2008 New Brunswick Campus Report Highlights
Report made to University Senate on January 23, 2009
by Philip Furmanski, Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
 

MARKERS OF EXCELLENCE:

• Members of our faculty have again been  honored through election to the most prestigious academies worldwide, including, among other: the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Austria
• Faculty have been singled out for highly competitive awards and fellowships, national and international—such as the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany,  the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Fulbright, Pew, and the American Academy.
• Our faculty members’ achievements can also be measured by the ever-increasing amount of external funding they receive for their research, which reached an all-time high last year for the University of $330 million, over 90% of which is awarded to New Brunswick.
• In Fall 2008, the combined SAT mean score for (matriculated) New Brunswick regularly-admitted first year students was a high of 1248. This mean is 240 points higher than the State of New Jersey SAT mean (1008) and 231 points higher than the national SAT mean (1017).
• Of the entering students in New Brunswick, 484 students were admitted with SAT score of 1400 or higher, and 114 were valedictorians or salutatorians.
• Our undergraduate and graduate students continue to garner individual awards; at this time we have students pursuing advanced work, both in the US and abroad, on fellowships such as Gates, Fulbright, American Council of Learned Societies, Mellon, the National Science Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and, from the German government, DAAD.
• Our graduate students in New Brunswick themselves brought in more than $2.2 million in external fellowships and grants to support their education and research.
• Our staff was recognized with awards for energy efficiency, recycling, and organizational leadership, and helped spearhead our wonderful program—Rutgers Against Hunger.

 
FACILITIES:

• Student housing in New Brunswick remains high on our list of priorities. Aside from continued upgrading and renovation of existing student housing, we are about to issue an RFP for construction of up to 1500 new beds on the Livingston campus and 500 beds on Busch just to meet current demand.
• Phase 1 of our three year classroom enhancement project began in Spring 2008. One hundred and ten classrooms, including eight major lecture halls on Douglass and Cook, were assessed for outstanding critical needs, from basic aesthetics, such as painting and ceiling tile replacement, to comprehensive refurbishing. Work began in the summer and has just concluded.  Phase II will begin at the close of the Spring semester.
• The renovation of the Livingston Student Center is underway, and the construction of the new Livingston Dining Commons should begin soon. These are important steps in fulfilling our pledge and meeting the needs of the students on that campus. It is also part of our long-term plan to expand the campus’s mission to become the university’s center for business and professional studies focused in the areas of social welfare, personal education, and economic development.
• An anonymous major gift of $13 million—the largest private gift in the university’s history—will support the construction of a new building for the Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick on the Livingston campus and the establishment of an endowed chair, the Bennett L. Smith Endowed Chair in Business and Natural Resources, named for the late geology professor who retired from Rutgers in 1974. That we received 11,000 applications for Fall 2008 for 300 seats in the newly-offered four year undergraduate program for New Brunswick students indicates the critical need for new space to serve the proposed growth of the program.
• Livingston Campus is also the site for the construction of a solar energy facility that will generate approximately 10% of the electrical demand of that campus and will reduce the university’s CO² emissions by more than 1,350 tons per year; nearly half of project will be subsidized by a rebate through the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities Clean Energy Program, and the university’s half of the investment will be recouped within seven years through energy efficiencies. This is the start of a major commitment to greening our campus.
• In September 2008, the Endocrine Research Building on the Cook campus opened. The endocrine research program brings together scientists from Rutgers and the UMDNJ Robert Wood Johnson Medical school in a number of areas, including animal sciences, nutritional sciences, genetics, molecular neuroscience, the Cancer Center, environmental and occupational health sciences, physiology, biophysics, and reproductive medicine to do both basic and clinical research. The focus of this group is to understand if there are links between specific endocrine diseases—which are more prevalent in the NJ/NY area than in other parts of the country—and environmental, social, and economic factors. The Center for Endocrine Research will also deliver community-based education about environmental factors and health, establish core laboratories to share cutting-edge technologies, and build collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry that may ultimately lead to discovery of cures for endocrine diseases.
• Cook Campus will also be the site of the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences’ new Institute for Food, Nutrition, and Health, which will focus broadly on this critical area. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has given the University a $10 million grant which will be used for building the facility that will bring together faculty across New Brunswick, in both basic science and clinical work, and including those not only from nutrition and food science but also from areas such as pharmacy, education, psychology, social sciences, and engineering. Building on the excellence already at Rutgers in these areas, one goal is to make the university the leader in this field globally.
• On the Busch Campus, construction will start this year for the Center for Integrative Proteomics Technologies, which will include new shared core instrument labs as a resource area for Rutgers and UMDNJ, our internationally renowned Protein Data Bank, and BioMaPS labs. Building upon the scientific potential of the Human Genome Project, this Center will bring together biomedical researchers who are working to characterize the structures and functions of proteins implicated in human disease and aging. It is anticipated that it will provide economic development and job growth in the state, and bring the university closer to our regional biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.

 
ACADEMIC OPPORTUNITES FOR STUDENTS:

• Now in their second year, the Byrne Seminars introduce first year students to our best faculty and their research, giving them the opportunity to understand what it means to be a student at a research university. In fall 2008, 1155 students signed up for one of the 67 seminars.
• The New Brunswick campuses’ continue their strong emphasis on internationalizing the curriculum to make our students more competitive for a global economy. For example, in 2008 the Office of the SAS Dean of International Programs and with support from the Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and others, organized a series of coordinated events in celebration of the 60^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, under the rubric of “Human Rights: Contents and Discontents.” This series, which continues through spring 2009, brings to campus scholars, politicians, policy-makers, activists, and artists focused on human rights, giving our students the opportunity to explore, discuss, and learn about human rights issues and their impact on many aspects of human existence, such economic, health-care, and environmental issues.
• A newly formed Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literatures in the School of Arts and Sciences will meet a growing need at Rutgers and in the state and country at large for instruction in these less commonly taught languages and will offer courses on Arabic, Yoruba, Swahili or Zulu literature in their respective African languages, thus recognizing their role in world literary heritage and translation processes across cultures.
• Other new programs that were developed and approved this year are those approved in the Business School-Newark and New Brunswick, including the four year undergraduate programs mentioned earlier, the B.S./MBA Business dual degree program, and the B.A. or B.S./MBA in Science/Business; at the Graduate School-New Brunswick the Master of Engineering (M.E.) in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, with an option in Pharmaceutical Engineering and Science, and many others.
• The excellence of the New Brunswick graduate programs in the humanities was recognized this year by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in awarding the School of Arts and Sciences nearly $3 million, the largest grant the foundation has given to the University. This grant targets six humanities programs to help in recruitment of the most qualified graduate students and to support their success in completing their doctorates, allowing us to compete with the best private institutions to recruit and retain the nation’s best scholars. More than 100 students in art history, comparative literature, English, history, linguistics, and philosophy will benefit from this program either through stipends, summer research and writing grants, or competitive dissertation fellowships.

 
NOTABLE EXTERNAL GRANTS AND CONTRACTS:

• Rutgers-New Brunswick continues to be a national leader in transportation education and research. The Federal Highway Administration awarded the Rutgers Center for Advanced Infrastructure and Transportation (CAIT), a competitive 5-year contract worth up to $25.5 million for their Long Term Bridge Performance program. This is phase one of a 20 year research study to expand quality information available on bridge performance, such as improved life-cycle cost and predictive models, better understanding of bridge deterioration and more effective maintenance and repair strategies. The total value of this grant could reach $150 to $180 million. But, more than money, it places the university at the center of the most critical aspects of dealing with our nation’s vital infrastructure and means that students who study here in the these fields will be the most experienced, up-to-date, and sought after for jobs in this area.
• The National Science Foundation awarded a grant of more than $2 million to the Graduate School of Education (GSE) in New Brunswick to continue a long-running research project on how children learn mathematics.
• The Rutgers University Cell and DNA Repository (RUCDR) received two major awards worth more than $57.8 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). One will fund genetic studies of mental disorders and the other will support investigations into the causes of digestive, liver and kidney diseases, and diabetes.
• The Rutgers Energy Institute integrates Rutgers’ expertise in science, engineering, economics, and policy, putting it at the forefront of alternative energy research. This Institute promises to be a central force in the transition from 20^th century technologies to those that sustain economic growth and preserve the integrity of the environment.
• The National Science Foundation awarded the Office for the Promotion of Women in Science, Mathematics and Engineering at Rutgers a $3.7 million grant to increase the representation and advancement of women in academic careers in the STEM areas. The grant will be used to encourage “bottom-up” initiatives from senior scientists on our faculty, who will apply for mini-grants to carry out their own plans for strengthening existing women’s networks and fortifying their ties to other campus networks.