The Pitt News T h e in de p e n d e n t st ude nt ne w spap e r of t he University of Pittsburgh
Bucs booted, but future is bright pg. 9
October 8th, 2015 | Issue 37 | Volume 106
BUSINESS SCHOOL CELEBRATES 20 YEARS Cristina McCormack For The Pitt News
A diehard buccaneer waves a Jolly Roger at PNC Park Wednesday. See pg. 3 Theo Schwarz | Senior Staff Photographer
GIVE IT THE SNIFF TEST With a $6.4 million grant, Pitt is leading a multi-field study to understand how animals use their sense of smell to recognize and navigate toward odors. | by Megan Tingley A rescue dog approaches a building collapsed into a pile of rubble. It has one mission: find a missing person. How does it know where to walk? The goal of a Pitt-led, multi-institutional project is to understand how animals use their sense of smell to recognize and navigate toward odors. On Sept. 21, the National Science Foundation awarded the team a three-year, $6.4 million grant as part of President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, which provides federal funding for research aimed toward understanding
the brain. Bard Ermentrout, a mathematics professor at Pitt, and one of the study’s principle investigators, said the project could lead to advancements in emergency rescue procedures. The grant and the study will run until 2018. The team’s ultimate goal is to determine how animals can recognize the smells of mates and food sources to see how the brain processes these signals. Ermentrout said he will develop algorithms to describe these behaviors. According to Ermentrout, if there’s a
more intuitive way to find landmines in Africa than by following rats on leashes, he’s determined to find it. “If you want to find a body in a building or landmines it would be nice if we could develop a more mechanical way of doing so,” Ermentrout said. At the Ideas Lab, a branch of the National Science Foundation that debuted in 2014 in Virgina, researchers from diverse backgrounds collaborated to resolve scientific questions by tackling them from different See Scents on page 2
On its 20th birthday, Pitt’s College of Business Administration has 2,000 more students, three more majors and three more certificate programs than when it first started. Pitt’s CBA meets the occasion, celebrating its growth as a school and focusing on the accomplishments of its alumni. For its 20th anniversary, the CBA is offering students a chance to reconnect with alumni and learn from their experiences. Yesterday at noon, faculty and notable alumni from the school took part in a webinar to celebrate this milestone. The webinar included an interview with Arjang Assad, the dean of the Katz Graduate School of Business. The webinar, which Audrey Murrell, the associate dean of the CBA, conducted, included a slideshow. The slideshow focused on the current obstacles business schools face and how both Pitt’s undergraduate and graduate business schools are tackling those obstacles. One of the obstacles Assad mentioned was whether or not business students receive a well-rounded education. The undergraduate and graduate business schools at Pitt offer students double-degree programs with the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and have increasingly focused on taking advantage of learning opportunities outside of the classroom. Deborah Good, a clinical assistant professor in the CBA, said over the past 20 See Business on page 2