Northwestern Reunion Celebration

    Election 2008: Inside the Issues

    Moderator: Les Crystal (J56, GJ57)

    Les Crystal joined The NewsHour in 1983, and was instrumental in preparing the program for its debut as the nation's first hour-long newscast.

    Formerly president of NBC News (1977-79), and executive producer of the NBC Nightly News (1973-76), Les spent 20-years with NBC serving as the chief producer of European news; participating in the press corps that covered President Nixon's historic 1972 visit to China; and serving as the news division's executive vice president. As vice president for affiliate news, Les oversaw the sizable expansion of news feeds from the network to affiliated stations. In 1976 and 1980, he was executive producer of NBC's election night and convention coverage, and he supervised all political and special news programming from 1980 to 1982.

    Born in Duluth, Minnesota, Les earned a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and began his broadcasting career in Duluth as a news writer for KDAL radio and television. He was later news director at both WFBG-TV/Radio in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and WFIL-TV in Philadelphia.

    In 1963, Les joined NBC in Chicago to produce WMAQ's nightly news and its Emmy-winning documentary series, "Dateline Chicago." In 1965, he joined The "Huntley-Brinkley Report" as Chicago regional manager, moving from there to New York in 1967 to serve first as the program's news editor, then associate producer. He was the Emmy-winning program's producer from 1968 to 1970.

    Les is married, has three children and lives in Scarsdale, New York.

    Panelists:

    David Figlio, who is a faculty member at the School of Education and Social Policy, is an expert on education policy and public economics. Dr. Figlio comes to Northwestern this year from the University of Florida, where he was the Knight-Ridder Professor of Economics. His research, which includes evaluations of preK programs, school accountability policies, and the effects of teacher expectations, has been funded by the National Institutes for Child Health and Human Development, National Science Foundation, U.S. government and private foundations. Dr. Figlio, who received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1995, is the inaugural editor of the journal Education Finance and Policy, as well as the author of numerous articles for top journals. He has also assisted foreign countries with development and evaluation of their education policies. In 2007 he was a visiting fellow at Exeter College and Department of Economics, University of Oxford.

    Professor Kimberly Gray joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University in 1995. She received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1988 and worked as a research engineer for the Lyonnaise des Eaux in Paris, France for 2 years. Gray has made chemistry the backbone of her research. Learning how to harness light energy to catalyze reactions to attack pollutants or make chemical fuels, tracing chemicals through food webs in the Great Lakes and figuring out how wetlands work – all of this falls under Gray’s investigative umbrella. Gray is a creative educator who strives to keep things interesting for both her students and herself, a collaborator with diverse faculty across the University, a committed mentor to young women in science and engineering, and a social advocate helping disadvantage individuals and communities. Her research and teaching is tightly interwoven with the many issues that underpin the drive toward sustainability. She is particularly interested in ecologically inspired design, especially as applied to cities.

    She was a recipient of the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. She was the Associate Director of the NSF Environmental Molecular Science Institute for Environmental Catalysis at NU from 1998-2005. Since 2003 she has been the Director of the Environmental Science, Engineering and Policy Program. She was the 1998-99 president of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors. In 2007 she received the McCormick Excellence Award in Research, Teaching and Citizenship. She was selected as the 2008-2010 Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer for her work in the areas of sustainability, energy and ecological restoration. Gray was chosen one of the 2008 Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellows by the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. She works closely with the Chicago Legal Clinic to solve environmental problems for low-income urban communities. Gray is the author of over 80 scientific papers and lectures widely on energy and environmental issues.

    Ellen Shearer is the William F. Thomas Professor in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and director and bureau chief for Medill News Service.

    She led the news service’s Powertrips investigative projects in 2004 and 2006, which created databases of privately sponsored congressional travel as part of the reporters’ investigative series of stories; it won an Investigative Reporters and Editors award. She also was a leader in the News21 project on privacy and civil liberties post-9/11; those stories won a special National Press Foundation citation and were picked up by hundreds of newspapers and TV stations.

    She created and directed Y Vote 2000: Politics of a New Generation, a project to cover the presidential campaign to engage young adults. She also led major reporting and research projects in 1996 and 2000 on why Americans don’t vote.

    She is co-author of the book “Nonvoters: America’s No-Shows,” has written chapters in five other books and is a regular contributor to “The American Editor” magazine. She coordinates judging for the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual awards and is secretary of the Washington Press Club Foundation.

    Before joining the Medill faculty, she was a senior editor at New York News, a consulting editor at Newhouse News Service, marketing executive at Reuters, and senior editor, bureau chief and reporter at United Press International.

     

    The Future of Architectural Engineering and Design

    Presenters:

    Laurence Booth

    David Van Zanten (Ph.D. 1970, Harvard; Professor) teaches courses in American and European architecture and urbanism after 1800. He has contributed to the exhibition catalogues The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (1975) and The Second Empire (1979-1980). His Designing Paris: The Architecture of Duban, Labrouste, Duc, and Vaudoyer won the 1988 Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. He extended this work in Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830-1870 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). His book Sullivan's City: The Meaning of Ornament for Louis Sullivan was published by W. W. Norton in 2000. He recently received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2001-02) to study the development of Paris, London, Vienna and Hamburg. Recently he held appointments at the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art (2006) at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (2008), both in Paris.

     

    Culture and the Brain

    Does culture influence the brain, or does the brain shape culture?

    Humans live in communities that can be characterized by specific patterns of behaviors. Such patterns of behaviors give rise to various structured activities, such as communication, the performing arts, and ritualistic practices that are considered manifestations of human culture. An important, yet less considered, aspect of culture is its relationship to the physiology of the host organism. While mechanisms of neural plasticity enable systematic shaping of the brain by activities of the outside world, cultural practices emerge from and are experienced within the limits of our brain. In this lecture, we will explore various interdependencies between culture and our brain, with the focus on music and language.

    Speaker:

    Patrick C. Wong, Assistant Professor
    Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders

    Patrick Wong’s research concerns central auditory processing and neurophysiology, especially speech perception and learning, auditory skill levels and deficits, and interactions between speech and music. The primary goal is to identify possible underlying neurophysiologic principles governing complex auditory perception and learning for developing effective treatment programs for auditory and speech processing deficits and second language instructions. It is supported by NIH and NSF.