Campus Currents

News Briefs

TIGHT TEAMWORK: Yankee ingenuity and a whole lot of smarts helped propel the UNH Precision Racing team to a best-ever 26th place finish in the annual international Society of Automotive Engineering Formula race car competition in May. UNH's team of 14 mechanical and computer engineering undergraduates, who had devoted a full year to designing and building the race car, tested their mettle in a field of 120 teams from universities around the world, speeding to a sixth-place finish for fuel efficiency and a 10th-place tie for design.

ON ICE: An Inuit activist and her daughter, two Canadian Coast Guard officers, a climate scientist, and two polar bears will share the UNH stage in February 2014 in "Sila," by Chantal Bilodeau. The play, which includes puppetry and spoken poetry, won the first Woodward International Playwriting Prize awarded by UNH's Cultural Stages project, which encourages greater understanding of world cultures.

NEW ROLE: Senior vice provost for academic affairs Lisa MacFarlane was named Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs by President Mark Huddleston effective July 1. An accomplished scholar and leader who came to UNH as a professor of English in 1987, MacFarlane served most recently as director of the University Honors Program and of the American Studies program. Previously she held the Walt Whitman Chair at Utrecht University and directed the UNH Cambridge Summer Program. MacFarlane replaces John Aber, University Professor of environmental sciences, who returned to the faculty in June after four years in the provost's office.

HONOR: Joanne Burke has been named the first Thomas W. Haas Professor in Sustainable Food Systems. The professorship was established last spring with a $1 million gift to the UNH Sustainability Institute from a fund established at the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation by Durham philanthropist Tom Haas. A clinical associate professor of nutrition, Burke is an expert on community nutrition and dietetics education with an emphasis on food systems. Her primary responsibility as Haas Professor will be to advance the mission of Food Solutions New England, a regional food systems learning-action network.