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Just this past Friday, we introduced our new men’s basketball coach. Mick Cronin is a UC graduate and a Cincinnati native who vows to build on the Bearcat’s great winning tradition. He served as an assistant coach at UC, and most recently has been the head coach at Murray State University. I want to thank Trustee Niehoff for being present for the welcome, as were many other people in this room.
On March 3, UC hosted business leaders from as close as downtown and as far away as Finland for our Innovation Imperative Symposium. This event brought together corporate, government and academic leaders to discuss an urgent issue for our nation’s economic vitality. That being: innovation, which was also the topic of my State of the University address in the fall. This was an exciting gathering.
A senior in our industrial design program, Geoff Baldwin, took second place honors in an International Housewares Association competition. His design consists of a spoon, that once placed in a cup of coffee or tea, heats it up again. I can’t wait to try that!
A team of UC architecture students is one of only 21 international teams selected to compete in a prestigious project called the Solar Decathlon. This means our UC students and faculty will design and build a completely solar-powered house to be displayed in 2007 on the National Mall in Washington D.C.
This month, the U.S. Postal Service unveiled a new stamp honoring the developer of the oral polio vaccine, Albert Sabin, of UC and Children’s Hospital Research Foundation. Dr. Sabin’s widow participated in our formal ceremony at the Vontz Center, marking this wonderful salute to the man whose vaccine has saved thousands, if not millions, of lives.
With more than $12 million in scholarships up for grabs, our tenth anniversary Cincinnatus Scholarship Competition broke another record this year, attracting more than 2000 seniors from 40 states, including a student from Hong Kong and one from Germany. This year, we experienced a 68 percent increase in awards to students in the top 10 percent of their class. I would like to recognize, and ask you to stand as I call your names, Connie Williams, Cindy Cohen and Randy Ullses of our Student Affairs and Services Division for their efforts in organizing this great competition! Thank you all.
UC joined Xavier and NKU in honoring 12 outstanding math and science teachers from the Cincinnati USA region this month. This is the second year that we have collaborated on this recognition program. The first ceremony, by the way, preceded all the recent reports focusing on our nation’s attention to the urgent need for more graduates in the so-called STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and math. So once again we are ahead of the curve.
Despite public perceptions, our campus and the surrounding neighborhoods are getting safer. Crime is down by 35 percent since 2003 on our campus and dropped by 25 percent in the surrounding neighborhoods. Our collaborative efforts with the city, with our neighbors and the Uptown Consortium, relative to public safety, are bringing results, and we will keep working towards even better results.
Dan Acosta, Dean of the College of Pharmacy, will receive on April 1 the prestigious 2006 Award of Excellence in Pharmacology/Toxicology from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America Foundation. The award honors his distinguished career. I didn’t get a chance to see if Dan is in the house, so pass it along.
Dorothy Air, our Associate Senior Vice President for Entrepreneurial Affairs, was recently named one of the “Top 10 Women in Technology” by Women’s Business Cincinnati. Dr. Air, who also serves as a loaned executive to CincyTechUSA, is charged with developing new initiatives and implementing plans to drive research and innovation to commercialization. Dorothy also currently heads up our new event, called Showcase 2006. This wide-ranging view of the university's transformational impact on the region will take place on Friday, April 21, here at Tangeman University Center. We hope you can all attend. This is an effort to showcase our contributions to regional economic development through our expertise in research, and the second day of Showcase 2006 will be a recruitment fair for students interested in attending the University of Cincinnati.
We are heading into baseball season now, but I thought I would mention that one of our own design students quarterbacked a Super Bowl assignment: Senior Zach Norman finished a co-op where he helped create designs for the Super Bowl in Detroit. Once again, our co-op students score a touchdown for real-life experience!
And finally, some highlights of our UC|21 progress. Just a couple related to Goal 3: Achieve Academic Excellence. I recently received word from our accrediting body that they are impressed by the academic integrity of our distance education programs. We should be duly proud of our growing efforts to expand our reach through these programs and delighted that the accrediting body that accredits traditional campus-based programs is so pleased with the way we are doing distance education.
Also our UC|21 team headed by Gigi Escoe has won a Mayerson grant to support a senior capstone course with an experiential learning emphasis. This is a part of our Integrated Core Learning Initiative, which extends the general education and the liberal learning curriculum throughout all four years of the undergraduate experience.
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