Francine Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD and professor of computer science and engineering, has been appointed to a three-year term to the California Council on Science and Technology.
University of California President Richard Atkinson appointed Berman in collaboration with Stanford University President John Hennessy, California Institute of Technology President David Baltimore, California Community Colleges Chancellor Thomas Nussbaum, California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed and University of Southern California President Steven Sample.
The council is a not-for-profit corporation established by the California State Assembly to examine urgent public policy questions relating to science and technology in California, including the state’s competitiveness. The council is composed of 30 eminent scientists, engineers, scholars and industrialists from California’s major public and private research and instructional universities and industry leaders.
A pioneer in grid computing, Berman is a leader in the national effort to build a comprehensive modern infrastructure to support research in science and engineering. She is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and also directs the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure, a consortium of 41 research groups, institutions and university partners with the goal of building a national infrastructure to improve and extend the reach of science and engineering.
Dinner etiquette workshop offered to grad students
To aid students interviewing at dinners, a workshop titled “”Etiquette for Interview Dinners, aka Protocol – An Interviewing Strategy”” will be offered to 35 UCSD graduate students from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Feb. 4 in the UCSD Faculty Club.
Protocol specialist Marie Betts-Johnson will conduct the four-hour etiquette practicum, in which she will share hands-on expertise that will guide participants through what she calls “”the social minefield of the interviewing process.”” The workshop will cover steps from creating a powerful impression in a networking situation to dining with the ease and confidence of a diplomat.
According to the Protocol School of Washington, D.C., it is estimated that 80 percent of the vice presidents and presidents of Fortune 500 firms have impeccable manners, both in the boardroom and the dining room. The figure falls to 40 percent for mid-management and drops drastically down to 12 percent for newly hired young professionals.
Betts-Johnson is founder/president of the International Protocol Institute of California. She was protocol coordinator for the Diplomatic Corps of the 1996 Republican National Convention in San Diego and has developed training programs for top U.S. corporations, including IBM; North American Title Insurance; Sony Corporation; W-D 40 Company; HNC Software; Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; Gucci Timepieces; the World Trade Center Association; the International Bankers’ Association of California and Hughes Aircraft Corporation.
For more information contact Marcy Swain at (858) 534-0141.
UCSD to compete at Jan. 31 debate tournament
Debating against such fierce competition as UC Berkeley, Davis, CSU Long Beach, Colorado College, University of Utah and Notre Dame, UCSD debate team members Danny Cantrell and Clint Burr will compete at the Sixth Annual Point Loma Round Robin Tournament of Champions on Jan. 31.
The Round Robin matches 20 of the top NPDA schools against each other in a modified tournament format. The tournament splits the 20 teams into four pools of five teams, which all debate each other in preliminary rounds. Then the top team from each pool advances to the semi-final round.
Burr and Cantrell are currently ranked 20th in the nation and are in their final year of debating for UCSD. Last year they won first place at the Coyote Classic tournament and won 17th at the National Championship tournament, the first time UCSD had attended the year-end tournament.
So far this year the duo has captured a top award at all four tournaments it has attended. In addition, in mid-season rankings, UCSD, as a program, was ranked in the top 25 nationwide, up from 55th last year.
For more information, see the team’s Web site at http://sdcc3.ucsd.edu/~spdebate.