Category: BU Today Features
Pépin Shares Recipe for Fulfillment
Jacques Pépin began cooking as a child, helping out at his parents’ restaurant in Bourg-en-Bresse, near Lyon, France. He had a gift, and he braised and sautéed his way to the position of personal chef to three French presidents, among them Charles de Gaulle. But Pépin (Hon.’11) dreamed of success in America, where he arrived to learn English in 1959 and never left.
Read more on BU Today.
From the BU Hardwood to the NBA Coaching Box
Don’t miss the write-up on Philadelphia 76ers head coach Brett Brown (MET’83) in BU Today. Get the backstory on this former Terrier, who played for legendary men’s basketball coach Rick Pitino. Learn why hopes are high—and season ticket sales are up—for the Sixers, despite winning fewer than 20 games each of the past two seasons. And find out which local eatery Brown frequents when he’s in town to play the Celtics.
MET students help Quincy prepare for climate change
The 19 students in this year’s Boston Urban Symposium, the capstone course for graduate students in the Metropolitan College City Planning and Urban Affairs Program, have been able to apply their classroom learning this semester in a real-world setting that could have broad implications for the future.
Life at the Chocolate Factory
Talk about tasty career choices: Lucia Austria (MET’13) and Sydney Oland (MET’09) discuss their roles as production manager and product developer, respectively, for Somerville’s Tazo Chocolate in a recent BU Today article. Both are graduates of Metropolitan College’s Master of Liberal Arts in Gastronomy program. The article also explains the process of creating stone-ground chocolate—and why Tazo’s offerings are so popular among brewers, bakers, and gourmets.
MET’s Regan Explains Why the T Broke and How to Fix It
Back in 2007, Terrance Regan, a MET adjunct professor of city planning and urban affairs, wrote a report for the Massachusetts Transportation Finance Commission on the precarious condition of the state’s public transit system. Today, he’s using the current snow-related breakdowns in the Green Line and other MBTA services as a prime teaching moment. Read this urban transit expert’s honest opinions in BU Today.
Merry White, Professor and Food, Wine & Arts Instructor, in BU Today
The BU Today article “Studying Brahmins, Baked Beans, and Baseball” profiled a course taught by College of Arts & Science Professor of Anthropology Merry “Corky” White. Among the BU students enrolled in “Boston: An Ethnographic Approach” were three students from MET’s Evergreen program, which allows those 58 or older to audit BU classes. The course examines Boston as “a set of ideas of identity, politics, and urban life, developing and placed in the spaces of a place called the Hub…” Professor White is also an instructor in MET’s Seminars in Food & Wine.
BU Ranked #37 Globally
On November 3, BU Today reported on new rankings that were announced by U.S. News & World Report. Boston University has been named 37th of 500 “Best Global Universities.” According to BU Provost Jean Morrison, the new ranking “demonstrates how strong our global competitiveness is.”
Read more on BU Today.
MET Computer Science Professor Receives DLI Grant
MET Associate Professor of Computer Science Eric Braude was one of three Boston University faculty to win an EdTech Seed Grant from BU’s Digital Learning Initiative (DLI)—a faculty-led group that acts as the “hub” for BU’s MOOCs (massive open online courses), and serves to “spearhead the University’s most innovative projects in online learning, uninhibited by pre-existing culture and structures.” DLI grants fund faculty and staff innovations in educational technology. Dr. Braude’s grant will underwrite work he is doing on his Knowla (“knowledge assembly”) system prototype—which will “allow students to respond to test questions in forms that could be automatically graded.”
Read more in BU Today.
The definitive English-language book on Sicilian Wine
MET Wine Studies instructor and Master of Wine Bill Nesto coauthored The World of Sicilian Wine (UC Press, March 2013) with his wife Frances Di Savino. The book has received many positive reviews, including a recent one in the quarterly The World of Fine Wine (issue 43), which calls it an “impressively scholarly new book.” The review asserts that “the sheer weight of historical, geographical, and viticultural information is enough to make this the definitive English-language book on the island’s wines.”
Learning from Boston’s Top Cop
A BU Today series examining the building blocks of education at BU recently profiled Boston Police Commissioner William Evans, who is teaching MET’s criminal justice course Policing in a Democratic Society. Evans, who this year received a Roger Deveau Part-Time Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching, is spending six hours a week this summer in a BU classroom—passing on practical knowledge gained from his 31 years with the Boston Police.
With his class running until 9 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays, those days are grueling for a man who rises at 4:30 in the morning. But Evans says that he enjoys teaching and the chance it provides him to impart the class’s key lesson: police perform a multi-textured role in a democratic society—not just as enforcers of public security, but as social workers and political scientists balancing the law with individual freedoms.
Read more on BU Today.
