Campus News in Brief
Heinz College officially named
The Heinz School of Public Policy and Management has undergone a transformation. The Heinz School has merged with the graduate School of Information Systems and Management to become the H. John Heinz III College.
The Heinz College will feature curricula that combine public policy, management, and technology.
The initial funding for the college came from a $13 million grant from The Heinz Endowments.
The naming of the college was officially celebrated Oct. 24. Paul H. O’Neill, former United States treasury secretary and member of the Heinz College Dean’s Advisory Council, gave the keynote address reflecting on the legacy of Sen. Heinz and the essential interconnection of technology and policy. The Board of Trustees led the dedication ceremony.
Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon, Heinz Endowments and Heinz Family Philanthropies Chair Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Heinz College Acting Dean Ramayya Krishan, all participated in the ceremony.
A bronze plaque was erected in honor of Sen. Heinz in the foyer of Hamburg Hall, base of the current Heinz School and future Heinz College.
The plaque reads: “Heinz’s all encompassing commitment to public service, environmental issues, and international commerce endeared him to constituents of all ages, transcended partisan mind-sets and set a new bar for the political vocation.”
Researcher gets Gates grant
JudJudith Klein-Seetharaman, a research scientist in Carnegie Mellon’s Language Technologies Institute, has been awarded a $100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for her continued research on anti-HIV therapies.
Klein-Seetharaman was one of only 104 scientists on five continents and in 22 countries to receive a grant. The grants were given out as part of the first funding round of Grand Challenges Exploration, an initiative to help scientists internationally discover health solutions for the developing world.
In her upcoming research with the grant, Klein-Seetharaman will examine the biochemical reaction sequences within cells that serve as signal transduction pathways.
HIV is able to replicate itself by intercepting these pathways at points in their sequences. Klein-Seetharaman will be looking into the existence of parallel pathways that may be able to take the role of a disrupted pathway in the case of HIV replication. Through targeting these parallel pathways, she believes that HIV therapy and medications can be made more effective.
Klein-Seetharaman is currently a neuroscience professor and head of the Centre for Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London.