University Times

When Pitt issued new I.D. cards to Pittsburgh campus employees in January, it inadvertently cut off several privileges previously enjoyed by spouses of faculty and staff, including borrowing privileges at Pitt libraries and access to campus shuttle buses and Trees Hall recreation facilities. Recently, the administration took steps to restore those privileges, said Andrew W. […]

Aftershocks of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings, recent anthrax attacks and the war in Afghanistan are being felt in Pitt classrooms and research facilities. Some examples: * More than 30 undergraduates have enrolled so far in Pitt's new certificate program in global studies, more than twice the number that planners of the interdisciplinary program had […]

Pitt appears not to be suffering the exodus of foreign and out-of-state students that some experts feared would follow the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — and the xenophobic violence that ensued in Pittsburgh and other cities. As of Nov. 2, the Pittsburgh campus had processed spring term registrations of 11,356 students, 726 more than last […]

Pitt's Health Sciences Library System (HSLS) has compiled an information resource titled Medical Responses to Terrorism. This resource is available at http://www.hsls.pitt.edu/intres/index.html?page=46. It contains links to full-text journal articles and book chapters, and authoritative web resources from organizations such as the National Safety Council, the Centers for Disease Control, the American College of Physicians, the […]

UPMC Health System is hosting a series of free public programs on bioterrorism. The sessions, entitled "Bioterrorism: What You Need to Know," will feature UPMC bioterrorism and infection control experts who will address questions about biological agents, such as anthrax and smallpox, and will highlight how UPMC is preparing for these threats. "The specter of […]

Last month the University shut down all on-campus vendors, pending a review of its vending regulations. For more than two decades, Pitt has allowed an eclectic mix of on-campus vendors who paid a daily fee to set up tables near the William Pitt Union. At a Nov. 2 press conference, Robert Hill, executive director of […]

After completing his proof of the Kepler Conjecture, Thomas Hales turned his attention to a related problem of even greater antiquity: What is the most efficient partition of a plane into equal areas? The Honeycomb Conjecture asserts that the answer is the six-sided honeycomb. Honeybees had always taken the conjecture as a given. But for […]

The property and fa- cilities committee of the Board of Trustees has approved five renovation and construction projects totaling $10,269,000. The committee is authorized to approve Pitt construction projects in excess of $1 million. The committee reports its actions to the trustees budget committee for the purpose of including the actions in the operating and […]

Organ transplant pioneer Thomas E. Starzl, professor of surgery in Pitt's School of Medicine, has donated his personal papers to Pitt's University Library System (ULS). The papers, which span some 200 linear feet, reflect Starzl's medical career before, during and after his significant contributions to the field of transplantation. According to Rush Miller, director of […]