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Points of Pride — Academics

Mar

2013

Top-ranked programs helping Baylor prepare tomorrow’s healthcare industry leaders

Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in Academics, Alumni, Honors, Student life

Hilary Griffin From individual honors to national rankings, Baylor continues to make its name known among universities preparing tomorrow’s healthcare industry leaders.

Just this month, Baylor MBA candidate Hilary Griffin placed second in the 2013 Richard J. Stull Student Essay Competition in Healthcare Management, sponsored by the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). Her essay outlines a possible solution to obstacles that hinder more than 11 million children with chronic conditions from getting the medical care they need.

Griffin (pictured) is a graduate student in the Robbins MBA Healthcare Program in Baylor’s Hankamer School of Business, which ranked 25th nationally in U.S. News & World Report’s most recent graduate school ranking of healthcare management programs. Another Baylor graduate offering, the Baylor-U.S. Army master’s program in health administration, was ranked No. 11 in the nation by U.S.News.

Of course, Baylor isn’t only preparing tomorrow’s healthcare industry leaders — they’ve also prepared many of today’s, including the CEOs of both Baylor Health Care System and Scott & White Healthcare, the president of a leading network of rehabilitation and long-term care providers, and a top Army medical reserve commander.

Sic ’em, Bears in healthcare!

Mar

2013

Alum’s photos document 50 years of changes in the Middle East

Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in Academics, Alumni

A lot has changed in the Middle East over the past 50 years. That might be intuitive, but it’s never more evident than through the lens of Dr. Colbert Held’s camera.

Take the images above, for example. At left is a mostly empty stretch of desert along the Persian Gulf in 1973; at right, that same stretch of coast in 2003 – now part of Dubai, a city of two million people known for its ambitious skyscrapers and luxurious lifestyles. Both photos were taken by Held, BA ’38 — the first during his 20 years in the Middle East as a Foreign Service officer (part of the U.S. Department of State), the second during a return trip many years later.

Held photos exhibit, Poage Library In 1976, Held retired from the State Department to Waco, where he was invited by Baylor President Abner McCall, JD ’38, BA ’42, to join the faculty as diplomat-in-residence and professor in political geography. But even after returning to the States, Held and his wife, Mildred, continued to regularly visit the Middle East, always taking photos to document the changes they began to see.

Held’s knowledge of the region led to the publication of a book, Middle East Patterns: Places, Peoples, and Politics, in 1989; an updated sixth edition will soon be released, as the volume is still used as a textbook at Baylor and elsewhere.

This spring, Held (now 95) worked with Baylor doctoral candidate Corinne Peters to select approximately 200 photographs (out of his collection of more than 19,000) for an exhibit on display through May in Baylor’s W.R. Poage Legislative Library (pictured at right), sponsored in part by Aramco Services Co. Additional photos are also on display in Moody Memorial Library, The Texas Collection and Armstrong Browning Library.

Sic ’em, Dr. Held!

Mar

2013

Nobel Prize-winning poet goes out of his way to visit Baylor

Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in Academics

Seamus Heaney at Baylor New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Waco. Those were the four stops for arguably the world’s most famous living poet on his brief tour of the U.S.

Monday night, nearly 1,000 people filled Baylor’s Jones Concert Hall for a reading by Ireland’s Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature, on his first visit to Texas since 2006. Heaney’s presentation was a special event of the 19th annual Beall Poetry Festival, which will take place at Baylor April 4-6, 2013.

Heaney has been the recipient of dozens of honors for his work, including 15 collections of poems, literary criticism, essays, translations and a play. Among his past professional titles are Professor of Poetry at Oxford University and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Writer-in-Residence at Harvard. His most recent collection of poems is Human Chain (2010). Fifty broadsides of a new Heaney poem written for the occasion, “On the Gift of a Fountain Pen,” were sold at the event.

The coordinator of Heaney’s visit, Dr. Richard Rankin Russell, authored an award-winning critical study of Heaney’s work in 2010: Poetry and Peace: Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Northern Ireland. That book played a role in persuading Heaney, who was scheduled to visit Baylor a few years ago but had to cancel due to health issues, to stop at Baylor on his now infrequent trips to the U.S. Russell, the Beall Poetry Festival’s director and 2012 Baylor Centennial Professor, has another Heaney-related book, Seamus Heaney’s Regions, under contract and set to be released in late 2014.

Sic ’em, Seamus Heaney and all lovers of literature!

Feb

2013

DeBakey legacy lives on in Baylor medical humanities scholarship

Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in Academics, Student life

DeBakey Medical Foundation Gift to Medical Humanities

Dr. Michael DeBakey joined the Baylor University family in 1948, when he joined the Baylor College of Medicine faculty (more than 20 years before the college became an independent institution). His accomplishments are too numerous to detail here — that would be its own blog post — but Dr. DeBakey’s New York Times obituary from 2008 gives a great rundown.

Even after his passing, the long connection between the names “DeBakey” and “Baylor” continues today — certainly in Houston at the College of Medicine, but also in Waco, thanks to the Michael E. DeBakey, Selma DeBakey and Lois DeBakey Endowed Scholarship in Medical Humanities.

Established in 2009 by a $500,000 gift from the DeBakey Medical Foundation and doubled in size by an equal gift from the foundation just this month, the DeBakey Endowed Scholarship provides assistance to junior and senior medical humanities majors at Baylor.

The medical humanities program takes a unique approach to educating the doctors of tomorrow by incorporating the insights of disciplines ranging from literature to economics to religion into the practice of modern scientific medicine. The idea behind the program (which is now being emulated at other universities) is to produce Baylor graduates with not only the scientific background necessary for a career in medicine, but also a sense of human understanding that will allow physicians to care for their patients as people.

Sic ’em, DeBakey family and Baylor medical humanities students!

You might also like:
* Multiple top-25 programs making Baylor a leader in healthcare administration (Oct. 2011)
* Baylor University and Baylor College of Medicine ties evident in newest BCM Board appointees (Feb. 2011)

Feb

2013

Texas Tribune brings ‘Hot Seat’ public conversation series to Baylor

Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in Academics, Videos

Texas Tribune 'Hot Seat' at Baylor University

Baylor last week served as host to the latest in the Texas Tribune’s “Hot Seat” conversation series, as two state representatives and one state senator discussed public school funding, among other issues, in front of a crowd of about 200 people in the Ferrell Center’s Stone Room. [Click here to watch the entire event.]

State Senator Brian Birdwell and State Representatives Charles “Doc” Anderson and Kyle Kacal answered questions from moderator Evan Smith, editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune and former editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly, as well as members of the audience.

[MEDIA COVERAGE: Waco Tribune-Herald || Baylor Lariat || KXXV-TV || Photo gallery]

The Texas Tribune describes itself as “a nonpartisan, nonprofit media organization that promotes civic engagement and discourse on public policy, politics, government, and other matters of statewide concern.” Its “Hot Seat” series is held at universities across the state, aimed at encouraging interaction between Texas government officials and the people they represent.

Sic ’em, Texas Tribune!

Feb

2013

Cities of Waco, Addison step forward to give young Baylor entrepreneurs a boost

Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in Academics, Alumni, Student life

Addison-Baylor partnership In the last month, Baylor entrepreneurship students and alumni have received two big boosts, as the cities of Waco and Addison have each partnered with Baylor to provide the budding entrepreneurs a leg up in starting their own businesses.

In March, the Greater Waco Chamber and Baylor will launch “Thinc Space,” a business incubator for creative start-ups that will house Baylor’s Accelerated Ventures Program. Students enrolled in the program will receive free office space downtown for up to two years as they build their businesses; they will also have access to mentoring, support and professional expertise from a network of local business owners.

Each year, eight three-person teams within the Accelerated Ventures Program take a business from idea to reality over the course of the two-semester program. Within 45 days of the beginning of class, they are expected to have launched their company; it should be generating revenue by the end of the first semester, and profitable by the end of the second semester. Each team receives $5,000 in seed money from the Baylor Angel Network. (The program is part of Baylor’s entrepreneurship program, which was ranked No. 2 in the country last fall by The Princeton Review.)

After graduation, Accelerated Ventures Program alums can choose to stay and further cultivate their businesses here in Waco, or take advantage of the second boost: free office space for an additional year in Addison, Texas (north of Dallas), provided by the Town of Addison. There, the new business owners can continue to benefit from the expertise and support of a community of seasoned economic developers, this time in North Texas.

Graduates of the program have already launched companies such as Avundas Skin Solutions, a vitamin C skin care line; Whol-E Water, specially formulated bottled water; Shavespeare, a high-end shaving kit; and Vendevor, which offers a new approach to online sales.

Sic ’em, Baylor entrepreneurs!

You might also like:
* ‘I’m thirsty!’: Alums’ product allows plants to text you when they need water (Jan. 2013)
* Young alum’s San Antonio boutique serving through sales (July 2012)
* Young grad’s company uses water bottle sales to provide water for those in need (Nov. 2009)

Feb

2013

Time, USA Today & NPR turn to Baylor professor for more on new health science study

Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in Academics, Research

A study by Swedish researchers released this month in the journal Science shows the effects human drugs can have on animals when those drugs find their ways into our wastewaters — a subject Dr. Bryan Brooks, professor of environmental science and biomedical studies, has been studying at Baylor for years.

The full effects on fish of the drug studied by the Swedish group are unknown (though this initial report shows substantial behavioral changes). But scientists do know that the drug works on people through a particular cellular receptor that many other species (including some fish) share. In coverage of the subject reported in national media outlets such as TIME, USA Today and NPR, Brooks called for more attention to be given to the subject, by pharmaceutical companies and the government alike.

From USA Today, for example:

“Bryan Brooks, director of the Environmental Health Science Program at Baylor University, said drugs could also be designed to break down more quickly in the environment, and the government could continue to run take-back programs where people drop off their unused and expired drugs at government locations.

“Brooks said he’s particularly concerned about drug effects on aquatic environments, like the Trinity River south of Dallas and the South Platte River near Denver, where the majority of the flow comes from treated wastewater. In the developing world, he said, the problem may be even worse, because of lax wastewater treatment and industrial regulations.”

Brooks, a professor in Baylor’s College of Arts and Sciences since 2002, is one of many Baylor professors who brings his students into research experiences and his research into the classroom. He mentors undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students in their thesis and other studies while each semester teaching classes from the 3000 level on up through graduate pursuits.

Sic ’em, Dr. Brooks!

You might also like:
* Baylor junior wins one of 40 EPA fellowships nationwide (Oct. 2012)
* National Geographic devotes two-page illustration to Baylor research (June 2010)
* Results of Baylor study garner media attention nationwide (March 2009)

Feb

2013

Baylor oral history archives tapped for PBS feature on ‘Lynching and Forgiveness’

Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in Academics, Research, Videos

A couple of years ago, a visiting scholar at Baylor, Dr. Angela Sims, interviewed more than 70 African Americans who had not only lived through an era where lynchings were common, but who had witnessed or narrowly escaped such treatment themselves.

Her interviews are now housed in Baylor’s Institute for Oral History; transcripts of some of those interviews can be read online here. PBS’ “Religion and Ethics Newsweekly” recently followed up with Dr. Sims and some of those who suffered through what the correspondent calls “one of America’s most shameful chapters” for this report:

They say that those who forget history are doomed to repeat. Baylor’s Institute for Oral History aims to make sure such history is never forgotten, so that it may never, ever be repeated.

Sic ’em, Dr. Sims and oral historians!

You might also like:
* Texas Historical Commission honors Baylor’s part in preserving the state’s history (April 2011)
* Baylor Institute for Oral History works to capture stories before they disappear (Oct. 2010)

Feb

2013

Hankamer School of Business looks toward new home on east side of campus

Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in Academics, Pro Futuris, Student life

Exterior rendering of new home for Baylor's Hankamer School of Business

After Baylor Stadium, what’s next for the Baylor campus? How about a new home for the Hankamer School of Business?

At their February meeting, Regents approved fundraising for a new facility on the east side of campus (near the Baylor Sciences Building and the upcoming East Village Residential Community) that would offer nearly 40 percent more space for business school students and faculty.

The new 275,000-square-foot business school facility would be roughly half the size of the BSB but twice the size of the McLane Student Life Center and Umphrey Law Center, three of the university’s largest non-athletic construction projects of the last decade. It would also make the current Hankamer-Cashion space occupied by the business school available for other academic needs on campus, benefitting students across disciplines.

Baylor’s business school was established 90 years ago at the behest of President Samuel Palmer Brooks, and over the years, it has been housed in Carroll Library, Old Main and the SUB, among other locations, before moving into its current space in 1960.

Today, the Hankamer School of Business is home to approximately 3,000 Baylor students, accounting for some 20% of the student body. Undergraduates choose from 24 major areas of study, including the No. 2 entrepreneurship program in the country and a top-25 accounting program; graduate programs offer 13 different master’s areas of study and one PhD program.

Sic ’em, Baylor business!

Feb

2013

Journalism professor named to national industry ethics board

Posted by The Baylor Proud Team in Academics, Honors, Research

Marlene Neill As a leading Christian institution of higher education, it makes sense that Baylor would be recognized as a leader when it comes to ethics in the field. That has proven to be the case, whether it’s Baylor alumni serving as high-ranked ethics officials or Baylor programs being lauded by national publications for their focus on teaching ethics to students.

The latest example comes from Baylor’s College of Arts and Sciences, where journalism, PR and new media lecturer Dr. Marlene Neill was named this month to the national Board of Ethics and Professional Standards for the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). Neill is one of just two university professors on the 17-person committee, which is comprised largely of high-ranking representatives from some of the world’s leading PR firms.

PRSA is the world’s largest organization of public relations professionals, with more than 21,000 members; Neill’s committee is responsible for helping guide those members in navigating the ethical issues that arise in the industry.

A professor at Baylor since 2006, Neill’s research has largely focused on ethics in PR and advertising. Her most recent study, published in Journal of Mass Media Ethics, examined whether PR professionals stand up to senior management when pressured or if they fold as “yes men.” The study’s results have been featured in industry publications such as prdaily.com.

Sic ’em, Dr. Neill!

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