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From baseball to breathtaking art, from storytelling to symposia, from colorful dance to collaborative research, the week celebrating the inauguration of Joseph Aoun—a week entitled “Northeastern Illuminated”—had something for everyone.
To demonstrate the university’s excellence in academics and culture, professors and students showcased their research. Community members young and old displayed their artistic prowess. The Husky baseball squad won its home opener in eleven exciting innings. And dancers, singers, artists, musicians, and cooks from around the globe demonstrated their talents at a spirited finale.
President Aoun called the week like he saw it: “Magnificent.”
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Arts in the Park |
During inauguration week, a section of the Curry Student Center blossomed into an oasis of art and greenery.
“Arts in the Park” featured works in a variety of media created by Northeastern students, faculty, and staff, as well as artists from nearby neighborhoods and community organizations.
That the indoor art garden scored a big hit is clear from enthusiastic guestbook comments: “Awesome park.” “Breathtaking!” “Brilliant!!”
Organized by Pat Neblett, administrative assistant in the provost’s office, the art included drawings and paintings in charcoal, oil, acrylic, watercolor, and pencil; photographs; collages; quilts; laser prints; monotypes; and digital illustrations.
The “park” was created by director of landscape services Chuck Doughty and his staff. It had real trees, ferns, shrubs, and tropical flowers; beach stones; cobblestones; park benches; even a small pool and a fountain with two Japanese bronze cranes.
At the opening ceremony on Tuesday, students from Northeastern’s Russell J. Call Children’s Center, dressed in Northeastern red and black, sang songs. Visiting artist Virginia Eskin played the piano. And President Aoun greeted guests.
Doughty says the art-filled park was dismantled at the end of the week, and the rented flowers and plants were sent back to a Florida distributor. But not before many visitors offered the same suggestion: “This should be done every year.”
Huskies Everywhere
A show of artful dogs, customized to represent
Remember those cow sculptures, decorated in colorfully idiosyncratic ways, that popped up all over Boston a few years back? Well, during Northeastern Illuminated, the university had its own version of the cows, but its model was a beast with a furry ruff and a noble mien.
Nine embellished Husky sculptures were shown in a Curry Student Center exhibition curated by associate professor and acting chair of visual arts Ed Andrews.
One large Husky—the same size as the bronze mascot in the Ell Building lobby—was customized by Andrews to represent Northeastern alumni. Eight smaller Huskies, about fourteen inches high, were decorated by Northeastern faculty and alumni to represent the university’s colleges and the law school.
Andrews’s Husky is covered with student portraits from old yearbooks.
“I scanned the photographs,” he says, “and used a variety of filters to get more of an abstracted look, à la Andy Warhol.”
He also attached a View-Master to the spot where the Husky’s eyes would normally be. When art lovers looked into the View-Master, they saw snapshots from recent alumni events.
Last but not least—in a nod to the tradition of rubbing the Ell Husky statue’s nose for good luck—Andrews put a button on the dog’s muzzle. When people pushed it, they heard a bark.
“All my work is either kinetic or interactive,” he explains. “I make sure I engage people into participating.”
The smaller Huskies were customized by different volunteers: arts and sciences by Andrea Raynor; business by Jodie Manasevit; computer science by Jay Laird; criminal justice by Matthew Rich; engineering by Michael Ulman, AS’00; health sciences by Rob Sansone, AS’93; law by Ann McDonald; and professional and continuing studies by John Kane.
Over the next few months, the smaller dogs will be displayed around campus, then will be auctioned off to raise money for the Annual Fund. For more information about the Huskies Everywhere campaign (and to see more sculpture photos), go to <www.neu.edu/alumni/ huskies-everywhere/index.html>.
And to look deeply into the big Husky’s stereoscopic eyes, check him out in the Alumni Center lobby, on the sixth floor of Columbus Place.
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The day after President Aoun’s inauguration, a group of young artists who live near Northeastern came to the Curry Student Center and started sketching—working on ideas for new banners that will soon hang along Columbus Avenue.
According to Bob Gittens, LA’75, L’78, vice president for public affairs, the banner project has two goals: Create imagery that describes the university and its surrounding communities, and give budding artists a chance to learn and grow.
Northeastern asked the Boston-based nonprofit Artists for Humanity, an organization that offers local teens paid apprenticeships in the arts, to find the young people who would design the new banners, which are scheduled to be completed this summer.
In the weeks before inauguration, the teens came to campus to find out more about Northeastern and do some preliminary drafting. “They heard messages about urban engagement,” Gittens says, “and were able to draw on some of the images in the archives and things they saw around campus and in our literature.”
Then, during inauguration week, the young artists spread sheets of paper on a table in the student center and started to draw. They also met with Aoun and gave him a painting by Roxbury teen Lenny Lubin, which now hangs in the president’s office.
Root for the Huskies
Tuesday, March 27
The Northeastern nine uncork an extra-innings win over Rhode Island
The last week of March actually offered another Northeastern inaugural. The day after the president’s installation, the Husky baseball team played its first home game of the season.
Appropriately, they won it in exhilarating fashion, in the eleventh inning.
Playing against Rhode Island, the Huskies were tied 4-4 with two outs. That’s when junior shortstop Mike Lyon hit a walk-off single that allowed senior catcher Dan Milano to score from second base.
Other game highlights included Milano’s first-inning two-run homer, junior first baseman Josh Porter’s solo home run in the sixth, and sophomore left fielder Mike Tamsin’s RBI single in the third.
Starting pitcher Bobby Carrington, a junior, pitched seven-plus innings. Relief came in the form of freshman Ryan Quigley and sophomore Dan Zehr, who combined for three-plus scoreless innings.
The newly installed president, sporting a red Huskies baseball cap, was able to catch a few innings of Parsons Field action from the Northeastern dugout.
Fans at the game enjoyed hot chocolate and hot dogs. A hot combo—sort of like a presidential inauguration and an edge-of-your-seat home opener.
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Life of the Mind Lecture Robert D. Klein Lecture Leading-edge scholars share their findings in three presentations |
Northeastern Illuminated was the perfect time to celebrate the talent and imagination of the university’s researchers. And so, a variety of scholars gathered to present their work in a range of settings.
On Tuesday, the Center for Drug Discovery held its fifth annual symposium on current trends in drug abuse.
The same day, the problem of obesity was discussed by a panel of researchers
in the first installment of the new Life of the Mind lecture series.
Finally, on Thursday, Sanjeev Mukerjee, professor of chemistry and chemical
biology, explained how nanotechnology discoveries may allow us to reduce our dependence on oil, at the forty-third annual Robert D. Klein lecture.
Held in the Raytheon Amphitheater, the daylong drug-discovery symposium featured talks by drug researchers from Northeastern, Brandeis, Brown, Harvard, McLean Hospital, the National Institutes of Health, Pfizer, and other organizations. Topics included cocaine abuse, substance abuse in HIV patients, and adolescent drug abuse.
Across campus in the Alumni Center, the inaugural Life of the Mind lecture—titled “Obesity: Living Large, Living Dangerously”—featured Northeastern researchers from three disciplines: law professor Richard Daynard; Alexandros Makriyannis, who holds the Behrakis Chair in Pharmaceutical Sciences and directs the Center for Drug Discovery; and assistant professor of counseling and applied educational psychology Jessica Blom-Hoffman. The trio spoke on medical, behavioral, and legal efforts to curb the appetites of a “supersized” culture.
Daynard predicted America’s obesity problem will be vigorously addressed and solved when the health-care costs associated with weight-related ailments —diabetes, heart disease, and stroke—start to have a serious impact on workers and insurers.
To make a difference now, Daynard suggests taxing extra-large portions, removing sugary drinks from school vending machines, and making nutrition labeling less deceptive.
As Daynard focuses on winning the obesity battle in the courts and legislatures, Makriyannis seeks answers through novel pharmaceutical treatments.
Working with cannabinoid compounds, Makriyannis is trying to develop a safe, reliable drug that can limit appetite without triggering the adverse side effects of current obesity drugs, such as nausea. He says he’s hopeful recent discoveries are pointing to a pharmaceutical blockbuster.
Blom-Hoffman wants to change schoolchildren’s bad eating habits. Currently, she’s exploring using behavior modeling—enlisting athletes to talk to students about good food choices—and computer programs that get kids to look at healthy eating as an interesting game they can play.
In his Klein lecture, tackling another kind of oversized hunger, Mukerjee predicted the eventual demise of oil dependence.
Speaking before a West Village F audience, Mukerjee contended in a talk he called “Finally Unplugged: The New Revolution of Energy Conversion” that researchers are close to developing batteries, supercapacitors, and fuel cells that will be capable of powering everything from homes, to cars, to PDAs, greatly reducing the need for oil and electricity.
He described fast cars whose only emission would be a bit of water from the tailpipe. Cell phones that could double as computers. And the end of energy blackouts, as homes and businesses rely on individual power sources.
Food for thought, indeed.
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Can a computer recognize human emotion?
What makes consumers buy an alternative-energy car?
Can a service dog be trained to recognize nonverbal cues?
Such were the questions raised at Northeastern’s biggest-ever Research and Scholarship Expo, which unfolded in Matthews Arena. For three hours, crowds of faculty, staff, and students examined 215 research posters, including 50 submitted by undergraduates.
The poster presentations outlined the research of faculty and students from
a wide range of disciplines, including physical and life sciences, engineering, humanities, the arts, health sciences, law, business, and social sciences.
Vice provost Srinivas Sridhar called the expo “a terrific collaboration of intellectual activities of all kinds.” For instance: In an effort to help computers “read” people, assistant professor Yingzi Lin and PhD student Xianyi Huang, from the mechanical and industrial engineering department, have come up with a framework that enables computers to pinpoint human emotion on the basis of eye movements, hand gestures, and facial expressions.
To understand how consumers look at alternative-fuel vehicles, assistant marketing professor Rosanna Garcia and Samer Balbaky, a graduate student in industrial engineering, worked on a consumer-behavior model that determines how different factors—consumer attributes, vehicle attributes, and government policies, for example—influence the market demand for “green” vehicles.
And to enable those who lack vocal ability to communicate with service dogs, undergraduate psychology major Marisa Landau, on co-op at Canine Assistants, in Georgia, trained a dog to respond to thirty nonverbal commands given through eye movements, gestures, and minor sounds. Being able to communicate nonverbally allows more people with such severe disabilities as muscular dystrophy and cerebral palsy to use service dogs.
Other topics tackled at the expo included measuring bridge deterioration, assessing juvenile delinquency in the United States and abroad, developing new treatments for cancer, using nanotechnology to understand brain function, determining whether insoles can prevent osteoarthritis, and improving your health by using a special program developed for PDAs. President Aoun, speaking at the event, said the expo was important not only because it highlights the work of individual researchers, but because it sparks ideas for future collaborations.
Deep research, he said, cannot be “boxed in.”
International Gala
Friday, March 30
The week ends brilliantly with a global house party in the student center
Gospel, flamenco, henna art, Asian cooking—such were the offerings at the end of Northeastern Illuminated week, which closed with a colorful, flavorful, and inspired celebration of cultures around the world.
A buoyant global spirit filled the Curry Student Center on that Friday afternoon. Dancers, singers, artists, musicians, and cooks did what they do best in honor of President Aoun’s inauguration.
The talent was, literally, all over the map. Performances included Italian jazz; Indian, North African, Persian, Balkan, Latin American, Filipino, and Armenian dancing; a martial arts demonstration; and an international fashion show.
A Bedouin tent, belly dancing, and drumming drew visitors to the Arab Student Association presentation.
The International Student and Scholar Institute held workshops on ikebana (Japanese flower arranging), mehndi (henna body art), and flamenco dance. A Taiwanese chef gave a cooking demonstration. Spiritual Life hosted Hatha yoga sessions.
There were also Deaf poetry and storytelling performances, and an exhibit of international art and artifacts.
When the last dancer had stopped twirling, it was clear the week had ended jubilantly—call it a case of global heart warming.