SPSU again boasts Engineering and Engineering Technology students of the year
The Georgia Engineering Alliance (GEA) has, for the second consecutive year, selected SPSU students to receive two prestigious awards. No other institution in recent history has been honored with both of these student awards, which will be presented at the 2012 Georgia Engineers Week Awards Gala on Feb. 25.

Garrett Bailey, a senior majoring in mechatronics engineering, is the state’s Engineering Student of the Year, while Christopher Cutter, a senior in mechanical engineering technology (MET), is the Engineering Technology Student of the Year.

Bailey recently became the first recipient of SPSU’s Engineering Innovation Scholarship, and he has maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout his time at SPSU. A non-traditional student, he holds a degree in philosophy from Georgia State University and, among other pursuits, worked as a ferryman on Martha’s Vineyard for several years before coming to SPSU.

Cutter’s 3.46 GPA places him in the top 15 percent of seniors in the MET program, and he has made the Dean’s List and received a Georgia Engineering Foundation Scholarship for the past two years. He is secretary of the campus chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers and is active on the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Team.

“Chris [Cutter] is a bright and determined student, someone who always takes the initiative and is not a follower,” wrote one of his professors in nominating him for the GEA award. “He has a very special personality.”

Georgia Engineers Week will be celebrated Feb. 20-25. A list of special events and activities being planned at SPSU will be included in next week’s issue of the Hornet’s Nest.

CSE to open new Data Center Feb. 17
The School of Computing and Software Engineering (CSE) will formally open a state-of-the-art data center in Building J on Fri., Feb 17, that will greatly enhance information technology instruction, provide a more controlled environment for the school’s sophisticated servers and significantly reduce the school’s power consumption as well.

CSE Dean Han Reichgelt believes SPSU is unique in offering students this sophisticated learning tool. In addition to several other pieces of equipment that support the school’s teaching and research activities, the data center was built to house the high-density server that runs the $850,000 hospital information system software donated to the school in April 2011 by CPSI.

“Many of our students, but particularly those in the IT programs, will benefit from the opportunity to do hands-on work in a state-of-the-art data center,” said Dr. Reichgelt. Students in the health information technology programs have already been getting hands-on experience on a hospital information system, thanks to the CPSI donation, he said, but the data center provides a much more protected environment for that and other CSE servers, both in terms of security and climate control.

The new data center is also an energy-saving feature. Through extensive virtualization, the center has allowed CSE to consolidate many of its current servers into a single physical server. Moreover, the data center is enabling CSE to replace the computers used in many of its teaching labs with more energy-efficient “thin” clients.

Recent faculty publications
• Dr. Christina Scherrer, assistant professor in industrial engineering technology, has co-authored two papers recently accepted for publication. “A Specialized Column Generation Approach for a Vehicle Routing Problem with Demand Allocation” will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the Operational Research Society, and “The Stop and Drop Problem: Applications of Vehicle Routing to the Food Bank Vehicle Routing” will appear in Annals of Operations Research.

• Dr. Jeffrey Greene, assistant professor of professional writing, and Dr. Laura Palmer, assistant professor of information design and communication, have had an article, “It’s All in the Game: Technical Communication’s Role in Game Documentation,” published in Intercom, the magazine of the Society for Technical Communication.

SPSU’s international students have a new coordinator
Julie Sharpe recently joined the staff of the Advising,Tutoring, Testing, Disability Services, Multicultural Affairs, International Student Center (ATTIC) as coordinator of international student services.

Her job entails serving as a liaison between SPSU’s international students and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). Sharpe authorizes, supports and counsels visa-holding students about their government documents – whether they are concerned about maintaining full credits on campus, entering and leaving the United States or obtaining Social Security cards and driver’s licenses.

Sharpe, a former high school teacher, came to SPSU from Darton College in Albany, Ga., where she was also the international students coordinator. She holds a Master of Public Administration from Albany State University and an undergraduate degree in international studies from Georgia Southern University in Statesboro.

Sharpe can be reached at ext. 5293 or jsharpe4@spsu.edu.

iStrategy training session coming up
On Thurs., Feb. 16, the Division of Business and Finance again will host iStrategy training. The event will be led by the Board of Regents staff and is open to anyone with financial management responsibilities at SPSU.

iStrategy Solutions is the leading provider of analytic reporting for higher education purposes and is a user-friendly financial management tool. The tool works with PeopleSoft but allows users to access financial information without directly interacting with that application. The iStrategy tool will eventually replace the current financial information system.

The first iStrategy training session was held in November with 17 people participating. Based on that experience, the program has been tailored to better meet the needs of the SPSU staff.

iStrategy training is free. There is a limit of 30 seats for the Feb. 16 session, which will be held in Q-303. To reserve a seat or obtain further information, contact Arthur Vaughn at avaughn@spsu.edu

Have news to share?
If your department has an upcoming event or other news to share with the campus community, please send an e-mail with all the pertinent information to Diane Payne (dpayne@spsu.edu). To be considered for use in a specific issue of the SPSU Hornet’s Nest, a news item must be submitted no less than four weeks before the date of the issue.

Volume 5, Issue 5
Feb. 8, 2012