News from the Office of the Provost

A NOTE FROM THE PROVOST

This is my final note as Provost, and I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your contributions to Georgia State University and for your unfailing support of our trajectory as an innovative urban research university. I also want to welcome Wendy Hensel, Dean of the College of Law, as interim provost and senior vice president for academic affairs effective July 1.

The end of the fiscal year is a time to evaluate our successes, honor others’ achievements and service, and congratulate those will continue our university’s upward trajectory.

As Georgia State’s reputation for innovation continues to rise, we are examining how we can best prepare students to thrive and become adaptable problem solvers in a world of rapid and disruptive change. Georgia State is moving forward with a new pilot effort, derived from the Moonshot Committee conversations. The Experiential Project-based and Interdisciplinary Curriculum, or EPIC. EPIC will help students think critically across the curriculum, making connections between their coursework and the world around them, and you can read more about this exciting endeavor below.

The University System of Georgia has honored our History Department and the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for reshaping the history curriculum through new teaching methods, course flexibility, and incorporating data visualization projects into history courses. You’ll learn more in this issue.

There is also more information about the pending, official launch of College to Career, the university’s Quality Enhancement Plan, which will further enhance our students’ ability to demonstrate core competencies needed in the workplace.

In this issue, you will also learn more about Georgia State students who, with the support of faculty from the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute, took top prizes in a national business pitch competition this past semester. They prove that student entrepreneurship is for everyone, and that they can succeed across majors.

At the heart of a great university is a great faculty. You can read more below about this year’s faculty awards, promotions, and tenure, which we celebrated this May at the Celebrating Faculty Excellence event. The article includes specifics about the award winners, as well as lists of promotions and tenures.

Thank you for all that you do to make Georgia State the institution that it is. It has been a privilege to serve as provost, and I will remain dedicated to the university’s success as a member of our faculty.

Risa Palm
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

EDITOR’S NOTE: Georgia State University President Mark Becker spoke to Dr. Palm for Episode 3 of his podcast, “Conversations With Mark Becker,” discussing her career-long commitment to breaking down barriers to leadership in higher education for women. You can listen to the episode here, through iTunes, Google Play, Spotify or your favorite podcast service. -Jeremy Craig

TABLE OF CONTENTS

NEWS

• QEP Update: Preparing to Introduce College-to-Career This September
• Celebrating Faculty Excellence: Awards and Promotion and Tenure
• The EPIC Program: Innovation in the Core Curriculum
• Leadership Appointments
• Faculty Affairs News: Orientation and Training
• Graduate Programs News
• History Department Earns Regents’ Award for Teaching Excellence by a Department or Program
• Student Entrepreneurs Take Top Prizes at National Pitch Competition
• WomenLead Scholarship Established in Honor of Provost
• News from University Research Services and Administration

NEWS FROM THE NEXT GENERATION PROGRAM

• New Director of the Center for Translational Immunology Appointed
• Second Century Initiative Fellow Profile: Data Miner

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QEP Update: Preparing to Introduce College-to-Career This September

Our Quality Enhancement Plan, College to Career: Career Readiness through Everyday Competencies, is formally under way as we prepare for the official introduction in September.  Faculty Fellowship recipients and Department Incentive Grant recipients across all GSU campus have begun developing curriculum enhancements to help students become aware of the career-readiness competencies employers value most.

The Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning will award faculty seed grants this month to the most recent round of applicants working on College to Career projects: https://cetl.gsu.edu/programs-grants-awards/college-to-careers/.  Faculty interested in participating in Teaching and Learning Communities related to College to Career can learn more here: https://cetl.gsu.edu/programs-grants-awards/cetl-teaching-and-learning-communities/.

Instructors will have access to a digital career readiness skills building tool that will enable them to drop and drag relevant skills into a downloadable and printable template of competencies for which various curricular and co-curricular activities fulfill.  This is a flexible template which will enable users to add their own discipline specific skills to any of the competencies listed.  The career readiness skills building tool will be available in iCollege and on the CTC website in the next few weeks.

For students who will miss valuable CTC information and Portfolium onboarding instruction by opting out of traditional orientation courses such as GSU 1010 and PCO 1020, a non-credit bearing 30-minute online College to Career orientation course will be available through iCollege.  The course, which will introduce students to the career competencies and QEP outcomes, helps students onboard to GSU’s ePortfolio system, and initiate meaningful engagement with Career Services.

Information about the CTC initiative, where students can practice the skills needed to be successful in the workplace, and upcoming CTC events can be found at the College to Career website: www.gsu.edu/collegetocareer.

– Julie Fowkes, Administrative Coordinator for the QEP/College-to-Career Initiative

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Lists of awardees, new Regents and Distinguished University Professors, and the promotion and tenure lists, are located below. To view each section, click on the “+” sign. To close the section, click the “-” sign.

The list is courtesy of the Office of Faculty Affairs. Click on the “+” sign to expand each list for each category. Click the “-” sign to collapse the list.

Sorted by college, then by rank, then by last name.

For more information about faculty awards, promotion and tenure at Georgia State, visit https://faculty.gsu.edu.

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The EPIC Program: Innovation in the Core Curriculum

As advancing technologies change the career landscape students enter on graduation, higher education continues to examine how best to provide a curriculum that prepares students to thrive. At Georgia State, a provost-led, cross-university team has been working to re-examine elements of the university’s core coursework with a focus on ensuring Georgia State’s students have opportunities to develop foundational skills to help them become adaptable problem-solvers, overcoming the academic challenges they face in their studies and creating solutions to the issues they’ll tackle as they graduate into their professions and lives.

The team has developed EPIC (Experiential, Project-based and Interdisciplinary Curriculum). In fall 2019, Georgia State will pilot EPIC, with elements including a number of highly-connected Freshman Learning Communities (FLCs) and Project Labs.

Through meaningful course pairings throughout the core curriculum and highly connected FLCs for students beginning their college experience, the EPIC program will help students think critically across the curriculum, making connections between their coursework and the world around them. Course pairings will encourage students to examine what they are learning across contexts by offering themes across courses such as American government and American history.

Students in these highly-connected FLCs will also learn by doing with in-class curriculum enhanced through games, outside speakers, and activities. Outside of the classroom, students will explore course concepts on walking tours, at museums, and through events.

Project Labs will allow students to earn course credit over multiple semesters while working on faculty-led, interdisciplinary, public-facing projects that take on issues like homelessness or the development of STEM educational resources for metro Atlanta schools. Through project labs, students will have opportunities to develop and demonstrate 21st century skills like digital literacies, complex problem solving, and teamwork, while working on projects with impact and building their portfolios. Over time, faculty will build a skilled project team of undergraduate and graduate students to work in their lab.

To find out more about EPIC, visit: provost.gsu.edu/epic or email the project team at [email protected].

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Leadership Appointments

Faculty Affairs News: Orientation and Training Information

Orientations for new faculty will be held this August, and are required for all new full-time faculty (both tenure track and non-tenure track) at the Atlanta and Perimeter College campuses.

Additionally, the Center for Teaching and Learning is offering teaching and pedagogy orientation sessions that are highly recommended for all new faculty on the Atlanta campus, in addition to an orientation session for new part-time faculty for all new part-time instructors at both the Atlanta and Perimeter College campuses.

More orientation information is listed in the table below. Additional onboarding information is available at https://faculty.gsu.edu/for-new-faculty/#new-atlanta-campus-faculty. Faculty who have not received emailed invitations by August 1 should contact the Office of Faculty Affairs at [email protected].

– Demetra Watson, Office of Faculty Affairs

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Graduate Programs News

Information provided by Dori Neptune, Office of Graduate Programs

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History Department Earns Regents’ Award for Teaching Excellence by a Department or Program

The University System of Georgia has awarded Georgia State University’s Department of History on the downtown campus with the Regents’ Award for Teaching Excellence by a Department or Program, recognizing innovative and engaging efforts to transform teaching and learning in the department’s curriculum.

The nomination packet was submitted by Jeff Young, Rob Baker and Jared Poley, who have worked together to include data visualization, in addition to the incorporation of the Reacting to the Past (RTTP) teaching and learning concept in history courses, and redesign of U.S. history and world history courses.

These efforts have resulted in an increase in student engagement, and a reduction in DFW rates – the rates of students who either earn grades of D or F, or withdraw from the course.

The Regents Award for Teaching Excellence by a Department or Program is designed to showcase an outstanding department or program that promotes, supports and recognizes excellence in teaching and in service to students.

In survey courses such as in world history and Georgia history, students are assigned projects requiring them to make and use maps as part of assignments.

Through these assignments, they learn to use ArcGIS, a geographic information systems tool, and Tableau, a widely-used data visualization program, to make sense of historical datasets, including petitions to southern courts and legislatures on the subject of race and slavery, data on lynchings in the U.S., census data on American population and economic growth, records of early modern plague outbreaks in Europe and Asia, and data on global refugees in the 20th and 21st centuries.

By learning how to work with large datasets, history students are learning data science and analysis skills that they can apply across many disciplines of study and many career fields outside of history.

The History Department’s redesign of U.S. history and world history survey courses have also made a significant impact at Georgia State. The online versions of the courses have become the gold standard for the department, and instructional modules form the foundation of the core curriculum, widely adopted by Atlanta-campus faculty.

Teaching methods aiding in reducing DFW rates include early feedback on low-stakes assessments, and interactive and effective digital tools connected to a bank of over 130 learning modules in U.S. history and hundreds more for world history.

Instructors can organize the modules in any way to custom-create a course to support and facilitate critical thinking, including short videos, readings, quiz questions and interactive materials.

In 2016, the History Department received an Endeavor Challenge grant from the RTTP consortium to incorporate RTTP into the curriculum. The concept consists of elaborate games, set in the past, in which students are assigned roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas. Class sessions are run entirely by students; instructors advise and guide students and grade their oral and written work. It seeks to draw students into the past, promote engagement with big ideas, and improve intellectual and academic skills.

In qualitative surveys, students reported excitement about RTTP roleplaying, and responded that in addition to history, they learned soft skills such as teamwork and leadership.

Earlier this year, Barnard College, the founding institution of RTTP, recognized the History Department as a leading institution in the use of the concept to teach history and leadership. Read more at https://provost.gsu.edu/2019/02/07/georgia-state-takes-the-spotlight-for-incorporating-innovative-reacting-to-the-past-concept-to-teach-history-and-leadership/.

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Student Entrepreneurs Take Top Prizes at National Pitch Competition

A team of Georgia State University student entrepreneurs took top prizes in the Schulze Entrepreneurship Challenge, winning during the live competition finals and championship round of e-Fest 2019 held April 11-13 in Minneapolis.

Georgia State students Chanté Knox and Dia Davis of DelivHer won the grand prize in the pitch competition against 25 other finalists. The students are bringing to market a patented feminine hygiene product created by women for women, and a monthly subscription service of feminine products that can be customized for an individual woman’s needs.

Knox and Davis faced stiff competition against teams from institutions such as Princeton University, the Air Force Academy, Virginia Tech and other colleges and universities.

The students used the resources and faculty mentoring of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute at Georgia State, which seeks to expand and support student entrepreneurship for students across all majors.

Read more at https://news.gsu.edu/2019/04/22/georgia-state-student-entrepreneurs-take-top-prizes-at-national-pitch-competition/.

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WomenLead Scholarship Established in Honor of Provost

Nancy Mansfield, director of Georgia State’s WomenLead Program, has announced the founding of the Dr. Risa Palm WomenLead Endowed Scholarship, established by the Women’s Philanthropy Network.

The announcement was made on April 16 at the network’s luncheon.

The merit- and financial-need based scholarship will be awarded to students in the WomenLead Program, a professional signature experience that equips undergraduate women from all majors with the skills, experience and networking opportunities needed to become leaders in all fields.

“This endowed scholarship recognizes her service to Georgia State University, and her support of student success and women’s initiatives across our campus,” Mansfield said. “The scholarship awarded to women who come through the WomenLead program will impact generations of Georgia State students to come.”

In brief remarks to the Women’s Philanthropy Network, Dr. Palm recalled the film On the Basis of Sex, which dramatized now-Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s efforts against sex discrimination in the justice’s early career in the late 1960’s and early 70s.

The events took place during the same timeframe when Dr. Palm began her academic career in geography, becoming the only woman in her department in her first academic appointment at the University of California-Berkeley.

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg made such a difference in showing that all the things that were discriminating against women were illegal, opening a pathway for my generation,” she said. “For those of you who are contributing to the Women’s Philanthropy Network, you are making a pathway for everyone to come.

“You are paying it forward, and I’m so grateful to all of you for what you’re doing, for women’s leadership in the future, for women in the future, and for Georgia State University,” Dr. Palm said.

In the fall 2018 semester, the university announced that Palm, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Georgia State for nearly a decade, would step down from the position to join the faculty, effective at the end of June 2019. Check out an article that explores how her future research will continue to tackle one of the most critical problems of our time – climate change.

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News from University Research Services and Administration

Academic Analytics/Faculty Insight Replaces PIVOT Funding Database

An integrated research tool is offering university faculty with a powerful way to search for research funding opportunities.

The Faculty Insight portion of the powerful Academic Analytics system allows faculty to find opportunities most relevant to their research, and is accessible at https://oie.gsu.edu/academic-analytics/.

Because of the new system, declining use, and increasing cost, the university’s subscription to the PIVOT research funding database will end June 30, 2019.

Besides Faculty Insight, faculty can find additional research funding sources at the URSA website, at https://ursa.research.gsu.edu/finding-funding/.

Research & Environmental Safety Training Requirement

Georgia State is required to comply with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Guidelines for Research Involving Recombinant or Synthetic Nucleic Acids. Anyone at the university who works in a research laboratory must be familiar with the guidelines and implement best practices when working with recombinant or synthetic nucleic acids. NIH Guidelines Training is available on iCollege. Completion of this training will be monitored by RES as part of the existing Institutional Biosafety Committee training requirements. For questions regarding this requirement, please contact RES at 404-413-3540.

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New Director of the Center for Translational Immunology Appointed

Dr. Cynthia Nau Cornelissen, a leading researcher in the study of infectious diseases, including sexually transmitted infections (STIs), has been named director of the Center for Translational Immunology in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.

Recruited from Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center, Cornelissen joins Georgia State as a professor in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences and a Distinguished University Professor.

The Center for Translational Immunology investigates the cellular and molecular components of the immune system to better understand complex immune-mediated diseases and to develop innovative vaccines. Cornelissen’s research is focused on bacterial pathogenesis, metal acquisition and vaccine development against STI pathogens. Cornelissen also brings about $12.95 million in federal research funding to Georgia State.

Read more at https://news.gsu.edu/2019/05/13/microbiologist-and-immunologist-cynthia-nau-cornelissen-joins-institute-for-biomedical-sciences-as-director-of-center-for-translational-immunology/.

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Second Century Initiative Fellow Profile: Data Miner

Second Century Initiative (2CI) Fellow Soukaina Filali Boubrahimi is engaging in interdisciplinary research to assist other disciplines across the university, using neural networks ensembling, a data mining task that involves predicting categorical class labels based on empirical data.

Read more at https://nextgen.gsu.edu/2019/05/15/second-century-initiative-fellow-applies-computer-science-research-to-multiple-fields-at-georgia-state/.

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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 Jeremy Craig at [email protected].

Previous issues are available at the following links:

Oct. 2018 (Vol. 1, No. 1)
Dec. 2018 (Vol. 1, No. 2)
Feb. 2019 (Vol. 1, No. 3)
April 2019 (Vol. 1, No. 4)

Look for the next edition of the Provost’s Office newsletter in August 2019 (Vol. 2, No. 1).