MSU will partner with the University of Wisconsin–Madison in establishing the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, one of three new U.S. Department of Energy Bioenergy Research centers. The center, based in Madison, will be funded with $125 million over five years. MSU will receive approximately $50 million for basic science research aimed at solving complex problems in converting natural materials to energy. Kenneth Keegstra, University Distinguished Professor of plant biology and of biochemistry and molecular biology at MSU, will be the executive director of the center.
The College of Engineering has opened the Energy & Automotive Research Laboratories, a $10 million, 29,000-square-foot research complex, where researchers will identify ways to realize greater fuel efficiency, determine how to collect waste heat and convert it to electricity and work to develop new biobased fuels.
In August, a delegation including MSU bioeconomy researchers, state government officials, and business executives from Michigan traveled to Sweden to discuss how the country and the state can use the competitive advantages of each to create thriving bioproducts industries. At a ceremony, Gov. Jennifer Granholm recognized Kris Berglund, University Distinguished Professor of forestry and of chemical engineering and materials science at MSU, as being instrumental to fostering an agreement between a Swedish company and a Michigan company to explore developing a plant in Michigan to produce fuels from biomass.
The University Research Corridor (URC) presidents released an independent analysis on September 10 showing the state’s three research universities helped create 68,803 Michigan jobs and produced $12.8 billion of net economic benefit in 2006. Anderson Economic Group compared the resources of the URC—the alliance of MSU, the University of Michigan, and Wayne State University—with top-ranked peers in North Carolina, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
MSU is expanding its presence in southeast Michigan with MSU–Detroit Partnerships, an effort to develop new university–community relationships and accelerate the pace of community-based research that focuses on economic, social and educational challenges. MSU rents a 3,000-square-foot suite in the same facility as YouthVille Detroit, a multiservice youth development program. The facility will serve as a hub in the area to support research and outreach by MSU faculty and staff from any discipline and enable collaboration and partnerships to address community-identified needs in Detroit.
Three MSU programs that U.S. News & World Report says are “linked to student success” were listed among the magazine’s “Programs to Look For” in its August rankings of America’s Best Colleges 2008. They are MSU’s residential colleges, its study abroad program and its service-learning experiences.
The American Academy of Family Physicians recently recognized MSU’s Department of Family Medicine as one of the top 10 departments in the nation for the training of primary care physicians. The department also received an award from the state of Michigan for its commitment to quality patient care.
Through the efforts of MSU physicians, the General Electric Corp. donated an MRI unit to a hospital in Blantyre, Malawi, which currently has one radiologist who serves the entire nation. The unit, expected to be installed at the hospital in February 2008, will be used by MSU faculty who do research there and will allow the resident radiologist to send images to MSU where radiologists will be able to assess and evaluate them.
A team of MSU health educators, faculty, and staff received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education for its highly successful efforts to reduce the amount of alcohol use on campus and to change what many consider a culture of alcohol use and abuse. The $175,000 grant will enhance existing activities and help disseminate information on the MSU Social Norms Project to other colleges and universities.
Because of the success of MSU’s background check system developed for long-term care facilities in Michigan, it is being used as a model for the rest of the country in legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate.
MSU is celebrating the Year of Arts and Culture, an initiative that encompasses a year of activities wrapping around all arts and culture units and academic programs. Highlights include the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wharton Center for Performing Arts, anniversaries of the MSU Museum and the Department of Theatre, the beginnings of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, the opening of the new Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, the first academic year for the newly designated College of Music and much more.
MSU will be the home of a new world-class art museum focusing on modern and contemporary art thanks to a gift of $26 million from philanthropist and MSU alumnus Eli Broad and his wife, Edythe. Groundbreaking for the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, to be built at the current site of the Paolucci Building along Grand River Avenue, is expected to begin in fall 2008. Five architecture firms selected as finalists from a pool of 30 presented design concepts on campus this summer. The winning proposal is expected to be chosen this fall.
The incoming freshman class of 7,318 students includes 378 international students, a 49 percent increase in the number of enrolled international students compared to last year.
MSU was one of four institutions in the nation honored for their sustainability efforts at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education in September. Michigan State was recognized for making environmental stewardship a major part of its campus vision, for committing to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and for offering academic programs and research projects related to sustainability.
The MSU Board of Trustees approved changing the Lyman Briggs School of Science to the Lyman Briggs College, making it MSU’s seventeenth degree-granting college. Housed in Holmes Hall, Lyman Briggs is marking its fortieth anniversary during 2007.
MSU, along with other members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, announced a collective agreement to digitize select collections across all its libraries, up to 10 million volumes, as part of the Google Book Search project.
Of national note
More than 13,800 students engaged in service-learning activities during the 2006-07 academic year, working with 375 community service organizations and agencies. MSU offers 300 courses that include a service-learning component.
The College of Education’s elementary and secondary education graduate programs have been ranked No. 1 for 12 consecutive years by U.S. News & World Report.
MSU continues its outstanding record of students earning prestigious scholarships with the naming of 3 Goldwater, 2 Udall, 1 Truman, and 1 Hollings scholars in 2006-07. The overall scholarship count now stands at: Goldwater, 23; Rhodes, 16; Churchill, 15; Truman, 15; Marshall, 11; Udall, 8; Gates, 2; and Mitchell 1.
Current and planned gifts to MSU totaled $146.4 million in fiscal 2005-2006.
MSU consistently ranks as one of the three largest undergraduate study abroad programs in the nation, with 2,247 students participating in study abroad in 2005-06.
MSU is the only university in the country with three on-campus medical schools, graduating allopathic (M.D.) and osteopathic (D.O.) physicians, and veterinarians.
MSU’s extensive research collection of approximately 4.8 million volumes is housed in the main library and several branch libraries across campus. The collection includes more than 28,000 print and electronic journal titles, 200,000 maps, and 40,000 sound recordings.
MSU has the leading and largest faculty of African Studies in the nation, producing more Ph.D. dissertations and conducting more development work in Africa than any other university. The faculty of the center, with the third largest U.S. library on Africa and offering 30 African languages, conducts almost two-thirds of all MSU research and development work abroad in Africa, addressing issues of hunger, malaria, HIV, education, communication, and environment.
MSU’s College of Music faculty and student ensembles present more than 275 concerts per year on campus and throughout the nation.
MSU is one of only four universities across the country asked by the Carnegie Annenberg, Rockefeller and Ford foundations to take part in the "Teachers for a New Era" initiative, which is designed to strengthen K-12 teaching by developing state-of-the-art programs in teacher education.
MSU is the only non-military institution that uses the U.S. Department of Defense’s “Dynamic Distributed Decision-making Simulation” (DDD) for both teaching and research. The DDD command-and-control “video game” is used to learn about and teach leadership and teamwork skills in conjunction with The Eli Broad College of Business.
Research of note
Research expenditures for academic year 2005-06 totaled more than $379 million.
MSU is the leader in a research project funded by a $10 million grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Homeland Security to create the Center for Advancing Microbial Risk Assessment, a consortium of scientists from seven universities with expertise in quantitative microbial risk assessment methods, biosecurity, and infectious disease transmission through environmental exposure.
MSU has joined with the University of Notre Dame and the University of Chicago to establish a Physics Frontier Center for Nuclear Astrophysics funded by a five-year $10 million National Science Foundation grant.
The SOuthern Astrophysical Research Telescope, a 4.1-meter telescope located on the western edge of the Andes Mountains in Chile, made the first observations in September 2005 of the glowing remains of a star, marking the most distant explosion ever seen in the universe. MSU is part of an international consortium that built and will use the instrument to study everything from how galaxies form to the origins of the Milky Way Galaxy.
MSU Hearing Research Center faculty discovered a set of gene mutations that causes progressive hearing loss, a discovery that should provide significant clues in the hunt to solve the puzzle of acquired hearing loss. The research was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics in November 2003.
MSU is home to a world-class atom-smasher, the National Superconducting Cyclotron.
As the state’s land-grant institution, MSU is home to the Michigan Agricultural Experiment Station, which funds the research of more than 300 scientists on campus and at a network of 14 field research stations across the state.
MSU has one of the top nutritional immunology programs in the country, a cutting-edge discipline studying how the food eaten affects a person’s immune system.
MSU’s Diagnostic Center for Population and Animal Health, which was established in 1973, has become one of the country’s premier and busiest veterinary diagnostic laboratories. From just over 9,700 submissions when it first opened, it has grown to about 170,000 submissions and more than 1.2 million diagnostic tests per year.
The Mary Anne McPhail Dressage Chair in Equine Sports Medicine at the College of Veterinary Medicine is the only chair of its kind in the world. Research supported by the chair is devoted to the health needs of high-caliber performance horses.
Faculty of note
James Tiedje, university distinguished professor of crop and soil sciences and director of the Center for Microbial Ecology, and Michael Thomashow, professor of crop and soil sciences and of microbiology and a member of the MSU-Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory, were named to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003. Tiedje was also awarded the Pasteur Award in November 2005 for his outstanding contribution to the science of microbiology.
Yong Zhao, MSU university distinguished professor and director of the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence at MSU’s College of Education, led efforts in September 2005 to open a Beijing preschool in which pupils are taught in both Chinese and English with the best teaching practices from China and the United States.
Douglas Schemske, Hannah distinguished professor of plant biology, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.
Mercouri Kanatzidis, professor of chemistry, was named a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2002.
William S. Penn, professor of English, was awarded the 2001 American Book Award for fiction for his novel Killing Time With Strangers.
Bruce R. Harte, professor and director, School of Packaging, received the Institute of Food Technologists’ Food Packaging Division Riester-Davis Award, which honors lifetime achievement and accomplishment in food packaging.
Alumni of note
MSU has a network of more than 389,500 living alumni worldwide.
Spencer Abraham, class of 1974, is the former U.S. secretary of energy.
James Blanchard, class of 1964 and master’s degree, 1965, served two terms as governor of Michigan (1983-1991). He also served as U.S. ambassador to Canada from 1993 to 1996.
Eli Broad, class of 1954, is chairman of SunAmerica Inc. and founder of the Broad Foundation. In 1991, Broad pledged $20 million to the MSU College of Business, which now carries his name.
Michael Budman, class of 1968, is the co-founder and president of Roots, an international clothing company based in Canada.
Clark Bunting, class of 1977, is president of Discovery Networks Productions.
John Engler, class of 1971, served three terms as governor of Michigan (1991-2003).
Clare Fischer, class of 1951 and master's degree, 1955, has recorded more than 45 albums as leader and has arranged, composed and/or played on more than 100 albums for other recording artists. He won Grammy awards for "Salsa Picante plus 2 + 2" and "Free Fall."
Richard Ford, class of 1966, won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel "Independence Day." Ford is considered to be one of America’s great novelists, and his works have been translated into 21 languages.
Jim Harrison, class of 1960 and master’s degree, 1966, wrote "Legends of the Fall," which was made into a film starring Anthony Hopkins and Brad Pitt.
Walter Hill, class of 1962, directed “48 Hours,” “Another 48 Hours,” “Last Man Standing,” “Geronimo: An American Legend” and many other action movies.
Donna Hrinak, class of 1972, is the U.S. ambassador to Brazil. She is the first female career civil servant to be named to the post.
James Hoffa Jr., class of 1963, is the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and son of the legendary Teamsters president.
Rick Inatome, class of 1976, is chairman of Inacom Corp., a venture capital firm and Fortune 500 company, and founder of Computer City, one of the country’s leading computer superstore chains.
Kay Koplovitz, class of 1968, founded the USA Network.
MSU President Emeritus Peter McPherson, class of 1963, is president of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.
Bill Mechanic, class of 1973, is one of Hollywood’s most successful film producers. He was the top executive responsible for the production of such hits as “Titanic” and “Independence Day.”
R. Drayton McLane Jr., master’s degree, 1959, is owner of the Houston Astros baseball team and vice chairman and director of Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Douglas D. Randall, doctoral degree, 1970, serves on the National Science Board, the governing body for the National Science Foundation.
Debbie Stabenow, class of 1972 and master’s degree, 1975, is the first woman elected to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate.
John Walters, class of 1974, is the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and is known as the “U.S. drug czar.”
Of historic note
MSU’s record of Rhodes scholars has led the Big Ten since the 1970s.
MSU researchers developed the platinum-based compounds Cisplatin and Carboplatin, which have saved tens of thousands of lives in the treatment of certain cancers.
Founded in 1855 as the nation’s first land-grant university, MSU was the prototype for the 69 land-grant institutions established under the Morrill Act.
MSU was the first institution of higher learning in the United States dedicated to the teaching of scientific agriculture.
Historic discoveries at MSU include the research that led to the development of hybrid corn and the process still used for the homogenization of milk.
In 1956, MSU was the first major university in the United States with a dean of international programs. More than 1,000 faculty members are involved in international research, teaching, and service projects and programs.
MSU’s criminal justice program is the largest such program in the nation. Established in 1935 as a school of police administration, it is a world leader in cyber security, forensic science, and the study of youth violence.
MSU’s Music Therapy Program, established in 1944, was the first of its kind in the world designed specifically to train music therapists.
