Campus Voices: Suma Datta | TAMUtimes

Many of you read that we recently lost one of our original Mercury Seven astronauts and national Space heroes, Scott Carpenter, who was also one of the founders and ongoing supporters of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation (ASF). Since 1986, ASF has awarded more than $3.7 million in scholarships and now awards 28 scholarships annually of $10,000 each to outstanding college students who exhibit motivation, imagination, and exceptional performance in science and technology fields. These scholarships go to a select group of institutions that include MIT, Georgia Tech, and others, as well as Texas A&M, based on these institutions' initiative, creativity, and excellence in the fields of science, mathematics, and engineering.

For the first time in its history, AFS has awarded two scholarships to the same institution in a single award year-Texas A&M University. I am thrilled to congratulate both of our outstanding nominees, and winners, on this honor: Dillon Amaya '14, majoring in meteorology and Amanda Couch '14, majoring in electrical engineering. One is already a gifted scientist and the other, a gifted engineer. Both have demonstrated a passion for solving complex research problems.

Dillon Amaya says he had a love of science from childhood and a curiosity to "understand how the world works." By the time he arrived at Texas A&M, he knew he wanted a hands-on approach to his field and was inspired to focus on understanding, predicting, and publicizing the immense implications of global climate change. His drive and curiosity to explain the future by investigating the past began in an Oceanography research laboratory on campus that led him to an internship in Alaska, then out onto the open ocean on a research vessel. Last year, Dillon presented his research and defended his work at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Amanda Couch's childhood dreams of superpowers and Space battles have matured into a fascination with communication-both in Space and to local communities, to inspire others with the enormous potential of applied electronics. Her journey has taken her from the Texas A&M Electromagnetics and Microwaves Laboratory to high school engineering summer camps and an internship with Boeing. Currently she is developing a reconfigurable antenna and measurement system for educational purposes, intended for use in a high school physics or engineering setting, and presented on her work last year at a symposium of the Institute of Electronics and Electronics Engineers.

Both of these exceptional students have combined intellectual drive and talent with unique opportunities for undergraduate research at Texas A&M, and found a lifetime calling, one that we hope will lead them to become established as visionaries of their fields and improve the world for all of us. Both will be recognized for these accomplishments next week with their scholarship presentations from the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.

The program will be an occasion to hear from one of our leaders in the Space industry, Kennedy Space Center Director Robert Cabana, a veteran of four space shuttle missions that included the first assembly mission for the International Space Station. (If you haven't seen the movie Gravity yet, I encourage you to do so and then come to hear from someone who has actually been in Space!) The program is open to the campus community and public, and is free of charge, thanks to sponsorship by the ASF, Honors and Undergraduate Research, and the Office of the Provost.

Programs like this bring to the forefront the academic scholarship of our students and the value of opportunities for them at an institution like ours through internships, international experiences, research with renowned faculty, and service to the community at large.

I hope you will join me on October 28!

Tags: ASF, Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, astronauts, research, students, Suma Datta

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Source: Tamu

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What Constitutes Merit?

Christine Ortiz
Dean for Graduate Education

What Constitutes Merit?

Dear Students:

I recently attended the 2013 MIT Institute Diversity Summit which focused on the topic of "Meritocracy and Inclusion at MIT: Principles or Practices?" At the Summit, we were reminded that MIT has been an institution committed to the ideal of a meritocracy and inclusion from its inception. In fact, William Barton Rogers, the founder of MIT, wrote in 1862 in the original proposal to create MIT―Objects and Plan of an Institute of Technology―

"The limited and special education which our plan proposes, would, we hope, fall within the reach of a large number whom the scantiness of time, means, and opportunity would exclude from the great seats of classical and scientific education in the Commonwealth."

Striving for the ideal of a meritocracy compels us to consider the question of what defines merit, as well as how to mitigate unintended bias in the evaluation of merit. Discussions at the Diversity Summit emphasized the importance of maintaining a multidimensional concept of merit to achieve diversity and, correspondingly, the highest possible levels of excellence and creativity. Embracing a multidimensional concept of merit is consistent with a commitment to providing a multidimensional educational experience, where students integrate discipline-specific academic rigor with innovative and enriching non-traditional learning opportunities that develop transferable skills, context and character. I recall a particularly insightful quote from the 2010 report of the Initiative for Faculty Race and Diversity, on which I had the honor to serve:

"To insist on orthodoxy [i.e. narrow, singular definition of excellence] would stifle one of the pillars of MIT which is to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship of ideas."

When considering what constitutes merit, we might begin with the values and mission of MIT, the latter of which emphasizes the generation, dissemination, and advancement of knowledge in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century. Importantly, today we are seeing an increasingly broad array of mechanisms to create, disseminate and advance knowledge, which are often highly discipline-dependent.

For example, in addition to scholarly journal publications and citations, consider the following recent work at MIT:

The list could go on and on. Consider the diversity of these achievements and of the individuals and teams behind them. Clearly, all contribute to MITs mission and excellence, and represent our collective creativity in generating, disseminating and advancing knowledge in diverse and impactful ways. My office, the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education, aims to highlight and recognize publicly the rich diversity of achievements of MIT students; we support an array of content-rich co-curricular activities that facilitate a multidimensional educational experience; we foster inclusiveness through welcoming and dialoguing cross-cultural events and we serve as a caring resource for personal support, mentoring and advising of individual graduate students.

I encourage you to consider what you think constitutes merit at MIT and to write to me your thoughts on this matter directly ( cortiz@mit.edu) or post a comment on my facebook page post at this link: http://bit.ly/ChristineOrtizMerit.

Have a great semester.
Sincerely,
Christine Ortiz
Dean for Graduate Education
Professor of Materials Science and Engineering

Source: Mit

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Woods Lecture Series Presents Nina Tandon

Tissue engineer Nina Tandon will open the 2013-2014 J. James Woods Lectures in the Sciences and Mathematics with a talk called "Body 3.0″ at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 24 in the Atherton Union Reilly Room.

All lectures in the series are free and open to the public without tickets. For more information, call (317) 940-9269.

Tandon believes that the era of engineered tissues-like, for example, a replacement kidney grown in the lab-is just beginning. In this talk, Tandon shows us how we (and our bodies) have lived through most of history (Body 1.0), and then how we evolved into "cyborgs" with implants (such as pacemakers and artificial joints, Body 2.0).

Now, Body 3.0 is all about growing our OWN body parts. For her doctoral thesis, Tandon grew cardiac cells that beat like tiny hearts. In this thrilling and eye-opening talk, she explains the process of growing tissue and transplants, and the future of medical science. With the help of manufacturing and information technology, we are on the verge of being able to grow human tissue-and Tandon is here to walk us through this unbelievably exciting era.

After receiving a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Cooper Union, Tandon spent her early career in telecom (Avaya Labs) and transitioned into biomedical engineering via her Fulbright scholarship in Italy, where she worked on an electronic nose used to "smell" lung cancer. Tandon studied electrical stimulation for cardiac tissue engineering at MIT and Columbia, and now continues her research on electrical stimulation for broader tissue-engineering applications.

Source: Butler

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