NEWS
6 April 30, 2013
TIER ONE: More funding for research, scholars on the way From Page 4
committee and awaiting vote in the House. Changes To improve academic standards, UTSA is also actively recruiting more scholars and researchers, which was largely kick-started by H-E-B’s recent $5 million donation to the cause. The donation brought HE-B’s total support to over $7 million and is the largest private challenge gift in UTSA history. Secondly, the donation is also a matching one, bringing the total funding brought in from this particular exchange to $10 million. Frederick stated that the gift is important to buildup the endowed positions at UTSA. An endowed position is one backed by a financial investment, and as that investment makes dividends, that position’s holder may use the money for educational or research
purposes. “Most of the time it’s used for research purposes, and in many cases it’s used to pay students who are working on research with that faculty member,” said Frederick. “I think the greater benefit is that it makes us competitive for hiring the best faculty... so we can ensure that we’re providing our students with the opportunity to interact with the best faculty.” Included in the faculty recruitment is Dr. Gerry Sanders, a professor at Rice University, soon to be the new dean of the UTSA College of Business. “I have been extremely impressed by the caliber of students that I’ve met and the professionalism of the faculty, administrators and staff at the UTSA College of Business,” Sanders told UTSA Today. “The university’s momentum toward top-tier status is clearly evident, and I am thrilled to be a part of this journey.” “I think Dr. Sanders is going
to bring good leadership to that college and help make sure that our business programs are keeping up with the needs of the San Antonio and greater community,” commented Frederick. Sanders will officially complete his move to UTSA July 1. Research Despite incoming faculty changes, an internal move propels UTSA’s research with the appointment of Donovan Fogt, associate professor in the health and kinesiology department, to the newly created position director of undergraduate research. According to Fogt, “The Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) was created as part of the restructuring of the Office of the Vice President for Research to promote the visibility and breadth of research opportunities for undergraduate students in all academic disciplines.”
“Our goal is there is to get more and more undergraduates involved in research activities and open for them the world of discovery and innovation,” stated Frederick. “These are the kinds of things that go beyond the classroom.” According to Frederick, the newly created division has been in the works for around a year, and has finally been settled. Frederick explained the focus on building up research in the university, as simply the part of Tier One status that is not as fundamentally strong at UTSA. “The university is a place devoted to learning... there’s lots of ways you can learn something: you can learn it in a book, learn it because somebody told you or learn it because you went out and found the answer yourself,” said Frederick. “The first one, you don’t need a university for that if you know the right books to look at. (The second) universities can help you with if you learn correctly
from a professor.” “But the question, how do you learn when the answer isn’t known yet? That’s something special,” said Frederick. “And that’s what being a research university allows us to do. It allows us to have a community of active scholars that understand what it takes to go out and find answers that don’t exist yet and can help students learn how to do that as well.” Addressing the concerns of overlooking fundamental education for research, Frederick commented that while tenure is more affirmed by research standards than it has been in the past, no amount of outstanding research will give a faculty member tenure if he or she isn’t a good teacher. Upon employment, UTSA faculty members currently have five years to gain tenure. “It is really important to us that we have faculty here that not only are actively developing new ideas and discovering new
things, but are also quite devoted to sharing that experience with students,” Frederick said. Into the Future In hopes of competing on the Tier One stage in Texas, UTSA aims to equalize student opportunity and growth with that found on UT-Austin and Texas A&M University campuses. In comparison, UT-Austin’s return rate for second-year students is 93 percent, while UTSA’s rate is 73 percent, according to College Board. Texas A&M University’s acceptance rate is 67 percent, only 6 percent lower than UTSA’s. However, UT-Austin’s rate is one of the lowest in Texas, at 47 percent, 20-23 percent lower than both Texas A&M University and UTSA. Can UTSA compete? “In some areas we already do,” stated Frederick. “But across the board, it’ll take a few years. It’s like cooking a good stew; you have to give it time.”
CPRIT: No guarantee of more grants TEXAS: New laws geared for safer roads
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Grey told KUT. “So it actually goes through the clinical trial process all over again and provides even greater benefit. And so it takes—for some drugs, some therapies—decades.” Although medical research does not yield significant results for many years, CPRIT has already begun to make notable strides in cancer prevention. For example, it awarded a $1.6 million grant to health organizations in the panhandle. “We increased our educational outreach by 66 percent over a three year period,” said
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Leticia Goodrich of the Amarillo Area Breast Health Coalition, one of the groups who benefited from the grant, according to KUT News. “We were able to increase our percentage of mammograms by 400 percent.” Although voters approved the founding of CPRIT to fund billions of dollars of research, the financing of salaries for administrators and scientists was not agreed upon. To help solve this issue, the Legislature created the CPRIT Foundation in 2009. The foundation, a separate entity from the insti-
tute, was essentially a private, nonprofit organization whose purpose was to solicit donations for the institute’s staff. The ultimate goal of this was to ensure that Texas was recruiting the field’s top talent. “It was an agreement that all but guaranteed questions about conflicts of interest would arise,” reported the Austin American-Statesman. To continue reading this article visit ww.paisano-online.com
ironic because one of the traffic accidents that I was in — not that I’ve been in a lot — I was a distracted driver. I was eating a taco and my hot sauce fell to the floor and I reached down to pick it up and ran into the back of a parked car.” Supreme Court bans warrantless blood draws On Wednesday, April 17, the Supreme Court ruled the fact that blood-alcohol level decreases over time does not warrant a forced blood test for DWI cases. While the ruling was “extremely narrow” and did
not specifically pertain to Texas law, according to Bexar Country First Assistant District Attorney Cliff Herberg, it does leave many questions unanswered. “In an abundance of caution, we’re going to be changing our procedures,” he said to the Express-News, and said that prosecutors will now advise police to seek warrants in all felony DWI cases. Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed said on her twitter account April 24 that the decision would not affect San Antonio’s no refusal program. The ruling was almost im-
mediately used in the local case involving Christopher Hughes Lamar, who killed a mother and her 10 year old son in a crash on I-10 on March 23. Lamar had a blood alcohol level of .23, three times the legal limit, and also had other drugs in his system. State District Judge Melisa Skinner, who is presiding over the case, denied the motion to dismiss the evidence from the blood tests, saying she didn’t believe the Supreme Court ruling pertained to the case.
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