Technique
Go Green
Friday, June 24, 2011 • Volume 97, Issue 2 • nique.net
The South’s Liveliest College Newspaper
The Green Lantern gives a fun but mildly disappointing movie experience.49
GT Savannah to end degree programs CoA Paris study abroad program suspended By Aakash Arun Contributing Writer
versity or Savannah State University. Of the 338 students in the GTREP in 2010, 213 were at one of the three partner colleges and had not yet enrolled at GTS; only 97 students were on campus in Savannah. A significant percentage of GTREP students would either drop out of the school or transfer to the Atlanta campus. Bras said that time spent at another college before transferring to GTS caused a number of students to rethink the decision to leave the original school. “Very commonly, [students] spend the two years in a full-fledged campus [such as] Armstrong Atlantic or Georgia Southern, and they find that they… [feel] comfortable and [feel] at home there,” Bras said. The report indicated that some faculty members were frustrated with the low student-faculty ratio, which was
The College of Architecture (CoA) has decided to suspend the operation of its Paris Program for the 2011-12 academic year. The program, which was initiated in 1975, offered ARCH students the opportunity to spend their senior year abroad enabling cross enrollment in partner school Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette (ENSAPLV). The cancellation of the program was announced in a letter of reference dated April 21 from George Johnston, CoA school chair. According to the letter, the program was cancelled due to financial unsustainability as well as under-enrollment for the academic year. “We did everything we could to avoid it,” Johnston said. The Paris Program was a “resident instruction” program. Tech’s School of Architecture maintained an office at ENSAPLV, the host architecture school, and participants had full-time Tech faculty members as resident directors. During the spring term, students from Tech and ENSAPLV collaborated on common architectural design projects with the help of faculty from both institutes. “[It is a] great program in terms of cultural exchange because Paris has a rich history, architecturally and urbanistically,” Johnston said. On average, about 20-30 students were traditionally enrolled in the Paris Program each year. In recent years, however, there has been a progressive drop in enrollment in the program. There were only 13 students enrolled in the 2010-11 academic year and only five interested in enrollment for the 2011-12 academic year. The program was also deemed financially unsustainable due to the current economic downturn, coupled with budgetary restrictions imposed by the state of Georgia. The Tech tuition fee covered the cost of instruction, but with added “non-personal” services, the costs rose.
See Savannah, page 3
See Paris, page 2
Photo courtesy of Rob Felt / Georgia Tech Communications & Marketing
From Nov. 2010 through May 2011, a task force led by Provost Rafael Bras conducted a review of GT Savannah and outlined a new plan for its future. As part of this plan, GT Savannah’s degree programs will be gradually phased out. By Nishant Prasadh News Editor
Institute President G.P. “Bud” Peterson accepted a series of recommendations presented by a task force he appointed to conduct a review of Georgia Tech-Savannah (GTS). As a result, starting next year, GTS will initiate a plan to gradually phase out its undergraduate and graduate degree programs and to install new programs as part of a new operational model. Peterson received the task force’s report, titled “Defining a Path Forward for Georgia Tech-Savannah,” on June 1, and spent two weeks reviewing the findings. On June 15, he presented his decision in a memorandum sent to Provost Rafael Bras, the head of the task force. “After considerable review and deliberation, I am pleased to accept the report in its entirety. While I am excited about the bold vision that you have pro-
posed, I know that we have much work ahead of us,” Peterson said in the memo. The 16-member task force was formally established in Dec. 2010 and conducted a study through the end of May 2011. Along with Bras, the task force included Tech administrators and faculty, including two faculty members who currently work at the Savannah campus. During the six-month review period, members of the task force consulted with numerous people associated with GTS, including current students and faculty, GTS advisory board members and alumni and members of the Savannah community and government. One focus of the task force included low enrollment and retention rates. Through the Georgia Tech Regional Engineering Program (GTREP) and the Engineering Alliance (EA), undergraduate students transferred to GTS after two years at Armstrong Atlantic State University, Georgia Southern Uni-
Atlanta hosts DAMOP international physics conference By Stephen Brown Contributing Writer
Photo by Doug Kim / Student Publications
DAMOP 2011 attendees gather in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis hotel. The annual conference was held on June 13-17.
Last week, the Division of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics (DAMOP) of the American Physical Society (APS) held its 42nd annual meeting in Atlanta. Roughly 1,000 scientists in the field of AMO physics, including professors, researchers and even a handful of Nobel Prize winners, convened at the Marriott Marquis hotel to present their research and discuss topics for future exploration at the event, known as DAMOP 2011. Several individuals from Tech were in attendance, with many of them giving their own presentations. The meeting opened Monday with a graduate student symposium on precision measurements in AMO physics, organized by Tech PHYS Professor Alex Kuzmich. The remainder of the week was scheduled with morning and early afternoon presentations, followed by afternoon poster sessions. Presentations were given both by in-
vited speakers and by contributing authors, who were divided into various blocks based on subject material. The poster sessions were held in a large ballroom where upward of 150 research posters were on display at a time, with the authors stationed nearby to discuss their research and answer questions. Talks concluded late Friday morning with special presentations on hot topics in the field. To commence with the talks on Tuesday, an event was held in the morning honoring four AMO individuals who received prizes for their work, including Tech PHYS Assistant Professor Shina Tan. Tan was awarded the George E. Valley, Jr. Prize for his derivation of exact relations for Fermi gases with large scattering length. According to the APS website, the prize is awarded “to recognize one individual in the early stages of his or her career for an outstanding scientific contribution to physics that is deemed to have significant potential for a dramatic impact on the field.” Other invited speakers from
Tech included Kuzmich and Carlos Sa de Melo. Kuzmich spoke Wednesday afternoon about advancements in quantum memories for telecom networks, while Sa de Melo presented Thursday morning about his findings on possible quantum phases of dipolar molecules. Thursday afternoon, an event was held for high school teachers in the Atlanta area which was organized by Kenneth Brown of the Institute’s chemistry department. Throughout the week, several graduate students here gave short presentations on contributed papers and displayed their posters during the afternoon session. Paul Goldbart, who was recently chosen as the new Chair of the School of Physics at Tech, spoke about emergent co-crystallization of atoms and light in multimode cavities Friday morning. “You go [to conferences like DAMOP] for two reasons. You come to these meetings because a lot of the discussions take place in the hallways... there’s this exSee DAMOP, page 3