Bartram to speak at University Day Oct. 12
| September 26, 2012 | |
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill community will celebrate its history as the nation’s first public university on University Day, Friday, Oct. 12, Carolina’s 219th birthday.
Dr. Jamie Bartram
Jamie Bartram, PhD, director of the Water Institute at UNC, will give the keynote speech for the convocation, which begins at 11 a.m. Classes will be canceled from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Chancellor Holden Thorp will preside. University Day marks the laying of the cornerstone of Old East, the nation’s first state university building, in 1793 and the beginning of public higher education in the United States. The campus first celebrated University Day in 1877.
The Water Institute is a founding member of the new U.S. Water Partnership, a public-private group formed to share U.S. knowledge, leverage and mobilize resources and facilitate cross-sector partnerships to find solutions to water accessibility challenges, especially in the developing world.
Bartram, who also is the Don and Jennifer Holzworth Distinguished Professor of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the Gillings School of Global Public Health, has more than 20 years’ experience in international policy, research and advisory work in public health and disease prevention, especially in relation to environment and health and water supply and sanitation.
Other University Day convocation highlights will include the presentation of Distinguished Alumna and Alumnus Awards, a practice begun by the faculty in 1971 to recognize Tar Heels who have made outstanding contributions to humanity.
This year’s recipients are public health specialist Gregory S. Allgood, PhD, alumnus of the public health school; oral historian Mary Marshall Clark; health and human services administrator Deborah Parham Hopson, PhD, also a UNC public health graduate; and Habitat for Humanity chief executive officer Jonathan T.M. Reckford.
Likewise, the Edward Kidder Graham Faculty Service Award, established by the Faculty Council in 2011 to recognize outstanding service by a faculty member, will be presented to Ferrel Guillory, professor of the practice of journalism in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Guillory, who founded the Program on Public Life in 1997 to build bridges between the academic resources at Carolina and the governmental, journalism and civic leaders of North Carolina and the South, also is an adjunct faculty member in the department of public policy. He will receive the award in honor of his distinguished service to the state, the nation and the University.
The award was named in memory of Edward Kidder Graham, University president from 1914 to 1918, who committed the University to public service by vowing to “make the campus co-extensive with the boundaries of the State.”
In keeping with a tradition of celebrating milestones on University Day, the new state-of-the-art Genome Sciences Building, part of a campus-wide research initiative begun in 2004, will be dedicated at 3:30 p.m. Chancellor Thorp will host the public event, with remarks followed by a reception and building tours.
The seven-story, 228,000-square-foot building creates new space for interdisciplinary genomics research, housing more than 400 faculty members and researchers in the College of Arts and Sciences, and the schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy and public health.
The building is part of the Bell Tower Development, a mixed-use project that advances key concepts identified in the campus master plan.
For more information about University Day, refer to www.unc.edu/universityday.
UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health contact: Linda Kastleman, communications editor, (919) 966-8317 or linda_kastleman@unc.edu.
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