April 22, 2004
Etc. – campus news and notes
WINNING VENTURE: Five UW students won the National Venture Capital Investment Competition held last weekend in Chapel Hill, N.C. The UW Business School’s Center for Technology Entrepreneurship (CTE) sponsored the team of four master’s of business administrations students: Andy Baldridge, Shaun Westfall, Uday Keshavdas and Balu Chenicheri; and Joy Ghosh, a fourth-year UW Medical School and CTE student.
The event required student teams to assume the role of a venture capital firm. Each school was given a hypothetical $100 million fund to invest and had 48 hours to evaluate five bona fide business plans and then decide where to invest their money. They then had to defend their decisions to a judging panel of venture capitalists. The UW team won the $15,000 first prize. This is the first time UW entrepreneurship students have won a national competition.
The UW defeated University of Texas, Austin; Cornell University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Notre Dame; University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and University of Virginia. The team’s adviser was lecturer Emer Dooley.
SLAM DUNK: Seattle Storm forward Adia Barnes visited the UW’s Experimental Education Unit (EEU) Friday to show the young students some basketball finesse and support the school’s annual fund-raising auction, which will be held May 22. About 50 of the school’s 200 students and about as many parents, staff and administrators attended the event, held in the school gym.
The EEU, a publicly funded school for children 6 months to 6 years old, uses several innovative educational concepts, including integrating special needs students with typically developing children in the classroom and encouraging teachers and therapists to work in tandem for the children’s benefit.
The fund-raising auction will be titled “Making Dreams Come True.” Auction items will include a one-day honorary Seattle Storm “ballkid” for a selected child. For more information about the auction or the school, call 206-543-4011 or visit online at http://www.eeuauction.org.
A&S HONORS: The College of Arts and Sciences will honor a poet, a clown, a sociologist and a chemist-turned-administrator as winners of its annual Distinguished Alumni Awards. Michael Christensen, an alum of the Drama School’s Professional Actor Training Program, is the founder of the Big Apple Circus, a nonprofit performing arts group that brings the adventures of the big top to the bedsides of ill children. Tess Gallagher, who earned her master’s in English at the UW, is a well-known poet, essayist, novelist and playwright. Saad Eddin Ibrahim earned his doctorate in sociology here and is currently at the University of Cairo, where he is a prominent advocate for human rights in the Middle East. And Isiah Warner, who was denied admission to Louisiana State University because of his race, now serves as that institution’s vice chancellor for strategic directions. He earned his doctorate in chemistry at the UW, and because of his leadership, LSU is now the number one producer of African-Americans with doctorates in chemistry. The awards will be presented at a dinner, the Celebration of Distinction, at 6 p.m. Thursday, May 20, in the HUB. Information and registration are available by contacting the celebration office at 206-616-4469.
EDITOR’S ELITE: Matthew Alford, an oceanographer at the Applied Physics Lab, has won a 2004 Editor’s Award from the American Meteorological Society for his “unusually prompt, perceptive, well-balanced and constructive reviews” for the AMS Journal of Physical Oceanography.
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