Graduates, and really the entire campus community, are excited about commencement this weekend when 2,970 candidates for degrees from spring and summer will have the opportunity to walk across that stage and ceremoniously complete their collegiate career at The University of Toledo. Congratulations to all the new Rocket alumni!

This time of year comes with a nice amount of media attention on our successful recent graduates.

Tune in to Jeff Smith’s Roundtable on ABC 13 at noon Sunday to hear stories from nontraditional students among the Class of 2102, including Ali Badran who returned to college after a 20-year hiatus and will receive his UT degree tomorrow.

Pick up The Blade on Sunday where we expect a story about the Class of 2012 quoting Beth Nicholson, director of Career Services, and a few UT students.

Provost McMillen speaks at event to announce new teacher LEADERS

UT celebrated education in a different way this week too with the announcement of the second cohort of teachers from Toledo Public Schools and Monroe County, Mich. in the LEADERS program, which aims to enhance science education by training teachers to provide Project Based Science and alternative energy lessons.

UT’s Tom Barden also was in the news this week with more attention for his book “Steinbeck in Vietnam: Dispatches from the War” (University of Virginia Press). The English professor and Dean of the Honors College was quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

This is the first collection of the columns and their first publication in 40 years. The dispatches “infuriated the doves and delighted the hawks,” says Thomas E. Barden, the collection’s editor and a professor of English and dean of the Honors College at the University of Toledo. Publishing them permits readers “to consider from this distance how important the essays must have been to the large number of readers who were undecided and bewildered about the war and who considered Steinbeck a reliable moral witness.”

Cosmic dust near Orion's Belt

He already appeared on NPR and had a nice feature in The Blade about the book.

Check out this amazing photograph of cosmic dust near Orion’s Belt observed by the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope led by UT’s Tom Megeath, associate professor of astronomy, and Amy Stutz of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.

The observations use the heat glow of interstellar dust grains to show astronomers where new stars are being formed.

The European Southern Observatory released the photo this week and it was shared by news agencies including MSNBC, Discovery News, New Orleans Times-Picayune, and CNN Mexico.

In health news, UTMC opened a newly renovated Outpatient Rehabilitation Services clinics to better serve patients. Among the improvements are a larger gym, more individual treatment rooms and a new pool. ABC 13 came out to the ribbon cutting celebration and we at UT News did a video as well.

Interested in leading a healthier lifestyle? Tune in to Rebecca Regnier’s Full Plate program Saturdays at 1 p.m. This week her show will feature a cooking demonstration by UTMC Executive Chef Scott Sundermeyer, who is making the rounds promoting the new UTMC Four Seasons Bistro and healthy cooking and has already been featured on WTOL and in The Blade.

Meghan Cunningham is UT’s media relations specialist. A Michigan native, she is a proud Michigan State University graduate (Go Green!) who is learning to root for a Rockets team with colors a little too similar to that other Michigan school. Meghan traded in her newspaper reporter notebook for a public relations one and will use this space to comment on and critique the work of her former colleagues and fellow reporters (in the most polite way possible) and spread the news of what is going on at UT.
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This entry was posted on Friday, May 4th, 2012 at 1:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized.
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