Grain & Chaff

Something to say

Mary Deane Sorcinelli, associate provost for Faculty Development and director of the Center For Teaching, was a keynote speaker at the Nineteenth Annual Academic Chairpersons Conference on "The Changing Role of Department Chairs" held Feb. 6 in Orlando. More than 300 chairpersons from colleges and universities across the country attended the conference, which also featured Richard Chait, professor of higher education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Strength in numbers

Professor Ivan Mirkovic and assistant professor Tom Braden of Mathematics and Statistics last month participated in special events at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, Calif. They were joined by two visiting researchers collaborating with Mirkovic: Maxim Vybornov, holder of a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship, and Michael Finkelberg, a professor at the Independent University of Moscow. All of them have interests in algebraic geometry and representation theory related to special programs and workshops at this year's institute. Mirkovic gave a talk on "Beilinson-Bernstein localization of Lie algebra modules in positive characteristic" as part of the longer program on Infinite-Dimensional Algebras and Mathematical Physics.

And the winner is...

Chemical Engineering professor Phillip Westmoreland has been selected to receive the American Society for Engineering Education's (ASEE) William H. Corcoran Award for his article "Chemistry and Life Sciences in a New Vision of Chemical Engineering," published last fall in Chemical Engineering Education. The award is sponsored by Bayer Corporation and goes to the author of the most outstanding article published in the journal each year. Westmoreland will receive the award at the ASEE meeting in Montreal in June.