Dreams Realized weekend celebrates array of successes

On Friday and Saturday (April 24 and 25), the campus will celebrate a series of achievements, anniversaries and new beginnings.

A highlight will be the groundbreaking for the $40 million, 93,000 square-foot Wolfe Center for the Arts, at 1:30 p.m. Saturday in parking lots N and 14. Hundreds of student performers, faculty, staff, alumni and donors—including Fritz and Mary Wolfe—will gather to celebrate the beginning of the much-anticipated project.

President Carol Cartwright will give remarks, the Wind Symphony will play and representatives from the Snøhetta architectural firm will be on hand. A cabaret performance at 2:45 p.m. in the event tent will conclude the festivities.

That evening, a campaign gala, “Dreams Realized,” will be held in the Lenhart Grand Ballroom of the Bowen-Thompson Student Union to celebrate the success of the $146 million Building Dreams Centennial fundraising campaign.

Other Saturday activities, from 11 a.m. to noon, are:
• “Entrepreneurship and Innovation at BGSU,” with Dr. Gene Poor and special animatronic guest “Thomas Edison,” 228 Union
• Tours of the Sebo Athletic Center by coaches, student-athletes and administrators
• School of Art Showcase, featuring thesis works by BGSU MFA candidates, along with ceramics and glass demonstrations in the studios.

The spring Falcon football game gets under way at 2:30 p.m. Saturday at Doyt Perry Stadium.

The weekend kicks off Friday with the Sebo Series in Entrepreneurship: “Creating Your Marketing in a Changing World,” The daylong event in the Lenhart Grand Ballroom features speakers and discussion sessions and is sponsored by BGSU Trustee J. Robert Sebo, the Dallas-Hamilton Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership and the College of Business Administration. For more information, call 2-8181 or visit http://sebo.bgsu.edu/.

Also Friday, the Browne Popular Culture Library and Center for Archival Collections will be celebrating their 40th anniversary.

Additional details are available at http://bgsudreams.com/gala.

Mary Power

Buchanan lecturer to speak on role of nature reserves

River ecologist Dr. Mary Power will speak on "Mapping the Future: The Importance of Research Reserves," at 7 p.m. Thursday (April 23) in the Bowen-Thompson Student Union Theater. Her talk is this year’s Jean Pasakarnis-Buchanan Lecture, hosted by the Department of Biological Sciences, and is free and open to the public.

Power is a professor in the integrative biology department at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founding director of the California Biodiversity Center, which fosters collaborations between Berkeley's natural history museums and natural history field stations. Since 1987, she has been faculty manager of the extensive Angelo Coast Range Reserve, the first gift to the Nature Conservancy west of the Mississippi.

With students and collaborators, she studies controls on food-web interactions and ecosystem fluxes in downriver drainage networks.

A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the California Academy of Sciences, she is president-elect of the Ecological Society of America and past president (2007) of the American Society of Naturalists. She has served on advisory boards for various groups including the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center. She is also on the board of trustees for the California Nature Conservancy, the NOAA-Fisheries Salmon Recovery Science Advisory Panel and the Executive Committee of the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics (a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center).

Power will also give a departmental lecture, "Food Web ‘Regime Change’ in Downriver Drainage Networks," at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday (April 22) in 112 Life Sciences Building.

The annual Pasakarnis-Buchanan Lecture Series was created in 1998 through an endowment by Jean Pasakarnis-Buchanan, who graduated from the University in 1952 and went on to a 33-year career as a cytologist with Massachusetts General Hospital. She also taught cytology—the study of human cells—at Northeastern University. Pasakarnis-Buchanan received the Alumni Community Award from BGSU in 1972, and in 1987 set up a scholarship for biology or medical technology majors. Her lectureship endowment has allowed the University to bring some of the leading figures in biology and medicine to campus each year.


Expert on mammoths to recount his adventures

"Mammoth Hunting in the Mountain West" will be the topic of a talk this week by famed geologist Dr. Larry Agenbroad, whose searches for the ancient species have taken him around the world. The talk will begin at 8 p.m. Thursday (April 23) in 95 Overman Hall and is free and open to the public.

The director of the Mammoth Site of Hot Springs, S.D., a death assemblage of pre-Columbian mammoths dating to 26,000 years ago, and the Hudson-Meng Bison Kill Site in Nebraska’s Pine Ridge National Forest, Agenbroad has done field work in nine southwestern and western states as well as Mexico and Siberia.

Since earning his Ph.D. in 1966, Agenbroad has made numerous important contributions to the body of knowledge about the areas in which mammoths lived and the creatures themselves. These have included recognizing and researching the first intact boli of mammoth dung in this hemisphere, in the Colorado Plateau; mapping the southernmost glacial features in Utah, and initiating research into a high-altitude “early man” site in Utah. Since 1994, he has been principal investigator of the pygmy mammoth remains in the California Channel Islands, including the recovery of the most complete set of the specimen’s remains ever found.

He was featured on a Discovery Channel program called “Raising the Mammoth,” about a 1999 expedition in which he was the only American scientist invited to join an international team that excavated and airlifted a 23-ton block of permafrost containing the remains of a woolly mammoth. The team moved the permafrost from the tundra of the Tainy Peninsula in northern Siberia to an ice cave in Khatanga, Russia.

In 2003-04, Agenbroad was involved in the research of the Yugakir mammoth from Yugatia, Siberia, believed to be 1,800 years old.

A professor emeritus of geology at Northern Arizona University, Agenbroad initiated and directed a multidisciplinary graduate program in quaternary studies there.

His talk is sponsored by the Geology Club and Sigma Gamma Epsilon, the geology honor society. For more information, contact club president Ben Linzmeier at linzmeb@bgsu.edu.


CSS quick-reference Web page available

Students, faculty and staff may have noticed several changes to the Campus Solutions System (CSS), such as how to search for, add or drop classes; view class schedules; obtain advising information; receive financial aid information, and pay for bursar billings. These changes are a part of the BG@100 project to implement the University's new student administration system.

A quick-reference Web page is now available for you at:
http://www.bgsu.edu/offices/cio/campussolutions.html.


Student Affairs to hold golf outing in May

Student Affairs will hold its second annual golf outing on May 15, with all proceeds going toward scholarships and professional development. Last year’s outing raised more than $2,700.

The event will be a nine-hole scramble with a 3:30 p.m. shotgun start at Forrest Creason Golf Course. Prizes will be awarded to six, first-place teams in three categories (one winner in each category for both the front and back nine holes): men’s, women’s and mixed. Door prizes will be awarded at the dinner, immediately following the outing. 

In addition to golfing, you may be a sponsor or volunteer. To sign up to play or to get involved in other ways, contact Deanna Vatan Woodhouse at 2-2151 or deannav@bgsu.edu.