I hope you had a relaxing and fun holiday season and are ready to tackle the new semester.

One big thing: improving our culture

Last month, I presented the final version of the Strategic Plan. As you know, our strategic plan has the same first three pillars as the university plan, but it also has a fourth very important pillar: School Culture and Operations. This is all about how we strengthen the ways we work and collaborate to ensure the conditions for our success.

The leadership team has been doing this: we read and discussed excerpts from Misconceiving Merit and the IUB team participated in a series of leadership seminars. But all of us should have opportunities to talk about how we work together.

Along those lines, I am happy to announce that from now on, we will have at least one seminar or workshop every semester on topics related to improving our community and culture. This semester, we will start with the important topic of graduate student mentoring- policies and best practices. Faculty, staff, and graduate students will each have their own event. Details to come!

In addition, we want to make sure we are building a community where everyone feels included and respected. We have created an anonymous reporting form where anyone can report behavior that is good or bad. Let’s all contribute to making Luddy a welcoming environment by reporting unwelcoming or discriminatory behavior so we can deal with it quickly and effectively, and examples of good behavior so that we can elevate and celebrate it. Tap the button below or type luddy.indiana.edu into your browser.

Anonymous reporting form

New computer science department and programs at Luddy Indianapolis

The new computer science department in Indianapolis has been approved and established! The department will begin offering bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science in fall 2024.

As part of this development, we've hired 10 new CS faculty this past fall, with more in the works, including an inaugural department chair, and new academic advising staff. We're also hiring a new director of marketing in Indianapolis to help strengthen marketing and communication efforts in coordination with Luddy Bloomington and IU marketing teams.

Luddy in the news

Feng Guo, associate professor of intelligent systems engineering at Luddy Bloomington, recently published a new article in Nature Electronics with a team of IU researchers that has garnered widespread national and international attention. In the article, Guo shows how they created a process that combines electronic hardware with human brain organoids that was trained for speech recognition with an accuracy of 78%. The article was only published in December, and has already secured the highest online attention rating in the history of the publication.

Juexin Wang, assistant professor of biohealth informatics, and team published an article in Nature Communications. Wang has developed a novel approach for improving gene expression analyzation in situ. This new approach will allow for further exploration of specific targets for treatment of disease. Shortly after publication, the article was selected as a featured editorial by the journal.

Staff/faculty highlight

Part of improving our culture includes celebrating our successes. To that end, each month, I'll highlight one or two staff or faculty. This month's highlights are Kelsey Karum from Luddy Bloomington and Carlos Zapata from Luddy Indianapolis. Kelsey recently received the Luddy Bloomington staff traveling trophy, which celebrates success among Bloomington's staff. Carlos recently won the IUPUI Mikki Jeschke Advisor of the Year Award, an award given to an academic advisor who shows deep commitment to providing excellent service to students.