EPP Tom Johnson Fellowship Recipients Spend Summer in Washington

      The Tom Johnson Washington Study Fellowship honors the memory of Tom Johnson, an Army (and Air Force) officer who built the physics program at West Point, and served with distinction in staff positions with the President’s Science Advisory Committee and the Defense Science Board. Dr. Johnson died in 1990, shortly before he could join the faculty in Engineering and Public Policy.
      EPP awarded two Tom Johnson Fellowships for undergraduate students to study and work in Washington during the summer of 2004.
      Michael Katz-Hyman, an ‘04 graduate with a major in physics, and a minor in Technology and Public Policy, used his Tom Johnson Fellowship to go to Washington to assess the extent of the contribution to scientific literature that has been made by research related to the Hubble Space Telescope. He gathered data for this independent project from research centers including the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, MD.
      Michael Galang, a Policy and Management major, and Technology and Public Policy minor, worked in the Media Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission. This Bureau supports the development of FCC policy, including licensing requirements, for cable tv, broadcast tv, and radio.
      Over the summer, the Tom Johnson Fellows, as well as students supported through the Milton and Cynthia Friedman Fellowship and other Carnegie Mellon students participated in three events coordinated by Alexandra Carr, Director of EPP’s Washington office. These included: a lunch meeting with Ms. Ann McFeatters, Washington Bureau Chief of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ; a meeting with Ms. Shere Abbott, Director of the Center on Science, Technology and Sustainable Development and Chief International Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); and a meeting with two Carnegie Mellon graduates, Ms. Gina Ikemoto, Research Analyst in the Education Division of the RAND Corporation, and Robert Button of RAND’s National Security Research Division.

Peha Mounts Effort to Improve
Communication for First Responders

      Jon Peha (EPP/ECE) provided the intellectual leadership for a policy panel discussion held in Washington on September 14, 2004 on the issue of how to improve interoperability among
the communication systems of first responders, such as police and fire departments. He served as moderator and speaker for a panel of 11 experts from federal and state government and
universities. Speakers presented their views on the primary causes of poor communication interoperability and discussed near-term technical solutions and policy needs. Keynote speaker for the event was Congressman Bart Stupak (D-MI).
      The policy panel, which met at the Reserve Officers Association on Capitol Hill, was convened by the New Millennium Research Council (NMRC), a network of policy experts who develop real-world solutions for policy makers, primarily in the fields of telecommunication and technology. For details on NMRC see www.newmillenniumresearch.org.

Environmental History of Pittsburgh.

      The book Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003) edited by Joel A. Tarr (History/EPP/Heinz) discusses the environmental history of Pittsburgh and includes chapters on the interaction of Pittsburgh’s natural and built environments, on air, water and land pollution, and on what may be called the city’s environmental ethos. All cities possess environmental stories but Pittsburgh exceeds most in terms of the scope of its pollution history and the extent to which its landscape has been altered and shaped. But while renowned in the past for its polluted environment, Pittsburgh today has managed to overcome many aspects of this history. The factors driving positive change include technological innovation, changing fuel types, and public policy. The collapse of the city and region’s steel industry, while viewed by many as an economic disaster, made possible cleaner rivers and air as well as development of the riverbanks for other purposes.

Annual EPP Graduate-Faculty Picnic

      Once again, more than 150 graduate students, faculty, staff and their families gathered on Friday of Labor Day Weekend at the home of Betty and Granger Morgan for a gourmet picnic to kick off the new academic year. Betty Morgan, who has been staging the annual gathering for 25 years, reports that next year’s picnic will be the last at the Morgan’s home. She’s told Granger “You can keep on being department head as long as you’d like, but I’m retiring at age 65!” Ph.D. alums, who have been thinking about coming back to join the picnic some time, should make plans accordingly.

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