Dean's Corner

by Mary Nisbet, Associate Dean

Spring Quarter is always such a busy and exciting time for our office. As well as all the activities associated with Commencement, we organize the Annual Undergraduate Research Colloquium on Thursday, May 12. This year we have added further enhancements to make it an even better showcase for the best in UCSBŐs undergraduate research and creative activities.

As in previous years, the backbone of the day will be the Poster Presentations in Corwin Pavilion. This event will be held over lunch time (from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.) and we hope that many of you will drop in on your way to lunch. This year we have (again!) a record number of presenters and have almost every discipline in the university represented, so you are guaranteed to find something of interest in the 120 presentations.

One of the new innovations this year is a group of oral presentations by undergraduate researchers to be held in the Multicultural Center Theater at 2 p.m. Each student presenter has been selected by a competitive process and again the entire campus is represented. Each of the College of Engineering, the College of Creative Studies and the three divisions of the College of Letters and Science – Humanities and Fine Arts, Mathematics, Life and Physical Sciences and Social Science, have a student presenter.

The other innovation this year is the establishment of a Keynote Speech at 4 p.m. in the Corwin Pavilion. We are very fortunate that Professor Finn Kydland, one of UCSB's newest Nobel Prizewinners, has agreed to give the speech. Professor Kydland is a faculty member in the Economics Department and some of you may already be lucky enough to have him teaching you in Economics 101 this quarter. We are delighted that Professor Kydland has agreed to speak at the Colloquium, especially since this will be his first public talk at UCSB since he won the Nobel Prize.

We hope that you will come to hear and see what undergraduates at UCSB have achieved and that, if you are not already doing so, you will be inspired to get involved in research yourself.

I wish you well for the rest of the quarter and that you will have a happy and fun summer.

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