News
Postcards from the world
FROM PETTING CROCODILES in Ghana to celebrating Halloween in Tunisia, PSU students—including Sarah Wimmer (pictured here)—are experiencing life abroad and sharing their adventures with students in local schools. For their senior capstone, a PSU-required project that helps the community, 15 students studying abroad have each created a blog for a Portland middle school class that chronicles their life-changing experiences.
What’s new on campus?
- Lincoln Hall glass entrance and lobby on Southwest Broadway
- Laboratories and classrooms in the remodeled Science Building 2—now called Science Research and Teaching Center
- College Station, a 16-story residence hall now under construction
- Electric Avenue car and bike charging stations on Southwest Montgomery
Greening the Portland skyline
PSU MAY SOON BE home to the Oregon Sustainability Center, rendered here. The $62 million, seven-story structure is designed to capture and process all its own water, generate its own electricity, and leave no carbon footprint. It will be a resource for education, green business, and energy and environmental research and development. Groundbreaking is planned for early 2012 if the Oregon Legislature approves $37 million in state-issued bonds.
Unsettling news
MULTNOMAH COUNTY’S Native Americans are three times more likely to live in poverty than their white counterparts. Their income is, on average, half that of whites, their unemployment rate 70 percent higher, and their children 20 times more likely to be placed in foster care. This information comes from “An Unsettling Profile,” the second of seven planned reports from PSU’s School of Social Work and the Coalition of Communities of Color. The first report, a general survey of racial disparities in Multnomah County, was detailed in “Color Matters,” Portland State Magazine, Fall 2010.
Team science
MANY OF TODAY’S most innovative products are developed when scientists from varied disciplines collaborate. But mixing vastly different experiences, terminologies, methods, and backgrounds can cause chaos, not creativity. Professor Melissa Appleyard in the PSU School of Business Administration is studying scientists at eight nanomedicine development centers. Her goal: identify those who have developed what she calls a “knowledge-meshing capability” that occurs when scientists merge different fields and create new ways of approaching challenges.