Year: 2011

Categories
Healthy People

Family Matters

Patricia Gregg and Subra Suresh, Director of the National Science Foundation, at the White House announcement of the “NSF Career-Life Balance Initiative.”

When Patricia Gregg received an e-mail invitation from first lady Michelle Obama asking for her social security number, she assumed it was a scam. But on September 26, Gregg found herself at a White House event shaking hands with the First Lady herself. Gregg sat in the second row as one of 14 select scientists and a group of industry and university leaders that filled the room. The event, put on the National Science Foundation (NSF), was held to promote a new initiative encouraging up and coming scientists to take time off for family matters.

Categories
Healthy Economy Innovation

Testing Our Metal

Chain saws, baseball bats, truck bodies, jet engine parts and bridges. All from America’s industrial heartland, right? Or made in China? Wrong. Companies that produce these and other metal products — from kitchen knives and laboratory incubators to steel fabrication stock — employ thousands of Oregonians. One of the tools in their toolbox is a research partnership with Oregon State and Portland State universities.

Categories
Healthy People Innovation

Chemistry for Life

In 2011, the first Baby Boomer turned 65 — the leading edge of a wave that is going to change the country. By 2030 one in every five Americans will be older than that. People are already living longer, taking time to travel and to enjoy their families. Think gourmet cooking classes, fishing trips and art museums.

Categories
Healthy Planet Inquiry

Rice Paddy People

The young Chinese laborer was desperate. Like millions of other migrant workers in China’s dash to industrialize, he had left his home and family to work in a factory in the rural interior. Now, environmental officials had closed the zinc smelter in Futian where he worked, and without a job, nearly out of money and separated from his support community, he knocked on the door of the inquisitive American who had been conducting interviews in the village.

Categories
Healthy People Inquiry Stewardship

Love of Language

As a college student, Bryan Tilt spent three years in South Korea and returned with a love for a new culture and its language. “I don’t know that I would have gotten into anthropology without that experience. It just opened up doors for me that I didn’t even know existed, let alone knew how to walk through,” he says.

Categories
Earth Healthy Planet

Polar Plunge

With ice coverage shrinking in the Arctic and parts of the Antarctic, scientists are scrambling to predict future consequences.