Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | winter 2010

WINTER 2010
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Cover Story:
Jack Trice: A powerful story retold

Feature Story:
Take time to meet the deans

Feature Story:
Good breeding

Departments:
Getting Started
Letters
>>Around Campus
Newsmakers
Association News
Sports

AROUND CAMPUS

Influential teacher honored in South Korea
Campaign Iowa State Update
Innovator of the Year
Water watchers
Quote, unquote
Ash stash
Futurity shock
Solar success
Casting a wide Net

Influential teacher honored in South Korea (Return to top)
In November, Grandmaster Yong Chin Pak, a senior lecturer in kinesiology and ISU martial arts instructor, traveled to his native South Korea and earned a distinction many of his 35,000 former taekwondo,
hapkido, judo, and self-defense students would say is long overdue: “one of the world’s most inf luential taekwondo leaders.” Pak was one of 150 worldwide
taekwondo professionals presented with the honor by the South Korean government Nov. 9.

Pak, who in his youth took up martial arts as a way of rising out of poverty and fulfilling his post-Korean War dream of moving to the United States, competed
professionally in taekwondo for many years but passed up his chance to compete on the world’s biggest stage (the 1972 Munich Olympics) so that he could begin teaching in America. Nearly 40 years later, he
doesn’t regret the choice.

“For me, teaching is about helping students change their lives,” Pak says. “They ask me why I push them so much, and I tell them, ‘I like you. I love you.’ I’m teaching them how to be the best in life. This isn’t professional sports. It’s not a science or engineering class. This is an art that’s about learning discipline and
respect.”

Pak, who has led Iowa State to several national collegiate taekwondo championships, receives frequent contact from former students and from grateful parents who say his wisdom, leadership, and guidance
have changed their children’s lives.

“He’s a grandmaster, and it’s very unusual for grandmasters to teach as much as he does,” says Keri Andersen Davis (’04 microbiology; MS ’08 genetics), a third degree black belt who studied under Pak for 8 ½ years at ISU. “He doesn’t just teach taekwondo; he puts lessons about life in everything. I love him. He’s very approachable for being a grandmaster. He does it for the students.”

Pak says he can be very tough and that his early semester attrition rates can be high, but his tough love is rooted solely in a strong desire to see his students become their best.

“When he sees somebody who has a lot of talent,” Davis says, “he’ll push them really hard.”

Pak doesn’t just push his students in martial arts; he speaks with great pride about the numbers of his students who graduate in the top 2 percent of their
graduating classes or who go on to successful
military careers. If you are a former student with a success story or appreciation to share, e-mails may be sent to Grandmaster Pak at ycpak@iastate.edu.

“People are always surprised when they hear ‘he’s still here,’” Pak says with a laugh. “But even after 20 or 30 years, they still bow nicely when they see me.”

Campaign Iowa State Update (Return to top)
For the past century Curtiss Hall has been a fixture on the Iowa State University central campus. Each semester, thousands of students stream into Curtiss Hall to attend classes.

One of those students was Neil Harl, himself an iconic figure on campus. For the past 58 years, Harl has been
a fixture at Iowa State, including more than 40 years as a faculty member in the Department of Economics before retiring in 2004.

Now the Harl legacy and Curtiss Hall will be forever linked through a $1.5 million pledge from Neil (’55, Ph.D.’65) and Darlene (’81 sociology) Harl of Ames toward renovation of Curtiss Hall, the building housing the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ main
offices.

The Harls’ pledge will create the Harl Commons, a renovated space located on the ground floor of Curtiss Hall. This student-centered area will include a
café/deli and four small meeting rooms to encourage teamwork and to improve communication. Adjacent to this area will be a student services “mall” that will
provide one-stop shopping for students, including offices for career services, academic advising, study abroad, agricultural entrepreneurship, multicultural
programs, and a welcome center.

“The Harl Commons project seemed like the ideal place to stake one’s identity,” Harl said, “to provide a warm and caring place for students who, like me when I started here as a student in 1951, needed a warm and caring place on the side of the campus that I already recognized would be my principal habitat.”

That is one of the goals of the Curtiss Hall renovation, according to Wendy Wintersteen (Ph.D. ’88 entomology), Iowa State’s endowed dean of agriculture and life sciences.

“We are approaching the renovation of Curtiss Hall as an opportunity to maintain and improve an iconic symbol of the college and the university,” Wintersteen
said. “We expect to present a building to the outside world, and to our colleagues and students on campus, that shows the pride we feel in agriculture, the cuttingedge nature of the sciences of agriculture, and the warm, caring approach to students that has been the hallmark of the college since its birth.”

It’s an approach that Neil Harl, an internationally recognized expert in farm finance, taxation, estate planning, business planning, and agriculture law, is excited about.

“As students, and later in our faculty service, Darlene and I came to believe firmly that Iowa State is one of the finest institutions in the country in helping
students build their educational and personal platforms for life,” Harl said. “We are pleased and honored to be
identified with Iowa State in this manner.”

This gift is part of Campaign Iowa State: With Pride and Purpose, the university’s $800 million fundraising effort. As of Nov. 1, more than $725 million
in gifts and future commitments for facilities and student, faculty, and programmatic support had been made to Campaign Iowa State.

Innovator of the Year (Return to top)

R&D Magazine has named ISU professor of civil, construction, and environmental engineering Hans
van Leeuwen its 2009 “Innovator of the Year” for his work on biofuels. “I feel more than a little bit humbled,” van Leeuwen said. And he’s in humbling company: Past
recipients of the award include Google cofounder
Larry Page and Segway Personal Transporter inventor Dean Kaman. But consider van Leeuwen’s credentials: He led a research team that received an R&D
100 award in 2008 for its work to grow microscopic fungi in leftovers from ethanol production; then, in 2009, he won again as the leader of a team that developed technology for using a fungus to convert wastes from biomass processing into biodiesel.

“I do appreciate that, by presenting this award, R&D Magazine is recognizing the importance of the environment and finding ways to create new products from wastes and ultimately feed a hungry Third World,”
he said.

Water watchers (Return to top)
The European Space Agency’s Nov. 1 launch of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite was such a big deal to some researchers on the ISU campus that they threw a party in its honor. That’s because they’re working with NASA to analyze the satellite’s data on soil moisture over the next three years. “The ultimate
goal,” associate professor of agronomy Brian Hornbuckle says,“is to someday use this type of information in conjunction with models to forecast soil moisture conditions, the weather, and to detect climate change.”

Quote, unquote (Return to top)
“I’m very pleased to hear that it has leather, heated seats. I don’t even have that in my car.”

– College of Engineering dean Jonathan Wickert, commenting in the Oct. 6 Omaha World-Herald about the John Deere 8245R tractor recently donated by the company to the college

“It’s like the old movie, ‘Fantastic Voyage.’ You can go down the blood vessel or take a side trip down the trachea into the lungs.”

– Des Moines University simulation lab director
Gregory Kolbinger, explaining in the Oct. 7 Des Moines Register why his university has been using the virtual reality software, BodyViz, that was developed by ISU engineers James Oliver and Eliot Winer

“[We] are squandering our precious youth when we spend hours scrutinizing the details of whether planting aloe vera yields a higher return than planting bell
peppers.”

– An Oct. 20 Iowa State Daily editorial about
the growing popularity on campus of the Facebook game “Farmville,” which allows players to create and manage their own virtual farms online

“It may have been a grab for attention, but people were happy to take a look at it – perhaps to distract from the real business that we’re supposed to be getting down to here, health care and everything
else.”

– ISU assistant professor of art & design Emily
Godbey, quoted in an Oct. 20 Associated Press article about the nation’s fascination with the “balloon boy” hoax

“It takes several years to kind of figure out how to grow these grapes right. So we’re getting better
growers, better acreage, and the supply’s coming on.”

– ISU Extension field specialist Mike White, speaking Sept. 17 to Radio Iowa’s Kay Henderson about Iowa viticulture

“We came out here and had no fear at all, which hadn’t happened in the past.”

– Cyclone setter Kaylee Manns, talking to reporters after Iowa State’s first-ever volleyball win over national power Nebraska. Iowa State beat the fifth-rated Huskers 3-2 in Lincoln Oct. 21 to snap a 75-match losing streak against Nebraska.

Ash stash (Return to top)
ISU assistant professor of agronomy and horticulture and USDA horticulturist Mark Widrlechner is on a
mission: to save the native ash tree from extinction. He’s coordinating a national seed stock of tens of millions that he hopes will allow the trees to be reintroduced after the emerald ash borer, a beetle with deadly larvae, wreaks its havoc across the United States. Widrlechner hopes the ash tree can avoid
the fate of the Dutch elm and American chestnut, both of which were wiped out in the last century.

Futurity shock (Return to top)
Iowa State has joined Yale, Princeton, and Duke as one of 35 top research universities posting its latest research news on the new Web site www.futurity.org. “As the news hole shrinks, universities are not
getting coverage for science and scholarship like we used to,” said Bill Murphy, vice president for communication at New York’s University of Rochester. “Our mission [with Futurity] is to help the public understand and appreciate what our universities are doing.” Subscribe to a daily e-mail summary at www.futurity.org or read just ISU’s news at
http://futurity.org/tag/iowa-state-university/. Futurity is also tweeting the research news at www.twitter.com/futuritynews.

Solar success (Return to top)

Iowa State’s solar interlock house finished 12th overall in the 2009 U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon, held Oct. 9-18 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Teams were judged in 10 competitions, and ISU finished third in marketability/livability/ buildability, fourth in communications, fifth in engineering, and sixth in net metering (ISU’s house was the sixth best in producing
more energy than it consumed). Now that the competition is over, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources is giving the house a permanent home at Honey Creek Resort State Park in southern Iowa, where it will be used as an interpretive center. Researchers from both the DNR and ISU will continue to monitor and study the building’s performance.

Casting a wide Net (Return to top)
An assistant professor in ISU’s Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication has played a key role in the Broadband Technologies Opportunities Program, a $4.7 billion federal grant program created through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Jeff
Blevins, who teaches the course “Electronic Media Technology and Public Policy” at Iowa State, volunteered to review grant proposals for the program because he believes in the importance of equal access
to broadband service for all Americans,“not only for our economy, but also for our democracy.”

Blevins reviewed proposals to develop broadband networks across the U.S. In the review process, Blevins had to ensure that the projects were not just sustainable but self-sustaining and that they protected“network neutrality,” the concept of
ensuring that Internet service providers do not censor lawful content or treat content providers discriminatorily.

“Whether the Internet remains neutral has significant implications for the participatory- democratic nature of the medium, the free f low of information and speech,
user’s privacy rights, Internet governance, efficacy of independent media, and political participation, as well as the continued vitality of libraries and educational systems,” Blevins said. “Given these stakes, I would
go as far as saying that network neutrality may well be the telecommunication policy issue of the 21st century.”