Franklin Hall to host year’s first Board meeting

Wall Street’s recent instability will prompt a discussion about its impact on Kent State during tomorrow’s Board of Trustees meeting in Franklin Hall.

“We will spend a little bit of time talking about how we proceed with our investments given the way the market has performed recently,” said David Creamer, senior vice president for administration.

Creamer said the troubles facing insurance companies have caused a “ripple effect” that indirectly affects Kent State.

“We want to be more assured of getting favorable interest rates than we’ve experienced in the past week,” he said.

The Finance and Administration Committee will also seek Board approval for the purchase of the Altdoerffer property near Kent State’s East Liverpool regional campus to ease the student parking situation.

“It’s in an older industrial town,” Creamer said. “There’s not a lot of parking near there.

“Many of the students today have to find parking on the streets.”

Laura Bartolo, faculty member in the College of Arts and Sciences, said the college will ask for Board approval of the establishment of the Center for Materials Informatics.

Bartolo, who will be become the center’s director, said the Center for Materials Informatics will contribute to effective material data collection and integration to support innovative materials, computation and experimentation.

She said it will include collaborations among the biological sciences, chemistry and physics departments.

“Materials informatics is an emerging interdisciplinary field which draws on the expertise of many disciplines,” she said. “It seeks to facilitate the exchange, analysis and dissemination of materials data to support more comprehensive understanding of materials behavior and accelerate development of materials with novel properties in such areas as biomaterials and drug delivery.”

Other decision items on the Board of Trustees’ agenda include:

n the establishment of a music technology major within the bachelor of science degree at Stark campus.

n the establishment of a respiratory therapy technology major within the associate of applied science degree at Ashtabula campus.

n the establishment of an Allied Health management technology major within the associate technology studies degree at Trumbull campus.

The Board of Trustees meeting begins at 1 p.m. in the Hirsch Lab in Franklin Hall.

Contact administration reporter Jackie Valley at [email protected].