Vanderbilt University Register: Faculty Staff Notes

FACULTY & STAFF NOTES

APPOINTMENTS

Dale C. Farran, professor of educ ation, director of the Susan Gray School, and Kennedy Center associate director for early childhood research, has been appointed by Mayor Bill Purcell to a three-year term on the Metro Action Commission. This 18-member board has six representatives from the community and oversees the Head Start program as well as other services for low-income families.

Farran

HONORS

Walburga von Raffler-Engel, profe ssor of linguistics, emerita, received a commemorative mention by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The mention came in honor of Raffler-Engel's 19841985 seminar at Vanderbilt called "International Seminar on Cross-Cultural Advertising" in which a professor from the University of Oslo in Norway had been a participant. Raffler-Engel also gave an invited lecture at the University of Turin in Italy recently, and that lecture has been published in the chapter of an Italian-published book. Also, two students at the University of Turin are doing their dissertations on her work.

von Raffler-Engel

PAPERS & PRESENTATIONS

Randolph Blake, Centennial Professor of Psychology and John F. Kennedy Center investigator and senior fellow, was invited to deliver the 2001 Wolfgang Kohler Memorial Lecture at Dartmouth University March 30. The title of his lecture was "Visual Shape from Temporal Structure: A Reincarnation of Common Fate." Kohler was one of the founders of Gestalt Psychology

R. Wilburn Clouse, associate professor of education, and two graduate students, Terry Goodin and Jeff Burgoyne, presented a paper titled "K through 12: Best Practices for Entrepreneurship Education" at the 6th annual Collegiate Entrepreneur of the Southwest Conference in Albuquerque, N.M., on March 30.

Clouse

Douglas P. Hardin, associate professor of mathematics, presented a talk titled "Orthogonal spline wavelets" at the southeastern regional meeting of the Mathematical Society of America, held at Huntington College in Montgomery, Ala., March 2930.

Mike Neamtu, associate professor of mathematics, presented a talk titled "Multivariate B-splines" at the 10th International Conference on Approximation Theory, held in St. Louis, Mo., March 2529.

Guoliang Yu, associate professor of mathematics, presented a talk titled "Coarse geometry, C!=-algebras and the Novikov Conjecture" at the Geometric group theory and C!=-algebras conference held at Penn State University in State College, Penn., March 1518.

Richard M. Zaner, Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor of Medical Ethics, presented a public lecture at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, Monday, April 2, titled "Sisyphus Without Knees: Exploring the Self and Self-Other Connections in the Face of Illness and Disability." This lecture was part of the retirement celebration in honor of S. Kay Toombs, associate professor of philosophy at Baylor. Zaner presented another paper at Genetic Engineering and the Future of Human Nature, a conference held April 57 in Scranton, Penn., hosted by the University of Scranton and the Northeast Regional Cancer Institute and funded by a Department of Energy grant. The lecture was titled "Vision and Re-visions: Life and the Accident of Birth."

Zaner

Items for the Faculty and Staff Notes column should be sent to Tara S. Donahueby campus mail to 708 Baker Building, by e-mail to tara.s.donahue@vanderbilt.edu or by fax to 343-7313.