Rutgers News Center

Rutgers appoints administrator to oversee athletics financial operations

Following a national search, Rutgers’ director of intercollegiate athletics Robert E. Mulcahy III and senior vice president for finance and administration Bruce C. Fehn announced the appointment of Richard J. Costello to the position of deputy director of athletics-finance and administration.

Under the terms of his contract, Costello’s primary reporting relationship will be to the senior vice president for finance and administration. However, with respect to the day-to-day operations of the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics, his supervisor will be the director of athletics.

Costello comes to Rutgers from Delaware State University, where he was director of athletics. Immediately prior to that, he served for four years as associate athletic director and chief financial officer at the University of South Florida.

Costello holds a bachelor’s degree in accounting from Muhlenberg College and a master’s degree in business administration from Lehigh University, where he subsequently served as a senior budget analyst for four years.

Costello will oversee all day-to-day administrative operations in the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics, including athletic financial matters, strategic planning, budget preparation and management, contract administration, information technology, ticket offices, and athletic financial aid administration.

– Greg Trevor

$3.67 million to advance women in science

The Office for the Promotion of Women in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering (WISEM) has been awarded a five-year, $3.67 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s ADVANCE program.

The grant, “Rutgers University for Faculty Advancement and Institutional Re-imagination” (RU-FAIR), will support activities aimed at increasing the participation and advancement of women faculty in science, engineering, and mathematics (SEM) on all three Rutgers campuses: recruitment and retention, communication, networking and liaisons, visibility, and family.

WiSEM is now able to provide collaborative mini-grants to women SEM faculty, promote their activities through lectures and awards, enhance its web presence, bolster resources available to dual-career families and families with children, administer a mentorship program, and focus on increasing diversity among women SEM faculty, among other activities.

The grant will provide funds for three or four professorships, each with an annual budget of up to $50,000 per year. These professors are expected to serve as university leaders who foster mentoring, promote diversity, facilitate communication among geographically dispersed faculty, and mediate between faculty and administration.

WISEM will conduct benchmarking and evaluation activities to track the status of women and minority SEM faculty members.

– Ashanti M. Alvarez

Libraries post welcome pages in multiple languages

Rutgers University Libraries have launched the first of its multilingual Welcome pages on the libraries website. Visitors can see a new box in the right-hand column of the home page, with links to a Welcome to the Libraries page in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, and Spanish.

The welcome pages are intended to provide an overview of the libraries, with links to primary services, to English speakers and to audiences comfortable with other languages. Visitors range from the parents of prospective Rutgers undergraduates, graduate students from other countries, and international scholars learning about the libraries’ collections.

As one of the most diverse states in the nation in terms of language and culture, New Jersey has large populations of speakers of world languages. The new welcome pages provide a launch pad to wider use and awareness of library services for diverse communities.

People who assisted with translation include Myriam Alami, Eulalia Borres i Riba, Moha Ennaji, Hala Issa, Mei Ling Lo, Eugene McElroy, Françoise Puniello, Jan Reinhart, Li Sun, Connie Wu, and Tao Yang. The Rutgers University Libraries’ World Language Task Force includes Michael Joseph, Triveni Kuchi, Melanie Miller, Nita Mukherjee, Jan Reinhart, and Judith Ward. Volunteers are welcome to help with other languages and should contact task force chair Ryan Womack at rwomack@rci.rutgers.edu or 732-932-7129, ext. 131.

– Ashanti M. Alvarez

GSE awarded $2.1 million grant for math study

The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $2,132,621 to the Graduate School of Education (GSE) in New Brunswick to continue a long-running research project on how children learn mathematics.

The project, “Collaborative Research: R&D: Cyber-Enabled Design Research to Enhance Teachers’ Critical Thinking Using a Major Video Collection on Children’s Mathematical Reasoning,” is under the direction of GSE professors Carolyn A. Maher and Cindy E. Hmelo-Silver, GSE assistant director of learning and teaching Marjory Palius, and associate university librarian Grace Agnew.

The grant money will be used in part to store the extensive library of videos Maher and her associates have amassed over 21 years of study. The videos record how students from grade school to college age solve mathematical problems.

The grant will also enable math teachers to make use of the video library to study how children learn mathematics.

– Coleen Dee Berry

Rutgers Business School’s EMBA ranked number four among public universities

 Wall Street Journal special report on the world’s 25 best Executive MBA programs published on September 30, ranks Rutgers Business School at number 19 worldwide.

Among U.S. public universities, Rutgers is ranked in the top four.

The Wall Street Journal’s Executive MBA (EMBA) rankings are based on “which schools do the best job of turning up-and-coming managers into full-fledged leaders.” Members of the most current graduating Executive MBA class and companies that employ EMBA students were both surveyed.

In addition to the overall ranking, the report also ranks Rutgers Business School as number 13 worldwide in the student-rank category, and number 14 worldwide for management skills.

The Rutgers EMBA program is also ranked among the world’s best by the Financial Times.

“It is tremendous to see Rutgers Business School increasingly gain recognition as a top business school. It certainly speaks to the exceptionally high quality of the program in delivering the cutting-edge business skills and knowledge demanded by world-leading companies,” said Dean Michael R. Cooper.