Perry Jones, age 6, stands in a field on his grandfather’s Virginia farm. He hears a buzz and looks up to see a plane flying overhead. “Grandpa, that’s what I want to do when I grow up,” he says eagerly. “I want to drive that airplane.” “Perry, if you want to drive that airplane, you can do it,” his grandather tells him. Jones would go on to become the first Black airline pilot for Pan Am. More > (PDF p. 12)
Filed under: Business, Carnegie Mellon, Education, Health, Profiles, Radiology | Tags: radiology profile women "carnegie mellon" "carnegie mellon today"
Cynthia Sherry is having dinner with seven gentlemen at a Dallas restaurant. All of them are radiologists, and Sherry is about to become the first female partner of the practice. During the meal, one partner says to her, “I’ll bet you’ve never been to dinner with seven men before.” If the radiologists think Sherry is uncomfortable with the numbers, they’re wrong. More >
Filed under: Culture, Education, Geology, Pitt, Pitt Engineer, Profiles, Technology
Oil erupts from the ground with a whoosh! Dirt-poor Jett Rink (James Dean, in Giant, his last film role) staggers backward, arms outstretched, letting the “black gold” rain down on him.
Watching this movie as a child in Cairo, Egypt, Mahmoud Dabbous was enamored not only with the excitement of striking oil but also with the American geography and way of life it depicted.
He went on to found the Improved Petroleum Recovery (IPR) Group of Companies, of which he is president and chief executive officer. More (Large PDF) >
Having just come from a full day in charge of five-year-olds, Denise Sheffey Powell claims to be “a walking zombie.” If that’s true, looks are deceiving: Zombies’ faces aren’t expressive and warm. It’s easy to imagine the kindergarten students she teaches in her day job falling in love with her gentle way. It’s even easier to imagine aficionados of classical music falling in love with her rich voice. More (PDF) >
Women are missing from boardrooms and executive positions worldwide. School of Arts and Sciences Mellon Associate Professor of Economics Lise Vesterlund is working to discover why—and what we might be able to do about it. More >
At this spring’s commencement, many Arts and Sciences professors could be found draping hoods over the heads of their newly minted PhDs.
But it is likely that only one of them was hooding an advisee nearly 50 years after his first.
Though Bodie Douglas, professor emeritus in the Department of Chemistry, retired in 1989, he remains an active member of the department’s graduate faculty. So when Carol Fortney, a PhD student whose research was in inorganic chemistry—Douglas’s field—was in need of an advisor, Douglas stepped up. More >
In the remote Ghanaian village of Jukwa last summer, Kahleb Graham and fellow Pitt students helped to build a library—despite swarms of biting insects, dubious plumbing, termites that marched across their books and papers, even malaria. More >
How did Alice Scales get from a cotton farm in Mississippi to Pitt, where today she is a nationally recognized authority on reading/literacy education? More >
Why would a gourmet who has lived in Florence, Paris, and London choose to settle in Pittsburgh? “It’s a big enough city that there’s a wide variety of many, many things here that are open for you to explore,” Peter Machamer says. “All that just makes for the ambiance of the city.” More >
David Fiumara was headed home from Mt. Lebanon during rush hour last Friday, driving in the left lane of the inbound Liberty Tunnels, when he suddenly felt a pain in his chest that he thought was heartburn. The next thing he knew, he was waking up in Mercy Hospital and it was Sunday morning. More >
