UA Live

On April 28, participants of the fourth-annual Akron ZipOff celebrated their accomplishments with a celebration and awards event at held at the Student Recreation & Wellness Center. Thirty teams with 150 UA employees lost 695 pounds over the past 12 weeks. The total weight loss averages 1.9 pounds per team per week, well within the recommended range for safe weight loss.

The team “Mission Slim Possible” (above) won the grand prize. Team members are, from left: Pat Millhoff, associate professor of criminal justice technology; Kathy Shaffer of Public Service Technology; Marvin Duncan of Hardware and Operating System Services; and Lois Smith of the Office of the President. Not pictured: Kathee Evans, of Research Services and Sponsored Programs. Members of the team lost 6.11 percent of their overall weight during the contest period.

Prizes were also awarded for:

• best team name (“Dr. D. and the Dieting Divas”); 
• best team t-shirt design (Mission Slim Possible);
• individual weight loss winner (Nancy Blewitt of Student Financial Aid, who lost 9.3 percent of her beginning body weight); and
• team weight loss runner-up (Nancy Blewitt, Edward Evans, David McVaney, Neadra Ferguson and Lisa Sewell).

Teams were also reminded that they are all eligible for the Perseverance Award, to be given to the team that best maintains current weight or continues to lose weight over the summer months. Teams wishing to compete for that award will weigh in early September. 

As you can see here, work is well under way for InfoCision Stadium/Summa Field. Clearly, ground has been broken.

So on Friday, April 4, UA held a ceremonial groundbreaking to remind campus and the community about the benefits of the project and to thank publicly the lead donors who are supporting it.

Breaking ground for InfoCision Stadium-Summa Field are, from left, J.D. Brookhart, head football coach; Karen and Gary Taylor of InfoCison Management Corp.; Mack Rhoades, director of athletics; Dr. William F. Demas, chair of UA’s Board of Trustees; Dr. Luis Proenza, University president; Don Plusquellic, mayor of the City of Akron; Tom Strauss, president and chief executive officer, Summa Health System; and Ted Curtis, UA vice president for capital planning and facilities management.

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UA’s Student Surveying Team won the National Society of Professional Surveyors’ 2008 Surveying Student Competition, held earlier this month as part of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping’s annual meeting in Spokane, Wash. With the victory, the team from UA has won the national championship four times and placed second three times since the competition began in 2001.

Teams in this year’s competition had to write a research paper and produce a poster based on a famous surveyed line in their home state.  In Spokane, they had to demonstrate mastery of the mapping tools from the period when the line was first surveyed.  For the field exercise, the students were dressed in costumes appropriate to the period, and won the Best Costume award for the fifth consecutive year. Read the rest of this entry »

Leaders from UA, the state and Medina County gathered March 17 to ceremoniously open UA’s Medina County University Center. The center, which opened its doors to students in January, offers academic programs leading to associate and baccalaureate degrees, and workforce development programs that support local industry.

Below are some photos taken during the festivities.

Adorned with a ribbon, the building awaits the big day.

The ribbon is cut!

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Sixteen faculty members have been awarded $10,000 Faculty Research Grant summer fellowships from the Office of Research Services and Sponsored Programs.

“Our goal is to provide seed money to get projects off the ground,” said Laura Gelfand, associate professor of art history, who chairs the committee that reviewed the proposals. “For projects in the sciences, we try to assess the feasibility of the project and the likelihood that the project will be able to attract further funding as it is developed.”

The committee also awards projects in the humanities, social sciences, nursing and the arts.

Gelfand, who has served on the review committee for a number of years, said the task of reading the proposals is time consuming, but rewarding.

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Dr. Kevin Kern, professor of history, helps to coordinate a team of trivia mavens, many of them from UA, who gather at Damon’s Grille in Stow on Tuesday nights to compete in a national trivia contest. On Feb. 27, the team won the national McCarthy Cup, an achievement chronicled in this Beacon Journal article. UA Live talked with Kern afterward:

UA Live: Tell us about your team.
Kern: Usually there are 12 to 15 of us on a given night, and it’s really an all-star team, with many of them from UA. I mean, we’ve got Robert Jeantet from Modern Languages there; he won on “Jeopardy” a few years ago. Other members are:

• Bob Barrett from Geography,
• Laura Gross from Theoretical and Applied Math
• Mike Levin, Martin Wainwright and Wade Wilcox from History,
• Brett Riebau, director of financial reporting, and
• alumna Jessica McFall, who also is a student at the School of Law.

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Some items in the news you may have missed:

• President Luis Proenza is quoted in a Feb. 27 New York Times story on Ohio and NAFTA.
• John Green, Bliss Institute director, is quoted in the Feb. 26 New York Times and a March 3 article in the New Republic, both about the Ohio Democratic primary.
• Dan Coffey of the Bliss Institute is quoted in the Feb. 28 St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times about Ohio’s black voters and in the Feb. 28 USA Today about union presidential candidate support.
• Stephen Brooks of the Bliss Institute is quoted in the March 6 Washington Post about Ohio voters.
• Colleges and universities engaged in off-campus development are becoming major drivers of economic development, according to this Wall Street Journal article.

It’s Academy Awards season, when the best motion pictures are honored.

It’s also Ivy Awards season, when the nation’s best restaurant and food-service operations are celebrated. This year, The University of Akron’s Dining Services operation is among the handful of finalists for the coveted national award and a place in the elite Ivy Society.

Winners will be announced May 17-20 at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago. UA is competing in the noncommercial operations category against universities across the nation. Read the rest of this entry »

Our 14-day enrollment figures for the spring semester reveal continuing strength in the areas of recruitment and retention. Total enrollment is 23,754, an increase of 4 percent over the spring semester of 2007. Other highlights of the 14-day numbers:

• Student credit-hour production is up 5.3 percent over the previous spring semester.
• Total undergraduate headcount is up 775 students to 19,619 — that’s a 4.1 percent increase. Total graduate headcount is up 139 students, a 4 percent increase.

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Some items in the news you may have missed:

• Saturday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer analyzes Mayor Don Plusquellic’s proposal to sell the city’s sewer system to raise funds that would allow qualifying Akron high school students to attend UA. See also: “Mayor offers tuition plan” (Beacon Journal, Feb. 8 ).
• During his State of the State Address on Wednesday, Governor Strickland proposed a huge expansion of the Post Secondary Enrollment Option program. Summary of the governor’s proposals. The Columbus Dispatch’s account of the address.
  Also, the Beacon looked at how the Governor’s stimulus plan may benefit UA and Akron: “Two area industries applaud governor” (Feb. 8)
• The paper also continued its coverage of the University’s proposal to establish an Orthopedic Research Institute in Akron: “Group seeks research funds” (Feb. 7).

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