Education leaders, students share their ideas for change

January 3, 2012

Last fall ASU launched the 10,000 Solutions Project, a problem-solving platform anyone, anywhere, can use to confront local and global challenges. In the last few months, the collaborative online community has submitted more than 1,200 solutions. One of the most popular topics for users to consider is education.

Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO of Teach for America, recently submitted a solution to the 10,000 Solutions Project. “Education inequity is a pervasive problem all over the world,” Kopp states in her solution. Kopp’s idea about how to solve this global issue is Teach For All. Download Full Image

“What Teach For All is doing is working to build a global movement to ensure educational excellence and equity by accelerating the impact of organizations all over the world that are enlisting their nations’ most promising future leaders ... in addressing education inequity,” she says.

Many prominent ASU advocates for education have shared their solutions. ASU President Michael Crow and Mari Koerner, dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, both shared their ideas about how to improve the teaching profession.

“We need to find ways to produce new teachers,” Crow says. “A new teacher needs to be a person that is carefully selected, carefully advanced, moved forward in a new kind of way with an entirely different focus.”

10,000 Solutions also provides a venue for students to be more creative when thinking about how to solve education challenges. Instructor Stephanie Garcia embedded 10,000 Solutions within a course she teaches called “Entrepreneurial Educators.” She asked students to design a short “fast pitch” of their idea. Students then provided feedback to one another about their ideas.

Garcia finds the online platform useful and engaging. “I think the 10,000 Solutions platform is a great tool for collaboration within and beyond the university, and creating a space where these tools can be blended within a curriculum allows our students to experience this new collaborative space first hand.”

10,000 Solutions provides the engaged community necessary to support students in confronting real-world issues.

“I feel that the more we can model real-world experiences and challenges within the university, the better prepared our students will be when they leave the university setting,” Garcia says. “10,000 Solutions is taking online communication and collaboration to the next level by creating a space for social innovation to take place and grow.”

ASU students, staff, faculty and external community members can share their ideas about education or other topics by visiting 10000solutions.org.

Written by Paul Henne

Britt Lewis

Communications Specialist, ASU Library

britt.lewis@asu.edu

ASU scientists tapped to work with USC cancer researchers

January 3, 2012

Editor's Note: Arizona State University basketball will take on the University of Southern California on Jan. 5. The men’s teams will play at 7:30 p.m., in Los Angeles and the women’s teams at 6:30 p.m., in Tempe. Read more about ASU's collaborations with Pac-12 schools.

The National Institutes of Health have begun a multidisciplinary effort to gain a better understanding of how cancer develops, tapping scientists in fields ranging from medicine to physics. A research team led by Joshua LaBaer of Arizona State University is working with researchers from the University of Southern California in the program. Download Full Image

Scientists in 12 centers across the United States will investigate the physical laws of cancer, including cell growth control and response of therapy at different levels. ASU’s Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics (CPD) laboratory is a part of the Physical Sciences in Oncology Center at USC, whose principal investigators include the world-renowned bioinformaticist Danny Hillis and oncologist David Agus.

ASU’s LaBaer, director of the CPD, is one of the foremost investigators in the rapidly expanding field of personalized medicine and former director of the Harvard Institute of Proteomics. He was recently recruited to ASU’s Biodesign Institute as the first Piper Chair in Personalized Medicine.

Four research projects in the effort are underway at USC, focused on studying lymphoma as a model cancer system. ASU is involved in two of these projects: utilizing nucleic acid programmable protein arrays (NAPPA) to identify autoantibodies that arise during tumor development, and combining the power of NAPPA with surface plasmon resonance imaging to determine the kinetics of protein-protein interactions in various pathways involved in cancer development.

Promising advances in the area of personalized medicine have shown that life-threatening diseases are as distinct in character as the individuals they afflict. The Piper Center’s CPD was established with an eye toward overcoming the health care challenges posed by disease variance.

The center is developing new diagnostic tools to pinpoint the molecular manifestations of disease based on individual patient profiles. The strategy may not only improve therapeutic care but also reduce treatment costs.

Written by Sarah Auffret