Podcasts of recent interviews with Thayer School professors are available online. In “Blending Medicine and Engineering,” orthopedic surgeon Dr. Michael Mayor, a professor at both Dartmouth Medical School and Thayer, talks about his focus on engineering within orthopedics. He describes a current study of how bones respond to artificial joint implants. “More and more engineering disciplines are being called upon to design and apply specialty technologies to the problems patients have,” Mayor says.
He emphasizes the need for doctors with engineering backgrounds and engineers with medical knowledge. Engineering training, even if it’s only a few undergraduate courses, Mayor says, is helpful because it emphasizes research. “If you have that depth of understanding, you can interact better with patients,” Mayor says.
In another interview, “The WiFi Generation,” Ted Cooley ’82, Th’88, assistant professor and Thayer’s chief IT strategist, talks about wireless on campus. He says improved wireless access helps students work more efficiently, as when they gather data in labs and plug it into lab reports on their laptops at the same time.
In one research project, Cooley, who says that “more, better, faster” is the theme for wireless on campus, is trying to gain a better understanding of how the wireless network works. “The idea is that if I know exactly what’s going on in the network, then I can tune the amount of power that I transmit down to a more battery-friendly level,” he says.
A third podcast features Visiting Professor Quintus Jett talking about open-source organizing — ways individuals and groups are able to organize outside of big, bureaucratic organizations. Jett, who recently made a research trip to New Orleans, is using one hurricane-devastated neighborhood as a test case for his ideas about organizing. He theorizes that large disasters attract outside help, but if a disaster is too big, the enormity can be a disincentive to get involved because people don’t know where to begin. He says more people would do things in overwhelming situations if it were clear to them how they could be of assistance.
To download these and other podcasts, go to www.dartmouth.edu/~news/features/podcasts.
Launched March 22, Thayer’s new Web site welcomes visitors with the school’s fresh logo, bold photographs, energetic color, and of course, all the crucial information about what makes Thayer School a standout choice for prospective students.
