Correction to this story is run to include ME grad student, Alexis Noel.

This year, eight Woodruff School students earned graduate research fellowships from the National Science Foundation (NSF), including three undergraduates: Shantonio Birch, Samuel Cruz, and Max Stockslager; and five graduate students: Hagan Bush, Alexander Limia, Alexis Noel, Eric Tervo, and Luke Yates.

A column in The New York Times this past February, titled “How to Hold Colleges Accountable,” had several suggestions for making higher education more effective, but at the top of the list was “quality of teaching.” Noting that most professors come from Ph.D. programs where there’s much more emphasis on research than pedagogy, the co-authors lamented the lack of training, evaluation, and assessment that college professors receive when it comes to teaching.  

Well, Georgia Tech is on it — and actually has been for some time.

Varian Medical Systems, the world's leading manufacturer of medical devices and software for treating cancer as well as a premier supplier of X-ray imaging components, announced that it will expand its operations in Fulton County, Georgia. Company officials anticipate that this expansion will enable it to better serve its East Coast customers and accommodate anticipated growth that will create up to 100 new high-paying technical jobs over the next five years.

If such a designation existed, Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb would be on the fast track to becoming an Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) “super user.” Her research on nanoscale materials has taken her all across the ORNL campus, from scanning probe and electron microscopes at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences to neutron reflectometry at the Spallation Neutron Source and radiation equipment in the Materials Science and Technology Division.