Dartmouth was ranked No. 12 in the Peace Corps' top 25 list of small schools with alumni currently serving as volunteers, the College announced on Friday. There are 17 undergraduate alumni from the College now serving in the Peace Corps, rivaling other small institutions including St. Olaf College, which ranked first in the small school category with 26 volunteers. The University of Washington and George Washington University came in first in the categories for large and medium schools, respectively. Since the Peace Corps was founded in 1961, 606 College alumni have participated as volunteers, according to a College press release.
Albert Erives, assistant professor of biological sciences and adjunct professor of computer science at the College, received an award and a $625,000 grant from the Faculty Early Career Development Program at the National Science Foundation, the College announced on Wednesday. The award honored Erives' commitment to teaching and research on regulatory DNA. The funding will allow Erives' team to hire additional graduate students from the molecular and cellular biology, ecology and evolution, and computer science graduate programs. The grant will also support Erives' "Genomic Circuitry" class, offered to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Officials at the University of Calgary, which was recently removed from the Chinese Ministry of Education's list of accredited institutions, suspect that the removal resulted from the University's decision to extend an honorary degree to the Dalai Lama last September, The Vancouver Sun reported Thursday. In April, officials from the Chinese consulate objected to the University's intention of honoring the Dalai Lama, which later fueled suspicions of the link to its disaccreditation. There has been no confirmation that the suspicions are true, because the Chinese government did not cite an official reason for the school's disaccreditation. The decision to bring in the Dalai Lama was not "intended to dishonour or disvalue our relationship with our Chinese partners or the Chinese community," Colleen Turner, the University's spokeswoman, told The Sun.
