FIU named one of "America's Best Colleges for Entrepreneurs"

FIU recently was included in Fortune Small Business magazine’s “America’s Best Colleges for Entrepreneurs” list – a list of 56 colleges.

FIU was listed in the Cross-disciplinary/Cross-pollination category. The only other university in Florida that was included on the list was the University of Florida, recognized for the same category.

The list has been published in the magazine and online and you can read the version of the latter by clicking here.

Stempel School of Public Health receives CEPH accreditation

FIU’s Stempel School of Public Health has been accredited by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH). The school was accredited for a period of five years, the maximum initial accreditation time for a new school of public health.

The school’s Interim Dean Michele Ciccazzo says the accreditation was achieved in just three years, a testament to the program’s strength.

“We met the accepted national standards for a curriculum that provides the knowledge and skills needed in today’s job market,” she said. “This honor enhances the national reputation of FIU and provides a valuable indicator of the quality of our programs.”

The vote by the CEPH’s Board of Councilors puts the university in the ranks of 38 other nationally accredited schools of public health such as Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and the University of North Carolina School of Public Health. FIU’s is only the second accredited school in the state, after the University of South Florida.

FIU Executive Vice President and Provost Ronald Berkman believes a vibrant school of public health is vital to the university’s plans in the area of healthcare, which include the opening the College of Medicine in 2009.

“The field of public health can make important contributions to complex, changing communities like we have in South Florida,” Berkman said. “The impact will be transformative to this community, when coupled with the strength of a new public medical school.”

Golden Panthers publish research

A group of 16 students in The Honors College has completed a collection of research essays – the product of a year-long seminar – that has been published in a 150-page book titled Beauty & Power in the Mediterranean.

Golden Panthers Liala Abreu ’07, Elie Atho, Montserrat de Para, Juan N. Escobar, Maria E. Garcia, Gerardo Gomez-Galvis, Vanesa Herrera ’07, Yudiesly Herrera, Ricardo A. Largaespada, Lilibeth Miranda, Laura Ortega, Sarah Rodríguez, Crystal Sepulveda, Michelle Solano, Jenna Stone and Mirena Suarez researched their individual topics using art and propaganda objects from The Wolfsonian-FIU Museum’s Research Library, under the instruction of Honors College Associate Dean and Fellow John Kneski.

Topics of research included “The Connection Between Art & Science in the Changing Views of the Human Body in the Mediterranean,” “La Dolce-Amaro Vita: Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita as Satire & Social Commentary on Post-World War II Italian Society” and “Public Spaces of Antiquity in Italy: The Relationship Between Time & Space in the ‘Monumental’ Piazza” by Sepulveda.

“I felt the piazza is where Italian civilization began because it was a center for politics and culture,” said Sepulveda, a 24-year-old dance liberal studies major. “The research was intense, but the Wolfsonian had pieces that were very helpful. [The project] required a lot of dedication and investigation and meeting deadlines, but we were all very supportive of one another and excited to do it.”

Beauty & Power in the Mediterranean recently was accepted into the Library of Congress. The book was presented at the Student Research & Artistic Initiative in April and at the Florida Collegiate Honors Council conference in February. It will be presented at the National Collegiate Honors Council conference in Denver this November. Kneski is proud of his students’ achievement.

“It has been a fantastic project for them to have worked on,” he said. “It was fun to work on it; we literally had an assembly line going on, with some of the students collating pages themselves. And it’s a slingshot – how many students can say they have graduated as published authors?”

The Wolfsonian-FIU will host 2008 WebWise Conference

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has awarded $499,702 to The Wolfsonian-FIU to plan and co-host the 2008 and 2009 WebWise Conferences on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World.

“WebWise is a signature initiative of the Institute of Museum and Library Services,” said IMLS director Anne-Imelda M. Radice. “This year, it will be better than ever. The partnership with the Wolfsonian-FIU will allow us to offer it in the South for the first time. We look forward to working with the Florida team.”

Each year the WebWise Conference brings together approximately 350 representatives of museums, libraries, archives, information and systems science and other fields interested in the future of high-quality online content for inquiry and education. The annual conference shares new research and innovations in digital technology with technical experts and thought leaders from the library, archives and museum fields in order to enhance technology transfer among cultural heritage institutions nationwide and to promote institutional collaboration.

The 2008 WebWise Conference will be held in Miami Beach, tentatively on March 5-7. For more information, visit www.imls.gov.