Syracuse Views Fall 2024
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Five Syracuse University faculty and staff members will receive the Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence at a campus ceremony and reception in their honor on Monday, April 9.
The 2011-12 Chancellor’s Citation for Excellence honorees are:
The Chancellor’s Citation awards were first presented in 1979 in recognition of outstanding achievement in teaching, scholarship and creative work. Over time, the focus of the awards has changed to reflect new priorities and institutional directions. The emphasis on excellence and outstanding achievement remains unchanged.
Each year, members of the University community are invited to nominate a colleague or co-worker for recognition. A selection committee composed of faculty and staff from across campus reviews the nominations, and award winners are honored each spring. Carmel Nicoletti, part-time instructor in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, has been commissioned this year to create glass bowls for the awardees.
Don Carr
Carr is recognized for both his teaching and collaboration with students and faculty. His professional work within the industrial design industry and his passion for teaching come together to make possible creative collaborations among students, the community and industry partners.
Carr joined the IID faculty in 1995 after working for U.S. and international firms as a corporate industrial designer. He quickly found his niche and took leadership in 1997 as the IID program coordinator, offering a long-term “real world” plan for the program and creating sponsored projects with such corporations as LG Electronics, Welch Allyn, Motorola and Bose.
Carr was one of the first professors to include the Connective Corridor Initiative in his curriculum, integrating it into interdisciplinary class projects. Bus shelters, lighted walkways and signage were conceptual projects created for the .
Extending connections for students internationally, Carr established the SU Abroad London Design Center in 2003. His most recent global venture was for the I-DO six-week workshop at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2011, focusing on design considerations for aging populations.
Among other interdisciplinary efforts, Carr is working as part of a University-wide team to develop a telemedicine hub for outpatients suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He is looking to partner with the Presbyterian Home of Central New York and the Parkinson’s support group of Syracuse in this initiative. Carr also serves as a mentor for the Syracuse Student Sandbox at the Syracuse Tech Garden, helping to accelerate the process of ideation, development and deployment with students. He was also part of the faculty team that created the What’s the Big Idea Class/Idea 2 Start-Up and is currently working on two grants.
Carr’s honors and awards include gold, silver and bronze International Design Excellence Awards from the Industrial Designers Society of America; three Design Distinction Awards from ID magazine; and the American Center for Design’s Beacon Award. He was named one of Design Intelligence’s Most Admired Educators of 2006 and one of ID Magazine’s top 40 international designers in 1995. He was recently named the inaugural recipient of the Continuum + Arthur Pulos Award for collaborative and interdisciplinary work in design education. The Department of Design and the department’s collaborative design laboratory (COLAB) named him an inaugural Senior COLAB Faculty Fellow in 2010.
Steve Davis
Davis focuses on helping students find their passion and purpose in the print journalism industry. He is the department chair for newspaper and online journalism and continues to bring rich professional experience to the Newhouse School from his years as a newsroom writer, manager and editor. Since joining the Newhouse faculty in 1999, Davis has developed long-term strategic goals for the curriculum in print and online journalism and has embraced the Scholarship in Action vision through community engagement.
Davis teaches advanced news reporting and editing classes and was chosen to lead the school’s participation in . Davis also is the winner of two curriculum infusion grants that supported student projects to report on campus issues.
Among Davis’ key contributions is his vision and execution of The Stand . Beginning as a class project, the initiative evolved into a community newspaper produced through collaboration between South Side residents and Newhouse students. This project allowed students to put their reporting and writing skills into practice in the community and served as a catalyst to engage conversations and relationships between SU students and Syracuse residents.
“Professor Davis’ vision for the project did not end with simply creating a media product,” says Ashley Kang, Stand director for the South Side Newspaper Project. “Just looking at the success of the project proves his dedication to finding unique ways to increase the experience of his students—and even other professors’ students—and to work with and benefit the surrounding community.”
The Stand Project reaches out to community members and encourages them to speak out so their voices can be heard on issues of community concern. Davis leads workshops for interested residents, helping them to develop writing and reporting skills.
Davis’s global engagement initiatives include , a student reporting trip to South Africa that created an opportunity for students to use multimedia for storytelling, as well as an opportunity for students and local residents to engage in dialogue and community activities. In addition, Davis serves as a trainer for multimedia storytellers in Liberia through the . This summer, the World Journalism Project continues when Davis takes a group of 10 graduate students to the West Bank in Israel for two weeks in a cooperative project with the Near East Foundation.
A constant innovator and educator, Davis is the author and blogger of . The blog and textbook of the same name are designed for editors whose work is evolving as news and information sharing is constantly changing.
Davis has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists and Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, among other organizations.
Linda Littlejohn
Littlejohn is recognized for her dedication and determination to bring students, faculty and the Syracuse community together. As associate vice president and director of the South Side Initiative, she has engaged an entire community in imagining—and working toward—development and strengthening of local neighborhoods and global connections. Grounded in the West African philosophy of Umbuntu—“I am because we are”—she acknowledges each individual she encounters as an extension of herself.
Littlejohn formulates, coordinates and facilitates projects that address quality of life issues in Syracuse’s southern quadrant. Key components and aims of SSI projects are enduring partnerships between South Side residents and the University, enhanced and sustainable community capacity, and increased neighborhood cohesiveness. To promote such outcomes, Littlejohn collaborates with established community and University entities. To fill a gap in organizational resources, she created and organized SU Faculty for Community Engagement, the Southside Community Coalition and the Black History Preservation Project Team. The Black History Preservation Project Team promotes access to African American historical materials.
Littlejohn was selected as the SU liaison for the South Side Initiative Program in 2005. After this appointment, she began meeting with residents of the South Side several times a week to explore ways in which the University and community could collaborate in revitalizing the neighborhood. Through these meetings, the was born and continues to serve as the partnership that allows the University and the South Side to partner in neighborhood projects.
The SCC has created a communication center, where educational projects have been launched, and a public access technology center, including a bank of computers and community classes and workshops.
The South Africa Meets the South Side Initiative uses digital media to connect community members with residents of Alice, South Africa. Videoconferencing offers opportunities for discussion and a venue for enhancing communication among the African American community in Syracuse and abroad.
Other Southside Initiative projects include the Food Cooperative, annual film festival and the Virtual Community Museum, which highlights the history of African Americans through narrations of their lives as Syracuse residents.
Littlejohn serves as a strong advocate and spokesperson for community initiatives, encouraging local groups and individuals to work with her as pro bono consultants, providing considerable resources to the South Side community.
Karin Ruhlandt
Ruhlandt is recognized for her dedication to her students and faculty colleagues in the chemistry department. She is described by peers as “a renowned scholar, exceptional teacher and synergetic professional.” Her research projects and capacity to receive funding from have strengthened the chemistry department, providing opportunities for graduate students and enhancing the national reputation of the department.
Ruhlandt shares her passion for research in her teaching and with colleagues in the STEM disciplines and is generous with her time and attention to undergraduate students as well as graduate students and post-docs. She was awarded $1.1 million from the NSF for the project, which provides research training to students. From this funding and other grants, she has been able to maintain a highly productive research group of post doctoral fellows and graduate and undergraduate students. Under her direction, 15 students have been awarded Ph.D.s, and many of them are serving as faculty members and post-doctoral fellows. Recently, NSF awarded SU $3 million to develop an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training Program (IGERT) to educate Ph.D.-level scientists and engineers to reach across tradition fields of study in their research.
Ruhlandt has also been a key member of the Women in Science and Engineering program (WISE) at SU, a principal in the SU-ADVANCE initiative to attract women and members of underrepresented groups to science and engineering careers, and has organized many innovative workshops and provided critical feedback for external grant proposals.
Ruhlandt’s research focuses on the development of highly volatile precursors for solid state materials to allow the assembly line fabrication of computer chips/memory. This provides faster computers at a lower cost, and also access to novel semiconductors, superconductors and sensors. Her extensive research on the development of dinitrogen reduction by main group elements is vital for the chemical industry for the production of chemicals such as fertilizers and pharmaceuticals.
Ruhlandt has established multiple research partnerships with Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and with several other research groups in Germany and Austria. She has authored more than 150 publications, including review articles, since joining SU. She was a recipient of the 2008 National Science Foundation Special Creativity Award, and currently is serving on the editorial boards of Journal of Coordination Chemistry and Main Group Metal Chemistry.
Scott Webster
Webster is a leader in creating a foundation of supply chain management studies. Early in his career, his seminal work on scheduling helped build the foundation for the principles of supply chain management, and since then his leading research has evolved in three distinct areas of supply chain management: scheduling, risk and sustainability.
Webster has helped develop Whitman’s supply chain management master’s program, and his textbook, “Principles of Supply Chain Management” (Dynamic Ideas, 2009; 2nd edition), is used by university students nationwide. Another publication, “Essays on Competitive Strategy in Remanufacturing” (VDM Verlag, 2008), focuses on sustainable and green manufacturing practices—an important topic for both current and future study.
Also in the area of promoting sustainable supply chain management, Webster serves on the leadership team of the , which both engages the local business community in thinking about sustainable opportunities and operations, and links the resources of three Central New York institutions to offer world-class education and research and provide transdisciplinary understanding of sustainability.
Webster has published extensively in the field of remanufacturing, where his emphasis has been on eliminating waste and designing the returns and backward flows in supply chains. Most recently, Webster’s work on risk mitigation techniques in order to design resilient supply chains that reduce the catastrophic effects of natural disasters(tsunamis, flooding) and man-made disasters (U.S. credit crisis, Greek debt crisis) has provided a recognition unforeseen for Whitman’s supply chain program.
The Gartner Group—a collection of more than 400 executives from the world’s largest corporations—recognized Whitman as the top supply chain program in risk management and No. 3 in sustainability because of Webster’s work.
To enhance the student learning experience at Whitman, Webster assisted in the coordination and use of SAP in the supply chain management curriculum. SAP is an enterprise resource planning software that supports key business functions in an integrated manner, including sourcing, production, sales and distribution, finance and human resources.
Since 2002, Webster has served as co-director for the H.H. Franklin Center for Supply Chain Management at the Whitman School. The center supports student activities, faculty research and the annual Harry E. Salzberg Memorial Program, a joint academic/industry program that has been honoring leaders in supply chain management since 1949.
“Whitman is fortunate to have Scott, a pioneer in supply chain management education, on its faculty,” says Frances Gaither Tucker, associate professor of marketing and supply chain management and chair of the marketing department at Whitman. “He is known throughout Whitman for creating an inspiring and encouraging learning atmosphere, while his extensive research in risk management, sustainability and scheduling has significantly advanced the field of supply chain management.”
Webster says he’s looking forward to working on his next project, which is in its infancy, on the problems in the supply chain of malaria drugs in Asia and Africa.
We want to know how you experience Syracuse University. Take a photo and share it with us. We select photos from a variety of sources. Submit photos of your University experience by sending them directly to 鶹Ʒ at…
We want to know how you experience Syracuse University. Take a photo and share it with us. We select photos from a variety of sources. Submit photos of your University experience by filling out a submission form or sending it directly…
We want to know how you experience Syracuse University. Take a photo and share it with us. We select photos from a variety of sources. Submit photos of your University experience by filling out a submission form or sending it…
We want to know how you experience Syracuse University. Take a photo and share it with us. We select photos from a variety of sources. Submit photos of your University experience using #SyracuseU on social media, fill out a submission…
We want to know how you experience Syracuse University. Take a photo and share it with us. We select photos from a variety of sources. Submit photos of your University experience using #SyracuseU on social media, fill out a submission…
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