Noteworthy!
Marc Rosenblum, Political Science Department, was named Robert Dupuy Professor of Pan-American Studies In the fall of 2007. He has also received an International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations and was named a Next Generation Fellow by the Columbia University American Assembly. Rosenblum is actively involved with public policy work on issues related to US immigration enforcement, including technical issues related to employer verification of employees work authorization status in particular. Since April 2007 he has testified before the House Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law; chaired a staff briefing on capitol hill, and provided expert testimony in two different federal lawsuits over state and local immigration enforcement statutes . In 2007 he briefed Mexican executive branch officials and legislators on US immigration enforcement and the current immigration debate in a seminar series sponsored by the Migration Policy Institute, the Woodrow Wilson Institute, the Colegio de México, and the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Mexico City. He has also delivered lectures on the politics of US immigration policy at the University of New Orleans, Tulane University, the World Affairs Council of New Orleans, and the US Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a member of the Immigration Policy Committee of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
Robert S. Montjoy was named Research Professor in 2007. He also was invited to edit a symposium on elections administration for the journal Public Administration Review and he testified at a congressional subcommittee on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. He served on the Government Effectiveness Committee of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission.
John J. Kiefer was elected to the Executive Board of the Southeastern Conference of Public Administration. He also serves on the Executive Board on Crisis and Emergency Management for the American Society for Public Administration.
Michael G. Huelshoff was awarded a German Academic Exchange Service Faculty Research Grant in December 2005.
Steven Rick, Associate Professor of Chemistry, and his research group have developed a method to enhance protein folding computer simulations. Many processes, including protein folding, have rates which are determined by high energy barriers. These barriers can increase the times scales for the folding events beyond what can be routinely simulated with computers. The research group developed a method to circumvent the size limitation problem using a method which scales the energy, and therefore the energetic barriers, by an amount which fluctuates over time, mimicking the effects of temperature. This method scales much better with the size of the system and is at least ten times more efficient than comparable approaches. Conceived during the Katrina semester of Fall 2005, the method was part of a grant from the National Science Foundation funded in 2006. Initial results for the method were published early this year and subsequent revisions and additional applications of the method are ongoing in the research group.
Dr. David Hui, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has received four honorary degrees: two from Ukraine, one from Italy, and one from Vietnam. Dr. Hui has also participated as the keynote speaker for the recent Nano Thailand Conference.
Authored by Rebecca Drake on February 20, 2008