Grain & Chaff

Corporate support

Surita R. Bhatia, assistant professor of Chemical Engineering, is among the recipients of the 2002 3M Nontenured Faculty Awards. The awards, sponsored by the 3M Corporation, are intended to provide financial support to nontenured faculty in selected fields and to encourage recipients to develop an awareness of 3M research. Award recipients are nominated by 3M personnel and selected based on the quality and pertinence of their research programs. The program will provide unrestricted funds of $15,000 per year for up to three years for Bhatia's research in "Complex Fluids and Associative Hydrogels for Applications in Personal Care, Coatings, Cell Encapsulation, and Drug Delivery."

Poster prize

The Biophysical Society recently honored Renuka Sivendran, a doctoral student in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, for an outstanding poster presentation during the organization's annual meeting in San Francisco. Posters by Sivendran and 11 other graduate students from the U.S., Canada and Chile were selected from a field of 60 to receive the Student Research Achievement Awards.

Sounds like that guy on the radio

Callers to the Pelham home of Rachel Bouvier may soon be hearing the voice of National Public Radio newscaster Carl Kasel on the Economics Ph.D. student's answering machine. Bouvier won the custom recording for correctly completing the limerick challenge on NPR's "Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me!" last weekend.

Extra points

Two weeks ago as campus officials outlined plans to scrap seven teams at the end of the academic year, U.S. News and World Report's first-ever guide to top collegiate sports programs listed the campus among the top 20 in the nation. The guide's Honor Roll evaluated schools on several critieria, including gender equity, win-loss records, graduation rates for athletes and the number of sports offered. Schools sanctioned by the NCAA for major infractions during the past 10 years were excluded from the list. Other Honor Roll schools included Boston College, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Lehigh, Penn State, Princeton, Stanford, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New Hampshire, Utah and Villanova. UMass ranked third among public institutions in the number of sports offered. Ohio State offers 37 and Rutgers has 30, while Penn State and UMass currently have 29. Best place to find a team sport: Harvard, with a grand total of 41 intercollegiate teams.