Madeline provides the editorial content, photos, and design for the Salem High School Alumni Association newsletter, which is published twice a year and mailed to 10,000 alumni.
The Winter-Spring 2015 edition features the SHS alumnus who led the effort to correct the Hubble Space Telescope’s primary mirror, showcases 12 alumni artists, and tells what it’s like behind home plate at the World Series from the umpire’s perspective.
Community colleges with forward-thinking faculty and administrators and savvy grant writers have long used multiple federal grants to build programs. But these have been college-specific initiatives rather than aspects of a coordinated federal strategy.
Recent collaborative efforts by staffers who direct community college initiatives at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) are meshing programs in novel, intentional ways to maximize the government’s investment.
The newest, and perhaps most unusual, example of this collaboration is the NSF’s funding of five Advanced Technological Education (ATE) centers to provide technical assistance to recipients of DOL’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) grants.
V. Celeste Carter traces the connection between the federal government’s two large technician education programs to a conversation she had in 2011.
Carter, co-lead program director of the National Science Foundation’s Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program, said she received a phone call from Kumar Garg, senior advisor at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, when the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) was planning its education initiative to help displaced workers.
The authentic biotech lab experiences Sonja Lopez-Tellez had as an Austin Community College student will become more plentiful when the college opens a $4.9 million biotech research wet lab in 2016.
The small, but real, work projects Sonja Lopez-Tellez completed as a biotech student at Austin Community College (ACC) in Texas helped her succeed in two internships, with the second at XBiotech leading to a full-time job.
Authentic work experiences are something ACC biotech students will get a lot more of when the college opens a new $4.9 million biotech research wet lab with business incubator space.
ACC is the first two-year college to receive such significant funds from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund Research Award program. The ACC Biotech Department’s application with the support of a dozen community and corporate partners is a bold effort to address the shortage of wet labs that biotech start-up companies need to fine tune their new products and production processes for them.
“Once a company has discovered the value of using our interns to do projects, they ask for more. That is the bottom line … because we get things done for them that would normally cost them quite a bit of money. And we can accelerate their product development,” said Linnea Fletcher, chairman of the ACC’s Biotechnology Department. Fletcher has been the principal investigator of two National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (ATE) grants and the co-principal investigator of ATE grants for Bio-Link, a National Advanced Technology Education Center of Excellence focused on Biotechnology and Life Sciences at City College of San Francisco.
