Universities engineering talent

PhD student Giovanni Palmisano joined us in 2005 and is now completing a remarkable doctorate in chemical engineering at Palermo University. His talent, commitment and constancy of purpose will form the basis of a similarly great career in science. 

The term place refers to where the business will be located, or more generally, what channels will be employed to get the product or service to customers. Companies selling software to the financial sector will do well to locate in New York, London, and other major financial capitals to be close to companies in then-market. Companies that depend on recruiting specialized scientific and engineering talent will do well to locate near universities with excellent reputations in the needed talents. Of course, the virtual world of the Web has reduced somewhat the competitive advantage of physical presence or place. The Web permits customers almost anywhere to communicate, buy, and be serviced after the sale by companies that use e-mail, Web browsers, and other tools of online communication. 

This period also marked the expansion of scientific employment opportunities for African Americans outside of historically black colleges and universities (Atkins, 1949). These changes did not come without pressure from the federal government, however. In fact, much of the progress has been attributed to the efforts of the FEPC, which was mandated to draw on all of the United States human resources during a national crisis. In short, a critical shortage of scientists and engineers expedited the recruitment of African American scientific talent (A Monthly Summary of Events and Trends in Race Relations, 1945, p. 6). 

Should federal funds—not just NSF-derived, not just NIH (National Institutes of Healthj-derived funds, but all federal funds—be withheld from those universities that do not increase their faculty hires to reflect the diversity of today s pool of U.S.-granted chemistry Ph.D.s 7 As seen in Figure 6.1, women composed one-third of that pool in 1999 and have been present at more than 20 percent since 1985. Despite that year-in, year-out production of talent, NSF reported in 1998 that only 12.5 percent of the senior faculty (associate and full professors) in the natural sciences and engineering at U.S. universities and 4-year colleges were women.8... 

Our research on the use of ROP as a route to transition metal-based polymers has been supported by the Ontario Center of Materials Research (OCMR), the ACS Petroleum Research Fund (PRF), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Institute of Chemical Science and Technology (ICST). Research on Ihe detailed properties of the polymers is being carried out in collaboration with the Polymer Materials Science Research Group of Professor G. Julius Vancso at the University of Toronto. I would also like to acknowledge and thank my very talented and enthusiastic coworkers who have carried out this research and whose names are found in the references. 1 am also grateful to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for a fellowship (1994-1996). 

In 1927, Harley Earl started the Art and Color Section at General Motors Company. Henry Ford had the vision to realize the potential for car ownership and in the early part of the century ownership of a Model T Ford has enough to confer a high level of status on these customers. Harly Earl went beyond this, he realized that once car ownership was more universal, Americans would want more than reliability and low price. He transformed the automobile from an engineered object to a stylish artifact. This was a dramatic conceptual shift that has never been overturned. He went beyond the rational needs of consumers to a deeper desire and turned the car from a utility object into a realizable dream. Harley Earl had a talent for visualizing dramatic car bodies. He created a car for Fatty Arbuckle and one for Tom Mix that even came with a saddle. 

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