University Times

Pitt’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) has opened a Graduate Center for Public Policy and Management in Skopje, Macedonia, culminating nearly a decade of joint planning with university, governmental and business leaders from both the United States and Macedonia. This relationship, unique to Pitt, is one that GSPIA hopes to model in […]

Two Pitt award-winning English professors, Mariolina Salvatori and James Seitz, have spent their careers thinking and writing about the art and profession of teaching, or pedagogy, in addition to performing their teaching duties. Both professors have been named Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Program Scholars, winning a national competition for the awards, which […]

The race for smaller, faster and more powerful computers and consumer electronics took a new spin as researchers at Pitt and the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) became the first to control electrons using electrical, rather than magnetic, fields. In a recent edition of Science Express, the on-line portal of the magazine Science, […]

BOOKS ARTS and SCIENCES Acts of Reading: Exploring Connections in Pedagogy of Japanese by Hiroshi Nara, East Asian languages and literatures, and Mari Noda, Ohio State University. University of Hawaii Press. This book brings together various research in foreign language reading and promotes an effective pedagogical approach to teaching reading in Japanese. Advances in Japanese […]

A big gift is helping Pitt’s School of Engineering to investigate small things. Through a $1.4 million gift from John A. Swanson, the school will create the John A. Swanson Center for Micro and Nano Systems. Swanson, who earned a Ph.D. in applied mechanics from Pitt in 1966, is the founder of ANSYS Inc. The […]

Novelist and literary essayist Nicholson Baker provoked a bibliographical brouhaha two years ago when he accused American libraries of shortsightedly destroying books and newspapers — precious, irreplaceable pieces of our printed heritage — after reformatting (microfilming or digitizing) them. Baker’s allegations, published in his book “Double Fold” and in The New Yorker, were eloquent, caustic and […]

Copies of a book that helps pharmacy departments devise an emergency preparedness plan to deal with potential chemical or biological attacks were distributed to 6,500 U.S. pharmacies. “Biological and Chemical Terrorism: A Pharmacy Preparedness Guide” was written by Edward P. Krenzelok, professor in Pitt’s School of Pharmacy and director of the Pittsburgh Poison Center at […]

In his 30-plus years of teaching introductory psychology, Donald H. McBurney found that many of his students had misconceptions about science, and psychology in particular, that impeded their learning. To help remove these stumbling blocks and encourage undergraduates to think critically, the Pitt professor would spend part of each class fielding students’ questions. For example, […]

Robert William Avery, a retired Pitt professor of sociology who studied how organizations functioned and who mentored generations of foreign students, died March 25, 2003, of kidney and heart failure. He was 78. Avery taught at Pitt for 34 years. Upon his retirement 11 years ago, the sociology department created the Robert W. Avery Award […]

The seeds of David C. Barker’s book on conservative talk radio were planted in 1993, when he took a sales job that required a lot of driving in the Houston, Tex., area. “And you get tired of pop music all the time. The only real alternative there was conservative talk radio, especially Rush Limbaugh. I […]