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Helping, Learning and Understanding: Hurricane Katrina Efforts

Requests by campus organizations for food, money, supplies, books and clothing for Hurricane Katrina victims received overwhelming response from students, faculty and staff at HMC and the other Claremont Colleges. Debra Mashek, assistant professor of psychology, turned the crisis into a service-learning experience for 30 students in her Introduction to Psychology class. Spreading out over many of the Claremont campuses, they used four different persuasion strategies to solicit donations and raised $600 in one hour.

“The exercise was designed to help communities left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and provide a hands-on opportunity to learn about the implementation and effectiveness of various persuasion strategies,” said Mashek, who said the proceeds went to the American Red Cross. In the weeks that followed, the class drew on insights and data garnered through the experience and discussed topics including experimental design, experimenter variation, research ethics and pro-social behavior. One student commented, “We were helping people that needed it. [The exercise] also served to make me more aware of what had been happening elsewhere in the country.”

Mashek posted the assignment on the Web to share with faculty members around the country and was asked by a dozen of them for her course material. She received word from a SUNY Stony Brook professor who said her class raised $1,000 using Mashek’s activity. Perhaps the most rewarding message came from Samantha Wilson, a New Orleans refugee in Houston, who commented in an e-mail to Mashek, “What a fabulous idea. On behalf of those who will never know your generosity in person, THANK YOU!”

HMC was among the colleges nationwide that was able to provide temporary enrollment for a displaced student. Jennifer Hodges (left), a junior mechanical engineering major from Tulane University in New Orleans, was able to join her sister, Kelley, a Mudd first-year student.

Jennifer said that the hurricane hit a week before the semester was to begin at Tulane. Upon checking  Tulane’s emergency Web site from her home in Nevada and seeing that her school was closed for the fall semester, she sought other ways to continue her education. At press time, administrators at Tulane were contending with flooded buildings, downed trees, broken windows, and no sewer service.

After talking to Jeanne Noda, vice president and dean of students, Jennifer decided to come to Mudd for the semester. She is taking fluid mechanics, circuits and humanities classes, and is working on a Clinic project. “Everyone has been very friendly and helpful so the adjustment has been easy,” said Jennifer, who is living in Case Residence Hall. She intends to return to Tulane when it reopens for the spring semester.

 
Technology in Entertainment Series

Alumnus and Oscar winner Scott Stokdyk ’91/92 kicked off the fall Dr. Bruce J. Nelson ’74 Distinguished Speaker Series with a talk about how “digital doubles” of actors are created. Stokdyk showed examples from the Oscar-winning movie “Spider-Man 2” and described his work as lead visual effects supervisor for Sony Pictures Imageworks. He said, “The hardest thing about these computer generated actors is that you and I from birth are used to looking at faces. All day you’re looking at people’s faces for very subtle clues about what they’re thinking, whether they’re lying, whether they like you or not, whether they’re acting. Because of this, we’re incredibly sensitive to things looking fake. It’s my job to try and figure out what looks fake [in “Spider-Man 2”] and try to figure out on the next movie how to make it not look fake.” “Spider-Man 3” is scheduled for release in 2007.

The fall speaker series was organized by First Lady Jean Strauss, an author and filmmaker.

 
Presidential Candidates Screened

The Presidential Search Committee appointed by the HMC Board of Trustees is continuing its work to identify Harvey Mudd College’s fifth president, who will succeed President Jon Strauss.

The committee and its search consultant, A.T. Kearney Executive Search, has received literally hundreds of applications and nominations, and the committee has reviewed the backgrounds and qualifications of several dozen of the most promising.

“The committee has been extremely impressed with the number, and high caliber, of people interested in this position,” said Ed Johnson, trustee and search committee co-chair. “The fact that so many distinguished and highly qualified people want this job really speaks well of Harvey Mudd College and the unique position that it fills in higher education.”

The committee plans to continue the screening process through the fall, when the committee will interview the most promising candidates and select the finalists who will visit the campus. The committee expects to make recommendations to the Board of Trustees near year-end, with the new president announced sometime in the spring or sooner.

 
HMC Bulletin Earns Award

The Harvey Mudd College Bulletin received a 2005 APEX Award of Excellence for magazine writing.

The HMC Bulletin received the Award of Excellence for the summer 2004 issue, written primarily by Stephanie Graham, senior editor. The Bulletin is the college magazine, serving alumni, parents, donors, supporters and employees of HMC. Its mission is to foster ties with alumni and friends of the college by featuring achievements of alumni, students, faculty and staff, with particular emphasis on the societal impact of engineering, science and mathematics.

Each year since 1988, Communication Concepts, Inc. -- a Springfield, Va.-based publications and communications company --has presented APEX Awards to leading communicators in the corporate, nonprofit and independent settings. Of the nearly 5,000 total entries this year, 1,523 APEX Awards of Excellence recognized exceptional entries in 109 subcategories.

 
Engineering Education Receives
$500,000 boost

A $500,000 grant from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation will upgrade and modernize a major part of HMC’s teaching space for engineering.

The Engineering Project Design Studio and Instructional Center, to be created by renovating existing classroom space in the Parsons Engineering Building, will allow for improved teaching and learning in engineering and will create new, technically advanced classrooms. The project will transform 3,200-square-feet of space into a large, multi-use design studio, a new computer laboratory-classroom and a seminar room equipped for state-of-the-art video conferencing. Renovation of the existing facilities is scheduled to  be completed in time for the fall 2006 semester.

Anthony Bright, chair of the Department of Engineering, said the new state-of-the-art facilities will “help us to move to the next stage in engineering education here at Mudd—student-centered, studio-based learning, building upon and enhancing our students’ Clinic experience of solving authentic engineering design and research problems for sponsor organizations around the country.”

The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation has supported Harvey Mudd College through much of its 50-year existence through financial aid for students, faculty endowment, research facilities and building projects, including the building that houses the HMC Department of Engineering.

 
Random ACT of Kindness

Harvey Mudd College is one of the partners that helped the new Academy of Culture and Technology (ACT) in south Pomona open its doors this fall. HMC Summer Institute students helped paint, clean and landscape the school in preparation for its September opening.

The school serves 100 sixth- through ninth-grade students—many of them low-income local students—and aims to prepare them for college, for careers and for leadership. The school offers before- and after-school student services, including tutoring, in which HMC students are slated to participate.

Blanche D. Pringle, executive assistant to the president for institutional diversity, and Tomas Ursua, school director, are working together on additional ways that Mudders can benefit the ACT students. Mudders may be called upon to rebuild computers and help establish a computer network at the school, develop workshops on computer skills and robotics, and help students prepare for science competitions.

Faculty News

Grant to allow exploration of "exotic" ideas in theoretical physics

Vatche Sahakian, assistant professor of physics, was awarded a $32,058 grant from Research Corporation to investigate aspects of non-commutative geometry.

Sahakian’s topic has its roots in string theory, which he describes as “a framework for exploring new, exotic ideas on the frontier of theoretical physics. Crudely speaking, it involves considering spacetime coordinates that do not mutually commute; akin to the transition from classical to quantum mechanics where position and momentum are made non-commutative. This implies that at short enough distances, space and time become ‘fuzzy,’ without the coherent smooth structure that we associate with traditional geometry.”

The award will help fund up to six students for two summers. By studying the aspects of non-commutative geometry, Sahakian hopes to “learn about the smallest and most fundamental aspects of the fabric of spacetime.”

Founded in 1912, the Research Corporation is America’s first foundation for the advancement of science. In an effort to promote research at primarily undergraduate institutions and to encourage Ph.D.-granting institutions to excel at both teaching and research, the foundation awarded 77 grants—totaling $3.6 million—in the fields of chemistry, physics and astronomy to scientists at colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. Sahakian was selected for the Cottrell College Science Award program, which is aimed at faculty and programs at undergraduate institutions.

Katy Perdue ’05 and physics professors Patricia Sparks and James Eckert were co-authors on the paper “Exchange Bias and Giant Magnetoresistance in Spin Valves with Pico-Scale Antiferromagnetic Layers” presented by Perdue this past spring at the IEEE Intermag Conference, Nagoya, Japan. They worked closely with Matthew Carey ’85 at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies in San Jose, California.

Perdue, a physics major now employed at Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging in Massachusetts, explained their work: “Spin valves are thin-film devices that are able to sort electrons based on spin. The useful property of spin valves is the fact that they respond to a small applied magnetic field with a large change in resistance, a phenomena known as Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR). Spin valves have a number of commercial uses. One of the most common uses is that GMR-based read/wrote heads are used in modern, high capacity hard drives due to the fact that they can sense very small changes in magnetic fields, like the small magnetic fields that encode data on a hard disk.

“The reason for studying spin valves is that no one fully understands the mechanism, known as exchange interaction, which is the basis for how a spin valve works. This is a problem that has been in search of an answer for over 50 years. My research looked at how thick a particular part of the spin valve, called the anti-ferromagnetic layer, had to be in order for the spin valves to exhibit its characteristic GMR effect. We found that the antiferromagnetic layer did not have to be very thick—in fact, on average, it only had to be a little more than one atom thick for us to see the GMR effect. This result is incompatible with the current theories about the underlying mechanism giving rise to GMR and the exchange interaction.”

The team’s paper will be published in IEEE Transactions on Magnetics.

 
Briefly 

In July, Art Benjamin, professor of mathematics, filmed a segment for The Learning Channel’s special on “The Da Vinci Code,” set to air Oct. 30 and 31. Benjamin was filmed discussing “Mathematics, Magic and Fibonacci Numbers.”

Elizabeth Orwin ’95, Barbara Stokes Dewey Assistant Professor of engineering and biology, was invited by the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology to give a talk at the Western Eye Research conference held Sept. 25–28 in Laguna Beach, Calif. Her paper was entitled “A Model for Tissue-Engineered Corneal Matrices.” This was the first invitation for  HMC and for Orwin, whose research students also participated. The conference featured presentations on current frontiers of regenerative biology and its foundation within vision research.

Student News

Robot has a ball & Team Takes First

The HMC team of seniors Susanna Ricco, Mac Mason, Alan Davidson and alumnus Ben Tribelhorn ’05 took first place in the robot scavenger hunt competition sponsored by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. At the 20th AAAI conference held in Pittsburgh, Pa., robots in the scavenger hunt had to retrieve and return one of the scavenger hunt objects; in Mudd’s case, a yellow beach ball. The HMC team was the only one to succeed. Zachary Dodds, professor of computer science and team advisor, said, “Of note is the cost efficiency. Among the five entries to this competition, HMC’s robot totaled $600 while the next lowest-priced platform was $3,500. This underscores the programming and computational efforts of the team.”

HMC also had one of the only all-undergraduate teams among the 22 teams entered across three distinct competitions. The HMC team was awarded the prize for “Overall excellence for a fully autonomous system” and received a $2,000 Sony AIBO robotic dog.

Work done by the students began in January as part of the elective Robotics class and was continued as a summer research project up to the competition.

Fired up about Burn Research

In July, burn tests were conducted on a small wood-frame building by De Pietro Fellows in Civil Engineering and engineering Professor Zee Duron. The building was constructed by the Fellows and was covered with a plywood exterior and a drywall interior. The burn took place at the L.A. County Fire Dept training facility in nearby Pomona and was aimed at evaluating a new tool for detecting and tracking loss of stability in burning structures. The De Pietro Fellows were invited to present their findings Oct. 3 before a meeting of FIRESCOPE, which is in charge of all emergency services provided by the California fire services under the Governor’s control.

Minton Solves Second

Sophomore mathematics major Greg Minton received second prize in the National Problem Solving Competition sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America, during MathFest in Albuquerque, N.M., Aug. 6.

This is the fourth year in a row that someone from HMC has finished first or second in this competition. Last year, Eric Malm ’05 finished first, and in the two previous years, second place finishes were earned by Robin Baur ’06 and Daniel Boylan ’02.

Instider Tells All

Moana Evans ’06 has helped potential Mudders get “true insider insight” about the college by contributing to the “College Prowler: Harvey Mudd College” edition. Evans said it took her about 30 hours to write and edit the guidebook, designed—according to College Prowler™ CEO Luke Skurman—to give readers “honest information and a realistic impression of the student opinions on any campus.” Also helping with the project was the “Mudd Bounce Back Team,” a group of Mudders who read and commented on the book draft. HMC is one of 200 schools covered in College Prowler guidebooks.

The Science of Politics