Kudos

NIU has received national recognition as one of the 100 Best Campuses for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender students, according to the newly published “Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students.”

NIU earned the distinction based on its record of creating a positive living and learning environment for LGBT students, such as through the programs and services offered by the NIU LGBT Resource Center.

Colleges and universities selected for the book were reviewed for their institutional policies, commitment and support, academic life, housing, student life, counseling and health services, campus safety, and recruitment and retention efforts. NIU was one of 680 campuses nominated for the honor, and was selected after an online interview process that gathered information from nearly 5,000 online interviews nationwide with LGBT students, faculty and staff.

Margie Cook is director of NIU’s LGBT Resource Center.

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Earl Shumaker, head of the government publications department at NIU, has been named the 2006 Illinois Academic Librarian of the Year by the Illinois Association of College and Research Libraries.

This award has been given by IACRL annually since 1985 to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to academic and/or research librarianship at the statewide level, and to library development. Shumaker has been the head of the government publications department since 1978. He also is the coordinator of the NIU Branch Libraries System. In addition to his duties at NIU, he provides reference service and bibliographic instruction on the weekends at Waubonsee Community College.

Shumaker became active in the Illinois Library Association when he arrived at NIU in 1978. 

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Portland State University in Oregon and a master’s of library science from Louisiana State University. He also did postgraduate work at Ohio University and NIU, where he has also served as adjunct faculty in the Geography Department and the Library Science and Information Studies Department, where he taught the first Government Publications course.

Shumaker will receive his award Oct. 5 at a formal presentation during the IACRL Annual Business Meeting at the Illinois Library Association Conference in Chicago, and also will be recognized at the Awards Ceremony.

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The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is highlighting the research of NIU chemist Narayan Hosmane on its Web site.

NIOSH lists Hosmane among its “featured contributors” in its section on nanotechnology and points visitors to a research paper he published last year in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The research discusses the use of carbon nanotubes for the delivery of drugs in Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT).

Hosmane has been working for many years to advance BNCT – an experimental, two-step approach to cancer treatment. The treatment employs a boron-containing compound administered intravenously or through injection into a patient’s tumor. A beam of low-energy neutrons is then directed at the tumor. The interaction between the boron and the beam is designed to kill tumor cells that have high concentrations of boron without harming normal cells.

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First the bad news: Ioannis “Yanni” Sideris, a research associate in the NIU Department of Physics, where he is a key member of the Beam Physics and Astrophysics Group, is leaving the university later this month.

Now the good news: Sideris is moving on after winning a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship to the Cosmology and Computational Astrophysics Group in the Theoretical Physics Division of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, where he will serve as the 2006-2008 Tomalla Fellow.

The Zurich group is world famous, particularly for its pioneering work on gravitational research, including galactic dynamics, which is Sideris’ forte.

“We’re going to miss Yanni, but we’re very proud of him,” said physicist Court Bohn, leader of the NIU Beam Physics and Astrophysics Group. “He was my first NIU post-doc, arriving just after I joined NIU. It was starting with him that we built our group and established our reputation for published research. This fellowship reflects highly on his personal accomplishments as well as on NIU.”

9-18-06