Category: Learning
Center for Enterprise Leadership
The Center for Enterprise Leadership opens. A partnership of academics and senior executives dedicated to research, communication, and learning with respect to fundamental problems of product and service supply in a global economy, the center would operate for the next fifteen years.
Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation
The Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, a research, training, and service organization dedicated to improving the lives of persons who have psychiatric disabilities, opens. The center adheres to the most basic of rehabilitation values: First and foremost, a person with psychiatric disabilities has the same goals and dreams as any other person. Its mission is to increase the likelihood that a person with psychiatric disabilities can achieve these goals by improving the effectiveness of people, programs, and service systems.
Center for Energy & Environmental Studies
The Center for Energy & Environmental Studies is established as part of the College of Arts & Sciences to educate, research, and train in the fields of energy and environmental analysis. The center is multidisciplinary and problem-oriented; its educational programs are based on the philosophy that students need a solid training in traditional disciplines as well as a set of integrative courses that expose them to the broad and systematic nature of environmental problems. This approach also informs the center's research programs, which investigate some of the planet's most challenging environmental issues.
Makechnie Study Center
The Media Resource Center, a support facility offering media services for students, faculty, and staff including classroom media support and media production as well as technical support and instruction, opens at Sargent College. The center is later renamed the George K. Makechnie Study Center (MSC). Through the production of digital educational materials, the MSC supports and enhances teaching, learning, and research in the health and rehabilitation fields. The center also features four quiet study rooms—each one equipped with hi-definition LCD panels for viewing course-related media and developing PowerPoint presentations for classes—so students can work in groups without disturbing others.
Slone Epidemiology Center
A public health research organization, the Slone Epidemiology Center studies the possible health effects of medications and other variables in adults and children. A staff of approximately 100 includes specialists in epidemiology, adult and pediatric medicine, nursing, pharmacy, biostatistics, and computer science. Slone researchers use a variety of epidemiological tools, including case-control and follow-up studies, clinical trials, surveillance studies, risk management studies, and population-based surveys.
The Health Policy Institute
The Health Policy Institute opens at Boston University. HPI today consists of the Management of Variability Program, the Health Care Entrepreneurship Program, Scholars in Health Policy Research Program, and the Center for Educational Development in Health. HPI is also affiliated with the Boston University Health & Disability Research Institute.
CELOP Opens
The Center for English Language & Orientation Programs (CELOP) opens.
Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute
The Whitaker Cardiovascular Institute of Boston University Medical Center advances research, treatment, and education in the broad area of heart and vascular disease by providing a unified structure that integrates the components of basic science, clinical investigation, medical education, patient care, health-policy planning, and community research. The Institute has been designated a Specialized Center of Research in Hypertension and a Specialized Center of Research in Ischemic Heart Disease by the National Institutes of Health’s Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which indicates that the Institute serves as a site for important medical research in the national interest. The Institute was also named a Center for Cardiovascular Proteomics through support from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
The Gerontology Center
Created by School of Social Work professor Louis Lowy and School of Medicine professor F. Marott Sinex, the Gerontology Center is affiliated with the Geriatrics Section at Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine, and offers training opportunities in geriatric medicine and dentistry. School of Medicine Associate Professor Thomas Perls directs the world’s largest genetic study of people over 100 years old, and after analyzing the genomes of 308 centenarians and their siblings, discovers a “genetic booster rocket” for longevity. Amazingly, Perls and his researchers pinpoint a region on human chromosome 4 that is likely to contain a gene or genes associated with extraordinary life expectancy.
"With scientists at a company called Centagenetix in Cambridge, we’ve been working to find the gene that plays a role in life span."—ProfessorThomas Perls
Prison Education Program
The Boston University Prison Education Program, founded by labor organizer, tenant activist, and poet Elizabeth Barker, offers its first credit-bearing college courses at MCI/Norfolk prison. The program strives to provide the means whereby, through education, students currently imprisoned can become informed, successful, and contributing citizens. Students who earn 30 to 60 credits can apply the credits towards a Boston University bachelor’s degree and even go on to pursue a master’s degree. In 1991, the Prison Education Program expands to include MCI/Framingham, the only penal institution in Massachusetts for women. Boston University continues to be nationally recognized for its contribution to the lives of prisoners in the program, and by extension, its contribution to the prisons they inhabit, the families they left behind, and the communities to which they will return.
