News Service

Food safety specialist provides E. coli advice

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued an alert recently about a nationwide outbreak of E. coli traced to packaged spinach. Sam Beattie, a food safety extension specialist at Iowa State, offers consumers information and advice on what they can stay safe.

News release.

Purdue dean is finalist in provost search

Jeffrey S. Vitter, dean of the College of Science at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind., will interview on campus Sept. 19-20 for the executive vice president and provost position.

More.

Somerville named ISU dean of students

Dione Somerville, director of enrollment services and registrar at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio, will be Iowa State University's dean of students. She begins her new post in January.

News release.

ISU, Pappajohn Center rank 24th nationally

Iowa State University and its Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship rank 24th nationally for students who want to be entrepreneurs, according to a survey of more than 700 colleges and universities by The Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine.

News release.

Ames Lab receives computing grant

The U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory is one of 30 recipients nationwide to receive a share of $60 million in Department of Energy award money for computational science projects over the next three to five years.

News release.

Provost forums set

Open forums for two finalists for the executive vice president and provost position are scheduled for Sept. 19 and Sept. 21. Each candidate will participate in a general forum and a forum to discuss diversity-related topics. All forums are in the Memorial Union Gallery. Biographical information for each finalist will be available a few days before each forum. Here's the forums schedule:

• Sept. 19. General: 1:45-2:50 p.m. Diversity: 3:50-4:40 p.m.
• Sept. 21. General: 1:45-2:50 p.m. Diversity, 3-3:50 p.m.

Political scientist sees little change in Bush administration foreign policy

James McCormick has been studying the Bush administration's foreign policy decisions for a related presentation during the U.S. Foreign Policy Conference at the University of Leicester in England next week. He found that in spite of mounting opposition, the administration continues to practice its unilateral and ideological foreign policy approach.

News release.

Keck Foundation donates $1.6 million for lab

A $1.6 million from the W. M. Keck Foundation will launch an experimental laboratory for engineering and analysis and engineering of new materials. The facility will be equipped with a highly advanced three-dimensional atom probe microscope, a unique tool that can only be found at two other U.S. universities.

News release.

Convocation video is online

Online video offers a look at the Sept. 11 convocation, during which President Gregory Geoffroy discussed the coming academic year and some 50 faculty and staff received awards.

Full convocation | President's address | Awards ceremony.

Wells Fargo's top regional banking officer to give Sept. 21 lecture

Scott Johnson -- Wells Fargo's new head of regional banking operations in Iowa and Western Illinois and an Iowa State alumnus -- is the fall 2006 speaker for the Robert Stafford Lecture Series on Banking in the university's College of Business.

News release.

Sophomore turns passion into profession

Kelly Norris is a horticulture major at ISU and operates a seven-acre flower business that boasts an inventory of more than 250,000 plants with more than 550 different cultivars for sale.

News release.

ISU offers economic development help to rural areas

Iowa State University's fourth annual Economic Development Open House will feature talk of new opportunities in agriculture, rural entrepreneurship, community vitality and opportunities for help from Iowa State and federal programs. The open house is Friday, Sept. 15, in Iowa State's Memorial Union.

News release.

Newell: Product placements saturating small screen

With the research firm PQ Media estimating that the worldwide value of product placements will grow this year by 25 percent to $7.5 billion, Jay Newell -- an assistant professor in Iowa State's Greenlee School of Journalism who has studied the history of product placement in film -- believes that television advertising is rapidly reaching its saturation point.

News release.

Part of $12 million gift will support faculty

A recent $12 million gift to Iowa State comes from late alumna Frances Craig and is one of the largest on record. Craig was a 1949 home economics graduate who died in November 2005.

News release.

Iowa State computing power jumps another 1.8 trillion calculations per second

"Lightning," a new high-performance computer at Iowa State University, is already helping faculty advance their research projects. The new machine can make 1.8 trillion calculations per second and store nearly 28 trillion bytes of data.

News release.