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		Pharmacy school, NU Press celebrate milestones Between its founding and today, Northeastern’s School of Pharmacy has gone through many incarnations and homes. Once just a print shop, the Northeastern University Press is now a serious book publisher. Time makes all the difference. Last fall, the School of Pharmacy celebrated its seventy-fifth year, and the Northeastern University Press marked its twenty-fifth. Founded in 1927 on Beacon Hill as the Meriano School of Pharmacy, the pharmacy program has been renamed and reorganized several times. In 1962, it merged with Northeastern, and became a unit of Bouvé College of Health Sciences in 2000. Today, the pharmacy school has a gleaming new home—the Behrakis Health Sciences Center—and is poised to enter a new era that promises many technological advances, such as those allowing individuals to be treated with drugs tailored specifically for them. In November, one hundred people attended the school’s anniversary celebration and banquet, which included remarks from Harvard Business School’s Juan Enriquez-Cabot, senior research fellow and director of the Life Science Project, on how the human genome mapping project could revolutionize the health-care industry, including drug-treatment methods. The month before, the Northeastern University Press held its anniversary party at the Massachusetts Historical Society, with former university presidents John Curry and Kenneth Ryder in attendance. The gathering celebrated the press’s transition from a publisher of obscure academic titles to a respected operation turning out roughly forty books a year. Titles now include a Boston crime caper set to become a Hollywood movie and an expert’s view of Osama bin Laden that has sold more than 50,000 copies. Director William Frohlich gave special thanks to longtime employees Jill Bahcall, Ann Twombly, and Emily McKeigue for making the press’s success possible. Across the Atlantic, in memory of a student In fall 2001, Angie and John McQuaig were thinking about having a fourth child. Though September 11 almost discouraged them from bringing a new life into the world, optimism won out, and Angie became pregnant. They decided to name their baby after someone who had been lost in the terrorist attacks. Pouring over the long list of victims’ names, they finally settled on “Candace Lee,” after Candace Lee Williams, the twenty-year-old Northeastern business student aboard one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. “My husband just really liked the name,” Angie said. Since then, the McQuaigs—Americans living in Burnt Yates, a village in North Yorkshire, England, where John serves with the U.S. Air Force—have kept in touch with the Williams family. And late last year, Angie and four-month-old Candace Lee McQuaig flew across the ocean to attend Candace Lee Williams’s internment ceremony. “It’s sort of bittersweet, but it’s been an amazing experience,” said Angie. “It was such a pleasant surprise that the two of them came here,” said Jan Williams, the late student’s grandmother. “It was really beautiful when we saw the child. She even has blue eyes like Candace’s.” After Angie wrote Candace Lee’s mother, Sherri, and Jan a year ago to tell them about selecting the baby’s name, the families exchanged photos, and Angie began to learn more about the young woman who is her daughter’s namesake. Then Sherri sent the McQuaigs an invitation to last November’s internment ceremony, mostly to show them a photograph of the stone she’d had designed for Candace Lee’s grave. Recalled Angie, “My husband said, ‘Why don’t you go?’ It was only a week away—such a whirlwind thing—but I decided I would.” Angie and baby Candace stayed at Sherri’s house, meeting many of Candace Lee’s family and friends. Angie said she realized how many lives the young woman had touched and how much she had accomplished—becoming a star student, a tutor, an athlete, a Special Olympics volunteer. And Angie saw how happy people were to meet the baby. “Sherri’s whole last year has been devoted to keeping Candace’s memory alive,” Angie said. “I think, for the Williamses, baby Candace is a living and growing way of doing that. We had no idea it was going to bring them so much joy.” High marks for CBA The College of Business Administration’s MBA program just got another feather for its cap. On the heels of September’s news that U.S. News and World Report had ranked Northeastern first among colleges that combine real-world experience with academics, BusinessWeek magazine judged the MBA program one of the best in the world. “We are very, very pleased that they took recognition of the special attributes of our co-op MBA program and the success of our graduates,” said CBA dean Ira Weiss. In its October 22 edition, BusinessWeek rated seventy-two U.S. schools as among the best, ranking only the top thirty and listing the rest alphabetically. Northeastern fell into the latter category—the first time the university has appeared on the BusinessWeek list, which has been compiled every two years since 1988. The ratings—based on a school’s reputation, innovation, and curriculum—were the result of a survey of 219 corporate recruiters and 11,518 business-school students asked to give their opinions of 300 business schools. Bourque named vice president President Freeland has tapped twenty-year Northeastern veteran Daniel Bourque, ME’80, to fill the newly created post of vice president of facilities. Bourque succeeds John Martin, who held the title vice president for business when he retired last June. In his new role, Bourque—who became director of plant maintenance in 1982 and was promoted to director of physical plant in 1992—will oversee all physical plant operations, new construction, repairs and renovations, maintenance, and custodial programs at the university. As physical plant director, Bourque played a large role in the transformation of Northeastern’s physical campus. He worked on such projects as the Marino Recreation Center, the Egan Research Center, Shillman Hall, Davenport Commons, and the entire West Village complex. Spreading NU's good news far and wide Northeastern’s marketing and branding campaign is in full tilt. Billboards, print ads, and other media touting the university’s strengths, such as its new housing and its state-of-the-art recreation center, will appear coast to coast by spring. Since fall, Northeastern has been broadcasting its message throughout the mid-Atlantic states. Billboards in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York have attracted interested attention, including a story in the New York Times. President Freeland said the effort creates a vision of “a university on the move,” adding that it was “terrific” that the campaign coincided with Northeastern’s ranking by U.S. News and World Report as number one among colleges combining classroom learning with real-world experience. By spring, the university will begin advertising in California, Florida, Texas, and Illinois to respond to a demographic shift: The number of potential college students is growing most swiftly outside New England. Co-op partners feted Northeastern welcomed three hundred guests to a banquet that honored some of the organizations that have made the university’s ninety-year-old co-op program a landmark education model. President Freeland presented awards to Children’s Hospital Boston, the law firm Foley Hoag, Roxbury Youthworks, and Gillette at the first Co-op Partners Dinner, held October at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. “We gather in celebration of the magnificent partnership between Northeastern and employers,” Freeland said. “We also gather to celebrate what that partnership has accomplished: the development and expansion and improvement of one of the most important educational innovations of our time, into a program that commands the attention of employers and universities and governments across the nation and around the world.” Awards were presented by students who have held co-op positions within the organizations being honored. Student government unveils new initiatives Northeastern’s student leaders are hitting the ground running this year, creating innovative outreach efforts that include an alumni network, a black-tie dinner dance, and a website, according to Richard Schwabacher, Student Government Association president. “We want to celebrate the tradition of student government here at Northeastern,” said Schwabacher, a junior. “And we want people to know exactly how hard we’re working for them.” This year, the SGA will create a network of all alumni who have ever been involved in Northeastern student government, said Schwabacher, and will communicate with them on a regular basis. And to celebrate the achievements of the many SGA officers who have gone on to professional success, the association will invite former student leaders to a “presidential ball” in the spring. “We think it’s something that will work well here, and it’s a little different than the usual event,” Schwabacher said. “It’s an event designed to exude the pride we take in what we do. Besides, who doesn’t like to get dressed up?” The SGA has created a new website, at <www.sga.neu.edu>, that describes how student government works, provides online request forms, and offers an easy way to communicate with the SGA via e-mail. SGA officers will also revamp the organization’s structure this year to make it more effective, Schwabacher said. Schwabacher wants students to know that “we’re not your high school class council—we’re the real deal,” he said. “The student government here does so much. We meet with the president on a regular basis, we meet with senior vice presidents, deans. The leadership of the school knows us. Student leaders at other schools tell us they always try to beat down the doors of their university’s administration, and they can’t—and they ask us how to do it. To us, it’s just second nature.” Take a Bow! William Hancock has been named Bradstreet Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry at the Barnett Institute of Chemical and Biological Analysis. Former vice president of proteomics —the study of proteins in diseases—at Thermo Finnigan Corp., in San Jose, California, Hancock plans to establish a research program in clinical proteomics, to help boost personalized health care. He also plans to help establish a world-class research and educational program in biotechnology at Northeastern. Kevin McHale, guest service manager at Northeastern’s Warren Conference Center, in Ashland, Massachusetts, has received the 2002 Best Practice Award from the International Association of Conference Centers. McHale won for his Backup Team Assistance Program, in which he specified a backup employee—and, in many cases, a second backup employee—for every function handled by each of the center’s fifty workers. Former manager of an Infiniti dealership, McHale has worked at the Warren Center for about twenty months. He said the underlying principle of his former and current jobs is just the same: “meeting the needs of the customer, large or small.”