President's Report - Wentworth Institute of Technology

Johnston is hopeful that this will serve as a pilot for future
opportunities to engage in intensive summer teaching and
learning experiences.
Assistant Professors Lora Kim, Mark Pasnik, and Elizabeth Gibb,
along with the Center for Community & Learning Partnerships
(CLP) and other faculty members, visited New Orleans on two
occasions in 2007. Both trips included 20 Wentworth students
who were involved in designing and building components of the
People’s Environmental Center, a non-profit organization.
Over the last two years, 67 students have participated in the current
architecture study abroad program, which is based in Berlin and
led by a German architect and Wentworth faculty member Rolf
Backmann. During their residence in Berlin, students work closely
with German design and planning professionals, as well as with
German students through an institutional affiliation with the
Technische Fachhochschule Berlin.
Civil, Construction, and Environment
The Department of Civil, Construction, and Environment worked
with Shawmut Design and Construction on the planning,
development, and creation of a project room containing 91
workstations. Adjacent to this room is the “Shawmut Conference
Center” – a state-of-the-art multimedia conference room.
Assistant Professor James Lambrechts, together with Delgado,
obtained a grant from the Boston Mayor’s Office to coordinate the
efforts of three interdisciplinary Wentworth students. The students
developed field tests and refined and ran a pilot program to assess
and inventory the physical conditions of the street and sidewalk
environments throughout Boston. The eventual goal of this
program, should it continue, is to assess the conditions of each
block on every street throughout the entire City of Boston.
Associate Professor Larry Decker once again organized the state
meet of MATHCOUNTS – a national math enrichment, coaching,
and competition program for middle school students. Decker is
very involved with both the Metro west chapter and the regional
competition, which Wentworth has hosted for over ten years.
The program provided full four-year Wentworth tuition
scholarships for the top four winners.
For the third year running, Professor Mark Hasso spearheaded the
entrepreneurship lecture series, a weekly guest-lecture program
providing students the opportunity to listen to presentations by
industry experts. The five-speaker series was organized as part
of the Construction Business and Finance course and discussions
focused on experiences and perspective related to the start up,
development, and finance of a construction business.
Computer Science and Systems
Associate Professor Leonidas Deligiannidis and freshman student
John Larkin received the best paper award in the Human-Computer
Interaction track at the Human Systems Interaction Conference
that was held in Krakow, Poland in May 2007. They presented
their research results in new navigation techniques in gaming.
Deligiannidis has been instrumental in plans for a new state-ofthe-art
gaming lab which will provide students with an area to
write programs for computer games using the Microsoft XNA
framework. Students write their own games and play them
9