Brettell To Serve As Dedman Acting Dean

Anthropology Professor Caroline B. Brettell has been named acting dean of Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, effective July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2007. During that time, a search committee will conduct a national search for a permanent dean to succeed Jasper Neel, who is returning to full-time teaching in the Department of English.

Brettell, the Dedman Family Distin­guished Professor, served as chair of the Department of Anthropology from 1994 to 2004. She joined SMU in 1988 and earned a B.A. degree from Yale University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Brown University.

Brettell’s research interests include migration and immigration, the cross-cultural study of gender, the intersections of anthropology and history, and European ethnography. She is the principal investigator for a project funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and another project sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Doctoral Recognition

Susan Vandiver, a Ph.D. student in the School of Engineering, won the 2006 competition for the INCOSE/Stevens Doctoral Award, presented for promising research in Systems Engineering and Integration from the Stevens Institute of Technology.

Yan Wang, a Ph.D. candidate in Statis­tical Science, received a 2006 summer internship with the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. She was selected for one of the 20 positions out of nearly 280 applicants and will participate in a project called “A Hierarchical IRT Model to Estimate Population Characteristics.”

Two Ph.D. students, Catrina Whitley, Anthropology, and Marie Arrowsmith, Geological Sciences, received a $10,000 scholarship each from the women’s service organization PEO for 2006-07. Based on research and advisers’ recommendations, the competition for these national awards is steep – only 85 scholarships are awarded from a pool of more than 650 applications.

Accomplished Jazz Musician To Lead Meadows

Acclaimed jazz musician, scholar, composer, and educator José Antonio Bowen has been named dean of Meadows School of the Arts. Bowen currently is dean of the School of Fine Arts and professor of music at Miami University in Ohio. He will assume his responsibilities at SMU July 1. He succeeds Carole Brandt, who has served as dean of the Meadows School since 1994.

While at Miami University, Bowen led a school of more than 1,000 students, 100 tenured faculty, 11 professional and liberal arts undergraduate degrees, and seven graduate degree programs in fields ranging from architecture and interior design to music.
He also has taught at Stanford and Georgetown universities, and served as founding director of the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music at the University of Southampton, England.

Bowen holds four degrees from Stanford: a Bachelor of Science in chemistry, a Master of Arts in music composition, a Master of Arts in humanities, and a joint Ph.D. in musicology and humanities.

Ford Fellowships Honor Outstanding Scholarship

Nine SMU faculty members, representing outstanding scholarship in diverse fields, have received Gerald J. Ford Research Fellowships. The 2005 Ford Research Fellows are Douglas Ehring, Philosophy; William Orr, Biological Sciences; Carolyn Sargent, Anthropology; Abraham Smith, Theology; and Mitch Thornton, Computer Science and Engineering.

Ford Fellows for 2006 are Shelley Berg, Dance; Gary Evans, Electrical Engineering; Raj Sethuraman, Marketing; and Ryszard Stroynowski, Physics.

The Gerald J. Ford Research Fellowships, established in 2002 by the current chair of SMU’s Board of Trustees, “are an excellent example of donor support of research,” says Hal Williams, dean of research and graduate studies. “They provide $15,000 stipends to faculty to enable them to travel to conduct research in other archives or in the field, acquire state-of-the-art lab equipment, or hire assistants. They also help enhance the University’s competitiveness in the recruitment and retention of outstanding faculty.”