BUniverse

Why Care? A Conversation with Timberland President and CEO Jeffrey Swartz about Our Collective Responsibility

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:00:00 EDT

Jeffrey Swartz, president and chief executive officer of Timberland, visits Boston University to discuss sustainability, carbon emissions, and corporate responsibility to provide ethical consumer choices. Throughout the lecture, Swartz draws on his own business experience and his company’s attempts to foster sustainability, highlighting Timberland’s efforts to discourage waste, encourage community action by its employees, and reduce its carbon footprint. Kristen McCormack, faculty director of the School of Management’s Public and Nonprofit Management Program, moderates the event.

As Timberland has grown, Swartz explains, it has begun to focus more intently on curbing its environmental impact. He discusses Timberland’s aims to reduce carbon emissions in the manufacturing of its leather, to safely eliminate toxins produced in its factories, and to make sure its working conditions are safe. He also emphasizes the need for business competitors to work together to create change in the area of sustainability. Swartz describes his own corporate philosophy, saying he runs his company on a belief in the notion of “justice in commerce.”

October 14, 2009, 4 p.m.

Morse Auditorium

Video Length is 01:12:03.

About the Speaker:

Jeffrey Swartz is the president and CEO of the outdoor apparel company Timberland, one of Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Since joining the family business in 1986, he has created a social enterprise department to encourage employees’ community service and has spoken frequently on corporate responsibility. In 1988, he helped launch Timberland’s public/private partnership with City Year, a national youth service organization, where he has served on the board of directors since 1989 and acted as the board’s chairman from 1994 to 2003. He served on President George W. Bush’s task force on national service, Business Strengthening America. Swartz is a member of the executive committee of Combined Jewish Philanthropies, chairman of the board of directors of the Maimonides School in Newton, Massachusetts, and a board member of Birthright Israel. He is a graduate of Brown University and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University.

Current State of Investigative Reporting

Tue, 19 May 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Newspapers across the nation are in serious trouble, pummeled by the recession, by declining revenue and readership, and by competition from round-the-clock online resources. Speaking at a reception marking the launch of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting at BU, Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and an author, speaks about the current state of investigative reporting.

Hersh observes that our most important interpersonal relationships involve trust and respect, but what we tolerate in our public life is especially telling. We have made a bad bargain, he says, in failing to hold public officials to the highest possible standards. It has become easy to avoid our moral obligations both internationally and locally. In fact, he says, some of the most “profound and avaricious behavior” occurs at the local level. Yet the propensity of news organizations to cut back on investigative reporting reflects a concern more for the bottom line than for taking risks.

The international scene should not be avoided, either, he says, because of our nation’s current economic problems. Stories about local and regional corruption, he says, connect us to the larger world and point to the dire consequences of poor leadership.

Tom Fiedler, dean of the College of Communication, and Joe Bergantino, director of the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, offer opening remarks.

Hersh’s observations are followed by a question-and-answer session.

May 19, 2009, 7 p.m.

BU Castle

Video Length is 01:16:31.

About the Speaker:

Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist and author. He is a regular contributor on military and security matters to The New Yorker magazine. Hersh first gained worldwide attention in 1969 by exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, in 1970. More recently, in 2004, he alerted the American public to the military’s mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Financial Crisis, Public Policy, and Economic Recovery

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Fear and uncertainty have become mainstays during the current financial crisis in the United States. Americans have witnessed the collapse of major banks, insurance companies, automakers, and the real estate market and unemployment numbers continue to break records. The U.S. government continues to funnel trillions of dollars into the economy, with no end in sight to what has been called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The College of Arts and Science’s Discovery Series for alumni invited Boston University faculty experts in the area of politics and economics to analyze what has brought the country to this point, debate whether the worst is over, and offer remedies to get the United States back on track financially.

Speakers Robert Bench, a senior fellow at the School of Law’s Morin Center; Simon Gilchrist, a professor of economics; Laurence Kotlikoff, a professor of economics; Charles Whitehead, an associate professor of law; William Grimes, an associate chairman and associate professor of international relations; and Graham Wilson, a professor of political sciences and director of graduate studies, offered their opinions on what caused the current economic crisis, including risky lending, the collapse of the real estate market, and the structure of the financial system itself. They also offered solutions, such as limited-purpose banking and modification of current regulations on the market.

A question-and-answer period followed the panel discussion.

April 16, 2009, 7 p.m.

Photonics Center

Video length 01:24:15.

About the speakers:

Robert Bench is a senior fellow at the Boston University School of Law’s Morin Center, where he is a strategy advisor. He has spent over 40 years in financial regulation and supervision, serving as a national bank supervisor for the U.S. Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of Currency and as managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers regulatory advisory services practice. Bench has also served as advisor to the Canada Deposit Insurance Corporation, chairman of the steering committee of the financial services forum in Toronto, a member of the Governing Council of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovations in London, an advisor to the central banks of Malaysia, Indonesia, and Korea, and a leader of a World Bank project to modernize regulation at the People’s Bank of China.

Simon Gilchrist is a professor of economics at Boston University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the leading nonprofit economic research organization in the United States, and a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review, and an associate editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics. Gilchrist was a staff economist for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and was an academic consultant to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and the International Monetary Fund.

Laurence Kotlikoff is a professor of economics at Boston University, research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellow of the Econometric Society, and president of Economic Security Planning, Inc., a company that produces financial planning software. Before coming to Boston University, he was a professor of economics at Yale University and at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was also senior economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and a consultant to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Harvard Institute for International Development, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the Swedish Ministry of Finance, the Norwegian Ministry of Finance, the Bank of Italy, the Bank of Japan, the Bank of England, the government of Russia, the government of Ukraine, the government of Bolivia, the government of Bulgaria, the Treasury of New Zealand, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the American Council of Life Insurance, Merrill Lynch, Fidelity Investments, AT&T, and AON Corp.

Charles Whitehead is an associate professor of law at Boston University, where he teaches courses in corporations and securities regulation. His areas of interest include securities regulation, corporate governance, the regulation of financial institutions, domestic and international business and Japanese law. He is currently on the U.S.–Japan Bridging Foundation’s board of directors and reviews fellowships for advanced research in the social sciences of Japan for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Before coming to Boston University, he practiced law in New York, London, and Tokyo and was an editor and translator for the Journal of Law in Japan.

William Grimes is associate chairman and associate professor of international relations at Boston University. His interests include Japanese and East Asian political economy, Japanese politics, and international political economy. Grimes wrote Unmaking the Japanese Miracle: Macroeconomic Politics, 1985–2000 and was co-editor of Japan’s Managed Globalization: Adapting to the 21st Century. He has written extensively on East Asian financial regionalism, the impacts of financial globalization in Japan, Japanese monetary policy making, and the relationship between the United States and Japan.

Graham Wilson is a professor of political sciences and director of graduate studies at Boston University. Before coming to Boston University, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a lecturer at the University of Essex and the University of Oxford. He has received numerous awards and grants, including the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment Grant, the PricewaterhouseCoopers Foundation grant, the Vilas Associates Award, the Glenn B. and Cleone Orr Hawkins Professorship, and the Nuffield Foundation grant.

BU in Service: The Chelsea Schools Program

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:00:00 EDT

Download available on iTunesU.

Former administrators and teachers in the Chelsea school system share personal memories of the challenges and achievements of the University’s 20-year management of the Chelsea public schools system. Douglas Sears, associate provost and assistant to the president for outreach and special initiatives, a former dean of the School of Education, and a former Chelsea school superintendent, gives a brief history of the initiative and talks about putting music and art back in the Chelsea schools. Hardin Coleman, dean of the School of Education, leads a panel discussion. Mary Bourque (SED’99,’08), deputy superintendent of Chelsea schools, recalls her trials as a student and later as a teacher in Chelsea, where, she says, dedicated teachers struggled for excellence in a broken system. Michael Caulfield, chairman of the Chelsea School Committee, talks about his experiences as a math teacher in the city and as a parent of students in its school system. David Driscoll, former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education, recalls his conviction that Boston University had greatly underestimated the challenges involved in helping the Chelsea schools. Robert Hildreth, vice chair of BU’s Board of Overseers and a native of Chelsea, talks about the successful effort to get private donors to support public education and about Chelsea’s move to become the first town in Massachusetts to provide free early childhood education.

October 24, 2008, 10 a.m.
2 Silber Way

Video length is 01:10:57.

About the speakers:
Mary Bourque (SED’99,’08) is deputy superintendent of schools in Chelsea (and an alumna of Chelsea’s school system). She was a teacher in the system before joining the administration.

Michael Caulfield is the chairman of the Chelsea School Committee and a former math teacher in the Chelsea schools. He is also a former head of the city’s teacher union.

Educator and psychologist Hardin Coleman was named dean of the Boston University School of Education in 2008. He came from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he had been the ad interim associate dean of the School of Education since 2004 and a professor of counseling psychology. His research has focused on the development of school-based interventions that support the academic achievement of students from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds.

David Driscoll is a former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Education. He has worked in public education and educational leadership for more than four decades. A former secondary school mathematics teacher, he was named assistant superintendent of Melrose, Massachusetts, schools in 1972 and then superintendent in 1984. In 1993, he was appointed Massachusetts deputy commissioner of education, became interim commissioner of education on July 1, 1998, and was named commissioner on March 10, 1999.

Robert Hildreth is vice chair of the BU Board of Overseers and a native of Chelsea. He is the founder and president of International Bank Services, Inc., a Boston-based company that trades and services bank loans from Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America. Prior to founding IBS, Hildreth was vice president of Citibank in New York and senior vice president of Drexel Burnham Lambert in Los Angeles. From 1975 to 1981, he was an economist for the International Monetary Fund in the western hemisphere department and resident representative in Bolivia.

Douglas Sears is BU’s associate provost and assistant to the president for outreach andspecial initiatives, a former dean of the School of Education, and a former superintendent of the Chelsea public schools. Prior to joining Boston University, he served for four years as an American diplomat in the U.S. embassies in Switzerland and the Philippines, earning tenure and the Department of State’s Meritorious Honor Award. He is a board member of the American-Swiss Foundation and the Hanson Initiative for Language and Literacy.

History and Civic Education: The Learning of Liberty for Civic Life

Thu, 08 May 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Download available on iTunesU.

Projects in Civic Engagement at Boston University’s School of Education and the Pioneer Institute, a nonpartisan Massachusetts public policy think tank, host a conference to explore ways to prepare citizens — young people in particular — to embrace liberty and exercise it for the common good.

Speakers include Charles White, an associate professor in the School of Education and director of Projects in Civic Engagement, Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, and Maureen Feeney, president of the Boston City Council. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Gordon S. Wood delivers the keynote address.

Wood discusses the reasons present-day citizens continue to turn to the Founding Fathers for guidance. “Why do we ask ourselves, What would Thomas Jefferson think of affirmative action? or What would George Washington think of the war in Iraq?” he says. “We go back to their ideas and their aspirations to reaffirm and refresh our own identities. Equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were the greatest ideals to come out of our country’s founding, and it’s only natural that we should go back to the Founding Fathers to learn what kind of people we are.”

Wood explains that while the Founding Fathers were not demigods, they were also not democrats. They were not embarrassed by talk of elitism and never hid their sense of superiority over ordinary people, but they were also never contemptuous of ordinary people. “There was a nice balance between their democratic and aristocratic values,” he says.

The Founding Fathers were less concerned with bloodlines and wealth and more concerned with gentlemanly traits, according to Wood. “To be a gentleman was to think and act with reason and to be free of prejudice,” he says. “Basically, being a gentleman encompassed all of the characteristics that today make up a liberal arts degree.”

May 8, 2008, 4 p.m.
School of Management

Video length is 01:01:52.

About the speakers:
Maureen Feeney has represented Dorchester’s district three on the Boston City Council since 1993. In 2007, she was unanimously elected council president. She is the second woman ever to hold this post. During her time on the council, she helped enable the legislation that created Boston Medical Center, with the merger of University Hospital and Boston City Hospital. She was also influential in establishing the city’s living wage ordinance and in maintaining the residency requirement for city employees. She is a trustee of Boston Medical Center and the Daniel Marr Boys and Girls Club. She is on the Democratic State Committee for the First Suffolk District and on the Ward 16 Democratic Committee.

Jim Stergios (CAS’85, UNI’03) is the executive director of the Pioneer Institute. Prior to his current post, he was chief of staff and undersecretary for policy in the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, where he chaired the Water Policy Task Force. He holds a doctoral degree in political science from Boston University.

Charles White, an associate professor in the Boston University School of Education, is director of the BU Projects in Civic Engagement, a program that promotes civic education in the United States and overseas. A former high school social studies teacher, White developed the Teaching with Historic Places project. The framework for this program was later developed for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Service and has been the focus of teacher workshops White offers nationwide. He currently is on the board of directors of the Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies.

Gordon S. Wood is a professor of history at Brown University. He earned an undergraduate degree from Tufts University and a doctoral degree from Harvard University. Prior to joining the faculty at Brown in 1969, he taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. Among his many books are The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, which won the Bancroft Prize and the John H. Dunning Prize in 1970, and The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize in 1993. The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin was awarded the Julia Ward Howe Prize by the Boston Authors Club in 2005. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different followed in 2006, and his most recent book, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History, was published in 2008. Wood is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.

Carol Johnson at the Boston University School of Education Consortium

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:00:00 EDT

The Boston University School of Education Consortium celebrates 30 years of partnership between BU and Boston-area school districts with a program and reception. The consortium, created in 1977 and funded by the School of Education, is a partnership between BU and Boston-area schools to exchange educational and instructional resources. The consortium includes seven public schools and five agencies, all partnering with the School of Education.

The consortium gives SED students the opportunity to participate in fieldwork at the various districts during their freshman and junior years, whereas students in other teaching programs are not placed in a school setting until junior or senior year. Work done through the consortium differs from senior-year student teaching in that students mainly observe the classrooms and only occasionally lead lessons. It has placed more than 9,000 students and provided the school systems with more than $1.5 million in funding for special projects.

Keynote speaker Carol Johnson, Boston’s superintendent of schools, says, “It’s important to plant the college seeds early on so that students are successful in kindergarten and that carries them to college and to complete college. I thank Boston University for understanding how important it is for all of our children to aspire to go to college.”

October 18, 2007, 4 p.m.
School of Education Auditorium

Video length is 00:55:36.

About the speaker:
After a national search, the Boston School Committee unanimously appointed Carol R. Johnson as superintendent of the Boston Public Schools, a 57,000- student district, in August 2007. She has garnered national praise for transforming low-performing schools by emphasizing the importance of family and community engagement as a key strategy for closing the achievement gap. Johnson previously held the positions of superintendent of the Memphis City Schools and superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools. In Memphis, she reorganized the district administration to cut costs and better serve student and initiated MCS Reads! a district-wide reading campaign to boost literacy. Her district was selected for the “New Leaders for New Schools” program, the Harvard Business School/Harvard Graduate School of Education Leadership Program and the New Teacher Project, and a $16 million “Striving Readers” federal grant for literacy improvement. Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education form Fisk University and master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota.

Presentation of Citations to Consortium Cluster Members included Antonio Barbosa, principal of the Winship Elementary School in Brighton Center, Anu Shivdasani from Brookline’s Lawrence School, Vice Principal Joseph Mackey of Chelsea’s Eugene Wright School, Bev Gauthier from the Concord public schools, Tom Krusinski from the Brookline public schools, Maura Tines, who heads up Newton’s Community Connections, Vicky Schwartz, a third grade teacher from the Lexington public schools, and Carol Johnson, superintendent of Boston Public Schools.

Building Indo-BU Collaborations in Health and Development

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 19:30:00 EDT

Gerald Keusch, associate provost for global health and associate dean for global health at the School of Public Health, delivers the keynote address at the sixth annual BU alumni event in Mumbai, India. Keusch opens by discussing the recent sobering past and the disappointing present in terms of world health, emphasizing that health is the one essential requirement for development. The twentieth century can confidently be described as the “century of the life sciences,” he says, but it also was a “century of great disappointments,” one in which the challenges of poverty, overpopulation, environmental degradation, and struggling civil societies resulted in massive health disparities. He draws a direct connection between poor access to health care and terrorism and notes that even marginal increases in per capita income result in huge increases in life expectancy.

Keusch describes the medical and health resources that BU offers and the extensive collaboration between the University and both the public and the private sectors in India on numerous health initiatives.

September 16, 2006, 7:30 p.m.
The Taj Mahal Palace and Tower
Mumbai, India

Video length is 00:51:24.

About the speaker:
Gerald Keusch, associate dean for global health and a professor of international health at the School of Public Health and Medical Campus assistant provost, came to BU from the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center. He is the director of BU’s Global Health Initiative, which links the Charles River and Medical Campuses in common programs for education, research, and service activities in global health. He is involved in international health research and policy with the NIH, the U.S. National Academies Institute of Medicine, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization. He has received awards for excellence from the Society of Infectious Diseases, published more than 300 research papers, chapters, and books, and delivered numerous named lectures at leading institutions around the world

Symposia in Honor of the Inauguration of Dr. Robert A. Brown: Session I, BU and the World

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EDT

This first session of the four-part symposia honoring the inauguration of the 10th president of Boston University, Robert Brown, addresses such global challenges as mass famine, poverty, and disease.

Symposium cochair Gerald Keusch, associate dean of global health at the BU School of Public Health and Medical Campus assistant provost, notes the enormous political, economic, environmental, and social and health challenges ahead, reminding viewers that with challenge comes opportunity and that universities have a unique responsibility to engage in discussion and take action for the betterment of society.

Symposium cochair and moderator is Ronald K. Richardson, director of the African-American Studies Program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Boston University Provost David Campbell introduces the participants.

April 28, 2006
595 Commonwealth Avenue

Video length is 01:30:00.

About the speakers:
Husain Haqqani is a CAS associate professor of international relations and director of the Center for International Relations. He has a wide range of experience as a journalist, diplomat, and advisor to three Pakistani prime ministers. He came to the United States in 2002 as a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., and an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His book Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military was published in 2005.

Gerald Keusch, associate dean for global health and a professor of international health at the School of Public Health and Medical Campus assistant provost, came to BU from the National Institutes of Health Fogarty International Center. He is the director of BU’s Global Health Initiative, which links the Charles River and Medical Campuses in common programs for education, research, and service activities in global health. He is involved in international health research and policy with the NIH, the U.S. National Academies Institute of Medicine, the United Nations, and the World Health Organization. He has received awards for excellence from the Society of Infectious Diseases, published more than 300 research papers, chapters, and books, and delivered numerous named lectures at leading institutions around the world.

Ronald K. Richardson is a College of Arts and Sciences professor and director of the African-American Studies Program at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. His work focuses on the black presence in Asia and black-Asian relations globally. He is the author of Moral Imperium: Afro-Caribbeans and the Transformation of British Rule, 1776–1838. His book Winston S. Churchill: Imagining the Racial Self is forthcoming.

Dana Robert is the Truman Collins Professor of World Christianity and History of Mission and a professor of theology at the School of Theology. Her research and teaching interests span the fields of mission history, the history of world Christianity, and mission theology. Her book Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers: Missionary Women in the Twentieth Century was a 2002 outstanding book in mission studies and “Occupy Until I Come”: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World was a 2003 outstanding book in mission studies.

Jeffrey Sachs is Columbia University’s Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development and the director of its Earth Institute. He is also the director of the UN Millennium Project, which aims to reduce extreme poverty, disease, and hunger by 2015. In 2004 and 2005 he was named among Time’s 100 most influential leaders worldwide and was the 2005 recipient of the Sargent Shriver Award for Equal Justice. He is the author of hundreds of scholarly articles and many books.

Elie Wiesel (Hon.’74) is BU’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and a professor in the University Professors Program. He received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986. A Holocaust survivor, Wiesel is the critically acclaimed author of Night, along with 40 other books. Appointed chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust in 1978, he has devoted his life to speaking for victims of genocide.

Symposia in Honor of the Inauguration of Dr. Robert A. Brown: Session II, BU and the City

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Think globally, act locally. This is one of Boston University’s highest ideals and the driving notion behind the second of four symposia honoring the inauguration of the 10th president of Boston University, Robert Brown.

Session two chairs Karen Antman, provost of the BU Medical Campus and dean of the School of Medicine, and Douglas Sears, dean of the BU School of Education, discuss the University as an integral community in the heart of Boston, serving the city in a multitude of ways. Consistent with the vision articulated by BU’s third president, Lemuel Murlin, the University has become a definitive part of the city’s identity — “in the heart of the city, in the service of the city.”

April 28, 2006
595 Commonwealth Avenue

Video length is 01:18:00.

About the speakers:
Susan Akram is a clinical associate professor at the BU School of Law. She was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan. Her father’s family members were refugees from the 1947 India-Pakistan partition, and this early exposure to the plight of refugees influenced her choice of a legal career in immigration and refugee law. Akram has served as executive director of Boston’s Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project and as directing attorney of the immigration project at Public Counsel, a public interest law firm in Los Angeles. From 1992 to 1993 she was interim director of the agency overseeing the resettlement of Gulf War Iraqi refugees in Saudi Arabia.

Karen Antman is the dean of the School of Medicine and provost of the Medical Campus. She came to Boston University from the National Cancer Institute, where she was deputy director for translational and clinical sciences. She is recognized internationally as an expert on the treatment of various malignancies and has served as president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Association for Cancer Research, and the American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation. She was for seven years an associate editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and has been on the editorial boards of several other major medical journals. Antman was a faculty member of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons for more than 10 years.

Robert Antonucci (SED’83) is the president of Fitchburg State College. He served as Massachusetts commissioner of education from 1992 to 1998, responsible for the state’s early childhood, elementary, secondary, vocational-technical, and adult basic educational programs. He played a key role in the passage and enactment of the state’s landmark Education Reform Act of 1993. During Antonucci’s tenure, his team fundamentally reformed the state’s education finance system, school governance, curriculum development, and charter schools.

Raul Garcia is a professor and chairman of the health policy department at the School of Dental Medicine. His research interests include the mechanisms of periodontal disease progression, alveolar bone loss, and skeletal bone mineral density, as well as tobacco control and prevention. His studies encompass the areas of oral epidemiology, health services research, and health policy and involve a variety of population studies, with focus on underserved populations such as elders, minorities, and persons living with disabilities.

Delores Handy-Brown is a broadcast journalist who has won multiple Emmy Awards. She worked at radio and television stations in her hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, as well as in Memphis, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., before moving to Boston in 1982 to work at Channel 7. She’s also worked at Channel 2 and Channel 68 as a producer, news anchor, and host. In addition, she’s been news anchor for the Monitor Channel and CNN Headline News. She is an anchor at WBUR, BU’s National Public Radio station.

Tin Le (SMG’01) attended the Upward Bound Program for high school students at Boston University in 1997 and graduated from the School of Management in 2001. Le attended BU on a scholarship from the Boston Scholars Program, which annually awards four-year, full-tuition scholarships to graduating seniors from Boston’s public high schools as part of the University’s continuing commitment to the city of Boston. He is a financial analyst at HSBC Securities (USA), Inc., a provider of investment services and products to corporate and retail investors.

Douglas Sears is dean of the School of Education. He was superintendent of the Chelsea, Massachusetts, Public Schools from 1995 to 2000. During his tenure, the school district made substantial improvements in many areas, particularly in academic achievement — as indicated by rising scores on such tests as the AP, the SAT, and the MCAS — and in student attendance. Since 2000 he has been chairman of the BU Management Team that has run the city’s school system since 1989. Earlier, Sears served for four years as an American diplomat in the embassies in Switzerland and the Philippines , earning the Department of State’s Meritorious Honor Award.

Symposia in Honor of the Inauguration of Dr. Robert A. Brown: Session III, BU and Research

Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EDT

The third session of the symposia in honor of the inauguration of Robert Brown as BU's 10th president explores some of the ways that interdisciplinary efforts can help the University realize its full potential to give back to society. . The session is cochaired by Bennett Goldberg, chairman of the College of Arts and Sciences physics department, and Kenneth Lutchen, chairman of the College of Engineering biomedical engineering department.

April 28, 2006
595 Commonwealth Avenue

Video length is 01:30:00.

About the speakers:
Aram V. Chobanian (Hon.’06), BU’s John I. Sandson Distinguished Professor of Health Sciences, is president emeritus of Boston University. He is a School of Medicine professor of medicine and pharmacology and a professor in the University Professors Program. He has dedicated his career to basic and clinical research on hypertension and vascular disease, patient care, and the education of students and trainees. He was the founding director of the Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute at the Boston University School of Medicine in 1973 and oversaw its rapid development into a center for pioneering research into the biological and clinical aspects of cardiovascular disease. He became dean of the School of Medicine in 1988 and provost of the Medical Campus as well in 1996. From 2003 to 2005 he was the president of Boston University.

James Collins is a UNI professor and a College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering. His research focuses on developing and implementing techniques and concepts from nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics to study and improve the function of physiological and biological systems. He has received research support from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Whitaker Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Office of Naval Research. He was the winner of the University’s 2000 Metcalf Cup and Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and in 2003 he received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.

Bennett B. Goldberg is a professor and chairman of the physics department at the College of Arts and Sciences and a professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering at ENG. He is director of Boston University’s new Center for Nanoscience and Nanobiotechnology, an interdisciplinary center that brings together academic and industrial scientists and engineers in the development of nanotechnology with applications in materials and biomedicine. His active research interests are in the general area of ultra-high-resolution microscopy and spectroscopy techniques for hard and soft materials systems.

Kenneth R. Lutchen is an ENG professor and chairman of the biomedical engineering department. He is the principal investigator of a $14 million Leadership Award from the Whitaker Foundation and the principal investigator on a National Institutes of Health Pre-Doctoral Graduate Student Training Grant in Quantitative Biology and Physiology. His current research focuses on advanced novel experimental and computational-based methods for probing the structure-function relations governing lung disease, particularly asthma, emphysema, and ventilator-induced lung injury.

Gloria Waters is dean of Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and a professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences. Her current research includes the studies of sentence processing in aging and dementia as well as studies of the neural basis of syntactic comprehension. This work is being carried out in conjunction with the Neuropsychology Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital and is funded by the National Institutes of Health. Waters is a member of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the American Psychological Society, and Psychonomics.