Summer 2010: Of Note

Ticker

Candler’s Youth Theological Initiative receives $1 million

Candler School of Theology received a $1 million grant from Lilly Endowment for its Youth Theological Initiative (YTI), a center for research and the theological education of youth and youth ministers. The YTI offers an intensive, residential program of justice-seeking theological education for high schoolers each summer.

Emory’s iTunes U site nears six million mark

Since Emory’s iTunes U (www.itunes.emory.edu) launch in 2008, people around the globe have downloaded nearly six million audio and video tracks from the site—including lectures, special events, and language lessons—at an average of 67,000 tracks a week. The most popular are clips on learning Japanese, the Dalai Lama’s talks, the Life of the Mind lecture series, and Alice Walker events.

Former Georgia Supreme Court Justice joins Board of Trustees

Leah Ward Sears 80L has been elected to the University’s Board of Trustees. Sears was the first woman and the youngest person to sit on the Georgia Supreme Court, serving on the state’s highest court since 1992 and as chief justice from 2005 to 2009. Sears is now a partner at Schiff Hardin and a visiting professor at the University of Georgia School of Law.

Barkley Forum debaters and coach win national honors

Stephen Weil 11C and Ovais Inamullah 11C won the Rex Copeland Award for being the top team of the season at the 2010 National Debate Tournament, and Weil was named top individual debater. Ed Lee, director of debate, received the James J. Unger Award for coaching and the Outstanding Alumnus Award from the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues.

Pulitzer-winning author appointed Cox Professor of Journalism

Hank Klibanoff, a veteran journalist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, has been appointed the James M. Cox Jr. Professor of Journalism. A former editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Klibanoff coauthored The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for history.

Turning vacant spaces into vibrant places

School of Law Professor Frank Alexander is taking his municipal and state-level affordable housing and community development work to the national stage as general counsel and director of policy and research of the Center for Community Progress, a not-for-profit organization charged with reforming policies on vacant and abandoned property throughout the country.

Chimps, like humans, mimic those with prestige

Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have discovered that chimpanzees prefer to follow the example of more experienced, high-status individuals when it comes to solving a problem or adopting a new behavior. “Such prestige-based cultural transmission is a phenomenon shared with humans,” says one of the study’s authors, postdoctoral fellow Victoria Horner 11N.

Getting undergraduates to the lab early in hopes they stay

Emory is one of fifty research universities in the nation to receive a share of $70 million for undergraduate science education from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; the $1.8 million will be used to get students into the lab early in their college careers, says Pat Marsteller, director of the Emory College Center for Science Education, making it more likely they will stay in the sciences.

New VP chosen for Division of Campus Services

Matthew Early, a civil engineer and leader in facilities management, will become vice president for the Division of Campus Services on August 1. Early comes to Emory from Columbia University in New York where he is vice president for facilities and is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Professor of comparative literature, French named AAAS fellow

Robert Woodruff Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and French Shoshana Felman has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “She has explored the links between literature and psychoanalysis, philosophy, theater, women’s studies, Holocaust studies, testimony, trauma, and the law,” Provost Earl Lewis says.

MARBL’s Irish literary collection expands

Irish poet Eamon Grennan has placed his papers—including drafts, lectures, journals, and electronic records—with the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL), joining a collection that contains the papers of W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon. “Being a fellow inhabitant of what I feel is an Irish village in Emory pleases me very much,” Grennan says.

Emory environmental health expert weighs in on the Gulf oil spill

Linda McCauley 79N, dean of Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing and a nationally recognized environmental health researcher, was one of more than a dozen scientists participating in a two-day Institute of Medicine workshop in New Orleans in June exploring the potential short- and long-term health impact of the nation’s worst oil spill.