ECU Report
News from around campus



Finnish students Arto Kaukko
and Mervi Koistinen. Below,
ECU students Josh Hall, Matt
Leggett and Korie Amberger
find the Oulu campus a bit colder.




Our semester
in Finland (and
vice versa)

It was an unusually warm winter day in Greenville when the president of the University of Oulu in Finland stopped by to renew his school’s student exchange program with East Carolina. Many ECU students were wearing flip-flops and shorts, including some of the nine Oulu students enrolled at ECU this semester.

It was 50 degrees colder that day in Finland, but ECU student Korie Amberger, an anthropology major from Kinston, still wanted to get outside to see more of his home-away-from-home. He tried ice-skating and later went for a run. “That… was, like, wow,” he wrote in his blog. “My eyelids kept freezing together and I was covered with ice when I was done. I need to get some goggles for sure.”

The student exchange program between East Carolina and Finland’s second-largest university is an example of a new emphasis at ECU on providing students with international experiences. In 2004, the university adopted a five-year plan to increase international programs, including international exchange students, student study abroad programs and faculty research and teaching opportunities. With that groundwork now in place, “next year has been declared the year of living abroad,” says International Programs Director Terry Rodenberg.

Rodenberg says his goal is to double to 500 the number of foreign students attending ECU by 2009 and to have at least 300 of our students studying abroad. Fifty-three ECU students were studying abroad this academic year, 19 of them in England.

ECU created an international dorm on campus within Jones Residence Hall last fall, and the university redesigned and expanded its web site to offer more detailed information about its international programs. ECU students can use the site to take virtual tours of nearly 70 foreign campuses offering accredited programs. For foreign students coming to Greenville, the site offers practical tips not only on academics but also on making friends, dating, tipping and rules on drinking alcohol.   

What’s it like studying overseas? “So far it has been really nice here, getting to dive into a new culture and experience a whole new lifestyle,” says Matthew Leggett of Grifton, another of the three ECU students at the University of Oulu. “The one thing I told myself when I got here is that you can’t look at this culture as being bad or wrong, you just have to except that it is all different and I think that is why I enjoy it here so much.”

Amberger is chronicling his experiences in Finland at his blog.



Researcher wins NIH grant
An elderly woman falls at home and breaks her hip. Weakened by the injury and long recovery, she develops pneumonia and dies. Would you say that the cause of her death was the pneumonia or the fall? ECU researcher Sherri Jones says the real culprit was the dizziness, one of several related maladies known as vestibular disorder. Treating dizziness might prevent thousands of injuries and deaths among seniors, she believes.

Dr. Jones, an associate professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders in the School of Allied Health Sciences, is researching the role genes may play in dizziness and imbalance, funded by a $1.4 million research grant from the National Institutes of Health.

She thinks the answer lies hidden in the ears of mice, whose genes and inner ear are very similar to humans. Her early research yielded encouraging results, so now she’s studying additional mouse strains and adding anatomy and genetic components to her work.

She and her collaborators are looking specifically at strains they initially identified to characterize the dysfunction in detail, which could lead to mapping the chromosome contributing to gravity receptor dysfunction. Of particular interest is identifying mouse strains with abnormal balance but normal hearing and the opposite—deaf mice with normal balance.

“Our studies suggest that there may be some unique genes for that to happen,” said Jones, a license audiologist. “If it’s a gene, I want to find it.”


Top honors for ECU ads
You might have been in the waiting room of your dentist’s office recently, thumbing through the latest Time or Sport Illustrated, when you saw a full-page ad about health care at East Carolina University. That ad, along with others about teacher education, research, and construction at ECU, appear regularly in a number of national and regional magazines. They also appeared earlier this spring in major newspapers across North Carolina.

The series of image ads, produced by University Marketing and the Department of University Publications, received top honors in two competitions this winter. The ads won the Grand Award for paid advertising in the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education III District 2006 competition and the Admissions Marketing Report Gold Award for magazine advertising series in its twenty-first annual Admissions Advertising Awards competition.

The ads highlight several of the university’s points of pride and were designed both as teaching moments and opportunities to showcase the good works and wealth of opportunity that exist here. In addition to Time and Sports Illustrated, they have appeared in Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, Our State, and Metro.

University Publications, which designs East magazine, also received a CASE Special Merit Award and an Admissions Marketing Report Bronze Award for a student recruitment viewbook for the School of Art and Design. The department won CASE Special Merit Awards for an East Carolina MBA program advertisement and a booklet for the dedication of the new Perkins and Wells Memorial Organ at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Greenville. Admissions Marketing Report gave a Bronze Award for a billboard advertising the MBA program and a Merit Award for a booklet about East Carolina’s doctoral program in coastal resources management.


Extending lives
A new study led by an ECU physician gives added hope to the more than 7,000 women who die each year in the U.S. from endometrial cancer. The study found that giving two chemotherapy drugs to women after surgery for an advanced form of the cancer reduces the risk of recurrence by 29 percent and extends survival by 32 percent compared with results from current treatments.

The lead author of the study, published online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, is Dr. Marcus E. Randall, professor of radiation oncology at ECU’s Brody School of Medicine and director of the Leo W. Jenkins Cancer Center.

Endometrial cancer is the most common gynecologic cancer in the United States. The American Cancer Society estimates that this year 40,880 women will be diagnosed with the disease and 7,310 will die.

Dr. Jonathan Dembo pulls a protective glove over his hand before carefully removing Specimen No. 1283-1297 from the vault in the Special Collections Department at Joyner Library. The artifact is more than 400 years old and shows the effects of centuries of weathering but there’s no mistaking what it is. It’s a gold signet ring with a lion crest. Dr. Dembo, who heads Special Collections, gently slips the ring on his finger and demonstrates how it was used to emboss the lion figure into drops of hot wax to seal a letter.

The ring probably was last used for that purpose by a member of the doomed Lost Colony, which disappeared into the mists of time around 1585. Two of the colonists were members of the Kendell family, whose crest was a prancing lion. ECU archeologist David Phelps discovered the ring and other artifacts at a site near Buxton on the Outer Banks, which an increasing number of experts believe was the site of the Lost Colony. A flintlock, coins, pipes and other artifacts consistent with the colonists also were found there.

Today the ring holds a new significance —as a symbol of ECU’s growing reputation in coastal archaeology. Before discovery of the Lost Colony relics, the university grabbed headlines around the world for its work recovering an 18th century shipwreck believed to be the Queen Anne’s Revenge piloted by the pirate Blackbeard. ECU researchers also discovered the oldest shipwreck ever off the coast of Alaska.

Now, ECU trustees have approved plans for the Coastal Studies Institute, a project between ECU, the UNC System and Dare County to develop 40 acres in Manteo. The project has received $1.3 million for planning.




Clark’s life becomes a made-for-TV movie
That’s “Friends” star Matthew Perry palling around with school teacher extraordinaire Ron Clark ’94, whom Perry will portray in a new TV movie about the ECU graduate’s stunning success teaching disadvantaged children. Turner Network Television will air “The Ron Clark Story” on Aug. 13 as the next installment in its Spotlight Presentation series. TNT says the two-hour biopic closely tracks Clark’s experiences as a freshly minted ECU education major who, by chance, ended up teaching at a rural elementary school in eastern North Carolina. His innovative teaching methods garnered worldwide attention. Later, Clark taught at an inner-city school in Harlem, where he produced similar successes. His 2003 book, The Essential 55, was a best seller. Clark’s latest project is the Ron Clark Academy, a new private school in inner-city Atlanta.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. Pictures is filming a moviea bout the aftermath of the 1970 Marshall University plane crash, with actor Matthew McConaughey starring as the football coach who led the team the following year. Seventy-five players, coaches, boosters and reporters died in the crash, which occurred on the team’s return flight after a loss to East Carolina in Greenville.


ECU graduates to new diploma
There’s something unique about the roughly 2,500 students who will graduate this spring: their diplomas will be different than anything ECU has bestowed in more than 20 years.

The most noticeable thing about the redesigned diplomas is that they are bigger—11 by 14 inches compared to the 8.5 by 11 inch sheepskins that the university has handed out since 1984. Another noticeable change ist hat the student’s major will be prominently displayed. Also, the documents are being printed on higher-quality stock, the lettering is ina new typeface and the ECU seal has moved to a more prominent position.

“People who see it say it looks more like what a diploma should look like,” said Assistant Vice Chancellor Angela Anderson. Alumni who want a copy of their diploma in the new format should wait until after June 1 to make the request through the registrar’s office.


ECU braces for dental school
North Carolina’s rank as 47th among the states in the ratio of dentists to population would improve dramatically if the General Assembly funds construction of a new dental school at ECU. Universityt rustees officially requested $80 million for the project and asked the UNC System Board of Governors to add the money to next year’s budget.

Trustee Robert Hill said the mission of a dental school at ECU would be similiar to that of the Brody School of Medicine which trains family doctors and encourages them to remain in eastern North Carolina. The dental school will admit students interested in serving in rural areas.Like the medical school, it will only admit North Carolina residents,he said.

The university plans to develop eight to 10 oral health centers in rural areas throughout the state where dental students will learn and work during their fourth year of study. If state funding is secured this year, the new dental school could admit its first class in three years.

Dr. Greg Chadwick,East Carolina University associate vice chancellor for oral health and a former president of the American Dental Association, was pleased. “This obviously is the first official step, and I can’t tell you how excited I am about this step,” Chadwick said. “The first step is usually the hardest.”




Road Pirates, from left: Louis Sewell, Lanny
Wilson, Stan White, Tom Betts, Marvin Blount


Pave my street, Matey!
Old college ties often are cited as clues to influence in business and politics, but who would have thought it mattered in getting your street paved? Not that we would ever suggest it might help, but it probably wouldn’t hurt to mention your ECU ties when doing business with the N.C. Board of Transportation.

There are five ECU alumni currently sitting on the 19-member transportation board, the body that oversees the DOT and its $1.6 billion annual budget. There also are five UNC Chapel Hill graduates on the board, which leaves nine seats for all the other schools to fight over.

Transportation Board members are appointed by the governor to represent specific regions of the state, and the ECU group is responsible for everything east of I-95. RBC Centura banker Thomas A. Betts Jr. ’68 of Rocky Mount represents the northern counties along the interstate. Beach developer Stan M. White ’75 of Nags Head represents the northern coastal counties. Attorney Marvin K. Blount III ’93 of Greenville represents the east-central counties from I-95 to the coast. Developer Lanny T. Wilson ’86 of Wilmington represents the southeastern counties. Louis W. Sewell Jr. ’61 of Jacksonville, a retired Golden Corral executive, is an at-large member representing rural transportation interests.

Eastern North Carolina recently has benefited from several major highway projects, including the Fayetteville Outer Loop, the US 64 Williamston Bypass and the Wilmington Beach Bypass. Some other major projects are getting started, including the Greenville Southwest Bypass, a project to ease existing and anticipated traffic congestion flowing into the medical complex.  

Right-of-way acquisition is scheduled to begin next spring for the Southwest Bypass, which will become a new artery stretching 13 miles from US 264 at the western edge of Greenville southward toward Ayden, where it would link up with the existing NC 11.


Centennial celebration begins
East Carolina’s celebration of its first century will commence next year and continue through 2009 as the university commemorates the official chartering of East Carolina in 1907 as the first step toward the opening of classes in 1909. Dates for many centennial events will be announced soon.

Among the first marking the occasion is university historian Henry C. Ferrell’s new book, Promises Kept, which chronicles the past quarter century, a period when he says ECU kept promises made in the past.

“By 1980, the university had assembled a body of intentions—promises—to cultivate,” Farrell writes in the introduction. “East Carolina had been successfully desegregated. Undergraduate degree programs won new students. Fine arts had obtained essential physical plants. Arts and Sciences also benefited from construction and library expansion. The professional schools…had either realized long standing building goals or had plans to obtain them. Medical education…completed the last touches to its core campus.

Other graduate programs, while postponed by the UNC System, made their way slowly and cautiously to reality.”

“We have met here to begin the foundation for a great institution of learning that will be a power in Eastern North Carolina,” T. J. Jarvis, a former governor and trustees chairman, said at the July 1908 groundbreaking for the first buildings on campus. “We never can begin to calculate the value it will be to North Carolina, especially to this eastern section, and more especially to Pitt county and Greenville. When those standing here live to be as old as I am, you will look back with pride to the day when Pitt county and Greenville gave $50,000 each for the erection of this institution. “

A Centennial Task Force is overseeing the celebration under the direction of honorary chairs Richard and Jo Eakin and John and Gladys Howell.


Sports marketing goes big time
ECU expects to gain greater visibility, and realize a tidy profit to boot, through an arrangement reached with ISP Sports to market the rights to Pirate athletics. The deal guarantees the university an annual rights fee plus additional payments based on revenue generated by ISP, which is based in Winston-Salem. The contract covers all sales and marketing associated with ECU’s 19 intercollegiate teams, including radio and television programming, game programs and other athletics publications, and signs in all campus athletic venues. ISP will base a three-person staff on campus to manage those activities.

Heading up the effort will be Jimmy Bass, 49, who was appointed to the new position of senior associate athletics director for external operations. Bass, whose position will be funded by ISP, most recently was senior associate director of athletics at Mississippi State University. He was associate executive director of the Wolfpack Club at N.C. State University from 2000 to 2005, where he directed the campaign that raised $60 million to expand Carter-Finley Stadium. He was ECU’s assistant athletics director for marketing from 1989 to 1994.

East Carolina joins 27 other universities aligned with ISP Sports. The group includes ACC schools Clemson, Georgia Tech, Miami, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest, as well as Conference USA members Houston, Marshall, Southern Miss, Tulane, UAB and UCF.