Got YMCA questions? We've got answers
The new Student Wellness Center and Steve Clark YMCA are officially open for business at WSU. How can you sign up? Do you get a discount? What do the Wellness Center and YMCA have?
Get all those answers and a lot more.
University community invited to attend Innovation Awards on Jan. 23
The university community is invited to attend the fifth annual WSU Innovation Awards at 3 p.m. Thursday Jan. 23, in Shirley Beggs Ballroom. The Innovation Awards, hosted by WSU Ventures and WSU Strategic Initiatives, recognize students, faculty, staff and partners who execute programs and initiatives that greatly impact achievement of the university mission and vision. The event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP at Innovation Awards.
President’s Innovation Award: School of Digital Arts
Visionary: Senator Jerry Moran
Innovation Partner: Textron Aviation
Community Partner: Wichita Police Dept. & Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Dept.
Philanthropy: Woolsey Family
Ambassador: Tom Aldag, Director of R&D, National Institute for Aviation Research, WSU
Catalyst: FirePoint Innovations Center, WSU
Creative Works: Darren DeFrain, Associate Professor/Director of Writing Program, WSU
First Dollar: Rapid Setting Composite Article
Patents:
- Protective antigen complexes with increased stability and uses thereof, James Bann, associate professor of chemistry, WSU; Masaru Miyagi, Case Western Reserve University
- Rapid setting composite article, John Tomblin, Tom Aldag, Kim Reuter, WSU-NIAR; Andrea Meyer, Spirit AeroSystems; Will McCarvill, Commercial Chemistries
- Non-invasive biofeedback system, Jibo He, associate professor of psychology; Jeremy Patterson, dean, Institute of Interdisciplinary Innovation, WSU
Shocker Innovation Corps Fellows: Sue Abdinnour, professor of Business, WSU; Jason Flanders, Scene Shop Manager, School of Performing Arts, WSU; Barry Badgett, associate professor of Fine Arts, WSU; Richard Sack, Engineering Technology Lab Manager, WSU; Enksaikhan Boldsaikhan, assistant professor of Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering, WSU
Shocker Innovation Corps Breakout: Tammy Dorsey, CEO Prenatal Hope
SBIR Award: Waruna Seneviratne, Director, Advanced Laboratory for Aerospace Structures (ATLAS), National Institute for Aviation Research, WSU
Newsmaker: NIAR ATLAS
Trailblazer: Tyler Levesque, WSU ESports
Bright Future: Aliyah Funschelle, Abby Warkentine, additional awardees TBD
Wichita State recognized for its increased safety efforts
The Wichita State University Police Department has been named as one of the Top 25 programs in the country for its focus on safety.
The list, compiled by Safe Campus, places WSU at No. 16 in the nation. The award is open to any administrative department from a U.S. college or university that has improved campus safety.
Making this Top 25 list is a recognition that WSU has excelled in making campus a more secure place for students, employees and visitors.
Pictured above: Wichita State Police, students and staff gather for a spring celebration on campus.
University Update
At Thursday’s Weekly Briefing, the following information was shared during the University Update.
WELCOME BACK TO SCHOOL
Spring semester classes begin on Tuesday, Jan. 21. We wish all students, faculty and staff a successful semester.
WICHITA STATE OFFERS HELP TO AVIATION WORKERS
Wichita State University and WSU Tech have joined the Air Capital Commitment to provide immediate support and resources to those impacted by the layoffs at Spirit AeroSystems and its supplier companies.
As members of the Aerospace Task Force, WSU and WSU Tech representatives are working alongside community leaders and partners at the federal, state and local levels of government to create enhanced services to lessen the impact of these layoffs on individuals, families and community.
Please watch for the Air Capital Commitment website being launched next week.
STEVE CLARK YMCA OPENS TUESDAY
The Steve Clark YMCA and Student Wellness Center on campus will hold its grand opening on Tuesday, Jan. 21.
Tours and giveaways begin at 9 a.m. and continue until 9 p.m. Ribbon cutting takes place at 3:30. A watch party for Wichita State’s men’s basketball game at South Florida begins at 5 p.m.
The facility’s preview days continue until Monday The YMCA is open from 5:30 a.m.- 11 p.m. Monday-Thursday, from 5:30 a.m.-9 p.m. on Friday, 8 a.m.-8 p.m. on Saturday and 8 a.m.-10 p.m. on Sunday.
We are proud of this collaboration with WSU students to improve our campus’ health and wellness. Wichita State’s partnership with the Steve Clark YMCA will bring new programs and opportunities to campus and deepen the university’s connection to the neighborhood.
In addition to providing added fitness programming, the facility will also house a comprehensive Wellness Center to better serve the academic, physical, mental and emotional health needs of our students. The Wellness Center offers expanded physical and mental health services, located in one facility.
All fee-paying students are automatically members of the YMCA and all of the other YMCA locations in the Wichita area. Faculty and staff receive a discount to become members of the WSU YMCA, and anyone in the community is welcome to become a member, as well.
INNOVATION AWARDS
Wichita State’s Innovation Awards takes place at 3 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 23 in the Shirley Beggs Ballroom in the Rhatigan Student Center.
The awards, sponsored by WSU Ventures and WSU Strategic Initiatives, recognize students, faculty, staff and partners who execute programs and initiatives that greatly impact achievement of the university mission and vision.
The honors include Bright Future awards for students such as Jalen Cooper in Fine Arts, a Trail Blazer honor for Wichita State’s varsity e-sports team and the Pioneer Award for the student-staffed Help Hangar at Textron.
INNOVATION CAMPUS UPDATE
The Advanced Virtual Engineering and Testing Labs (AVET) is open in its new home on the Innovation Campus, at Oliver and 18th streets.
AVET houses crash-test labs that were located in National Institute for Aviation Research headquarters on Mid-Campus Drive.
The new space and equipment for the labs will enable the Institute to expand its work volume, hire more employees and provide more precise testing for its clients. The facility will also house NIAR’s world-renowned Virtual Engineering Lab with space for 40+ computer workstations, three collaboration rooms and secured areas for restricted projects.
Journey East Asia Grill is the latest addition to Braeburn Square. The Asian Fusion restaurant opened in December and joins Fuzzy’s Taco Shop and Starbucks as dining options for students, staff, faculty and members of the community, in addition to the restaurants in the Rhatigan Student Center.
GOOD GRADES FOR SHOCKERS
Wichita State’s athletic teams excelled in the fall 2019 semester. The cumulative grade-point average of 3.30 is the highest in the department’s recorded history. It is the 29th consecutive semester with a GPA of 3.0 or higher.
The men’s golf team led the department with a 3.61 GPA with women’s golf at 3.59. Men’s basketball (3.29) and baseball (3.28) set team records.
Ten of Wichita State’s 11 teams posted a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher and 26 student-athletes earned a 4.0 GPA.
Parent Information Workshop on Jan. 25
Parents and guardians of admitted high school seniors are invited to attend the Parent Information Workshop on Saturday, Jan. 25. Attendees will hear from WSU administrators, enjoy a light breakfast and coffee, and learn more about the next steps their students need to take to become enrolled.
Interested parents & guardians can RSVP here, and questions can go to Chad Steinkamp, assistant director of admissions, at chad.steinkamp@wichita.edu.
Special thanks to Housing & Residence Life for hosting an Open House during this event
for any students in attendance!
Invitation to World Trade Council dinner presentation by Grant Thornton on the ‘State of the Global Economy’
The World Trade Council of Wichita (WTCouncil), part of a strategic public-private partnership with the Barton School of Business’s Center for International Business Advancement or CIBA, will begin this new year with a dinner presentation on Thursday, Jan. 23, sponsored by Grant Thornton, on the “State of The Global Economy.” Click here for details.
Our featured speaker is David Sites, partner at Grant Thornton's DC national office speaking on “Tax and Trade in the Global Economy.” Sites will address how multinationals may minimize legislative and regulatory risks in today's globally interconnected economies buffeted by tariff and policy changes. A Q&A session will follow.
WSU students enjoy a subsidized rate of $10; WSU faculty attend for $40. Please make your reservations through the link above; you may also send an email to Sherryl Hubble at sherryl.hubble@wichita.edu or Emily Orwaru at emorwaru@shockers.wichita.edu.
If you are attending and wish to ask questions of the speakers, please send these questions by today (Tuesday, Jan. 21) to Usha Haley, chair, WTCouncil / Director, Center for International Business Advancement, at usha.haley@wichita.edu.
The Lecture Series in the Mathematical Sciences presents Mark Walsh, Maynooth University, Ireland
Please join us for a public lecture by Mark Walsh, titled "H-spaces, Loop spaces and Curvature" at 3:30 p.m. tomorrow (Wednesday, Jan. 22), in 127 Jabara Hall.
Refreshments will be served before the lecture at 3 p.m. in 353 Jabara Hall.
View an abstract and a list of upcoming lectures here.
Impacted by the layoffs in the aviation industry in Wichita?
In the news lately we’ve been hearing about the impact across Wichita of the market uncertainty and layoffs that are affecting local aviation businesses, suppliers and their employees. Human Resources developed a website with information and resources which might be helpful for employees who may be directly impacted by this uncertainty.
Go to www.wichita.edu/CommunityResources for information and resources available to you.
Ulrich Spring Opening Party will feature exhibitions examining technology’s impact
From visualizations of gerrymandered political districts, to the art of a former Madison Avenue “Mad Man,” the four new exhibitions opening at the Ulrich Museum of Art have one thing in common: all examine our efforts to come to terms with technology.
The Ulrich will unveil the four new exhibitions at its Spring 2020 Exhibition Opening Party from 5-8 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 23. The event is free and open to the public.
Ulrich Museum Director Leslie Brothers said this latest suite of exhibitions was especially relevant given WSU’s commitment to technology and innovation.
“We couldn’t be more excited to share these exhibitions with the Wichita State community and the greater public,” Brothers said. “WSU is known as a technology-savvy campus and these four exhibitions offer an intriguing spectrum of views on how our humanity is connected to technology.”
The spring exhibitions will be on display at the Ulrich until March 29, with the exception of Solving for X, which will be on display until June 28. The four exhibitions are:
Lee Adler: A Mad Man Amid the Machines
Adler came to art-making in his late thirties, having already established a successful career in marketing—including a stint at one of the advertising firms featured on the TV show Mad Men. He threw himself head first into his new pursuit throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, producing over 70 editions of prints and over 300 paintings.
Based largely on the Ulrich’s uniquely rich holdings of Adler’s works, this exhibition will reassess the legacy of a forgotten artist and show how the imagery he created in the 1960s and 1970s foreshadowed urgent present-day concerns about the way human lives have become intertwined with the technology that surrounds them. In Adler’s work, the machines are humanized while human figures become machines, and his forms continue to capture something essential today about our reality as hapless cyborgs confused about where “nature” ends and technological culture begins.
Not seen at the Ulrich since 1991, Adler’s work is long overdue for greater exposure and reassessment. This exhibition will be the first attempt anywhere to present Adler’s work in a retrospective fashion.
Zoe Beloff: Emotions Go to Work
This interactive multimedia installation investigates how technology is used to turn our feelings into valuable assets—what the artist calls the transformation of emotion into capital. Beloff is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works in New York City. Her projects often involve a range of media including films, drawings, and archival documents organized around a theme.
The exhibition, accompanied by a limited-edition book, is an exploration of the “dream life of technology” and of our imaginative and imagined relationships with machines—how we create them in our image, shape them to serve our desires, and how they, in turn, reshape us. Beloff will be at the Ulrich on February 20 to deliver her artist talk.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a film series co-curated by the artist and Rebecca Cleman of Electronic Arts Intermix (New York). The films, ranging from feature length works to YouTube videos, will investigate in further depth the complex relationship between humans and their technologies that the exhibition explores. The first installment of the film series takes place at 6 p.m. on Friday, January 24 at the McKnight Art Center on the WSU campus. Beloff will introduce and lead a Q&A for the February 21 screening.
A.P. Vague: Digital Palimpsests
This exhibition presents a series of experiments in which the artist considers the materials of image-making as aesthetic resources in themselves.
At the root of A.P. Vague’s inquiry are the questions of how we trust photographic images, how they communicate their meanings across distance, and how they create a sense of personal connection to remote events. Does a negative still bear the imprint of the moment it was exposed, even if the visual information is blurred beyond recognition? In the age of fake news, Photoshop, filters galore, and truthiness, what can we believe about an image and what can we trust the image-maker to reveal?
Solving for X=Representation: Slaying the Gerrymander
Solving for X is a series of exhibitions organized by the Ulrich to work with scholars across campus to help create visualizations of their research. This latest installment looks at the process of “gerrymandering,” the term given to district drawing done for the benefit of the people drawing the maps. Dr. Brian Amos, an Assistant Professor in Political Science at WSU, is helping to stop gerrymandering by using computers to automate the drawing of districts. Amos’s work has been dedicated to improving the algorithms available to researchers and activists on this front. He does this by identifying bias in existing approaches that may skew measurements in how gerrymandered a map is, and by incorporating Voting Rights Act protections for racial and ethnic minority groups into algorithms created for other countries without those protections.
Voice faculty member Castaldi to perform recital on Jan. 26
Voice faculty member Cristina Castaldi, soprano, and her pianist-husband, Gene Philley, will perform in recital at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 26, in Wiedemann Recital Hall.
The program will feature the works of Erich Korngold, Claude Debussy and Richard Strauss. Admission is free.
HCEA Cybersecurity Speaker Series presents Brig. Gen. David Weishaar
Join the Hub for Cybersecurity Education and Awareness to hear Brig. Gen. David Weishaar from the Kansas National Guard and learn more about Creating a Cybersecurity Workforce and Cyber Threat Responsibilities for the Kansas National Guard from 2-3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 29, in 264 John Bardo Center.
Find out more and register at wichita.edu/cyberhub.
Enroll in a Badge course today!
Enrollment is now open for the spring semester! You can enroll from now until April 13. Courses start Tuesday, Jan. 21. All coursework must be completed by May 7.
Please note: Scholarships are not available for spring 2020.
Badges are academic short courses of one credit hour or less that are designed for working, non-degree seeking professionals. They are online and self-paced. Badges allow students to demonstrate to employers their knowledge, skills and competencies in a subject area.
Students who successfully complete a badge will receive a digital recognition of their accomplishment that they can share on social media and link to a digital resume.
To enroll and view the badge course catalog, visit badges.wichita.edu. For questions, contact workforce@wichita.edu or 978-7579.
You can help prevent suicide
Learn how you can support your community with the #WSUWeSupportU Preventing Suicide Training. Each training lasts an hour-and-a-half, and gives you the tools you need to assist someone in need through the Share, Ask, Support method.
To sign up, visit the myTrainings tab on your myWSU, or go to wichita.edu/SuicidePrevention.
$10 Tee at the Shocker Store
Now through Saturday, Jan. 25, or while supplies last, you can grab the pictured T-shirt at the Shocker Store for just $10 to celebrate the new semester. RSC location only, not valid with other discounts or promotions.
Take an extra 10% off clearance merchandise at the RSC Shocker Store
Now through Jan. 25, take an extra 10% off already-marked-down clearance merchandise at the Shocker Store! Sale is valid at RSC location only.
Black and Yellow Days coming this spring
On Monday, Feb. 17, the Office of Admissions will host the first of two Black and Yellow Days this spring. Each semester, we invite high school juniors, seniors and college transfer students to this all-day event on campus where they have the chance to participate in sessions hosted by each academic college, tour campus and explore the hands-on learning opportunities available at WSU.
The event is $15 per student and $5 per guest, and includes lunch in Shocker Hall Dining. This spring, students can choose to attend Monday, Feb. 17 or Friday, April 17. Interested students can register at wichita.edu/visit and click on "Admissions Events."
Questions? Contact Sarah Brill, event coordinator and SAS advisor, at sarah.brill@wichita.edu.