A NOTE FROM THE PROVOST
This semester, the university will reflect on our progress and continue our forward momentum through exciting programs and initiatives.
In this edition, you will find more details about the upcoming visit of SACSCOC as part of the reaffirmation of our accreditation required every 10 years by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
You will also find more information about how to use a new platform that will help you share your invaluable contributions to Georgia State’s research and scholarship. Faculty Insight will be a powerful tool not just for sharing publications, grants, awards and patents, but also to seek out opportunities for collaboration.
I also hope you enjoy learning more about the fascinating Women Inspire lecture by Elizabeth J. West, Professor of English, entitled “And They Raised Black Men: Black Women, Family, and Resistance in the U.S. South.” You will be able to view the video in the information below.
There is more information in this edition about the continued successes of the Next Generation Program, including new faculty hired under the program, and graduate students supported by the Second Century Initiative Fellows program.
Risa Palm
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
Table of Contents
NEWS
SACSCOC Team to Visit Georgia State Feb. 25-28, Public Presentation on Feb. 26
Faculty Insight
Watch the Latest Women Inspire Lecture with Elizabeth J. West
NEWS FROM THE NEXT GENERATION PROGRAM
New Next Generation Program Faculty
Second Century Initiative Fellows: Alexandra Yep
Next Gen In the News: Oversight on Opioids
NEWS
SACSCOC Team to Visit Georgia State Feb. 25-28, Public Presentation on Feb. 26
Every 10 years, Georgia State University must seek the reaffirmation of its regional accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). The reaffirmation process, facilitated by the Office of Institutional Effectiveness, began in January 2017, with the formation of seven writing teams, as well a reaffirmation leadership team led by President Mark Becker.
The writing teams worked to identify gaps in policy, write narratives and collect evidence for Georgia State’s Compliance Certification Report. The report asserts that Georgia State adheres to all 78 of the standards in SACSCOC’s Principles of Accreditation. Georgia State submitted its report to SACSCOC on Sept. 10, 2018. In November 2018, the report was reviewed by a SACSCOC Off-Site Reaffirmation Committee. A second round of reviews will take place during the upcoming visit by the On-Site Reaffirmation Committee.
On Feb. 25-28, 2019, a team of eight reviewers led by Dr. Jonathan Alger, President of James Madison University, will visit Georgia State’s downtown campus, as well as the Dunwoody, Clarkston, and Decatur campuses. The reviewers will hold dozens of meetings, inspect documents and facilities, and gather evidence of the university’s compliance with the accreditation standards.
As part of the reaffirmation, the university has also developed its next Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). The plan, College to Career: Career Readiness through Everyday Competencies, was selected in November 2017 by the Reaffirmation Leadership Team after an extensive selection process that drew 36 proposals and participation from faculty, students, and staff across all of Georgia State’s campuses.
College to Career (CTC) supports Georgia State’s mission, which states that the university “strengthens the workforce of the future” and “readies students for professional pursuits.” The topic grows directly out of Goal 1 of the university Strategic Plan: “Become a national model for undergraduate education by demonstrating that students from all backgrounds can achieve…career success.”
The QEP aims to fulfill Initiative 3 of the 2016 revision of the Strategic Plan’s Goal 1: “Establish new pathways that facilitate seamless college to career transitions.” The QEP builds on career readiness initiatives already in place as a result of grants from the Goizueta Foundation and the State Farm/LIFT program. In Spring 2018, a broad-based QEP Development Committee and executive committee were formed to flesh out the initial CTC proposal. In Summer 2018, Dr. Angela Christie was named as the QEP Faculty Director.
At 1 p.m. on Feb. 26, members of SACSCOC’s On-Site Reaffirmation Committee will attend a presentation on the QEP to be given by Dr. Christie and by Senior Vice President for Student Success Tim Renick. The presentation will be held on the third floor of the Creative Media Industries Institute, next to the 25 Park Place building. All are welcome to attend.
The members of the SACSCOC Board of Trustees will convene in December 2019 to determine whether Georgia State’s accreditation is reaffirmed. Because of the dedication and hard work of our students, faculty and staff, we look forward to continuing our quest to help students of all backgrounds succeed at high rates for another ten years. With regard to our growing research portfolio, as our mission statement declares, “The scholarly work and artistic expression of the university’s faculty” will continue to create “new knowledge, extend the boundaries of imagination, and enhance student learning.”
— Michael Galchinsky, Associate Provost for Institutional Effectiveness
Faculty Insight
The university has partnered with a company called Academic Analytics to give you access to a platform called Faculty Insight. The platform displays Georgia State faculty publications, grants, awards and patents for discovery by other researchers at the university. In addition, Faculty Insight enables you to perform keyword searches to discover other researchers on campus who are working on similar topics. This feature can help you in various ways, such as forming collaborative research groups for a Next Generation research proposal or putting together a symposium. You can also use the platform to find public and private funding opportunities for your research.
If you haven’t already done so, take a few minutes to log in and explore your research profile on the Faculty Insight platform. You can log in with your campus ID and password here.
Later this spring, Faculty Insight will go live as an outward-facing website. The university will use this site as part of its effort to tell its research story to other universities, the media and the public. Before we go live, it is very important that you to log in to ensure your research profile is accurate and complete.
Once you log in, follow these steps to confirm your Research Summary and Research Interests are reflected as you would like the public to see them:
1. In the platform, click on the three horizontal bars in the upper left corner that look like this:
2. From the menu that pops up, click on “My Profile.” This lets you see how your profile appears to other users, and here you can also explore the platform’s various tools.
3. In “My Profile,” click on the editor button that appears next to your name in the upper left corner. It looks like this:
4. Finally, edit your Research Summary and Research Interests.
Each college and school has a designated staff member in the Dean’s Office who will be happy to answer questions or concerns you have about Faculty Insight. You can also email Associate Provost for Institutional Effectiveness Michael Galchinsky at [email protected].
Watch the Latest Women Inspire Lecture with Elizabeth J. West
Dr. Elizabeth J. West, Professor of English
On Feb. 5, Elizabeth J. West, professor of English and affiliate faculty in the Department of African American studies, presented a lecture in the Women Inspire speaker series.
Her talk, “And They Raised Black Men: Black Women, Family, and Resistance in the U.S. South,” examined the lives and legacies of Francis and Louisa, two enslaved and later free black women, exploring the still-present misrepresentation of black matriarchy in popular and scholarly discourse.
This historical sentiment was articulated in the Rev. Jasper Williams Jr.’s August 2018 eulogy for singer Aretha Franklin, in which Williams said, “A Black woman cannot raise a black boy to be a man.” The story of Francis and Louisa shows Black women have a long history of doing that.
Both women dared to be mothers and to pass on a legacy of family and kinship in a nation that refused to recognize the humanity of Black family and society during and after slavery. Watch below:
You can also watch the video and download a transcript at https://provost.gsu.edu/files/2019/02/Women-Inspire-Transcription-Elizabeth-West-2-5-19-ejw.pdf.
News from the Next Generation Program
New Next Generation Program Faculty
Georgia State is adding top researchers in the biomedical field this March thanks to the Next Generation Program.
Drs. Cynthia Cornelissen and Arianne Theiss will join the university’s Institute for Biomedical Sciences (IBMS).
Dr. Cornelissen comes to Georgia State from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she has served as a professor in the Department of Microbiology in the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center. Her research is supported by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), investigating the development of a potential vaccine against Neisseria gonorrhoeae.
Dr. Cornelissen earned a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and completed postdoctoral training as a research associate in the Department of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Dr. Theiss comes to Georgia State from the Baylor Scott & White Research Institute’s Division of Gastroenterology at the Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. Her research has focused on elucidating the role and mechanism whereby mitochondrial signaling pathways contribute to inflammatory bowel diseases. Her research is supported by the NIH’s National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), as well as through the Crohn’s Colitis Foundation of America and the Cancer Prevention Research Institute of Texas.
Dr. Theiss earned her Ph.D. in cell and molecular physiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in digestive diseases at Emory University.
To learn more about the IBMS, visit https://biomedical.gsu.edu.
Second Century Initiative Fellows: Alexandra Yep
Alexandra Yep, a Second Century Initiative (2CI) Fellow, is a graduate student researching the formation of young stars in the Gum Nebula, an emission nebula that extends across the southern constellations. Southern constellations reside south of the equator and can be better seen from the southern hemisphere. According to Yep, the formation of these stars is specifically interesting because unlike most stars, these stars formed with the help of an external force: other stars.
“Whereas a lot of stars form from just a huge clump of gas and dust, these stars formed in a smaller clump with the help of external energy coming in from some nearby hot stars. These hot stars shined on these clumps of gas, producing a high radiation environment that helped them collapse into stars,” said Yep. “We’re interested in seeing if the stars formed in this high radiation environment would look any different from the stars formed in this typical, gravity based, big cloud of gas and dust.”
To read the full profile, please visit https://nextgen.gsu.edu/2019/01/29/second-century-initiative-fellow-redefines-stargazing/.
To learn more about past and present graduate students who have received 2CI Fellowships, please visit https://nextgen.gsu.edu/category/2ci-fellows/.
Next Gen In the News: Oversight on Opioids
Scholarship by Patricia J. Zettler, a College of Law faculty member under Georgia State’s Second Century Initiative, and her colleagues was recently covered in The Regulatory Review, where they contend that the FDA’s current regulatory approval process is insufficient in looking at the safety and efficacy of drugs like opioids.
The publication writes:
Recently, several health law scholars have argued that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration(FDA) is partly responsible for the nationwide opioid epidemic. They claim that FDA’s current regulatory oversight process for high-risk drugs like opioids fails to take into account sufficient information about their safety and efficacy.
FDA’s current regulatory approval process narrowly focuses on clinical trial data to evaluate the health impact of drugs, overlooking broader public health effects such as those created by opioid addiction, according to a recent paper by Patricia J. Zettler, Margaret Foster Riley, and Aaron S. Kesselheim. The federal agency should instead turn more consistently and frequently to broader sources of data—such as studies on population health impacts of high-risk drugs—when it decides whether to approve drugs or withdraw them from the market, argue Zettler and her coauthors.
The article in The Regulatory Review is available at https://www.theregreview.org/2019/01/24/barsky-fda-drug-review-opioid-epidemic/. The paper by Zettler and her colleagues, published in the Food and Drug Law Journal, is available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3193096.
Learn more about Zettler and her work at https://nextgen.gsu.edu/2018/06/26/2ci-qa-patricia-j-zettler/.
News from the Office of the Provost is a bimonthly e-newsletter highlighting news and activities in academic affairs at Georgia State University. For questions about the newsletter, email [email protected].
Keep up-to-date by visiting https://provost.gsu.edu/news.
To read previous editions of the newsletter, visit https://provost.gsu.edu/news/newsletter/.