Seems counterintuitive, but a student team from the Charles W. Davidson College of Engineering has designed a device that harnesses solar power to make ice cubes. A scene from the film "The Mosquito Coast" starring Harrison Ford inspired the project, which was recently featured in the Dvice blog.
An electricity-free alternative to refrigeration and air-conditioning, the unique clean tech icemaker uses the sun's heat during the day to drive a chemical reaction that separates a liquid refrigerant from a solid absorbent. Faculty advisor and Associate Professor Jinny Rhee explains that the solid absorbent stays in the solar collector, while the liquid refrigerant is driven away and stored in a separate component called the evaporator. At night, the chemical reaction runs in reverse, and the solid absorbent sucks all of the liquid refrigerant back into the collector: all of this happens without pumps, valves or any mechanical components. In the process, the liquid refrigerant evaporates and gets very cold. Any water touching the outside of the evaporator is frozen to ice. The project, dubbed Solar Ice, was a finalist in the 2008 California Clean Tech Open.
Once again, San José State University has excelled in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. The 2009 edition of "America's Best Colleges," shows San José State ranked 13th among the West's top public universities offering bachelor's and master's degrees. SJSU ceded five places from eighth last year, but remains very well regarded in a competitive field comprised of the world's top public higher education institutions.
The Charles W. Davidson College of Engineering received top marks as well. The college was ranked 12th nationwide among engineering schools whose highest degree is a bachelor's and master's, up from 16th last year. San José State was one of just three California State University campuses to make the top 20 in engineering. Also, SJSU's undergraduate computer and industrial/manufacturing programs were ranked among the top five in the nation, the same as last year.
For a second time in a row, San José State University's Career Center received the NACE/Chevron Award for their Internship Journey video series. The National Association of Colleges and Employers and Chevron Corporation select one school per year to acknowledge outstanding achievement for innovative programs in the college career services field. Through the five-module online video series, the career center team shows students the importance of internships and offers them resources to find and complete one or more intern assignments.
The San José State University Police Department placed first in the universities category of the 2008 California Law Enforcement Challenge sponsored by the California Highway Patrol. A competition between law enforcement agencies of similar size and type, the program recognizes and rewards the best overall traffic safety programs in California.
SJSU graduate students Linda Helland and Dipti Vaghela have been selected as Switzer Environmental Fellows by the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation. They are among 17 women and eight men chosen from universities in California and New England to receive the $15,000 fellowship, which is one of the nation's most prestigious awards for earlycareer environmental leaders.
Helland intends to use her master's degree in public health at SJSU to make clear the links between environmental quality and human health. Through her work at the Mendocino County Public Health Branch, she helps develop a local food system. Current projects include increasing access to fresh produce for low-income people by accepting Food Stamps at farmers' markets and subsidizing community-supported agriculture shares.
As part of her graduate work in environmental studies, Vaghela is doing applied research on micro hydro-electrification in Orissa, India. She is focusing on decentralized renewable energy programs for rural communities in India, using a participatory approach that helps beneficiaries to become aware of and take ownership of their region's development.
SJSU President Jon Whitmore, college deans and the provost were among the 85 attendees who honored some of the university's most accomplished students at the San José State University Alumni Association Scholarship event during Homecoming Week '08. This scholarship program has benefited our brightest students since 1975. This year, the 16 San José State graduate and undergraduate student recipients included a genetics researcher, Hebrew teacher, city planner and Habitat for Humanity volunteer.
Fourteen of these scholars, selected by their college deans on the basis of academic achievement and volunteer activities, each received $1,250. This is the largest disbursement of scholarships of any alumni association in the California State University system.
Maria Angulo, Counseling
Magdalena Franco, Microbiology
Talia Grobard, Multiple Subjects Credential
Taryn Hanano, Urban and Regional Planning
Susan Kavanagh, Occupational Therapy
John Kim, Biology/Chemistry
John Omweg Jr., Philosophy
Sally Perham Chaves, Nutrition
Devi Ramachandran, Accounting
Hector de Santiago, Business Administration
James Stone, Digital Media Art/French
Tingting Xu, History
Maksim Yegorov, Civil Engineering
Hanaa Zeid, Mechanical Engineering
Additionally, Denise Thomas, Nursing, received the $1,250 Hoover-Langdon Scholarship and Eve Wagner, Speech and Language Pathology, was awarded the $900 Katherine Peterson Alumni Association Scholarship.
San José Mercury News photographer Dai Sugano, '02 Journalism, won an Emmy Award for his video of mobile home residents in Sunnyvale, beating competitors from PBS and the Web sites of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. 'Uprooted,' which looks at the displacement of the mobile home residents in Sunnyvale, won for new approaches to news and documentary programming in the documentary category. Sugano was the photojournalist and multimedia producer on the project. View the award-winning video.
UniversityWater for Elephants (Algonquin, 2006), Sara Gruen's best-selling tale of a Depression-Era circus, is this year's selection for the university's Campus Reading Program. First-year students, faculty, staff and interested others are all reading the book, gathering to discuss it and pondering the themes woven into the story that contrast young and old, haves and have-nots, and people and animals.
Remembering Bert Burns
San José State remembered Hobert W. Burns, former professor, academic vice president and acting president, at a memorial service on October 26 in King Library. Bert, as everyone called him, died October 14 at his home in Los Gatos after a short battle with cancer. He was 83.
Burns came to San José State in 1966 at President Robert Clark's invitation to serve as the university's first academic vice president. He immediately began revising and strengthening the general education program and the model he created was subsequently adopted by the entire CSU system. He was a strong voice for the administration in the Academic Senate.
Upon President Clark's resignation in 1969, Burns served as acting president of SJSU for a year -- his term coinciding with the protests over the Vietnam War. He was credited with forging a student-faculty-community coalition that helped spare the campus the tumultuous unrest experienced by other schools. He then continued in administrative and teaching posts until retirement in 1983.
Burns received the faculty honor society's first Examplar Scholar Award for outstanding teaching in 1979. He was an early supporter of women's sports and Title IX, devoted special effort and attention to the Spartan Foundation, and defended the Spartan Daily's right to report on campus gay liberation efforts as it would any other student group. In recent years, Burns and his wife Patricia became strong supporters of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, jointly funding an annuity that will provide seed money for a Special Collections Endowment.
Irene Dalis, '46 Music, founder and general director of Opera San José, received a lifetime achievement award in recognition of her leadership in arts philanthropy at the Silicon Valley Arts & Business Awards luncheon on October 17. She is the first artist to receive the award. Dalis made her operatic debut in Oldenburg, West Germany, in 1953, and for 20 consecutive seasons was a principal artist with the New York Metropolitan Opera. The recipient of SJSU's 1974 Tower Award, Dalis retired from the Met in 1977, returned to her hometown and accepted a teaching position in SJSU's Department of Music. This past fall Opera San José celebrated the opening of its 25th season
Accompanied by two students, Karen Ristau, '62 English/Education, president of the National Catholic Educational Association, met privately with Pope Benedict XVI on April 16, in Washington, D.C., to deliver a "gift" of more than 1.7 million hours of community service pledged by Catholic youth across the nation in honor of the pope's 81st birthday. Ristau, who has served as president of NCEA since 2005, began her career as a teacher in California and was principal of Our Lady of Fatima School in Modesto. As vice president and dean of faculty at St. Mary's College in Notre Dame, she helped establish the Center for Women's Intercultural Leadership with a $12 million grant from the Lilly Foundation.
Julie Wong, '84 Recreation, former associate vice president and dean of students at the University of Texas at El Paso, was appointed vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She received her master's degree from Michigan State University and her doctorate from USC.
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