Rutgers News Center

Rutgers’ Ambrose Oral History Award goes to Ken Burns

Ken Burns, whose documentary films have chronicled American history and culture from the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to the history of baseball, is the 2009 recipient of the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award.

The award is given annually by the Rutgers Living History Society, which will present it to Burns during its annual meeting on Friday, May 15 in the Neilson Dining Hall on Rutgers’ Cook/Douglass Campus, beginning at 9 a.m.

Burns has directed 24 historical documentaries over the past 28 years. He is known for his use of archival footage and photos in his documentaries, with frequent use of personal diaries, letters, or on-camera interviews. His first documentary, Brooklyn Bridge, which was nominated for an Academy Award, relied in part on archival material housed at Rutgers.

Oral history has been at the core of Burns' work, and his use of oral history is considered to have changed the way historical documentaries are made.

Burns' current documentary projects include The National Parks: America's Best Idea, which is scheduled for broadcast in the fall. Burns will show an excerpt from that film at the May 15 event. Prohibition and Tenth Inning, an update of Burns' 1994 documentary Baseball, are in production.

The Rutgers Oral History Archives, which currently preserves the stories of more than 850 people who participated in or lived through World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or the Cold War, is headquartered in New Brunswick. To date, 486 interviews are accessible through the archives’ website.

– Ken Branson

Google funds research to study search process

With the number of unique website addresses topping 1 trillion, searching the internet may seem like trawling through an unfathomable mass of information. Now Google has asked Rutgers researchers to study how people go about finding what they need in hopes of improving the search process.

Nina Wacholder, a linguist and associate professor of library and information science, and Ph.D. candidate Catherine L. Smith have received a $70,000 Google Research Award to help determine why people using search engines often fail to use suggested search terms and the possible impacts of the way a search engine presents results.

“This is part of a larger endeavor to try to understand from people’s outside behavior what is going on in their heads when they are using search engines and looking for information,” Wacholder said. “The goal is to understand how people process information and to figure out how to develop search engines that meet user needs.”

The grant will fund studies that use cognitive and psycholinguistic techniques that measure how people make “lexical decisions” – how they recognize words that are semantically related to each other, like “robin,” “nest,” and “egg.” Wacholder and Smith also plan to use eye-tracking technology to learn about how people look at suggested terms, recording how they scan computer monitors and where their eyes fixate.  

– Ashanti M. Alvarez

Thomas Farris named Dean of the School of Engineering

Rutgers University has appointed Thomas Farris, currently head of Purdue University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, as dean of the Rutgers School of Engineering. He replaces Michael Klein, who returns to teaching and research.

Farris brings 23 years of academic experience in Purdue’s College of Engineering, one of the nation’s top engineering programs, to his new position. As head of aeronautics and astronautics since 1998, he presided over growth that more than doubled undergraduate and graduate student enrollment. The school last year awarded more undergraduate degrees to women than any of its peer aerospace programs and, under Farris’s leadership, has increased the number of women on its faculty from one to five.

Farris’s research and professional contributions have been recognized by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and several professional engineering societies. He served as coprincipal investigator for an NSF Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Manufacturing in the 1990s. He later led a research team as part of a U.S. Air Force-sponsored project and was the only academic team leader among researchers from leading industrial and engineering firms.

His academic achievements include advising 22 engineers who completed doctoral degrees in engineering and receiving his school’s outstanding undergraduate teacher award in 2008. He increased fundraising for the school and established an outstanding aerospace engineer alumni recognition program.

At Rutgers, Farris will apply his experience toward enhancing teaching and research, increasing minority and female student and faculty representation, and developing closer ties with New Jersey’s engineering companies. He also will work to increase federal research funding and donor gifts.  

– Carl Blesch

Report: Women lawyers seek workplace flexibility

New research from Rutgers’ Center for Women and Work finds that women lawyers are taking control of their lives by choosing employers that support flexible workplaces.

The report, “Legal Talent at the Crossroads: Why New Jersey Women Lawyers Leave their Law Firms and Why They Choose to Stay,” relies on survey data from female lawyers and women who have left the profession. It was sponsored by the Council on Gender Parity in Labor and Education of the New Jersey State Employment and Training Commission.

“One of the study’s key findings is that women are now willing to leave an employer to seek a more flexible work environment,” said lead study author Teresa Boyer, executive director of the Center for Women and Work and director of its Education & Career Development Research and Programs. “It appears that women no longer feel trapped or helpless in their pursuit of a successful career in the law.”

Many respondents left their former employers due to a lack of flexible work arrangements and chose new employers based on whether they offered access to those arrangements. The report also presents steps New Jersey firms can take to retain and advance women lawyers, including providing flexible work arrangements.

– Sandra Lanman

Camden MBA ranked among best in global management

The Master of Business program at the  Rutgers School of Business–Camden is one of the nation’s best when it comes to preparing students to succeed in global management, according to a survey published in the April 2009 edition of Entrepreneur magazine,

The program was among 15 programs nationwide to receive high marks from 19,000 MBA students who participated in a national survey by The Princeton Review. In the metro Philadelphia region, Rutgers–Camden and Temple were the only schools selected in this category.

The survey examined six core competencies for MBA programs: accounting, finance, general management, global management, marketing, and operations.

As markets and economies become increasingly global, the demand for highly skilled professionals who can navigate the complexities of international business grows exponentially,” says Rayman Solomon, acting executive dean for professional education at Rutgers–Camden.  “We are gratified that MBA students from across the nation recognize that Rutgers–Camden is rising as a center for business education in the 21st century.”

– Mike Sepanic

Rutgers researchers join federal efforts to advance battery technology

Three faculty members from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering have been tapped to help America improve performance of large batteries. Professors Glenn Amatucci, Frederic Cosandey and Stephen Garofalini will serve as associate directors of a new $17 million Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The center will perform innovative research on advanced battery technologies to power electric vehicles and collect energy generated by solar panels or wind turbines, and will use materials processing techniques recently developed at Rutgers.

Called the Northeastern Chemical Energy Storage Center, it is led by the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. In addition to Rutgers, the center includes collaborators from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, SUNY Binghamton, the University of Florida, the University of Michigan, and Argonne, Brookhaven, and Lawrence Berkeley national labs.

– Carl Blesch