President Jolene Koester greets students at 2011 Commencement.

Jolene Koester, president of California State University, Northridge, has announced her plans to retire at the end of December 2011. Koester became Northridge’s fourth president in July 2000.

“This is a university committed to fostering change in lives, families and the region,” Koester said. “My time at the university has involved a personal engagement with a mission I care deeply about and faculty, staff and students who inspire me daily. The spirit of collaboration makes my work here productive and fulfilling. It has been a most exhilarating and satisfying professional responsibility.”

The next issue of Northridge magazine will look back on her achievements as a leader in higher education and in the community.

President Koester’s retirement plans include some rest and rejuvenation, along with the pursuit of research around the role communication plays in the efforts to deal with the challenges that university presidents and chancellors currently face.

Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the 23-campus California State University system, will announce plans for selecting Koester’s successor, following procedures and policies established for the selection of CSU presidents by the CSU Board of Trustees.

Many interviews have already been collected and additional dates will be announced.

For more information, visit www.csun.edu/storycube.

Muhammad Ali with Boy (ca. 1962), a photograph by Harry Adams, will be featured in the fall 2011 exhibition Identity and Affirmation at CSUN.

The Getty Foundation has awarded CSUN’s Institute of Arts and Media $80,000 to cull its rich collection of photographs and create an exhibition as part of Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, a regional initiative led by the J. Paul Getty Trust.

From October 2011 through March 2012, more than 60 cultural institutions throughout Southern California will come together to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene.

At CSUN, the University Art Galleries will present Identity and Affirmation: Post War African-American Photography from Oct. 23 to Dec. 10, 2011. The exhibition will feature 125 images by more than a dozen artists who captured the vibrant development of the arts, music, politics, family and social life in the African-American community and Los Angeles at large.

The Maurice Amado Professor in CSUN’s Jewish Studies Interdisciplinary Program will “teach and engage in scholarship drawn from the heritage of Sephardic, Ashkenazic and other Jewish traditions” with courses that will explore the “Jewish ethical approach to communal and political challenges,” according to the endowment agreement.

The Amado Foundation, established in 1961 with a mission to further Sephardic heritage and culture, now serves as a grant-making organization. It was CSUN’s longstanding service-learning component, which connects Northridge students of all religious backgrounds and ethnicities with the Los Angeles Jewish community, that drew the foundation’s attention.

The College of Business and Economics at California State University, Northridge.

California State University, Northridge has been named an outstanding business school by the Princeton Review for the fourth year in a row. The education services company features the school in the 2011 edition of its book, The Best 300 Business Schools.

Based on student surveys, the book features two-page profiles of the schools and their MBA programs, plus 11 ranking lists from “best professors” to “best career prospects.”

In the profile on Northridge, Princeton Review editors describe CSUN’s MBA program as offering “solid preparation” in marketing, general management, communication/interpersonal skills, presentation skills and quantitative skills.

The editors quote students saying the university’s “greatest strengths are its diverse student population, its understanding of the educational needs of the surrounding community and its commitment to students’ educations.”

Mohammed Alhadlaq, Omar Alshahrani, Pei-chun Chen, Rodney Cheong Ye Yeu, Mike Cowhick, Alfie Gil, Amiel Hartman, Manuel Hernandez, Joseph Horvath, Rome Kenmepol, Nicholas Robert Keyawa (Proj Mgr), Andrew Lee, Garrett Leonard, Ara Mekhtarian, Jimmy Mohan, David Prince, Michael Staudenmeir, Steve Valadez, and Po-Jen Wang

In June, the 18-person team that developed the Red Raven (Robotic Autonomous Vehicle Engineered at Northridge) won top honors in the 19th annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition, held on the campus of Oakland University in Michigan. The CSUN students, mainly seniors in electrical and mechanical engineering, developed a dynamic frame with a low center of gravity inspired by the Mars Rover.

In May, a student team of mechanical engineers took home honors in the Human Powered Vehicle (HPV) Western area competition in Bozeman, Mont. The team won first place in the design event and second place overall in the speed class, which is the highest that a CSUN team has placed in this national competition.

Paid out at $220,000 per year for five years, the grant will enable Northridge officials to admit 140 new students, mainly first-time freshmen and first-time transfers who are either low income or first in their family to attend college, or both. A wide range of programs are expected to help students progress from one academic year to the next, maintain a performance level required to stay in good academic standing and graduate within six years.

Whitsett Professor of California History Josh Sides discusses archival material with a graduate student.

As project director for the $157,000 grant, CSUN’s Josh Sides, Whitsett Professor of California History, aimed to help educators improve their curriculum by introducing them to the Spanish and Mexican influence on California’s language, culture, arts, architecture and land use during this critical period in the nation’s history.

“If you look at the popular textbooks for history and social science teachers, the U.S.-Mexican War gets relatively short shrift, and the Spanish and Mexican influences become footnotes in the grand story of America’s westward expansion,” said Sides. “My goal is to get people to understand the extraordinary impact and influence thousands of years of indigenous history, 50 years of Spanish history and 30 years of Mexican history has had on the landscape that is now California.”

Illustration by student Angela Horton, CSUN Art Department

Observant eyes on campus may have noticed three 16’ x 4’ raised-bed vegetable boxes occupying a corner of campus adjacent to the path that leads to the University Park Apartments, near the tennis courts and Northridge Academy High School (NAHS). A cheerfully painted sign announces that the new plants on the block are the first sprouts of the CSUN Community Garden.

“The garden is a celebration of the green consciousness and desire for sustainability currently sweeping the campus,” said Erica Wohldmann, assistant professor of psychology and a member of the core greening team of CSUN’s Institute of Sustainability.

As Wohldmann envisions it, the garden eventually will have a total of five raised beds, a spiral herb garden and a raised potato bin.

“We’ll be using a dense urban-style approach,” she said. “You can grow an amazing number of vegetables if you use a small space to its fullest capacity.”

“From a physical point of view, the garden’s location makes sense,” said Colin Donahue, associate vice president for facilities development and operations. “The area is visible to both dorm residents and NAHS students, which we hope will lead to collaboration and participation from a wide spectrum of students.”

CSUN student volunteers gathered in March to build raised beds for the CSUN Campus Garden

The garden’s first raised beds were constructed by volunteers on March 31. Among them was Jean Porter, administrative analyst in academic resources and planning.

“This garden is about good food choices and how to grow them,” said Porter. “It’s a working demonstration of sustainable practices with an educational component for healthy eating.”

“In the short term,” said Wohldmann, “volunteers that I organize will tend the garden, but in the long term we hope to incorporate classes into the garden. Anyone who works in the garden will be allowed to harvest some food, although I envision that most of the food will be used for cooking classes and demonstrations, and eventually donations to local food banks.”

Student Roger Motti ’10 helped create a prototype for the CSUN Garden by building a raised-bed garden at nearby Hillel House. Motti hopes to continue mapping the edible landscape around the campus come fall, as part of his interdisciplinary graduate research in geography, food science and psychology.

To support the CSUN Garden, Wohldmann and Motti are pursuing grants, and Wohldmann will donate funds she earns from teaching a Sustainability Practices class. Academic Resources and Planning staffers already have designated their annual “holiday” gift for the garden. Initial planting will take place in the fall.

“We hope to celebrate a wonderful first harvest,” said Wohldmann, “while providing a great teaching environment.”

Team members (not standing in this order): Behnam Ansari, Ararat Arakelian, Boozarjomehr Behzadian, Jesse Cordero, Rio Delos Santos, Rey Evangelista, Ricardo Garcia, Jonathan Gorospe, Lior Inberg, John Lake, Mitesh Mistry, Sepideh Norouzi, Ray Palomino, Bruce Rivera, Daniel Sarfati, Maurycy Sarosiek, Michael Studer, Dave Walker, and Bryan Zubiate.

CSUN Breaks Through in Vehicle Design Competition

She is a thing of beauty. Her sleek, narrow, charcoal-colored carbon fiber body rests delicately on her wheels, the front pair crafted of aluminum alloy. Built, as the saying goes, for speed.

Her name is N.E.D. 1.0, and for months on end, she has been the center of attention for about 20 mechanical engineering students (listed above), all seniors, from Cal State Northridge’s College of Engineering and Computer Science.

N.E.D. 1.0—for Never Ending Design—is the reason for Cal State Northridge’s highest finish yet in the Human Powered Vehicle-West competition, which in April showcased the engineering skills of up to 300 students, mostly from western states but including some from as far away as India. Sponsored annually by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the competition this year was hosted by CSUN for the first time in more than two decades.

In a field of about 30 entries, CSUN—and N.E.D. 1.0—placed second in the design category and third overall in the speed class. The competition included a drag race event, staged around the campus’ G3 parking structure, and an endurance event which covered most of the campus. Bales of hay were strategically placed to keep the zoom-zoom on course at speeds up to 40 miles per hour.

CSUN’s breakthrough was the result of rigorous planning and a critical decision to go with a recumbent design, considered more stable and reliable.

“Lots of planning went into this project since October 2009,” said Jonathan Incorvaia, student project manager.

The idea of the competition, explained faculty advisor Robert Ryan, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is to give undergraduates a chance to apply sound engineering design principles as they develop practical transportation alternatives. “The vehicles were designed to be fast and agile,” said Ryan, and they were.

Ryan and College of Engineering and Computer Sciences Dean S.K. Ramesh were equally proud of the event itself, described as “the smoothest-running” of such competitions in years. “I can say with certainty,” smiled Dean Ramesh, “that we have set the bar really high.”