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University of South Carolina
IT’S A DIFFERENT WORLD
Spring 2019 / No. 1
2
TIMES
COVER TO COVER
So you’re wondering where we’ve been. Well, wonder no more. It took a little longer than usual to get this issue to the printer, but what do you expect? We’ve
TIMES STAFF Editor Craig Brandhorst
been busy changing the world, or at least writing about the people who do, and we had an awful lot of ground to cover. See for yourself. Research, collaborative teaching, global partnerships, academic publishing, a journey to the bottom of the ocean in search of the mysterious subaquatic chimneys of a place called Lost City — you could lose
Assistant editor
yourself in these pages, and we encourage you to do exactly that. Before you
Megan Sexton
dive in, though, we’ve got a couple of important items on the agenda, starting
Designer Brandi Lariscy Avant Contributors Dan Cook, Chris Horn, Page Ivey, Julie Smith Turner
with those back-to-back covers, and that towering new masthead. This isn’t the first time we’ve altered our look, and it won’t be the last. Evolution is a natural part of design, and we always strive to stay current. That’s why if you flip through this issue, you’ll also notice new fonts, a new color palette, new this, that and the other — all of it aligned to the university’s recently refreshed brand identity, which is now rolling out across the Columbia campus.
Photographer
The even bigger frontpage news involves our name, which you’ll notice
Kim Truett
we’ve changed. That’s right. The moment you peeled back cover No. 1 to reveal
Campus correspondents Patti McGrath, Aiken Cortney Easterling, Greenville Shana Dry, Lancaster Jane Brewer, Salkehatchie Misty Hatfield, Sumter Annie Smith, Union Tammy Whaley, Upstate Jay Darby, Palmetto College University of South Carolina TIMES is published and printed twice per semester during the regular academic year by the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, Wes Hickman, director. Questions, comments and story ideas can be submitted via email to Craig Brandhorst at craigb1@mailbox.sc.edu or by phone at 803-777-3681.
The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetics, sexual orientation or veteran status.
cover No. 2, we ceased being USC Times and became the University of South Carolina TIMES — or, on second reference, simply TIMES. A bold move? Maybe so. But we’re not being dramatic. The new name is, in fact, a direct statement of who we are and what we represent as an institution, part of a larger strategic move to re-emphasize our deep connection to the state we serve. We are the flagship university for South Carolina, after all, “a faithful index to the fortunes and ambitions of the state.” The name of our quarterly magazine for faculty and staff ought to reflect that. Ask J.C. Huggins, director of brand strategy with the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. The Q&A with J.C. on page 4 provides a lot of useful nuts-and-bolts information about implementing the new brand guidelines, but it also underscores exactly what we’re getting at with the redesign and renaming of this publication. “We are proud of South Carolina,” J.C. explains. “We really want to take what is already a strong tie between the state and the university — and has been for more than 200 years — and make that a point of emphasis and a point of pride.” You can’t argue with that.
On the cover(s): Maxcy Monument in January, USC Times; Maxcy Monument in March; University of South Carolina TIMES. Inside cover, front and back: primary and secondary color palettes introduced this semester as part of the university’s 2019 brand refresh.
Enjoy the new TIMES,
CRAIG BRANDHORST EDITOR
SPRING 2019 / No. 1 3
Q&A
Refresher Course / 4 UofSC’s director of brand strategy, J.C. Huggins, explains the finer points of the 2019 brand refresh.
FEATURES
Policy and Practice / 8 Team-taught global studies course explores pros and cons of international development.
p. 8
Seeking Answers at Lost City / 10 Assistant professor of geochemistry Susan Lang probes life’s mysteries at the bottom of the sea.
Global Footprint / 14 The university enjoys a vast international presence — and has the global partnerships to prove it.
p. 10
p. 22
FORWARD THINKING
Need for Speed / 18 Research Computing team accelerates data-crunching capabilities for campus scientists.
Turning the Page / 20 University of South Carolina Press celebrates 75 years, starts next chapter.
Revving up Resilience / 22 p. 18
p. 20
Climate change is real. Geography professors help the Carolinas prepare for what’s coming.
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REFRESHER COURSE Q&A by Dan Cook
UofSC director of brand strategy discusses the university’s updated brand platform When you hear the phrase “brand platform,” you might be tempted to think “logo.” But a brand encompasses more than a single design element and more than mere nomenclature, says J.C. Huggins, director of brand strategy in the University of South Carolina’s Office of Communications and Public Affairs. As Huggins explains, a focused higher education brand platform zeroes in on an institution’s distinctive attributes and character for the benefit of its stakeholders as well as the larger public. It also provides the tools for stakeholders to talk about the brand in a consistent voice. At UofSC, these stakeholders include students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors and others who have a vested interest in the institution’s reputation and success, both now and in the future. In January 2019, Huggins and a team from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs unveiled the latest University of South Carolina brand refresh to campus communicators, who are now beginning to incorporate it into print and digital communications across the Columbia campus. The refresh involved university leadership at every step and reflects approximately two years of research, analysis, consultation and feedback. After the initial rollout, Office of Communications and Public Affairs content strategist and brand refresh team member Dan Cook sat down with Huggins, who offered some background on the thinking behind the refresh for @ UofSCToday. That Q&A has been updated for TIMES.
The university has made some changes in terms of its look. Can you explain what’s changed and what hasn’t? The visual identity is just part of a much larger brand refresh. It had been a little over eight years since we had taken a look at the brand platform and asked ourselves if this needed to be updated. We did some pretty extensive research — both qualitative and quantitative, with just
J.C. Huggins, director of brand strategy
over 8,000 people, including leadership, faculty, students, prospective students, etc. — and it was clear that we needed to refresh some things. What has been seen so far is just one small part of that, part of the visual identity system that will be used on social media and on other communications applications where space is limited. People will start to see the new platform over the course of the semester as we put it into production.
We initially put out the new “UofSC” monogram on social media, and there was a little bit of confusion. Part of that confusion was the way it was rolled out. The entire brand platform was presented to stakeholders on campus, everyone from our steering committee to the Board of Trustees to the deans and others, and then to communicators across campus. At some point, you reach critical mass where it crosses from internal to external. In this age of social media, the organization behind the branding doesn’t have control over how it’s shared. For instance, when we introduced the platform to campus communicators we presented on a screen at the Moore
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TREE AND GATES Only used for official, university-wide communications.
PRIMARY Used in most marketing communications, unless restricted by space.
MONOGRAM Used in informal communications and where space is extremely limited, such as social media and digital marketing.
School that is 30 feet high, and we saw in real time that the third slide of the presentation had been photographed and tweeted out. At that point, things became external.
Can you walk through the different visual elements — what’s new, what’s been refreshed and what’s stayed the same? The athletics marks will not be altered as part of this — they will remain the same. We revised the “tree and gates” logo; it’s the second time that logo has been revised since it was introduced in 1996. It was originally introduced when the web was in its early days — prior to the advent of social media — so digital applications weren’t really a consideration in its design. As a result, it didn’t really hold up well in smaller formats, and especially in digital formats like avatars. We simplified it and made it a little cleaner. It’s still a pretty complex visual mark, so we wanted something that complemented that in small spaces. That’s why we created the UofSC monograms. There’s one that’s stacked, one that’s linear. Those will be used for promotional items, digital applications, lapel pins and other areas where space is limited. Then there’s a mark that sort of combines those two things. It pairs the South Carolina wordmark from the “tree and gates” logo with the monogram to give us a visual element plus “South Carolina.”
Other Southeastern Conference schools refer to us as South Carolina. There are a lot of universities nationally where, when you hear the state name — which is the flagship university’s name, as well — you think university first and state second. That’s kind of the idea here. We are proud of South Carolina. We really want to take what is already a strong tie between the state and the university — and has been for more than 200 years — and make that a point of emphasis and a point of pride.
Can you talk about some of the research and discovery that went into this? We did quite a bit of research, both brand perception research — testing some of the concepts that were part of the platform previously — and national identity research. In the national identity research, we tested things like “USC,” “Carolina” and “UofSC” nationally — and that includes South Carolina. Nationally, the abbreviation “USC” was associated with the University of Southern California 70 percent of the time and with us about 20 percent of the time. “UofSC” was associated with the University of South Carolina 71 percent of the time and with Southern Cal about 20 percent of the time. The findings were interesting to us. We have used “UofSC” in social media for 10 years, and we have used it
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STAMPS Used as a template for information that needs to be displayed graphically. It is an ideal element to use for honors and awards.
around campus for things like TEDxUofSC, a “@UofSC” section on the website since 2013 and the daily email @UofSC Today. But we really haven’t used it in other marketing materials in a big way, so to have that kind of association at those levels is pretty remarkable.
And those themes are reflected in the brand platform and things that the public has not really seen. That’s right. It’s everything from key messages to the visual identity. It’s the ways that we express who we are. One way to think of it is as a personification of the university. If you thought about the university as a person, what would its personality be? That’s what you’ll see in the voice and the personality of the things we create in communications, as well as in the visual identity. When most people think of a brand, they think of a logo and a tagline. But really, that’s a small part of it. The brand message focuses, as we have for the past several years, on academic and research excellence, our outstanding student experience and the fact that the university is both the economic and the social engine for the state, in part because we educate so many South Carolinians. The refreshed brand is an evolution of the way we’ve talked about those themes in the past. We’re still talking about those same themes, but we’re talking about them in a new way, where everything fits together in a holistic sense. We really aren’t creating a new brand for the university; we want the brand to reflect who the university is today.
Overall, what do you hope the brand refresh can do for the university and for its reputation? I hope it’s the foundation for enhancing our national reputation and for a sense of pride. I hope it gives people an idea of how they can best refer to and embody the
best of the university, so that our external audiences get a clear and consistent idea of what it is that makes this place great and all the fantastic things that happen here on a daily basis.
Faculty and staff who work outside of communications might not be used to thinking of the place where they work as a “brand” — it’s a university. Can you explain why it makes sense to have a unified way to talk about ourselves? The University of South Carolina is a very big, comprehensive place. Someone on the outside might just see us recruiting and educating students. But anybody who works here knows that it is so much broader than that. We produce a lot of communications around all those things that we do for various audiences. For people on the receiving end of that, who aren’t as close to it as we all are, sometimes that information can be both overwhelming and incompatible. The brand platform is really a way to give a hierarchy to that kind of information, so that we will make sense to people on the outside as they start to hear it. They will know how to assign meaning to it and won’t just dismiss it because it’s incongruent with what they are thinking or hearing elsewhere. A brand is not something that we are defining as much as it is defined by our external audiences — it’s a perception of us that people have in their minds. While we want to shape that, we also have to have brand awareness and understand what that perception is to start with. It all starts with the research. We have been doing longitudinal brand research since 2011, so we have a historical perspective on perceptions of the brand over time.
SPRING 2019 / No. 1 7
By now, most people have seen at least a piece of the new brand platform. What can they expect over time? Rather than spend a massive amount of money to have everything ready to go on Day One — and to change all of our communications like we are flipping a switch — we took the approach of training the trainers. The branding firm we partnered with, Ologie, came in and trained the Communications and Public Affairs staff on how to use the new brand platform and introduced communicators throughout campus to it. It’s going to be an ongoing process with academic units, with admissions, with development, to bring everybody online so that they start producing materials in the new brand platform. You’ll start to see things produced by various offices on campus that will reflect the new platform this semester, and it will be in full effect next fall.
How do you see the refresh playing out throughout campus, in terms of the involvement of colleges, schools, centers and institutes? The colleges’ and schools’ communications staffs are being trained, and we are creating a new brand toolbox on sc.edu with assets and guidelines for people to start producing things. The guidelines are comprehensive to an extent that we have not seen before and include things like voice and tone, typography, photography, colors and a new secondary color palette that complements our primary garnet, black and white. We will also have a custom communications portal where people who might not be designers can go in and construct pieces. Someone in a center who might not have the skill set or the time to go into InDesign will be able to go there and build a piece. They will be able to select the type of piece they want — whether it’s a poster or a brochure — input the copy they want, and it will be styled appropriately with the correct fonts, with photography they can select. They can build a piece in a way that is intuitive. Those types of things we are building now: They were not available Day One, but they will come online over the course of the semester.
What’s your message for people who are working on projects and wondering if and when they should be incorporating new elements? For the identity, the new tree and gates logo and the fonts are straight substitutions. If you are working on a piece, you have not been trained, but you want it to have the new look, those are pretty easy substitutions. You can work with Communications and Public Affairs to get
those assets. Understanding the voice and the personality — some of the subtler differences — is going to require training. The other thing I would say is, if you are up against a deadline, go ahead and produce what you are going to produce. Maybe don’t order the same quantity — order a lesser quantity, knowing that it is going to change. But there is not a hard date that says, “Everything needs to change over to the new look by X date.” It’s a matter of, “What are our options?” “How important is it to get this done by tomorrow?” “How much bandwidth do I have to think through some of the things I need to think through to change it to the new platform?” We have options. We understand that everyone is in this boat together, and everyone is up against their own deadlines. We would really rather have people take a thoughtful approach to the new brand and implement it in a way that isn’t rushed or is not giving them time to be thoughtful in the way they apply it.
When do you anticipate that faculty and staff will have access to PowerPoint, letterhead and those types of nutsand-bolts tools? All those things are being produced now, and we have a prioritized list of what to approach first. Business cards, letterhead and envelopes can be ordered by department business managers through that custom communications portal. This is a new thing — the portal is new, as well as the platform — so, we are getting a feel for how to put things into production.
For someone who is on campus but has nothing to do with communications, how does this affect them? Ultimately, branding goes beyond communications into interactions. The hope is that the brand platform stands as a model of how to refer to and represent the university. Some of the brand personality traits are “optimistic,” “committed” and “welcoming.” Those are the types of things that we should model in our behavior with visitors to campus, whether it is a visiting professor or a visiting speaker or a prospective student. Be optimistic, welcoming. Again, these are not things that are revolutionary — these are things that people who were surveyed said they feel about us when they come here. But it really should serve as a guidepost for how people think of the university and how we want them to think of the university. It’s us trying to be our best selves. T
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FEATURES
POLICY & PRACTICE
By Megan Sexton
Global Studies course presents range of perspectives on international development Since being introduced at the University of South Carolina in 2016, the global studies major has become the fastest-growing undergraduate major on campus, with 158 students and almost as many different combinations of coursework. It’s also a veritable melting pot of interdisciplinary approaches — with the viewpoints to prove it. Witness the new course Best Practices in International Development. Team taught by faculty from across the university, the class is both an exploration of how economies around the world can be developed through sound investment and smart advice, and also a critique of development policy and practice. It’s a complex subject but the classroom approach is simple. Each Tuesday, a different faculty member presents a lecture in a specific area of international development. On Thursdays, clinical associate professor of history and global studies David Snyder, who is leading the course, follows up with a discussion focused on the topic discussed earlier in the week. Caroline Nagel, for example, will dive into the relationship between migration and economic growth and global development. A professor and chair of the geography department, Nagel will lecture on migration and development, exploring both positive and negative effects and touching on a range of related topics. “Environment, health, migration, development, global inequalities, energy consumption — all of those things are tied together,” says Nagel. “When you learn about them in an interdisciplinary major, students will understand holistically about some of these issues and problems.” The economics of international development will also inform a lecture by Hildy Teegen, an international business professor and former dean of the Moore School of Business.
An adviser for business sustainability to the International Finance Corp., the private sector partner of the World Bank, Teegen studies large scale infrastructure projects around the world to help ensure that the needs of the investors, local governments and the community are all met. “This generation of students is very empathetic and very eager to be socially impactful,” Teegen says. “A course like this one really plays into that interest and desire to make a difference in the world and be able to understand better modern practice in development so they might be able to shape their own careers in ways that are developmentally important.” Just ask Ariella Izzo, a global studies major considering career options in international development. Izzo has studied abroad in Spain, spent summers in France, lived in Italy, traveled to Tanzania and worked with a nonprofit to raise money for water filtration systems in developing countries. She also understands that even projects with good intentions can be fraught with unanticipated consequence. “We get a lot of questions and some backlash,” says Izzo, whose concentrations as a global studies major are sustainability and development as well as conflict and security. “Are we helping people and doing it in a sustainable, ethical way? I want to see the best ways to go in international development.” The semester-long conversation will even delve into gender dynamics. Drucilla Barker, a professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Women’s and Gender Studies program, will discuss the crucial link between what has historically been called “women’s work” — housework, child rearing, emotional, physical
SPRING 2019 / No. 1 9
THIS GENERATION OF STUDENTS IS VERY EMPATHETIC AND VERY EAGER TO BE SOCIALLY IMPACTFUL. — HILDY TEEGEN, professor of international business
and intellectual labor — and the development of any society. She also will examine how the historical exploitation of countries in the global South continues in the form of international debt. “The economic development of Europe and America required the enslaved labor and expropriation of the natural resources of the New World,” Barker says. “By any reasonable moral calculus, the global North owes a debt to the global South. Today, however, the South is a net creditor to the North through payments on debts that were incurred to finance economic development.” Offering a forum for competing viewpoints is exactly what Snyder had in mind as he was creating the course in the College of Arts and Sciences, and it’s a big draw for faculty like Teegen, Barker and Nagel, whose input helped shape Snyder’s syllabus. It’s also a custom fit for students who might have studied abroad or traveled internationally but who might not have considered the vast complexities of international development. “A lot of students have more exposure than students did 30 or 40 years ago,” Nagel says. “They’ve traveled more, they’ve seen more, but they don’t necessarily understand it until they start taking courses in it, put two and two together and see the relationships between things going on in the world today.” T
David Snyder, associate professor of history
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Seeking Answers at Lost City Scientists probe life’s boundaries in remote undersea hydrothermal field By Julie Smith Turner
SPRING 2019 / No. 1 11
Carbonate-bruite towers (top) and deposits at cracks in the seafloor (bottom left) channel hydrothermal fluids at the Lost City field in the Atlantic Ocean. A remotely operated vehicle was used to collect these fluids (bottom right). Photos courtesy of Susan Lang, UofSC / NSF / ROV Jason / 2018 (c) Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Assistant professor of aqueous geochemistry Susan Lang will
previously unobtainable. The team also hoped to shed light
travel to the ends of the earth for her research — or at least to
on one of the planet’s greatest secrets: how life originates.
the middle of the ocean. In September 2018, Lang was co-lead researcher on a major
Chimney sweep
research expedition to one of the most remote parts of the
On Sept. 8, 2018, in the face of rough weather, 55 scientists,
Atlantic — an unusual hydrothermal field dubbed Lost City.
students and crew members set sail from Cape Cod to Lost
The goal? To better understand how the unique site’s exten-
City aboard the U.S. Navy research vessel Atlantis. The six-day
sive microbial life survive — and thrive — despite the hostile
journey swelled to nine as the expedition encountered a hur-
deep-water ecosystem.
ricane and small tropical storm en route to one of the most
It wasn’t Lang’s first trip to Lost City. She visited it on previous research trips, in 2003 and 2005, just two years after its discovery. But thanks to advanced equipment, new sampling
remote places on Earth. “We had to let one hurricane sweep through the study site before we arrived,” says Lang.
techniques, a team of researchers from several universi-
But once they did arrive, the ship stayed on station east of
ties and grant funding from several sponsors, including the
the Mid-Atlantic Ridge for about two weeks. Lang was joined
National Science Foundation, the 2018 expedition sought data
by two students, Jessica Frankle (’18, marine science) and
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From left: Jessica Frankle, ’18, marine science; assistant professor Susan Lang; Cameron Henderson, marine science. Photo courtesy of Mitch Elend, University of Washington / NSF / ROV Jason / 2018.
Cameron Henderson, a senior marine science student. During
serpentization, creates energy in the forms of hydrogen and
that time, researchers deployed a remotely operated vehicle
organic molecules that support the microbes and other life
(ROV) named Jason, gathered samples from the ocean floor
living on the surface of the chimneys.
and performed initial on-board testing. The samples were then
As researchers analyze the chimney fluid and surface sam-
earmarked for exhaustive analysis in labs around the country,
ples, researchers hope to learn how microbes access carbon
including Lang’s.
and nutrients thousands of feet below the water’s surface.
“On an expedition, everyone is focused on a singular task,”
One leading hypothesis among the team is that the mountain
she says. “When you have that many people working in con-
contains another family of microbes responsible for introduc-
cert and everyone brings their own expertise or background,
ing the life-giving elements into the ecosystem.
it’s such an amazing experience.” Frankle says the time at sea was an introduction to new
Race to the bottom
procedures, concepts and the fascinating minutiae of microbi-
Unfortunately for researchers like Lang, other parties are also
ology and geology — with the added complication of being at
eyeing the Lost City area. In August 2017, an authorized United
the sea’s mercy. “When we were ROV sampling on site, no one
Nations agency granted Poland the rights to exploit the sea-
really got much sleep between working their shift operating
bed where Lost City is located.
sampling gear, subsampling when Jason came on deck, and preparing it to go down again ASAP,” she explains. What the team found at Lost City continues to inspire researchers, according to Lang. Located atop the 10-mile-wide Atlantis Massif, a massive
The deep seafloor can be rich with valuable minerals, she explains, and just as scientists’ capabilities have progressed in the decades since Lost City was discovered, commercial miners can now explore at greater depths and distances than ever before.
subaquatic mountain that towers an estimated 14,000 feet
“Less than 1 percent of the ocean has ever been seen so
above the sea floor, Lost City is in one of most forbidding
we know there are unique organisms that will be devastated
undersea regions on Earth. Somehow, though, microbial life
by mining and vanish without us knowing about them,” says
prospers in the dozens of hydrothermal chimneys that grow in
Lang. “With Lost City, we’re anxious to characterize it now
the field, which is approximately the same size as a city block.
the way things are — before it starts getting potentially dis-
Many of these Lost City chimneys emit nutrient-rich flu-
turbed.”
ids, but the process is not driven by volcanic activity. Rather,
Indeed, the process of gathering minerals can result in
they form when the carbon in the seawater reacts with the
countless casualties. Miners essentially vacuum the seafloor
silica-poor rock of the Earth’s mantle. The interaction, called
to harvest minerals and, in the process, entrap anything living
SPRING 2019 / No. 1 13
Jessica Frankle recovers Niskin bottles and associated sensors that were used to characterize the water column around the Lost City field.
on, in and around the surface. Life and lifecycles are brutally
expedition will begin to close the gap on questions both large
interrupted in ways we can never fully understand, Lang
and small. “I’m amazed every time we analyze samples,” she
says.
says. “We are already learning things that bring us that much
Luckily, Lost City itself lacks the valuable minerals that interest mining operations, and its location currently provides something of an impediment. “Lost City isn’t low hanging fruit. There are other regions in much greater danger,” says Lang.
On dry land Now that the expedition is over, the work continues — and will continue for years — in labs across the country.
further down the path.” In the years ahead, the samples will be examined, analyzed, catalogued and shared with the members of the team, fellow scientists and expedition funders. Preserving and studying Lost City has become a mission for many researchers for what may lie there. They believe the spontaneous processes of Lost City — or a site much like it — could be a blueprint for how life began on Earth. “It’s unique and really the most extreme spot we’ve found,”
“We are chipping away in the lab and haven’t gotten to
says Lang. “I think the questions we can answer there are truly
study the nutrients yet,” Lang explains. “We’ve done a much
‘What is the origin of life?’ level. I love all my research questions
better job than what we’ve been able to do previously looking
the same, but that’s the one that’s just both spectacular and
at how much inorganic carbon is there. We’re still in a bit of
beautiful.”
wait-and-see mode because analyses take a long, long time.”
The expedition was equally profound for newcomer Fran-
Seeing the sample results come to life in the lab is a thrill for
kle, who believes the experience forever altered her life and
Frankle. “Getting to see the results of what we collected is like bringing the excitement of sitting in the Jason control room back to land,” she says. In the meantime, Lang is firming up plans for a fall 2019 expedition to the Mid-Cayman Rise where the research team will explore two hydrothermal fields with contrasting chemistries. She’s also planning a future visit to Lost City.
professional pursuits. “I came back from sea a different woman,” she explains. “I realized that I needed to be an oceanographer. I also defined myself more thoughtfully and gained newfound selfconfidence. I came back to land dying to go to sea again.” “I loved doing the work, my interactions with the ship’s community, and even the minute details like listening to the
Being at sea takes her away from the lab and the presenta-
waves break against the boat as I went to sleep. I’m still figuring
tion of research around the world, but Lost City expeditions are
out my path to get back to sea, but for now, I’m processing Lost
special for her and fellow undersea researchers, says Lang, who
City samples for a master’s thesis, and I could not be more
hopes the discoveries and data from last year’s tumultuous
excited.”
T
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GLOBAL FOOTPRINT By Craig Brandhorst
International partnerships boost consciousness, raise university’s profile The University of South Carolina has been a global player for a long time. The master of international business program, for example, has dominated the U.S. News & World Report rankings for three decades. The Walker Institute — originally the Institute for International Studies — has been supporting international teaching, research, and public affairs programming since 1961. Our strong relationships in Taiwan and Korea go back decades, and students have been studying abroad since the invention of the backpack. But since 2011, when the Focus Carolina strategic plan was announced, the university has significantly increased its internationalization efforts, transforming a healthy overseas presence into a clearly defined global footprint. “When President Pastides assumed office, he started a process of strategic planning, and one of the recommendations that came out of that process was to become a global university,” says Allen Miller,, vice provost for Global Carolina. “To do that, we needed to up our study abroad game. We needed to be able to send more students out, give them more varied experiences. We also needed to have more international students on campus.” Becoming a truly global university also meant burnishing the university’s international reputation, says Miller. In places where the university already enjoyed a strong presence — Taiwan, Korea and Vietnam, for example — the strategy was simply to build on existing networks. But developing partnerships in places like the People’s Republic of China was also necessary because, as Miller explains, “It’s a market too big to ignore. Not being there would be like not being in Europe.”
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“When President Pastides assumed office, he started a process of strategic planning, and one of the recommendations that came out of that process was to become a global university.” ALLEN MILLER, vice provost for Global Carolina And then there are places like Oman, where a relationship developed organically over several years and eventually became a full-fledged collaboration. “The core educational mission of Global Carolina is to produce students who have a global consciousness and are able to function as responsible citizens in the global community,” Miller explains. “But there are also a lot of educational institutions worldwide that simply will not deal with you if you are not ranked. As long as reputation is part of rankings, we foreclose opportunities for scientific and scholarly collaboration if we are not a known presence in the world.”
SOCIAL WORK IN SEOUL
The field of social work has been practiced in Korea for about 70 years, and the university’s College of Social Work has enjoyed a presence there for almost three decades. Launched in Seoul in 1993, the Korea-based Master of Social Work program offers the same curriculum that students receive at the Columbia campus and equips graduates to improve social services in their native country by broadening their understanding of social work theories and applications in the context of the Korean culture. The program also raises the university’s international profile. “Many people in Korea make a connection between social work and the University of South Carolina, which bolsters the image of the university as a global institution of higher learning,” says Kyunghee Ma, the program’s director. “Specifically, having a social work program in Korea demonstrates how much UofSC contributes to improving societies around the world.” The university’s presence is also changing the social work profession in Korea. Nancy Brown has taught nearly every cohort since 2001— frequently teaching courses on addiction and substance abuse — and describes a shift from what has been a case management approach to an approach predicated on front-line treatment. “Social work in Korea has been pigeonholed, but there’s a movement into more treatment areas. Social workers that we train are ready to engage clients,” Brown explains. “The more people that graduate from our program, the more people there are who will have this perspective on the profession and have the capacity to treat people.” And that’s really the goal: to improve people’s lives by expanding and improving the field of social work in Korea while being respectful of Korean culture. “Social work is sensitive to culture and economic and political contexts in which it is being practiced,” says Ma. “Some U.S. universities have come to Asian countries in the hope of offering social work degree programs, but no other U.S.-based university has been as successful.”
OPPORTUNITY IN OMAN
When the first Omani student came to South Carolina in 1985, no one could have anticipated the influx of other Omani students who would follow — thanks, initially, to word of mouth. Three decades later, though, you’ll find approximately 70 Omani students on the Columbia
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“When you go from here to Oman, you are not disconnected from USC at all. It becomes like your blood.” AYOUB ALWAHAIB, graduate student in mechanical engineering
campus in any give semester, most of them active in the Omani Student Association. There’s a Gamecock alumni club in Muscat. And, last fall, a delegation that included Miller and President Pastides paid a visit to the small Middle East nation to celebrate a new academic partnership. In November, after the Caledonian College of Engineering in Oman and the Oman Medical College merged to form the National University of Science and Technology, UofSC signed a memorandum of understanding with the newly formed university to help them launch an accredited program in engineering. “We think we have the second largest population of Omani students on a single campus of any university in the United States,” says Miller, who is also now on the National University of Science and Technology’s board of trustees. “Oman is a place where we have both deep ties and we think we can stand out.” And the admiration is mutual, according to Omani students like Ayoub Alwahaib, who came to South Carolina to study mechanical engineering on the advice of an uncle back home. The uncle, who earned a bachelor’s and a Ph.D. from the university (as well as a master’s degree from Virginia Tech), made Alwahaib’s decision simple. “He said, ‘Just go to USC. It’s a really good university.’ He really liked it here or he wouldn’t have come back for his Ph.D.” Alwahaib likes it here, too. After graduating in December, he immediately started work on his master’s in mechanical engineering and now spends the bulk of his time in the combustion lab at the McNAIR Center for aerospace research. Like his uncle, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. After that, who knows? He would love to land a job in the U.S., but he’s also excited about what’s happening back in Oman, especially the university’s strong relationship with his homeland. “When students from here go to Oman, or when President Pastides goes to Oman, they contact the USC alumni there — to talk to the them, see what has happened in their lives. Did they get a good job? What do their coworkers say about USC?” he says. “When you go from here to Oman, you are not disconnected from USC at all. It becomes like your blood.”
3+2 = MORE TO COME
Whereas Carolina’s now-robust relationship with Oman evolved organically over decades, the partnership with Nanjing Medical University began just three years ago, in 2016. It’s expanding rapidly, though — thanks, in part, to Xiaoming Li, an Arnold School of Public Health professor and SmartState Endowed Chair for Clinical Translational Research. In 2015, Li came to Carolina from Wayne State University, where he helped establish a joint degree program with NMU. After he arrived at his current post, his contacts at the Chinese university asked if something similar was possible at UofSC. With strong support from Global Carolina and the leadership of both the Arnold School and the School of Medicine, that’s exactly what happened. In 2016, five students from NMU spent three weeks at the UofSC School of Medicine doing clinical observation. That same year, representatives from NMU visited Columbia and signed a memorandum of understanding. “By that time, Nanjing Medical had already designated funds specifically to support collaboration with USC,” says Li. “That was a major milestone.” Since then, the number of Chinese students coming to the University of South Carolina, whether for clinical observation at the School of Medicine or research training at the Arnold
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“Every summer we have three to five faculty from USC visit Nanjing Medical to teach, and their students keep coming here every year.” XIAOMING LI, professor, Arnold School of Public Health
School of Public Health, has continued to ramp up. In 2017, there were 10 NMU students here, and in 2018 the number jumped to 22. This year, we will host 25. Meanwhile, NMU has been bringing South Carolina faculty to China to teach summer courses since 2017. “Every summer we have three to five faculty from USC visit Nanjing Medical to teach, and their students keep coming here every year,” says Li. “And last April, Provost Gabel and the deans from the School of Medicine and the Arnold School visited Nanjing Medical. At that time, USC was recognized by Nanjing Medical as one of four strategic partners in the world, and the only one in the United States.” Pending final approval, the next step is a 3+2 program allowing students from NMU to complete three years toward an undergraduate degree in China then come here for two years, after which they will graduate with a bachelor’s degree from NMU and master’s of public health degree from South Carolina. Eventually, Li hopes that some of those students will return for a Ph.D. He also hopes the relationship with NMU — which is a comprehensive university, not simply a medical school — can involve other disciplines. “Long-term, we want to see formalized degree programs,” says Li. “Before this year, everything was School of Medicine and Public Health, but we are hoping to expand into the humanities and social sciences. We now have two students here for foreign language, and next year we may see students studying literature or philosophy. We are concentrating on the 3+2 for now, but if we can make that a success, we can replicate it in different areas.” T 135 W
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FORWARD THINKING
NEED FOR SPEED
By Chris Horn
Research Computing program connects UofSC scientists with high-powered data analytics solutions They don’t look like a NASCAR pit crew, but the Research Com-
optimizing data analytic work flows, identifying bottlenecks
puting team is speeding up the data-crunching capabilities of
and problems in computer code and securing computing
the university’s scientists, bringing faster analytical results and
resources at the university level and beyond.
more efficient computing to those who work with very large and complex data sets.
“Depending on a researcher’s computing needs, we can help migrate them onto larger systems with more CPU cores
“Research computing is the third pillar of science now,” says
and more RAM. If their code scales well, we’ll move them up to
Paul Sagona, who directs the four-person team in the univer-
what we have available on campus and, if necessary, find ways
sity’s Division of Information Technology. “You’ve got theoret-
to graduate them to larger resources, whether it be supercom-
ical, experimentation, and now computation and simulation.
puting centers across the country or cloud computing.”
It’s become an absolute necessity for science.”
The program offers services at no charge to university
The Research Computing program was begun several
researchers, although there are opportunities to pay for dedi-
years ago to help researchers improve project performance by
cated and priority access to the university’s computer cluster. Research Computing’s services sometimes improve research grant competitiveness by demonstrating that a researcher has high-powered data analytics support and that the research question itself is scalable.
SPRING 2019 / No. 1 19
Sean Norman, an environmental health sciences professor
“We ended up accessing nearly 4,000 computing nodes,
in the Arnold School of Public Health, needed the kind of speed
each one of them with up to 10-times the computing horse-
Research Computing can deliver. His metagenomics research
power of a high-powered laptop,” Sagona says.
involves collecting environmental field samples and analyzing their genetic profile.
Ben Torkian, senior application scientist for Research Computing, wrote software tools that could split the job into
“With the advances in DNA sequencing, we generate mil-
smaller segments, then reassemble the results after the com-
lions of DNA sequences, and we have to rely on computers to
putational analysis was completed. It turned out to be one of
help us,” Norman says. “We can’t sit down and actually analyze
the largest data sets ever run on the Google Cloud Platform,
30 or 40 million sequences by hand.”
and the results were phenomenal, according to Sagona.
When the information technology division’s Hyperion
“It was a huge job, and it was completed in 16.6 hours. We
high-performance computing cluster became operational last
calculated that if Sean had tried to run this on his PC, it would
fall, Norman worked with Research Computing to use the new
have taken seven years,” Sagona says. “We provided a lot of
machine for his team’s data analytic needs. He had previously
feedback to Google during that project, and I think we learned
used the national supercomputer network, which provides
a lot and they did, too. We’ll be better prepared to help the
major computing horsepower but also requires waiting in line
next person at USC who needs that much computing power.”
with other researchers around the country.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Sagona was invited to the Google
The in-house Hyperion was far more convenient to use, but
Cloud Next conference in London this past October to present
Sagona’s team noticed that some of the analyses Norman was
a talk on the scale of the project and the role of cloud comput-
running were taking a month or more to complete.
ing in the performance of data analytics.
“By optimizing the work flow of Sean Norman’s research,
“My talk was well received, and I had a lot of positive feed-
we were able to speed it up,” says Sagona, adding that the goal
back,” he says. “I made some great connections there that will
was to reduce the computing time from months to weeks.
prove to be very valuable moving forward with cloud and
After optimizing the computer code, Sagona’s team deter-
funding agencies.”
mined that the Hyperion’s capacity wasn’t sufficient for the task. That’s when they looked at cloud computing. Sagona’s team talked to Google Cloud engineers and began to optimize Norman’s coding for a cloud-based approach. They tested small samples initially to ensure the code worked, then uploaded the entire data set to Google Cloud.
T
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Turning the page University’s press celebrates 75th anniversary, writes next chapter
By Chris Horn
The University of South Carolina Press celebrates 75 years of publishing in 2019, which is a pretty big deal in itself, but there’s more going on than a diamond anniversary. A new director, a new acquisitions editor and a more tightly focused editorial direction promise dynamic changes at one of the country’s foremost academic presses. Now if you’re one of those people who likes to skip to the end of the novel to see how it turns out, here’s a spoiler: the press plans to double down on its publishing efforts in books about the South and Southern history. In fact, the press’ previously published titles on those topics played a role in luring Richard Brown from Georgetown University Press to become director of USC Press a year ago. “I had been following USC Press for many years and always thought it had a really interesting list — lots of good regional books and absolutely gorgeous books with really high production values,” says Brown, who spent 17 years at Georgetown. “And I’ve always been interested in the South and Southern history.” Brown’s first year has been punctuated by lots of listening and thinking. “One of the things I wanted to do was sharpen the focus of what we publish. What is it we want to be known for? What’s our niche?” he says. “Southern history is something really fundamental to who we are as a press, and that’s why we brought Ehren Foley on as acquisitions editor. He has a Ph.D. in southern history, knows the players, knows the material, knows the literature.” But forget the parochial views of Southern history narrowly focused on the Civil War and Civil War heroes — there’s a much broader scope to the South than that, Foley says. “Having grown up in Fredericksburg, Va., my first love was the Civil War, but that’s not how I think about Southern
history,” he says. “We’re thinking about the South in terms of race relations, slavery studies in the Antebellum period, Reconstruction and the meaning of citizenship — the attempt to create a biracial democracy, most especially in South Carolina. “We’re really interested in how South Carolina has evolved. What are the hinge moments of its history? How has it changed and what’s pushing us forward? That’s really where we want to make a mark.” The press’ renewed emphasis on the South and Southern history will bring attention to unsung heroes and new voices, Brown says. “Every book is a story, and we want to tell great stories. There are lots of great stories about Southern history and Reconstruction and the civil rights movement,” he says. “I think it’s interesting to do books on people nobody knows who had a role in shaping history. We’ve got a list of about 40 people who were fundamental in South Carolina’s civil rights movement, stories that are under the radar and really need to be heard.” Brown has had several conversations with Bobby Donaldson, director of the university’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research and a member of the Press Committee, to learn more about little-known voices from the civil rights movement. “We know some of the history, but a lot we don’t know,” Brown says. “I’ve lived in eight different states, and I’ve never lived in a state that’s more self-conscious of its history than South Carolina. It seems like such an important thing for South Carolinians to understand their history and come to grips with it. “There’s some awfulness and some beauty, and we need to shine a light on it. Where were we 300 years ago, what
From left: Richard Brown, director; Ehren Foley, acquisitions editor; MacKenzie Collier, publicity manager
happened in the Civil War and during the civil rights movement? Part of our goal at USC Press is to help South Carolina understand its own history better.” Like other academic presses, the press has a limited bandwidth, so choosing to publish more books about certain topics and aligning the press with the strengths of the university means curtailing other topics. That led to the decision to close out Story River Books, a fiction imprint begun with Pat Conroy as its overseeing editor. More than 20 books were contracted, including Bret McClain’s One Good Mama Bone, which won the 2017 Wille Morris Award for Southern Fiction. Conroy’s untimely death in 2016 weighed heavily in the decision to discontinue the series. “It wasn’t an easy thing to do. But we have a small staff, and we don’t have money to throw around for big advances like a New York publishing firm,” Brown says. “Not having Pat Conroy for marketing and promotion was just too tough to overcome.” The press will also discontinue its Young Palmetto Books, a children’s book series, as well as a series on the Old Testament and New Testament. In
addition, the press recently closed its warehouse on Devine Street and outsourced those functions to another large university press for financial and technological reasons. What’s not going away are the popular regional titles — coffee table books, cookbooks and ghost story books — that sell well in tourist outlets along the coast and help support more scholarly titles. The press has also added a shopping cart option to its website, allowing retail sales. It continues to add digital versions of its paper offerings — about 450 books on its backlist are available in e-book format. And one more thing — the press’ 75th anniversary brings a new logo that will grace the spine of each of its new books. The new mark is a change, something the press has managed to navigate for the past three-quarters of a century. “Our books have to be reliable and enduring. That’s the value that university presses bring to the table — a credibility and an intellectual strength that we ensure,” Brown says. “It’s high-quality content in an era when you sometimes don’t know what’s true and what’s not.” T
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REVVING UP RESILIENCE Geography department helping Carolinas communities prepare for climate change By Chris Horn
Whatever you believe about climate change, this much is certain — it’s real, it’s happening now and there’s more of it on the way. The university’s geography department is headquarters for the Carolinas Integrated Sciences and Assessments (CISA) team, one of 11 NOAA Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) sponsored teams across the United States that pursues questions about climate science and adaptation designed to meet the needs of decision-makers. Since 2012, USC Geography’s CISA program has been the organizer and major sponsor of the biennial Carolinas Climate Resilience Conference, which brings together people from local governments, community organizations, state and federal agencies and researchers. It’s meant to be a resource primarily for the Carolinas, but the conference’s practical agenda attracts people from across the country, including national organizations like the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. TIMES asked geography professor and CISA lead investigator Kirstin Dow for the lowdown on climate change projections and the climate resilience conference she recently co-directed.
So, what are the latest predictions for the Carolinas in terms of the effects of climate change? Under the high greenhouse gas emission scenario, the Southeastern region is expected by the end of the century to take an almost $50 billion economic hit because of lost labor productivity, which will include more heat-related injuries, workers needing more cooling breaks, and those types of things. That figure is one-third of the entire amount for the U.S. Overall, there will be an increase in average temperatures and an increase in rainfall intensity. There will also be more heat stress because of overnight temperatures not dropping as much as they have in the past. Potentially, by midcentury in South Carolina we could see another 25-plus days of temperatures over 95 degrees in the summer. We’re not expecting as many hurricanes overall but more of the more intense ones. We’re confident that the sea level rise will continue. The City of Charleston is planning for a 1.5-feet of sea level rise when it considers construction projects with a shorter lifespan and a 2.5-feet of rise when planning for long-term construction projects.
What other kinds of disruption will climate change bring? Some challenges we face today, such as drought and floods, are expected to become more frequent in the future. Future higher temperatures are likely to lead to greater frequencies and magnitudes droughts particularly affecting agriculture. Heavy rainfall events will saturate the soil and cause flooding. The flooding
SPRING 2019 / No. 1 23
can potentially lead to road repair costs if there’s degradation of paving — the binders in concrete can actually leach out if the pavement is underwater long enough. Greg Carbone, co-principal Investigator of CISA and USC geography faculty member, has done extensive research on the historic and projected rates of extreme rainfall in the Carolinas. It’s also worth considering that earthquake-prone regions such as Charleston are at greater risk to soil liquefication during seismic activity due to water tables rising with sea levels, creating more property damage. Amanda Farris, our program manager for CISA, leads the development of the Condition Monitoring program in partnership with the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow (CoCoRaHS) Network. The CoCoRaHS network uses citizen scientists to augment the limited number of weather stations around the country. This approach is also useful today and will become more important to tracking changes in the future. We’re really interested in drought impacts because we know droughts are very expensive. But typically it’s difficult to capture all of the costs — things like pipes breaking underground when the soil dries out too much or bricks snapping in foundations when the soil moisture levels decline precipitously. The network helps prompt people to report observational information on drought that isn’t usually measured at the macro level. This information contributes to a more robust understanding of current drought impacts and helps authors of the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor identify the onset and recovery from drought.
Did you get any political pushback when you started this in 2012? The subject of climate change is much less politicized than it used to be. It has been in the past, but the more evidence of climate change we see, the less politicized it is. The more we deal with things like hurricanes that are getting an extra oomph from warmer ocean waters, the more we have flooding in Charleston, the less politicized it is. According to the October 2018 poll results from Winthrop University, 95 percent of South Carolinians believe that the climate is changing. The conference deals with the practical side of climate variability and change — how individuals and communities can build resilience to current climate that will help coming changes.
What are some of the ways the Carolinas can cope with what’s ahead? The good news about climate change is that there are technologies out there that we can use right now. So, more insulation is a great solution to higher temperatures. Building green roofs or white roofs that don’t absorb heat like our black roofs do can make a huge difference.
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More trees and shading because trees will regulate temperatures and will offset some of the urban heat island where you’ve got all these buildings absorbing heat and releasing it all day long. The other good news about the coming challenges is that many actions can increase both current and future resilience. For example, Kirsten Lackstrom, one of our research faculty members, recently co-organized a tabletop exercise on drought in South Carolina. They were walking through the state’s drought contingency plan to assure that all agency staff understood their roles in the case of a drought. While this event focused on present drought risk, many of the preparedness steps are similar. Individually, we can do more drought-tolerant landscaping, and we can recycle water on a commercial scale — car wash businesses already do that. We can also encourage recycling water systems for plant nurseries. Agriculture uses 70 percent of freshwater resources, so going from spray to targeted irrigation could help a lot. There are also technologies for anticipating drought, things like pumping water into the ground for storage. And simple things like keeping reservoirs higher when you know a drought is likely to form. T
TRACKING CHANGE When it comes to climate change, the university’s geography department faculty are on the case. GREG CARBONE, co-principal investigator of CISA, focuses on climate variability and change, including the spatial and temporal nature of drought and rainfall extremes. He co-developed a web-based drought-monitoring tool for the Carolinas. CISA co-principal investigator KIRSTEN LACKSTROM, meanwhile, concentrates on increasing drought preparedness and resilience. And the hard work doesn’t stop there. SUSAN CUTTER, director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute, focuses on disaster vulnerability/ resilience science and how vulnerability and resilience are measured, monitored and assessed, while JEAN ELLIS is looking at coastal and aeolian geomorphology and the impact of humans on the coastal environment. On another front, ZHENLONG LI is trying to accelerate spatial information extraction and advance knowledge discovery to support domain applications such as disaster management, climate analysis, human dynamics and public health.
ENDNOTES
The halls of the International House at Maxcy teem with students from around the world, but since November that vibrancy has also been reflected on the walls of the residence hall’s central stairwell, thanks to a mural designed by Maxcy Visiting Fellow, Viet Max. The Vietnamese street artist visited with his family in 2018, then sketched out a mural to be completed by a couple dozen students and several staff. “We asked Viet Max for a design that integrated Vietnamese and American culture, and we think he accomplished that and then some,” says David Snyder, Maxcy’s faculty principal. “On his second trip to the U.S., certain icons of Americana really made an impression on him, from the Statue of Liberty to an afternoon of Gamecock football.”
“Being American has always meant profound engagement with the rest of the world,” Snyder explains. “We are in the world, the world is in us, and Maxcy is one place where we can really see those truths. I’m paraphrasing, but what did the American poet Walt Whitman once say? ‘We are large, we contain multitudes’? That’s Maxcy!” Snyder loves several panels, including a depiction of the Greener statue honoring the university’s first African-American professor. His favorite aspect, though, is the dragon. “I love the dragon’s head most of all,” he says, “the way its scaly body weaves throughout all the other imagery, and especially how it leaves the building through one window and comes back in a floor above.” “While some of the images might seem a bit stock , they reveal the deep impressions that American culture made on Viet Max, and the value of cross-cultural encounter,” says Snyder. “His deep impressions of America are a very Vietnamese response to what he saw. Now, those impressions are permanently etched on our walls!”