Dear Friends of GCI,

May is always a bittersweet month at the Great Cities Institute. We welcome new Faculty Scholars and begin to say goodbye to those researchers who have been with us for the past year. We also celebrate the graduation of students who have made significant contributions to the Institute and our programs throughout the last year. The following students are graduating this year:

Rajiv Ghosh, College of Business Administration
Lashunda Gonzalez, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs
Youngjoo Kim, College of Education
Xin Li, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs
Nameeta Lobo, College of Engineering
Bing Luo, College of Business Administration
Brigid Rauch, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs
Lesley Roth, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs
Ginger White, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs
Todd Wolcott, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs

We wish all of them much success.

This month also finds many of us "on the road" as it were, with Great Cities Fellow Louise Cainkar attending a meeting of the Social Science Research Council, Section on International Migration, in Washington DC, to develop a Carnegie Corporation funded project on migration and national security. Along with GCI Fellow Wim Wiewel and UIC Neighorhoods Initiative Associate Director Nacho Gonzalez, I will be at the Lincoln Institute to continue our international project with the Lincoln Institute on the "university as developer."

David Perry Professor and Director

News

June course offerings for the Online Certificate Program in Nonprofit Management Mastering Grantwriting: How to Write a Winning Proposal - This online course brings participants together to work with an expert grant writer, who provides the class with the information needed to write a successful grant proposal. The course runs from June 17 - July 28. For more information on the program, please visit http://cnm.cuppa.uic.edu or contact Katie
Kaminski at katiek@uic.edu, 312.355.0423

The Great Cities Institute is pleased to announce the faculty scholars for the 2004-2005 academic year:

Tourist-Host Interactions in Sub-Saharan Africa: How Meanings Make a City
Benet DeBarry-Spence
Assistant Professor, Department of Managerial Studies, College of Business Administration

The Reproductive and Sexual Health of Latinas in Chicago: A Community Assessment
Elena Gutierrez
Assistant Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies/Gender and Women's Studies
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Telecommunications in the Industrial City
Richard John
Associate Professor, Department of History, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Rust Belt Revitalizing: What Determines Who Lives Where? The Inaugural Chicago Area Study and Beyond
Maria Krysan
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Untapped Talent: The Implications of Workforce Diversity Initiatives Designed to Mitigate the Underutilization of Women in Urban Government Workplaces
Sharon Mastracci
Assistant Professor, Public Administration Program, College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs

From Hunger Strike to High School: Success and Challenges across Communities in Creating a Neighborhood School
David Stovall
Assistant Professor, Policy Studies, College of Education

Promoting the Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning of Urban Children
Roger Weissberg
Professor, Department of Psychology, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Calendar

There will be a farewell reception for Wim Wiewel on May 10, from 4:30-6:30 pm, in Rooms A-B of the Student Services Building.

People

Michael Pagano, Faculty Fellow, has released his book, Terra Incognita, coauthored by Ann Bowman (University of South Carolina). The book is published by Georgetown University Press. Pagano also spoke at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in San Antonio on April 30. The topic of the lecture was "State and Local Government: The Challenges of the Fiscal Relationship."

Cynthia Barnes-Boyd, Director of the UIC Neighborhoods Initiative, has been elected to the Board for Campus Community Partnerships for Health.

Irma M. Olmedo, Faculty Scholar, gave a presentation at UCLA in April on bilingual children's language development based on research she has conducted in Chicago. She currently has two chapters in two books based on related research: "The Bilingual Echo: Bilingual Children as Language Mediators in a dual language school", in Latino Language and Literacy in Ethnolinguistic Chicago (M. Farr, Editor, in press) and; "Storytelling and Latino elders: What can children learn?" in Many Pathways to Literacy (S. Long & D. Volk, Editors, Routledge).

Faculty Scholar Spotlight

Eric Welch is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program in Public Administration at the University of Illinois at Chicago where he teaches a variety of public management and policy courses. His research interests focus primarily on electronic government and environmental policy and management. He is currently engaged in two multi-year funded projects, one in Japan on comparative voluntary environmental policy and one in Hong Kong on globalization of public bureaucracies. Eric arrived at UIC in 1999 after research stints at the US Center for Economic Studies, the Center for Technology and Information Policy at Syracuse University, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and the Japan National Institute for Environmental Studies. For more information, please contact Eric Welch at ewwelch@uic.edu.