Provost
Search Committee: Please Vote: 4 VSE Nominees
Search for VP Information
Technology:
Candidates?
Update
on the ePAR system
Amarda
Shehu and Estela Blaisten-Barojas Receive Funding from
Jeffress Trust
Celso
Ferreira Receives Funding from Jeffress Trust
Sushil
Jajodia and Massimiliano Albanese Receive Funding from Sandia
& US Army
Supreme
Court Decision on Patents
Provost
Search Committee: Please Vote: 4
VSE Nominees
The
GMU Faculty Senate has distributed via e-mail a ballot for faculty
representatives to the search committee for a new Provost.I encourage you to vote.There are four nominees from
the Volgenau School
of Engineering:
Jim
Chen (Computer Science)
Peter
Farrell (Applied Information Technology)
Daniel
Menascé (Computer Science)
Joseph
Pancrazio (Bioengineering)
This
is a preferential ballot, that is, you indicate by “1” your first
choice, “2”
your second choice, etc.Votes
are due
on Monday, June 24, at 5pm.
Search
for VP Information Technology:
Candidates?
Ken
De Jong and I are members of the search committee for the Vice
President for
Information Technology and CIO. Joy
Hughes
is stepping down from this role after having served for many
years.
If you know of individuals who
would be good
candidates for this position, we would be grateful if you could
either provide
us with their names, or send them information on the position.The job description can be
found online at
Update
on the ePAR System I wanted to provide
some information on udpates to
the ePAR system, the online system that has been used for some
years for
personnel reviews.
Personnel reviews
are being conducted in connection
with the raises being provided by the State.However, due to software updates, the ePAR system is not
able to provide full reports for the
most recent data on research and teaching while the updates are
in progress.Reports
corresponding
to the Fall 2012 personnel reviews are available, and reports
will be available in the future.
Mandy Richburg, a
member of my staff, has been
working for the past few months on revisions to the way data on
teaching and
research funding are uploaded to the ePAR system.That work is almost
complete, but has not
been fully tested yet.I
did not anticipate
that personnel reviews would be conducted in mid-summer.The new software should
reduce the effort
required to upload the data on teaching and research funding,
and should
improve its accuracy.
If you have
recently entered information in ePAR
corresponding to publications, presentations, etc., it will not
be affected by
the updates.You can
continue to enter
such information.
Over the summer I
plan to work with a small subset
of the faculty to test the new software to ensure that it is
performing as designed.
There are some
additional features that are being
added to ePAR, but I will defer reporting on them until they are
available.
Amarda
Shehu and Estela Blaisten-Barojas
Receive Funding from Jeffress Trust
Amarda Shehu of the Computer Science Department and
Estela Blaisten-Barojas of the College of Science received $100K
from the Jeffress
Memorial Trust for their project “Probabilistic Search Algorithms
Meet
Statistical Mechanisms: Powerful Novel Tools for Peptide
Modeling”.
Celso
Ferreira Receives Funding from
Jeffress Trust
Celso
Ferreira of the Sid and Reva Dewberry Department of Civil,
Environmental and
Infrastructure Engineering received $100K from the Jeffress
Memorial Trust for
his project “Protecting Virginia from Hurricane Storm Surge with
Wetlands
Ecosystems: Can Nature Help to Reduce Hurricane Flood Risk?”.
Sushil
Jajodia and Massimiliano Albanese
Receive Funding from Sandia & US Army
Sushil
Jajodia and Massimiliano Albanese of the Center for Secure
Information Systems received
$25K from Sandia Research Corporation and the U.S. Dept. of the
Army for their
project “STTR: Cyber Warfare Simulation Environment”.
Supreme
Court Decision on Patents
From
SCOTUSblog.com (an invaluable resource on the Supreme Court):
“The
Supreme Court long ago ruled that an inventor who discovers a
phenomenon in
nature, or figures out a “law of nature,” cannot get an exclusive
right to use
or sell that by obtaining a patent from the federal government.
Natural
phenomena are the basic tools with which every would-be inventor
starts, so
locking up the right to use them in a monopoly held by a specific
patent owner
will frustrate others who might want to look for new ways to
interpret that
phenomena, the Court has said. …
“The
Court said the company actually did not create anything at all,
but simply
extracted the genetic material from its location in human blood,
and setting it
apart for study.The
Court, however,
said that the company might be eligible to get a patent when it
created a
synthetic form of those genes — in other words, a laboratory
imitation of
them. Such imitations, according to the ruling, do not exist in
nature, and so do not run counter to the rule against patenting
nature.”