April 10, 2008
Etc: Campus news and notes
FANTASTIC FLEET: The Web site 100 Best Fleets has ranked the UW’s Fleet Services (formally Motor Pool) 37th among the 100 top fleets in North America for 2007.
Anne Eskridge, transportation services assistant director, says, “Placing 37th in North America among a possible 38,000 fleet departments is a great achievement, especially since there were only three university fleets that made the top 100. We’ve definitely raised the bar for university fleet operations.”
The UW’s Fleet Services ranking was decided by a team of fleet professionals and based on 12 criteria that included accountability, technology implementation, creativity and collaboration, and resource stewardship (green fleet initiatives). The complete list can be found at http://www.the100best.net/index.htm
LIBERTY LEGACY: Michael Honey, professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at UW Tacoma, has been selected by the Organization of American Historians to receive the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award, given annually for the best book on any aspect of the struggle for civil rights in the United States, from the nation’s founding to the present. Honey was honored for Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign, a historical narrative of the 1968 Poor People’s campaign. The book has been described as “a multilayered narrative that helps us better understand the high stakes that surrounded King’s final efforts to transform American society.”
EMERGENCY PLANNING: A team from the UW took second place in Skanska USA Building Inc.’s University Grant Project Competition. The three-student team (architecture students Grace Kidd, Timothy Ardena and Levi Jette, who were advised by Carrie Sturts Dossick), tackled the assignment of designing the ideal emergency department and health care facility responding to an infectious disease outbreak.
The team’s solution converted abundant and inexpensive shipping containers into a mobile unit that could be readily assembled to create compartmentalized space needed by hospitals in such an emergency. These pre-fabricated units, complete with all necessary emergency equipment, would be ready to ship and set up with ease anywhere in the world by ship, rail or truck. In addition to providing a hospital with emergency services, these units also would provide needed space for overflow patients when not used for infectious disease control. The team was awarded a $3,000 grant.
Each college team participating in the grant competition chose one of three “real world” situations in the health care industry and was given 45 days to present the best solution to their chosen assignments. A diverse group of Skanska employees made up the panel of judges that evaluated the projects and ranked the grant recipients.
DOUBLE WINNER: UW Tacoma Professor Annette Henry has been honored with an award from the American Educational Research Association for her research and advocacy for social justice. Henry received the Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity in Education Research Award, which recognizes individuals for distinguished research, professional practice and activities that advance public understanding of gender and/or sexuality in the education community.
A professor in UWT’s Education Program, Henry researches black women teachers’ practice in international contexts as well as race, language, gender and culture in teaching and learning. She has written extensively about conceptual and methodological issues, often with an emphasis on research with black women and girls. The association’s publications committee also honored Henry with an Outstanding Reviewer Award, as one of the year’s top 13 reviewers for its journal, Educational Researcher.
