Pioneering geneticist Francis S. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, delivered the 2017 SMU Commencement address “his way” and brought down the house. Watch his cheeky rendition of a Sinatra classic that has drawn almost 2 million views on SMU Facebook, see the Commencement Convocation in its entirety and take a look at more photos of the Class of 2017’s unforgettable day.
Category: June 2017
When award-winning scholar Dominique Earland ’17 crossed the stage at Commencement, she could track her academic accomplishments and the life path she has chosen directly back to the lessons about love, nurturing and vulnerability that she learned from her mother.
After Texas’ maternal mortality rate spike last year made international headlines, and the state’s family-planning resources continued to decline, Dominique focused her Community Outreach Fellowship, funded by SMU’s Embrey Human Rights Program, to create a 36-page life-saving toolkit for women facing motherhood. “Your Right to Health,” completed with input from Dallas County’s Fetal-Infant Mortality Review program at Parkland Hospital, is filled with medical advice and community resources.
Also, her 2016 research on anemia in pregnancy in western Jamaica has been accepted for peer-reviewed publication – a remarkable achievement for an undergraduate student.
Dominique says her ongoing efforts to strengthen women’s health rights and education will forever be linked to “the unbreakable bond that exists between mother and child.”
Read more at SMU News.
Kenechukwu (K.C.) Mmeje, assistant vice president and dean of students at Loyola University Chicago, has been named Vice President for Student Affairs at SMU effective July 17, 2017.
“Strength of character and a commitment to students shines through in interactions with Dr. Mmeje,” said SMU President R. Gerald Turner. “His experience at urban, private universities in Chicago and Los Angeles also set him apart as a candidate for this important position at SMU. We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Mmeje to the Hilltop in Dallas.”
In his new duties, Mmeje (pronounced MAY-jay) will oversee areas including the Office of the Dean of Student Life; Residence Life; women’s, LGBT, multicultural, volunteer and leadership programs; student activities; student conduct; the Hegi Family Career Development Center; campus ministries; health and wellness programs, including the Dr. Bob Smith Health Center; the Hughes-Trigg Student Center and the Dedman Center for Lifetime Sports.
Read more at SMU News.
The SMU Cox School of Business honored six alumni at the school’s annual Distinguished Alumni and Outstanding Young Alumni Awards Luncheon on Friday, May 19.
Three Distinguished Alumni Awards and three Outstanding Young Alumni Awards were presented at a luncheon ceremony in the Collins Executive Center on the SMU campus. Award nominations are submitted to the SMU Cox Alumni Association for consideration by a selection committee.
This year’s Distinguished Alumni honorees are, in alphabetical order: Peter T. Dameris, BBA ’82; Kirk L. Rimer, MBA ’89; and Liz Youngblood, MBA ’05. Outstanding Young Alumni honorees are: Amber Venz Box, BA ’09; Baxter Box, MBA ’11; and Vik Thapar, MBA ’09.
Read more at SMU News.
Graduating senior Arya McCarthy has been a frequent presence on SMU’s campus practically since the day he could walk.
As a child, he would stroll across verdant lawns, his tiny hand held firmly in his grandfather’s gentle one, as his grandpa, John McCarthy, checked his mail.John McCarthy was a biology professor at SMU, where he taught Mustangs and researched endocrine physiology from the 1950s up to his retirement in 1999.
Neither knew then just how grand a role SMU would play in Arya’s life.
Fast forward to the summer of 2016. Arya was a President’s Scholar at SMU, three years into his pursuit of bachelor’s degrees in both math and computer science, and a master of computer science. With the presidential race well underway, people were describing the American electorate as being more partisan than ever, and Arya wanted to know: Was it?
Read more at SMU News.
Categories
Crowdsourcing to beat cancer
Biochemistry professors Pia Vogel and John Wise in the SMU Department of Biological Sciences and Corey Clark, deputy director of research at SMU Guildhall, are leading the SMU assault on cancer in partnership with fans of the best-selling video game Minecraft.
Vogel and Wise expect deep inroads in their quest to narrow the search for chemical compounds that improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy drugs.
“Crowdsourcing as well as computational power may help us narrow down our search and give us better chances at selecting a drug that will be successful,” said Vogel. “And gamers can take pride in knowing they’ve helped find answers to an important medical problem.”
Up to now, Wise and Vogel have tapped the high performance computing power of SMU’s ManeFrame, one of the most powerful academic supercomputers in the nation, to sort through millions of compounds that have the potential to work. Now, the biochemists say, it’s time to take that research to the next level — crowdsourced computing.
A network of gamers can crunch massive amounts of data during routine gameplay by pairing two powerful weapons: the best of human intuition combined with the massive computing power of networked gaming machine processors.
Taking their research to the gaming community will more than double the amount of machine processing power attacking their research problem.
Read more at SMU Research.
Lawson Malnory’s fascination with music began not with a musical instrument but with a cowboy hat. The 22-year-old senior, who graduated May 20 from the Meadows School of the Arts, tagged along as a child with his McKinney family to SMU’s football and basketball games — both parents and a brother are SMU grads.
Those games set the course for Malnory’s future. “There was this one guy in the Mustang Band who always wore a cowboy hat on the field,” says the Meadows Scholar. “I thought he was the just coolest guy ever, and I decided I wanted to be like him. … I was going into sixth grade, so I tried out for band and got in, and I stuck with it. This year, the band director (at SMU) started letting me wear a cowboy hat, so it’s come full circle.”
Clearly Malnory likes doing things a little bit differently. Take, for example, his work with the Bridge the Gap Chamber Players: His positive experiences with music and the joy that it brings him led him to join the nonprofit student group whose mission is to bring music to those who might not get regular exposure.
Read more at SMU News.
By Karen Shoholm
SMU
“I met Michael Jordan during the first week of my internship,” says Mark Lau ’06. “Right then I knew that Nike was the place I wanted to work. Eleven years later, I haven’t looked back.”
Lau, who graduated with degrees in marketing from the Cox School of Business and in advertising design from Meadows School of the Arts, works at Nike’s World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. As global director of the company’s EKIN Experience – named in 1981 for the Nike reps who “had to know the product backwards and forwards,” according to Nike – Lau leads the team responsible for curating Nike’s stories and delivering inspiration and innovation to athletes around the world through a grassroots approach.
“My internship played a huge part in getting a full-time job at Nike,” he says.
Lau also credits his SMU Abroad experiences studying in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Suzhou, China. “I believe that some of the best learning experiences take place outside the classroom. The study abroad programs provided the opportunity to interact with students from around the world and experience global cultures.”
Adapting to different kinds of people and cultures was good training for what Lau does at Nike. “There is no such thing as a typical day at Nike, and that’s why I love it. We are a consumer-driven company, and the consumer moves fast. We learn, adapt and evolve quickly to keep up with today’s fast-paced environment,” he says.
“We call Nike’s World Headquarters a campus because it is designed like a university and fosters an environment of learning and sharing. Our maxim, ‘Be a sponge,’ inspires us to constantly soak up and share information.”
From the SMU campus, Lau is grateful for what he learned in his marketing classes, especially those taught by Judy Foxman, senior lecturer of marketing at the Cox School. Lau says she made learning fun. “She merged the classroom with the real world, providing valuable insights and experiences.”
Foxman calls Lau “a fabulous student whose marketing and communication skills were enhanced in my Honors Marketing Practicum class. When you are relating academics to a real-world project, a company knows that you will be able to hit the ground running. You earn more than a marketing degree; you acquire a level of confidence and professionalism.”
Lau serves as the co-president of SMU’s Portland alumni chapter and helps organize events for fellow Mustangs who live in the area.
He adds that SMU’s location in Dallas gave him an ideal launch pad for getting to Nike and Portland. “Dallas is strategically located so it is attractive to companies. Whether you want to work for a big company or a small company – or start your own – Dallas and SMU can provide those opportunities.”
Findings of a new study solve a key mystery about the chemistry of how plants tell time so they can flower and metabolize nutrients. The process — a subtle chemical event — takes place in the cells of every plant every second of every day.
The new understanding means farmers may someday grow crops under conditions or in climates where they currently can’t grow, said chemist Brian D. Zoltowski of SMU, who led the study.
“We now understand the chemistry allowing plants to maintain a natural 24-hour rhythm in sync with their environment. This allows us to tune the chemistry, like turning a dimmer switch up or down, to alter the organism’s ability to keep time,” Zoltowski said. “So we can either make the plant’s clock run faster, or make it run slower. By altering these subtle chemical events we might be able to rationally redesign a plant’s photochemistry to allow it to adapt to a new climate.”
Read more at SMU Research.
Under Texas and Federal law, individuals convicted of domestic abuse are required to surrender any firearms they possess – but it rarely happens.
A team of SMU law students who spent the past year studying Dallas County’s gun-surrender efforts presented their recommendations for improving the program during a press conference at the 12th annual Conference on Crimes Against Women, presented on May 24 by the Dallas Police Department with the Genesis Women’s Shelter & Support and other collaborating agencies.
“It is estimated that between 7,000 and 8,000 cases of domestic violence go through the courts each year in Dallas County, and yet only 60 guns have been turned in over the past two years,” says SMU Law professor Natalie Nanasi, director of the Judge Elmo B. Hunter Legal Center for Victims of Crimes Against Women. Nanasie advised law students Laura Choi, Rachel Elkin and Monica Harasim in assembling the report.
“Statistics show that the presence of a firearm in a domestic violence situation increases the likelihood of death by 500 percent,” Elkin says. “We hope that this report can be a tool for Dallas County leaders to use to expand and improve the Gun Surrender Program.”
Read more at SMU News.
A consortium of institutions led by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and the University of Texas at Dallas will partner with the U.S. Census Bureau to establish the Dallas-Fort Worth Federal Statistical Research Data Center.
The DFW center is the result of an extensive grant application process involving contributions from each consortium member and a review by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Census Bureau. One of several planned Federal Statistical Research Data Center locations across the country, the center will be housed at the Dallas Fed and will provide approved researchers with secure access to restricted micro-level data.
The center will advance scientific knowledge, improve data quality and inform policy in fields spanning the social, behavioral and economic sciences and the health professions, and extending to urban planning, and engineering. The cutting-edge research opportunities afforded by the center will raise the profile of participating institutions and assist in attracting and retaining top research talent to the region.
Read more at SMU Research.
Reflect. Refresh. Renew. We invite you to an enriching weekend at the SMU-in-Taos Cultural Institute, July 20–23.
Whether you choose an engaging course for intellectual growth or a Taos adventure, you’ll enjoy your experience in this inspiring setting. Taos Cultural Institute courses give you two-and-a-half days of in-depth, hands-on exploration of topics that reflect the unique cultural richness of Northern New Mexico. Field trips enable you to experience your topic even more vividly, with time to discover and sightsee on your own.
Register now at SMU-in-Taos Cultural Institute.
In case you missed it this month, please enjoy these quick links to cool stories and interesting videos!
- Three alumni awarded Fulbright English Teaching Assistantships
- Sixteen Guildhall graduates score virtual reality project gig
- Lyle team headed to national water environment student design competition
- Get ready for Gameday: Check out the 2017 football schedule and buy tickets
- National Bureau of Economic Research taps Elira Kuka as faculty research fellow
- Cox and Lyle students take high honors at national real estate case contest
- Theatre professor talks favorite shows and his path to SMU
- Meadows Museum exhibits set of Picasso drawings for the first time