Larry Jacobs, College of Engineering 
• Seth Marder, Chemistry and Biochemistry 
• John McIntyre, Management 
• John Pappolymerou, Electrical and Computer Engineering

The center, which will be based in the College of Computing but will include faculty from Management, Public Policy and Industrial Systems & Engineering, will focus on the role of disruptive technologies like social networking and innovations like open courseware, serving as a living laboratory  for testing new educational ideas.

“While technology is not the only enabler of change in higher education, it is on the critical path to all foreseeable change,” said DeMillo, who served as College of Computing dean from 2002-2008 and now is a Distinguished Professor in the colleges of Computing and Management. “Georgia Tech is among the largest and most influential engineering and technological universities in the world, and we have the opportunity to be leaders in examining how disruptive technology will revolutionize undergraduate education. The goal is to use the output of this living laboratory to drive innovative, diverse—perhaps competing—visions of higher education in the 21st century.”

While serving as dean, DeMillo oversaw the overhaul in the College of Computing’s undergraduate computer science curriculum, moving to a contextual, specialized approach called Threads that has been hailed as a groundbreaking development in higher education. The new center, dubbed “C21U,” will not only explore technological opportunities for innovation, it will examine some of academia’s long-held assumptions about knowledge and skill delivery. Reimagining those models, DeMillo said, could mean the difference between institutional success and failure in an educational environment that yields market share each year to nontraditional and international competitors.

“We’ve got to figure out how to scale a Georgia Tech education to a much larger population of students while retaining every bit of the intellectual rigor that makes that experience what it is,” said Steve Cross, Executive Vice President for Research. “The last decade has shown us that different models of education delivery can not only work but succeed. Given our nature and history as a technological university that responds extremely well to the shifting demands of industry, it’s appropriate that Georgia Tech help lead the way toward a thriving system of higher education in the 21st century.”

DeMillo added that the center hopes to develop a spirit of experimentation among its faculty affiliates, challenging them to innovate in curricular design while working with national and international groups also engaged with higher education reform. First on the center’s agenda is developing a seed grant program that will identify and provide funds for promising early proposals.

“Rich DeMillo is the perfect choice to lead this center because he has a passion for education and he understands that in today’s environment—both in technology and in education—you have to innovate or you will get left far behind,” said Zvi Galil, John P. Imlay Jr. Dean of Computing. “Georgia Tech has some of the best researchers and innovators in the world. This center will focus some of that creative energy on finding the most effective ways to leverage new technological tools to provide the best possible education to the greatest number of students.”

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About the Georgia Tech College of Computing
The Georgia Tech College of Computing is a national leader in the creation of real-world computing breakthroughs that drive social and scientific progress. With its graduate program ranked 10th nationally by U.S. News and World Report, the College’s unconventional approach to education is defining the new face of computing by expanding the horizons of traditional computer science students through interdisciplinary collaboration and a focus on human centered solutions. For more information about the Georgia Tech College of Computing, its academic divisions and research centers, please visit http://www.cc.gatech.edu.

Contacts
Michael Terrazas
Interim Director of Communications
College of Computing at Georgia Tech
mterraza@cc.gatech.edu
404-245-0707

The Lafayette Institute will be built at Georgia Tech-Lorraine in Metz, which is at the forefront of global engineering education and research.

At 2 p.m. on Nov. 30 in the Bill Moore Student Success Center, Georgia Tech leaders and a delegation of French officials will sign the agreement creating the Lafayette Institute. The event is part of the “France-Atlanta 2010: Together Towards Innovation” series running now through Dec. 12 at Georgia Tech and around the city.

“By providing our industrial partners and academic research laboratories access to state-of-the-art facilities, we will be creating an environment where solutions to global challenges, ranging from energy to medical technology, can be developed,” said Georgia Tech President G.P. “Bud” Peterson. “This Institute alsounderscores Georgia Tech’s commitment to expand our global partnerships.”

French authorities will finance 23 million euros, roughly $31 million in American money, to create the Lafayette Institute. The institute will provide access to state-of-the-art nanofabrication facilities for optoelectronics, technology transfer and commercialization services. It will focus on technologies at the intersection of materials, optics, photonics, electronics and nanotechnology.

“This European innovation hub will strengthen Georgia’s global footprint in technological innovation and serve as a link between research laboratories and industry, where technological solutions andprototypes can be developed rapidly to stimulate economic development,” said Yves Berthelot, president of Georgia Tech-Lorraine.

Established in 1990, Georgia Tech-Lorraine offers global research and internship opportunities, and year-round undergraduate, master’s and doctoral programs. More than 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students have attended Georgia Tech-Lorraine.

Georgia Tech has celebrated the 20th anniversary of Georgia Tech-Lorraine inMetz, France and Atlanta throughout 2010.  

To conclude the commemoration, Georgia Tech is hosting nine of the 20 events in “France-Atlanta2010: Together Towards Innovation,” a series of events focused on French and U.S. collaborations in four major areas: science, business, culture andhumanitarianism.

“France-Atlanta: 2010 Together Towards Innovation” is co-sponsored by the Consulate General of France in Atlanta and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The Georgia Tech events include scientific symposiums such as “Translational Treatment forCardiovascular Disease,” “Photonics, Materials, Nanotechnology, Applied Robotics” and “Haiti 2010;” business workshops such as “Bridging the Atlantic: Leveraging Workforce and Intellectual Capital for International Business Success,” “Investing in France – Focus on Lorraine” and“Commercializing Medical Devices.”

Tech will also host cultural events such as “Sonic Generator Presents Music of IRCAM with Guest Composer Philippe Leroux” and “Paris-Atlanta: Grand Plans, Everyday Life,” as well as a humanitarian program on “Bringing Awareness to Haiti ReliefAid.”

Faculty, staff and students are encouraged to attend the events, which are free and open tothe public. For a full list of the events at Georgia Tech, visit, www.global.gatech.edu/france-atlanta.

The co-branded season pass will go on sale September 20 at the Georgia Tech box office.  The Woodruff Arts Center will also host a special open house for Georgia Tech students on September 30 to introduce them to the arts center complex.

“We are delighted to partner with the Woodruff Arts Center in offering Tech students so many opportunities to take advantage of the outstanding arts environment in Atlanta,” said Georgia Tech President G.P.  “Bud” Peterson. “Between the High, the Atlanta Symphony and the Alliance Theatre, Tech students will be able to greatly enrich their college experience as they prepare to become leaders in their communities and good global citizens.”

According to Woodruff Arts Center CEO Joe Bankoff, the expanded relationship with Georgia Tech is a natural expansion of their arts education mission.  “There is a clear and proven connection between involvement in the arts and academic achievement.  At the Woodruff, we are committed to making the arts accessible to students and are thrilled to be partnering with Georgia Tech to provide extensive and inexpensive access to our artistic offerings.”

Georgia Tech students will be able to enjoy an exciting season. The High Museum of Art is currently featuring the Dali: The Late Work exhibition with the Titian and Golden Age of Venetian Painting exhibition opening October 17. The Alliance Theatre has “The Second City: Miracle on 1280 Peachtree Street,” and “Bring it On: The Musical” scheduled, with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra‘s season opening September 23.

Additional details regarding the Georgia Tech – Woodruff season pass include:

• Students will pay $20 at the Georgia Tech box office and receive a ticket voucher that can be redeemed at the Woodruff Arts Center box office for the season pass card.
• Students can reserve a ticket 48 hours in advance of a performance/museum visit for an unlimited number of performances/visits. Students will show their student ID and card at the Woodruff box office to pick up their reserved tickets.
• The pass is good for one ticket per performance/museum visit.
• Students can purchase one companion ticket per performance at a special rate of $12 per ticket in conjunction with each card “purchase.”
• Students’ spouses with Georgia Tech identifications can also purchase a pass for $20.
• The pass is valid through May 31, 2011.

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