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The NC State family is saddened by the loss of Jeanne Peck, a 25-year NC State staff member who passed away Sunday after a 15-month battle with lymphoma. A 20-year breast cancer survivor, Peck first worked as a database administrator for Administrative Computing Services before becoming the assistant director of configuration management and database administration within the university’s Office of Information Technology.

“Jeanne was one of those truly rare souls who made a better person out of anyone who knew her,” said Gwen Hazlehurst, director of enterprise application services at NC State. “Every day she helped to teach us all to be kinder to those around us, and her love for helping others never wavered – even as she fought the cancer that took her life.

Jeanne’s greatest passion was finding a cure for breast cancer. Thirteen years ago, she founded the NC Triangle Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure – a group that would be named Komen’s worldwide 2008 Affiliate of the Year for its efforts in eradicating a disease that affects more than 180,000 Americans each year.

“Jeanne’s enthusiasm, temperament and great courage were an inspiration to all who knew her,” said Nancy G. Brinker, founder of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, an international grassroots network of breast cancer survivors and activists. “Her work for Susan G. Komen for the Cure – to end breast cancer forever – was a labor of love, and an example of determination and leadership that has done much for North Carolina and for the breast cancer community.

“Jeanne’s good works will be her legacy, and while we mourn her loss today, we are grateful that we were able to know her.”

The N.C. Triangle Race for the Cure, which Peck organized in 1997 after participating in similar events held in other cities, has grown into the largest foot race held in North Carolina.

The 2008 event attracted close to 24,000 participants and raised nearly $2 million for breast cancer research, education, screening and treatment programs.

“We surpassed all expectations, and it was a very exciting day,” Peck told ncsu.edu staff members last year. “The first race also meant a lot for me personally, because it was a celebration of my 10th anniversary as a breast cancer survivor.”

Peck found an early Race for the Cure supporter in NC State women’s basketball coach Kay Yow, herself a breast cancer survivor who was diagnosed with the disease around the same time as Peck. Yow honored Peck with the “Courage Angel Pin” at NC State’s 2008 Hoops for Hope women’s basketball game – an award presented each year to a person dedicated to helping others fight cancer.

“Jeanne was obviously a special person for me to give it to,” Yow said. “I was really happy that she was chosen to be the person to receive it. She is so worthy because she has dedicated a lot of her life to helping others battle this disease.”

“Jeanne had a way of making hard work fun and always saw the good in people,” Hazlehurst said. “The hole she will leave in our hearts is immeasurable.”

Related Links:

• Online Condolences
• Susan G. Komen for the Cure
• Donate in Jeanne’s Honor or Memory.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have found an exponentially better way to protect streams and lakes from the muddy runoff associated with stormwater around road and other construction projects.

The alternative is lower or comparable in cost to commonly used best management practices (BMPs) around construction sites, yet much more effective at keeping streams and lakes free of runoff sediment that pollutes water and harms aquatic life.

In a study comparing BMPs against alternatives on road stormwater runoff in western North Carolina, the NC State researchers found the alternative method kept local streams that received the runoff cleaner, and helped reduce the amount of sediment loss inside ditches near roads. Sediment and muddy water are among the most common pollutants of streams and lakes.

Dr. Rich McLaughlin, associate professor of soil science at NC State and one of the researchers involved in the project, says that the current BMPs used in controlling erosion and sediment involve using so-called “sediment traps” along with rock check dams in ditches. Sediment traps collect water with the heavier sediment – like dirt and other larger, heavier particles – settling to the bottom and the “cleansed” water moving through rock check dams, or piles of rock that are intended to slow the flow of water through the ditch. Water then travels out of the ditch through a pipe to streams, rivers or lakes.

In the study, McLaughlin and NC State colleagues Scott King, extension associate in soil science, and Dr. Greg Jennings, professor and extension specialist in biological and agricultural engineering, found that the BMPs don’t hold a candle to the alternative – natural fiber check dams (FCDs) enhanced with polyacrylamide (PAM), a chemical that causes sediment to clump together. FCDs use natural fibers instead of rocks as a type of dam to slow the flow of water in ditches.

The researchers found, in a measure of the “muddiness” of road runoff, that the BMPs yielded 3,813 nephelometric turbidity units (NTUs) in testing, equating to some rather muddy water, McLaughlin says. Fiber check dams with PAM yielded averages of 34 NTUs, a veritable drink of Perrier in comparison, McLaughlin adds.

Further, the study showed that after a storm, sites that used standard BMPs lost an average of 944 pounds of sediment compared with only 1.8 pounds of sediment lost at sites utilizing FCDs with PAM.

McLaughlin says that these results are so convincing that North Carolina’s Department of Transportation is in the process of making FCDs with PAM the new best management practice around road and construction sites. McLaughlin’s group is also training engineers and installers around the state and nationally in the use of this system.

A paper showing the study results appears in the March/April edition of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation.

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Note: An abstract of the paper follows.

“Improving construction site runoff quality with fiber check dams and polyacrylamide”

Authors: Richard A. McLaughlin, Scott E. King and Greg D. Jennings, North Carolina State University

Published: March/April 2009 edition of the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation

Abstract: Sediment and turbidity are among the most common pollutants affecting surface waters, resulting in reduced reservoir capacity, degradation of aquatic organism habitat, and decreased aesthetic value. Construction activities, including roadway projects, can be significant contributors to sediment loading in streams and lakes. We studied water quality in stormwater runoff from three systems for erosion and sediment control on two roadway projects in the North Carolina mountains. The first roadway project was divided into three experimental sections, each with one the following treatments installed in the adjacent drainage ditch: (1) the standard best management practice (BMP) consisting of narrow sediment traps in the ditch along with rock check dams, (2) fiber check dams (FCDs) consisting of a mix of straw wattles and coir logs, or (3) FCDs with granulated, anionic polyacrylamide (PAM) added to each. The second project was smaller and included only two of the experimental sections described above: (1) the standard BMPs and (2) FCDs with PAM. Significant reductions in turbidity and total suspended solids were obtained using the FCDs, particularly those with PAM added. At site 1, from June 2006 to March 2007, the average turbidity values for the stormwater runoff were 3,813 nephelometric turbidity units (NTU) for the standard BMPs, 202 NTU for the FCDs-only, and 34 NTU for the FCDs with PAM. Average turbidity in discharges at site 2 was reduced from 867 NTU for the standard BMPs to 115 NTU for the FCDs with PAM. Sediment loading at both sites was similarly reduced with the use of FCDs. At site 1, the standard BMPs lost an average of 428 kg (944 lb) of sediment per storm event compared to just 2.1 kg (4.6 lb) for the FCDs-only and 0.9 kg (2.0 lb) for the FCDs with PAM. At site 2, the standard BMPs lost an average of 3.3 kg (7.3 lb) per storm event compared with 0.8 kg (1.8 lb) for the FCDs with PAM. A conservative economic analysis suggests that the costs of the FCDs are lower than the standard BMPs. This study suggests that the use of FCDs with PAM can bring discharges from similar linear construction projects much closer to the regulatory guidelines for non-point source discharges than the current standard practices.

Kellie Harper

North Carolina State University director of athletics Lee Fowler has announced that Kellie Harper, who has served as the head coach at Western Carolina University for the past five years, has been named the third head women’s basketball coach in the 35-year history of Wolfpack women’s basketball.

Harper has played a key role in eight conference tournament championships, six regular season conference titles and three national titles during her 14 years in college basketball as a player, assistant coach and head coach.

“This marks the beginning of an exciting new era for Wolfpack women’s basketball, ” Fowler said. “Our beloved Kay Yow built a program with rich tradition and I believe that Kellie Harper is the person to build on that legacy and move our program into the future. She has been a champion at every level – as a player, an assistant coach and a head coach – and we know that she will bring that championship mentality to NC State. ”

“I appreciate the hard work of the advisory committee and Athletics Director Lee Fowler in this process, ” NC State Chancellor James L. Oblinger said. “In searching for a new women’s basketball coach, we knew we wanted a coach who would build on the program Coach Yow worked so hard to establish and nurture.

“We also wanted a coach who would be successful on the court and one who appreciated the academic expectations of NC State, ” Oblinger said. “Coach Harper understands the history and tradition associated with women’s basketball here at NC State. I know she will build on this solid program. ”

Under Harper’s direction, Western Carolina has competed in three consecutive Southern Conference Tournament finals and this year won its second tourney title. The Catamounts had never won the league tourney before Harper’s tenure.

The team eclipsed 20 wins for the third straight season and has been in postseason play four times in her five years as head coach: twice in the NCAA and twice in the WNIT. She coached seven players to 11 all-conference selections and two SoCon Tournament Most Outstanding Players at WCU.

The 2007 Southern Conference Coach of the Year has led her student-athletes to success in the classroom as well, as her 2007-08 squad ranked fifth in the WBCA Academic top-25 and the 2006-07 squad was 15th.

Prior to her tenure at Western Carolina, Harper spent three seasons as an assistant coach at Chattanooga, where she helped lead the Mocs to three consecutive SoCon championships. She worked primarily with the perimeter players, including the 2004 league player of the year and three other all-conference players.

Prior to her stint in Chattanooga, Harper spent two seasons on the Auburn staff, moving from administrative assistant in 1999-2000 to assistant coach the next season.

Harper, whose maiden name is Kellie Jolly, played on three national championship squads at Tennessee under Hall-of-Fame coach Pat Summit, earning 1999 honorable mention All-America honors. As a junior, she averaged 7.6 points and 3.8 assists while guiding the Lady Vols to a 39-0 record and a national championship.

In the title game against Louisiana Tech, she scored a career-high 20 points and hit four of her five three-point attempts. She did not miss a free throw in that year’s NCAA Tournament, nailing 14 in a row. She was named to the 1998 All-Final Four team.

After missing the first 16 games of the 1997 season due to an injury, Harper return to help lead the Lady Vols to the second of the three national titles they won during her playing career. In the final game versus Old Dominion, she dished out a championship-game record 11 assists and was named to the All-Final Four squad with a record 20 assists in two games.

That year, the National Strength and Conditioning Association named her its “Strength and Conditioning Female Athlete of the Year. ”

For her career, Harper tallied 894 points and 450 assists, ranking among Tennessee’s top-10 career leaders in assists, assists-per-game, three-point field goals, three-point attempts and three-point field goal percentage at the time of her graduation.

She was drafted in the fourth round of the 1999 WNBA draft by the Cleveland Rockers and also earned her degree in mathematics that year. She was a three-time Academic All-SEC honoree as well.

Harper prepped at White County High School in Sparta, Tenn., earning preseason prep All-America honors and being named the MVP of various tournaments. In her eight years playing AAU ball, she played on three gold medal teams and three silver medal teams. She was a five-time All-American and two-time MVP during her AAU career. She graduated third in her high school class in 1995.

Harper, who will be 32 next month, is married to Jon Harper, who has served on her coaching staff at Western Carolina. Her contract at NC State is for five years, with a base salary of $247,000.

Related Links:

• NC State Women’s Basketball
• GoPack.com

You may want to thank David French in advance. Because, in the event that a comet or asteroid comes hurtling toward Earth, he may be the guy responsible for saving the entire planet.

French, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering at North Carolina State University, has determined a way to effectively divert asteroids and other threatening objects from impacting Earth by attaching a long tether and ballast to the incoming object. By attaching the ballast, French explains, “you change the object’s center of mass, effectively changing the object’s orbit and allowing it to pass by the Earth, rather than impacting it.”

Sound far-fetched? NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has identified more than 1,000 “potentially hazardous asteroids” and they are finding more all the time. “While none of these objects is currently projected to hit Earth in the near future, slight changes in the orbits of these bodies, which could be caused by the gravitational pull of other objects, push from the solar wind, or some other effect could cause an intersection,” French explains.

So French, and NC State Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Andre Mazzoleni, studied whether an asteroid-tether-ballast system could effectively alter the motion of an asteroid to ensure it missed hitting Earth. The answer? Yes.

“It’s hard to imagine the scale of both the problem and the potential solutions,” French says. “The Earth has been hit by objects from space many times before, so we know how bad the effects could be. For example, about 65 million years ago, a very large asteroid is thought to have hit the Earth in the southern Gulf of Mexico, wiping out the dinosaurs, and, in 1907, a very small airburst of a comet over Siberia flattened a forest over an area equal in size to New York City. The scale of our solution is similarly hard to imagine.

“Using a tether somewhere between 1,000 kilometers (roughly the distance from Raleigh to Miami) to 100,000 kilometers (you could wrap this around the Earth two and a half times) to divert an asteroid sounds extreme. But compare it to other schemes,” French says, “They are all pretty far out. Other schemes include: a call for painting the asteroids in order to alter how light may influence their orbit; a plan that would guide a second asteroid into the threatening one; and of course, there are nukes. Nuclear weapons are an intriguing possibility, but have considerable political and technical obstacles. Would the rest of the world trust us to nuke an asteroid? Would we trust anyone else? And would the asteroid break into multiple asteroids, giving us more problems to solve?”

The research was first presented last month at the NC State Graduate Student Research Symposium in Raleigh, N.C. The research, “Trajectory Diversion of an Earth-Threatening Asteroid via Elastic, Massive Tether-Ballast System,” has also been reviewed and accepted for presentation this September at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics SPACE 2009 Conference and Exposition in Pasadena, CA.

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Dr. Kathryn M. Moore, dean of North Carolina State University’s College of Education, will step down from her position effective May 15. After a study leave, Moore is planning on returning to teaching and research in the college’s Department of Adult and Higher Education in August 2010.

Moore has served as dean of the college since 2000. In that time, the university established the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation on Centennial Campus and began a new undergraduate degree in elementary education.

Provost Larry Nielsen said he would convene a search committee and conduct a national search for a new dean beginning this summer.

“Kay Moore has served NC State ably over the last nine years,” Nielsen said. “During her tenure, the College of Education has grown in stature and productivity.”

Dr. José Picart, vice provost for diversity and inclusion, will serve as interim dean.

Moore came to NC State after serving as founding director of the Center for the Study of Advanced Learning Systems at Michigan State University. She also held administrative and faculty positions at Michigan State University, Pennsylvania State University and Cornell University.

Moore has published numerous articles and books on higher education, including faculty work and compensation, administrative careers and student life, with a particular focus recently on institutional change worldwide.

Moore received bachelor’s degrees in English, history and education from Ohio State University, where she also earned a master’s degree in higher education. She received a doctoral degree in educational policy studies with minors in American history and educational administration from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

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Dr. Maxine P. Atkinson, professor of sociology and head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University, has been honored with an Award for Excellence in Teaching from the University of North Carolina (UNC) Board of Governors.

One educator from each UNC system campus wins the award, which comes with a prize of $7,500 and a bronze medallion.

The Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching is the most prestigious award given to faculty for teaching excellence and was created in 1994 to underscore the importance of teaching and encourage, recognize and reward outstanding teaching. Nominees for the award must be tenured professors who have spent at least seven years at the nominating institutions and who have “demonstrated excellent or exceptional teaching ability over a sustained period of time.”

Atkinson joined the NC State faculty in 1980. She has been an advisor for more than 600 undergraduates, and served on panels for more than 50 theses and dissertations. Atkinson has also served as a teaching mentor for 15 students.

“NC State has a unique mission as a research university with a commitment to provide an education that focuses on the skills of discovery,” Atkinson says. “My job is to construct diverse opportunities for learning, to ask questions rather than providing all the answers, to challenge rather than to dictate. We train students for jobs but we educate them for personal growth and community engagement. This current economic crisis reminds us of the serious consequences of having an educated population equipped to make ethical decisions and reasoned judgments.”

As a recipient of the prestigious teaching award, it should come as no surprise that Atkinson has done extensive research on the scholarship of teaching and learning. Her research also examines the sociology of the family and gender, with a focus on the economic relationship between spouses, and aging – particularly the relationship between adult children and their parents.

Atkinson earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia, her master’s degree in sociology from Georgia State University and her doctoral degree in sociology from Washington State University.

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For decades, researchers have evaluated the thermal performance of protective clothing worn by firefighters. A particular area of current interest is how to address the burns received by firefighters when they are not directly in contact with fire – called stored heat burns. Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a testing apparatus and measurement protocol that allow firefighter suits to be evaluated for their ability to prevent and minimize stored heat burns.

“You can compare the burn to when you sit close to a fireplace, and then press down on your jeans and you can feel the heat,” says Dr. Roger Barker, professor of textile engineering chemistry and science, and director of the Textile Protection and Comfort Center (T-PACC). “Firefighters are getting burns without ever coming in direct contact with the flames. It is a serious issue.”

Barker and his colleagues were contacted to develop and evaluate this new test method for stored heat measurement in a two-phase study. During the first phase, sponsored by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Barker and his team developed a laboratory testing apparatus to conduct the “stored energy test” which measures transferred and discharged heat in turnout suit materials. The second phase, sponsored by the National Fire Protection Research Foundation, involved using that apparatus to test a variety of firefighter suits and develop a database that will facilitate a new national standard that firefighter suits are measured against and certified.

All firefighter turnout suits are made of three layers – an outer shell, moisture barrier and thermal liner. There are many different combinations of fabrics and barriers used, and reinforcements and reflective trim are attached to the outer shell. Regardless of the combination of materials used, suits must go through a battery of tests to meet the standard set by the National Fire Protection Association, or NFPA.

“One of the major objectives of our study was to better understand the role moisture – mostly the sweat from firefighters – plays in transferred and stored heat burns,” Barker says. “When moisture accumulates in the turnout suit materials, it has a big effect on the thermal properties of those materials and changes its heat capacity and thermal conductivity. These changes affect its thermal protective insulation and ability to store thermal energy.

“The stored energy test protocol we developed includes having suit test materials pre-conditioned with moisture – similar to the sweat of a firefighter – in order to determine the effect on transferred and stored heat,” Barker adds.

Throughout the development process, various stakeholders – including firefighters, suit manufacturers and members of the NFPA – provided feedback and input to NC State’s researchers in order to develop a protocol that met the needs of the firefighters, while understanding the challenges and limitations of the manufacturing process. The NFPA is currently reviewing the protocol supplied by NC State’s College of Textiles, and will consider adopting this test method as part of the requirements that manufacturers will need their suits to meet in order to have their suits certified as complying with the NFPA standard.

“We know there is no lab test that measures with absolute accuracy what a firefighter encounters, because every fire is a different set of conditions and thermal threats,” Barker says. “However, we now have a better understanding of the general causes and mechanisms behind transferred and stored heat, and a test method to measure these effects. This research and recommended testing protocol is a major development that could significantly improve the health and safety for firefighters everywhere.”

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New NC State chemical compounds break up biofilms, make antibiotics work again

It started out as a research project focused on getting rid of harmful bacterial accumulations called biofilms.

Now it has the potential to make conventional antibiotics work against stubborn, drug-resistant bacteria.

This unexpected development might have come as a surprise to the North Carolina State University researchers involved in the project, Dr. Christian Melander, assistant professor of chemistry, and Dr. John Cavanagh, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Molecular and Structural Biochemistry.

What’s not surprising, however, is the researchers’ willingness to try seemingly unusual or unconventional methods to solve common problems. After all, getting rid of biofilms meant figuring out something odd to people who aren’t chemists: how to safely and efficiently mimic a sea sponge.

Sponging Away Biofilms
Bacteria have a number of ways of protecting themselves from antibiotics, including casing themselves in a protective barrier known as a biofilm. Biofilms comprise about 80 percent of the world’s microbial environment and are, according to statistics from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, responsible for up to 80 percent of all bacterial infections.

In addition to medical concerns – certain biofilms in the lung kill cystic fibrosis patients, for example – biofilms also have enormous impacts in agriculture and industry. Biofilms destroy crops, foul ship’s hulls and coat medical devices. Biofilms also coat – don’t be alarmed – your teeth. As anyone who has had plaque scraped from their teeth knows, getting rid of biofilms once they adhere to a surface is really difficult.

To create chemical compounds that can scrub away biofilms, Melander and Cavanagh looked to a particular sea sponge, Agelas conifera, that lives in the Caribbean Sea.

“Somehow, this sponge that can’t run away and that has no immune system stays remarkably clean while everything around it is covered in biofilms, so the sponge has some molecular way of keeping them at bay,” Cavanagh said. “We’ve never seen a sea sponge up close, but we understand the chemical processes going on. So Christian devised chemical compounds to mimic the sponge compound, ageliferin, that keeps the sponge free of biofilms. Our compounds are not toxic to mammals like ageliferin is, though, and we can make the compounds in enormous quantities.”

The NC State chemical compounds don’t kill biofilms outright, but cause them to revert to their single-celled form. Common antibiotics are then able to do their job of eliminating the single-celled bacteria.

Melander and Cavanagh have had great success achieving the original goal of their research, as every targeted biofilm has been defeated.

Working with researchers at Wake Forest University Medical School, for example, Melander and Cavanagh demonstrated they can break up deadly biofilms in a mimic of a cystic fibrosis lung. In collaboration with Dr. David Ritchie, professor of plant pathology at NC State, the researchers successfully eliminated bacterial spot disease from a field of pepper plants. Melander and Cavanagh have also dissolved their compound in marine paint and, working with Dr. Peter Moeller at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have shown in ocean tests that it assists in keeping marine biofilm growth to a minimum.

Rebooting Antibiotics
While thrilled with their successes, Melander and Cavanagh wondered if their compounds might do more than overcome biofilms. Could their molecules stop bacteria from protecting themselves in other ways? Was it possible to make multi-drug resistant bacteria susceptible to antibiotics once more?

“There are a lot of antibiotics lying around useless these days because bacteria have learned to resist them. We wondered if we could give antibiotics a new lease on life,” Cavanagh says.

The researchers certainly didn’t aim low. They decided to tackle two of the most insidious problems known today; methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii (MDRAB). MRSA needs no introduction – it is a widespread and dangerous infection resistant to more than a dozen common antibiotics, including methicillin, penicillin and amoxicillin. MDRAB is arguably scarier. Up to 1,000 times more resistant than MRSA, it is found in hospitals and attacks patients who have compromised immune systems. MDRAB has become notorious recently since it plagues the military. Wounded soldiers are taken to hospitals where they become infected with MDRAB, often with fatal results.

Melander and Cavanagh showed that their compounds were able to overcome the multi-drug resistance of two nasty strains of MRSA and MDRAB. The MRSA strain from a hospital in Portugal was resistant to 16 antibiotics. The MDRAB strain was taken from a Canadian serviceman. In both cases, the NC State compounds enabled conventional antibiotics to work again. As Cavanagh puts it, “We have, in effect, taken the MR out of MRSA.”

Now, Melander and Cavanagh have formed a start-up company called Agile Sciences that is producing more of the chemical compounds and partnering with several drug companies to do further testing. The Research Triangle Park company is the “vehicle for the masses – the way to get things out to the general public to see if we can help,” according to Cavanagh, while he and Melander get back to work on “building a better mousetrap,” or making the compounds even better. Is it possible to make a chemical compound that stops bacteria from forming biofilms, for example, or place a chemical on surfaces so biofilms don’t attach? Those are the types of questions the NC State scientists are now examining.

“Meanwhile, there are a lot more biofilms to destroy,” Melander says “and we need to see whether we can make even more antibiotics work again.”

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Researchers at North Carolina State University believe that 2009 will bring a near-normal hurricane season, with storm activity in the Atlantic basin and the Gulf of Mexico slightly above the averages of past 50 years, but staying in line with those from the past 20 years.

According to Dr. Lian Xie, professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences, and collaborators Dr. Montserrat Fuentes, professor of statistics, and graduate student Danny Modlin, 2009 should see 11 to 14 named storms forming in the Atlantic basin, which includes the entire Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

Of those named storms, six to eight may grow strong enough to become hurricanes, and there is a 45 percent chance that one of those storms will make landfall along the coast of the southeastern United States as a hurricane.

As for the Gulf, Xie’s data indicate the likelihood of three to five named storms forming, of which one to three will become hurricanes. The researchers expect two to four named storms to make landfall along the Gulf, and there is a 70 percent chance that at least one of those storms will be of hurricane status.

“The data show that the number of storms this year will not vary significantly from those of the past 20 years; in fact, 2009′s numbers are slightly lower than last year’s prediction of 13 to 15 named storms,” Xie says.

Xie’s methodology evaluates data from the last 100 years on Atlantic Ocean hurricane positions and intensity, as well as other variables including weather patterns and sea surface temperatures, in order to predict how many storms will form and where they will make landfall.

The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 through Nov. 30.

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Dr. John Seely Brown, independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation and a visiting scholar and advisor to the provost at the University of Southern California, will deliver NC State’s commencement address on Saturday, May 9, at the RBC Center in Raleigh. The commencement ceremony will begin at 9 a.m.

Prior to his position at Deloitte, Brown was the chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) – a position he held for nearly two decades. While head of PARC, Brown expanded the role of corporate research to include such topics as organizational learning, knowledge management, complex adaptive systems and nano/mems technologies. He was a co-founder of the Institute for Research on Learning. His personal research interests include the management of radical innovation, digital youth culture, digital media and new forms of communication and learning.

Brown is a member of the National Academy of Education; a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and a trustee of the MacArthur Foundation. He serves on numerous private and public boards for companies such as Amazon, Corning and Varian Medical Systems. Brown has published more than 100 papers in scientific journals and was awarded the Harvard Business Review’s 1991 McKinsey Award for his article, “Research that Reinvents the Corporation” and again in 2002 for his article, “Your Next IT Strategy.”

Brown received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brown University in 1962 in mathematics and physics and a Ph.D. from University of Michigan in 1970 in computer and communication sciences. Brown will receive an honorary Doctor of Sciences degree.

During the ceremony, Chancellor James Oblinger will confer honorary degrees on behalf of NC State to Brown and two other distinguished recipients: Sarita E. Brown, founding president of Excelencia in Education and a leader in the effort to raise academic achievement and opportunity for low-income and minority students, and Dr. Wayne Fuller, Emeritus Distinguished Professor in Statistics and Economics at Iowa State University.

Sarita E. Brown has spent more than two decades at prominent national educational institutions and at the highest levels of government, working to implement effective strategies to raise academic achievement and opportunity for low-income and minority students. Currently, she serves as founding president of Excelencia in Education, an organization that works to accelerate Latino success in higher education by linking research, policy and practice to serve Latino students. From 1997 to 2000, she served as executive director of the White House Initiative for Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans under President Clinton and U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley. She will receive an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree.

Dr. Wayne Fuller has published numerous articles in time series econometrics, measurement error, survey sampling and environmental statistics. He has held teaching positions at Stanford University, the University of Southampton, U.K., and the University of New England, Australia. Fuller also served as a visiting professor at North Carolina State University. Fuller is the author of Introduction to Statistical Time Series and Measurement Error Models. He is currently working on the text, Sampling Statistics. Fuller is a fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Econometric Society, and an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. Fuller attended Iowa State University for three years before serving in the U.S. Army for two years. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree and a Ph.D., both in agricultural economics. He will receive an honorary Doctor of Sciences degree.

For more information about NC State’s spring 2009 commencement activities, visit www.ncsu.edu/registrar/graduation/index.html.

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