Ways to Look at Trees
Paul F. Steinberg, a professor of political science and environmental policy at Harvey Mudd College, started the Social Rules Project, he says, to disseminate his research on how the “rules of the game that order society” affect the environment. The multimedia project encompasses a video game in which players try to save tropical forests, a 10-minute animated film, a website, and his recently released book, Who Rules the Earth?
“I was curious whether institutional analysis could be made not only accessible but beautiful,” he says of the film and video game. By institutions, he means structures like federal regulations governing cellphone technology and social norms determining whether people converse in an elevator. “We can reveal this massive infrastructure of institutions that shape the way we live our lives,” he says, “that ultimately determine whether we live in harmony with the planet or destroy it.”
Mr. Steinberg recruited more than 100 artists, game developers, and other students from the California Institute of the Arts and the Claremont Colleges consortium, including Harvey Mudd, to create the project. The film’s and video game’s narratives are rooted in Mr. Steinberg’s experiences studying environmental-policy change in developing countries, including his doctoral research in Costa Rica and Bolivia. “There are a lot of people who will tell you that environmental destruction is a simple result of greed and shortsightedness,” he says. The project, by pointing out differing motivations and underlying social rules, attempts to show a more complex story. Implicitly that also calls for more complex solutions.
For his efforts, he received a Deborah Gerner Innovative Teaching in International Studies Award from the International Studies Association this year.
Mr. Steinberg wants viewers of the project — students and the public generally — to “get political” by becoming involved in their communities. “My hope is it doesn’t just help people to see things in a new way,” he says, “but that it makes it impossible to see things the same way.” — Jenny Rogers
Medicine, Redesigned
Marsha Miller
Stacey Chang
Stacey Chang and Beto Lopez, former managers in the global design company IDEO, have been tapped to lead a new Design Institute for Health at the University of Texas at Austin. The institute expects to design medical devices, reconfigure hospitals, and reinvent the way doctors are taught and Americans get healthy. Mr. Chang, IDEO’s former managing director of health-care practice, spoke with The Chronicle’s Katherine Mangan about becoming executive director of the institute, which is a partnership of Austin’s new Dell Medical School and its College of Fine Arts. The interview has been edited and condensed.
Q. What appealed to you, as a designer who has worked on health-care projects for years, about joining a medical school?
A. A new medical school provides as much of a blank slate as you’ll ever get. We have an incredible opportunity to apply a creative approach to problem solving to help develop a curriculum.
Designing the environment in which care is delivered and trainees are taught makes a huge difference in the quality of both health care and education. For instance, we could turn the waiting room from something totally passive and anxiety-producing into an active space for learning or, if you’re taking a couple of hours off from work, drinking coffee or working on Wi-Fi.
Q. What impact is the institute likely to have on doctor training?
A. Part of our work will be developing curricula that help physicians define their own methodology for communicating with patients and staff. That differs from the traditional approach in medical schools, where you’re presented with best practices and told to replicate them.
Q. How will your joint appointments in fine arts and medicine extend what you call design thinking to other disciplines?
A. UT has about 50,000 or so students but only a couple dozen graduate from the design program. Then you have a place like Stanford, where design is a fundamental underpinning to every major. UT now has an opportunity to bring design forward in a way that augments any major and allows students to apply what they’ve learned in creative ways to solve problems.
Wellesley Chief to Leave
H. Kim Bottomly, president of Wellesley College, says she will step down in July 2016. An immunobiologist, she has led the elite women’s college since 2007.
“There will never be an easy time to leave such a wonderful place,” she said in a letter to the campus, “but this is the right time for me. With robust financial and intellectual resources in place, and with efforts to renew our celebrated campus well underway, the college is strongly positioned to move forward.”
In a news release announcing her departure, the college credited Ms. Bottomly with overseeing the institution’s finances following the recession of late 2007 to mid-2009, leading a campuswide renovation, and bolstering the college’s spending on financial aid, among other things.
Ms. Bottomly, a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, is the first scientist to lead the 145-year-old institution. — Andy Thomason
Focus on Inequality
U. of Pittsburgh
Jessie B. Ramey
Thirty years ago, Jessie B. Ramey raised her hand and asked her high-school history teacher why the class wasn’t learning about any women.
To which, she recalls, her teacher responded: “Because women never did anything important.”
That exchange helped inspire Ms. Ramey’s 25-year career studying women’s and gender issues. And on June 1, she will assume her newest role: inaugural director of the Women’s Institute at Chatham University.
Chatham — founded as an educational institution for women in 1869 — decided last year that it would begin admitting male undergraduate students this fall. To uphold its commitment to women’s issues, the university established the Women’s Institute, which seeks to use education, research, and outreach to help eradicate injustices experienced by women.
Ms. Ramey says she is excited that the newly coed Chatham will maintain its focus on gender inequality and female leadership. Those subjects are “not necessarily something that we’re hearing coming out of higher ed as strongly these days,” she says.
She will be leaving her jobs as a visiting scholar in women’s studies at the University of Pittsburgh and as an adjunct professor in history and the Humanities Scholars Program at Carnegie Mellon University. Among her plans for her new position are to strengthen existing programs at Chatham, such as its Center for Women’s Entrepreneurship, that have become part of the institute, and to work with nearby institutions to expand the discussion of women’s issues.
Inequalities continue to plague women in higher education, says Ms. Ramey. Women still don’t have adequate child-care resources at work, she says, and many female college students will face a gender gap in pay after graduation.
“We don’t have a lot of models of institutions that focus on gender inequality,” she says. “I really applaud Chatham for taking this step.”
— Maddy Berner
Obituaries 2 Heart Pioneers Die
Levi Watkins Jr., a retired professor of cardiac surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a trailblazer in his field, died on April 11 in Baltimore of complications from a stroke. He was 70.
Dr. Watkins became the first black chief resident in cardiac surgery at the university’s hospital in 1977. Three years later, he successfully implanted an automatic defibrillator in a human heart. That was the first time such an operation was performed.
After he was selected to join the university’s admissions committee, he worked to increase minority enrollment at Johns Hopkins, as well as to diversify the faculty. “The best way to recruit minority students is by example” and the intervention of mentors, he said in a 2013 article in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.
Another groundbreaking African-American heart specialist, Elijah Saunders, died of cancer on April 6. He was 80.
Dr. Saunders, a professor of medicine and former head of the hypertension section in the division of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, became the first black resident in internal medicine at the school in 1960, and the first black cardiologist in the state of Maryland in 1965, a remembrance on the medical school’s website said. Among his many publications is a book he edited with two other researchers, Hypertension in Blacks.
— Anais Strickland
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