Facilities Management seeks to win APPA Award The site audit team for the APPA Award for Excellence will be on the ASU-Jonesboro campus on March 28-30 to evaluate Facilities Management’s application for this most prestigious award. APPA (formerly the Association of Physical Plant Administrators) is the association serving educational facilities professionals. The APPA Award for Excellence is designed to recognize and advance excellence in the field of educational facilities. Originally established in 1988, the Award for Excellence is APPA's highest institutional honor and provides educational institutions the opportunity for national and international recognition for their outstanding achievements in facilities management. The award is designed to highlight the essential role of facilities operations in the overall institutional mission and vision. Award for Excellence nominations are evaluated using the same criteria applied through the Facilities Management Evaluation Program (FMEP) in the areas of leadership, strategic and operational planning, customer focus, information and analysis, development and management of human resources, process management, and performance results. Nominated institutions also submit to a site review conducted by an awards evaluation team. The Award for Excellence designation is valid for a period of five years. Arkansas State began work on this continuous improvement effort in 2003. The site audit team is Gregory Fichter from the University of Indiana and David Gronguist from Kansas State. Dr. Kher recently named chartered engineer Dr. Shubhalaxmi Kher, Electrical Engineering, has recently become a Chartered Engineer of the Institution of Engineers (India) (IE India). The Chartered Engineer title is based on her professional training,experience, corporate membership, and extensive contributions to thefield of electronics and telecommunication engineering for over 20years. Dr. Kher has been a member of IE India since 2001. The corporate membership criteria requires engagement in engineering or an industrial profession for at least 10 years in a position of responsibility, including work with wireless sensor networks, distributed algorithms, fuzzy logic, decision systems, genetic algorithms, and bioinformatics, with a number of international publications and presentations. IE India is a prestigious professional body that maintains bilateral agreements with several international professional societies including the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering (CSCE), and the Japan Society of Civil Engineers (JSCE). Winters elected president of national association Ray Winters, chair, Medical Imaging and Radiation Sciences, was recently elected president of the Association of Collegiate Educators in Radiologic Technology (ACERT) at the annual meeting in Las Vegas. ACERT is a group of more than 300 educators from across the nation whose purpose is to foster education in the profession, consider national policies for the profession and foster collective research. Winters will serve a two-year term as president and them move into a two-year term as chair of the board. Winters is currently vice president of ACERT. Dr. Kulkarni presents CoHSS lecture March 30 Dr. Veena Kulkarni, Sociology, will present a lecture as part of the College of Humanities and Social Science's spring seminar series on Tuesday, March 30, 4-5 p.m., Wilson 217C (the Konold Room). Dr. Kulkarni will present "Wives' Earning Contribution: The Case of Asian Households in the U.S." She will examine a notable feature in American family life--that of the steady rise of paid labor force participation by married women. Instead of revisiting the literature on race and ethnic differentials, largely limited to Black-White-Hispanic comparisons, Dr. Kulkarni will examine working wives in six major Asian groups, disaggregated by their immigration status. Her findings show significant differences between the foreign-born and the native-born and ultimately indicate that the dichotomous frameworks of gender-specialization (breadwinner-homemaker) versus economic independence may not always fully capture the heterogeneity in the patterns of Asian wives' contributions in the U.S. For details, contact series coordinator Dr. Veena Kulkarni, ext. 3331, or see the NewsPage release. Annual Social Work Month conference is April 2 The Department of Social Work and the College of Nursing and Health Professions will host the fourth annual Northeast Arkansas Social Work Month conference and awards ceremony on Friday, April 2, in Centennial Hall at ASU's Student Union, from 8 a.m. until 12 noon. The topic of this year’s conference is Narrative Therapy from a Strengths Perspective. This conference provides continuing education units (CEUs); participants will receive certificates of attendance for two contact hours. Registration begins at 8 a.m., and a welcome will be given at 8:30 a.m. The keynote speaker for the conference is Dennis Saleebey, DSW, Professor Emeritus of Social Welfare at the School of Social Welfare, University of Kansas. His keynote presentation, "Narrative Therapy from a Strengths Perspective," will begin at 9:30 a.m. Dr. Saleebey is an internationally renowned pioneer of the strengths perspective. He is the author and editor of five editions of “The Strengths Perspective in Social Work Practice,” and he is also the author of the widely used text, “Human Behavior and Social Environments: A Biopsychosocial Approach,” as well as five additional textbooks. At 11:15 a.m., the presentation of awards will begin. Awards will be presented for Social Worker of the Year, Student Social Worker of the Year, Public Citizen of the Year, and Agency of the Year. A Lifetime Achievement award will also be presented. Print a registration form and mail it to:  Attn: Ms. Jennifer Short, Spring 2010 Social Work Conference, P.O. Box 2460, State University, Arkansas  72467. For other details, contact Dr. Gauri Bhattacharya, Social Work, conference chair and director of ASU’s Bachelor of Social Work program, at ext. 3676, or see the NewsPage release. Back to the top