Rotary Club honors Dr. Zvi Szafran
Dr. Zvi Szafran, vice president for Academic Affairs at SPSU, recently received the Paul Harris Fellow award, which the Rotary Foundation grants to members who have made significant contributions to world peace and understanding.

Honorees are recognized for contributing $1,000 to the Rotary Foundation or having another Rotary member donate in their honor. These donations go to programs such as the Annual Programs Fund, PolioPlus and Humanitarian Grants Program. Foundation programs use the funding to help provide food, drinking water, health care, educational opportunities and shelter to millions of people worldwide.

Dr. Szafran is a member of the Rotary Foundation’s Marietta branch, which elected this year to become a 100 percent Paul Harris Fellow club. As of June 1, all 130 members of the club qualified for the award. This represents a significant achievement for large Rotary Club branches such as this.

Dr. Phil Patterson back on WXIA-TV weathercast
Dr. Phil Patterson, chair of the Department of Biology, Chemistry and Physics, was featured alongside WXIA-TV meteorologist Chesley McNeil on the station’s morning newscast on July 21, doing the weather, showcasing his skills and promoting SPSU. To watch the clips of Dr. Patterson’s performance, click here: WXIA-TV.

SPSU partners with Atlanta Crime Stoppers
SPSU has found a new way to stop crime in its tracks by joining Atlanta Crime Stoppers. With this partnership the SPSU Police Department expects to be able to better serve the campus community and improve the level of safety on campus. Crime Stoppers provides students, faculty and staff members a way to communicate with law enforcement agencies through a system of anonymous tips.

In May, SPSU Police Chief John Bauer and a fellow officer attended a training class on how to better communicate with the community and social media. It was there that they learned about Crime Stoppers and decided to put a plan into action. In mid-June, SPSU officially became the second university to partner with Crime Stoppers Atlanta.

“You don’t want to wait until there’s an emergency to figure out how to resolve it.” says Chief Bauer. “We’re trying to be ahead of the game.”

Atlanta Crime Stoppers is the first program in Atlanta to have the community actively participate in crime reduction and public safety. Currently, 267 criminals have been captured due to the program’s anonymous tips. The program is easy to use, hassle free and particularly useful to those who wish to avoid direct involvement with a situation. Simply contact Crime Stoppers directly with a tip, and the information will be quickly passed along to the SPSU Police Department for investigation.

Students, faculty and staff members are encouraged to provide tips to Crime Stoppers Atlanta by calling 404-577-TIPS (8477), texting CSA or CRIMES (274637) or sending an e-mail message using an anonymous online form available at www.crimestoppersatlanta.org.

SPSU student knows his vibrations
Jeff Patterson, who will graduate in December from the Department of Mechanical Engineering Technology, was recently featured in the article, “Solving a Vibration Problem” in Power Source, a publication of his employer, Oglethorpe Power Corporation (OPC).

In the article, Patterson, a combustion turbine technician at OPC’s Sewell Creek Energy Facility, shares information on the inner workings of the facility and how he and other OPC employees deal with concerns about equipment vibrations, the smallest of which are capable of causing machinery to fail.

Patterson said a YouTube video on vibration analysis at OPC that he and three classmates made earlier in the year for Dr. Simin Nasseri’s Vibrations and Advanced Dynamics course caught the attention of OPC officials, who decided to interview him for the article.

Recent and upcoming activities by faculty and staff
• Development officers Andrew Schmidt and Cheryl Hammock are on the steering committee and serving as co-chairs of the publications committee for the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ (AFP) 2011 National Philanthropy Day event, to be held on Nov. 8 at the Georgia Aquarium. Each year AFP honors individuals and groups who, through their hard work and dedication, have enhanced philanthropy, their communities and the world. At last year’s luncheon, SPSU honored Dale Heatherington ’69 for his generous gift to the SPSU Foundation naming the Mechatronics Lab in the Engineering Technology Center. Stay tuned for an announcement of the 2011 SPSU honoree.

• Tara Adams, interim director of housing and residence life, was one of 30 people out of more than 150 applicants invited to attend the 2011 James C. Grimm National Housing Training Institute (NHTI) June 14-18 at the University of Georgia. NHTI is an annual professional-development opportunity for members of the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. Participants met and networked with colleagues, established mentor relationships with experts in the field, developed professional-development plans, and gained the skills and competencies vital to careers in student housing.

• Dr. Chih-Cheng Hung, professor of computer science; Sameer Kulkarni, a graduate student in computer science program; and Dr. Bor-Chen Kuo of National Taichung University in Taiwan had an article, “A New Weighted Fuzzy C-Means Clustering Algorithm for Remotely Sensed Image Classification,” published in the June issue of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing.

• Dr. Hung also collaborated with two faculty members and two students from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China on an article, “Semi-Supervised Multi-Class AdaBoost by Exploiting Unlabeled Data,” that was published in June in the journal Expert Systems and Applications.

SPSU students pass certification exams
In late June, Anita Bing, a graduate student in accounting, became the second SPSU student to pass all four parts of the rigorous Certified Public Accountants exam, the “gold standard” in accounting, according to Dr. Don Arail, Accounting program coordinator.

Bing is currently employed as an internal auditor at the international Certified Public Accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.

Meanwhile, earlier this spring, 2010 alum Clark Beecken became the first SPSU undergraduate student to pass the Certified Fraud Examination (CFE) exam. He is the son of Prof. William Beecken, who teaches a popular undergraduate SPSU accounting course in fraud examination.

Clark Beecken, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration with an accounting concentration, works as an auditor with the Legal Services Corporation in the Office of the Inspector General in Washington, D.C.

Dr. Rossbacher on WSB-TV Sunday night
As we told you last week, SPSU President Dr. Lisa A. Rossbacher took part in a panel discussion with several metro Atlanta leaders on the future of the region that will be shown on WSB-TV and excerpted in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Sun., July 31. WSB’s program, “Atlanta Forward,” will air at 7 p.m. The panel’s discussion focused on economic development, transportation, education and water. Be sure to tune in and/or read the Sunday paper.

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 4, Issue 28
July 27, 2011