Brown and White Vol. 130 no. 9

              The Brown and White Vol. 130 No. 9
Friday, March 4, 2016 ‘All the Lehigh News First’
Roshan Giyanani, Tanner Buss/B&W Staff
LEFT: Stephanie Pugh, ’19, Will Sarnie, ’19, and Molly Hwang, ’19, discuss answers for trivia night on Oct.
3, 2015. Lehigh After Dark is looking for new ambassadors to sponsor events like trivia night. RIGHT: A
sign outside Taylor Gym advertises Lehigh After Dark on Friday. Lehigh After Dark hosts several late
night events including Thursday night trivia and keeping the gym open late.
‘An alternative avenue to have fun’
Lehigh After Dark introduces student ambassadors
By LAURYN RAGONE
Associate News Editor
Lehigh students receive UNICEF awards
Search for
Data X faculty
continues
By JESSICA HICKS
Assistant Lifestyle Editor
Lehigh has hired and is continu-ing
to seek for faculty members
through synergistic searches to be a
part of the Data X initiative.
The Data X initiative, which
launched in May 2015, aims to pro-vide
students with the opportunity
to learn and refine their skills with
data analysis across disciplines. The
recent increase in demand of data
analytics courses from students in
various areas of study led to the
search for staff members with a
wide range of integrated skills.
“We are looking for excellent
teachers that can teach courses
we already have, and will bring in
courses that we don’t have already,”
said Daniel Lopresti, a professor
and chair of the department of com-puter
science and engineering, and
director of Data X.
Lopresti said data is being infused
into all aspects of life and all aca-demic
areas of study, and the Data
X initiative caters to that demand.
“It has changed the way we learn
and interact with one another,” he
said. “There is no single profession
that is not affected in some way.”
It is significant to hire new fac-ulty
members who can work across
different fields, as it is the inter-disciplinary
individuals who have
made big things happen — such as
personalized medicine, the develop-ment
of self-driving cars and other
technological advances individu-als
may have not thought possible
before.
The faculty search is centered on
finding professors to teach digital
media, consumer analytics and con-nective
health. The goal is to have
these areas of study grow at Lehigh,
Lopresti said.
While the top candidates have
been hired in the areas of digi-tal
media and consumer analytics,
there are still searches for faculty in
computer science and engineering.
Jeremy Littau, an assistant pro-fessor
of journalism and communi-cation,
said the search for a candi-date
in digital media was the most
challenging and interesting search-es
he has been involved with.
“We were looking for an inter-section
between data and media,”
Littau said. “Yet in our department,
we don’t do a lot with spreadsheets
and numbers. A lot of our students
dread statistics, but it’s not that
our students can’t handle it, it is
just that no one has spoken about
numbers in a way that is relevant
to them.”
Littau spoke of the need for facul-
See DATA Page 4 See UNICEF Page 3
Lehigh’s party scene has topped
national rankings and earned the
university a spot in the Princeton
Review’s top 10 party schools in
the country. While Lehigh’s night-life
offers a social option for those
who enjoy partying, the Lehigh
After Dark organization aims to
provide alcohol-free social events
for members of the campus com-munity
on Thursday, Friday and
Saturday nights from 10 p.m. to
2 a.m.
Lehigh After Dark is imple-menting
an ambassador program
in which students serve as spokes-people,
marketers and resources
for these events. The ambassadors
work with student organizations
to fund and co-sponsor events.
They also attend the meetings for
the Lehigh After Dark operations
committee — a group comprised of
six faculty members representing
all students on campus.
The members of the Lehigh After
Dark operations committee work
on marketing, outreach, planning
and funding. They come togeth-er,
along with the two Student
Senate liaisons and ambassadors,
to collaborate and discuss poten-tial
alcohol-free events for Lehigh
students.
“We have recently established
a student advisory board to serve
as the ‘student voice’ and commu-
See AFTER DARK Page 3
By AMBER CARDONA
B&W Staff
Graduate student Fayaz
Amiri, ’14, grew up in war-torn
Afghanistan. He came to Lehigh
for college and joined the UNICEF
club, which was founded at Lehigh
in 2014. In February, he was one
of two Lehigh students to win an
award at the UNICEF Student
Summit in Washington, D.C.
Amiri was voted “Best Public
Speaker 2015-16” at the summit,
which was held from Feb. 19-21.
He was also the vice president of
UNICEF at Lehigh in 2014.
Fatih Aktas, who also won an
award at the summit, is a gradu-ate
student and doctoral candidate
from Turkey studying compara-tive
and international education
in the College of Education. Aktas
received the “Member of the Year
2015-16” award from the UNICEF
national committee.
Both winners said they were driv-en
by experiences in their native
countries to join the UNICEF club
at Lehigh.
“I was curious about children
and I cared about them,” Amiri
said. “Coming from a developing
country, that was my passion.
“I wanted to do something
because as a child, I suffered back
there from bad schooling, a war
torn country and more. All those
things matter, and that’s where
my passion was. I got into it and
wanted to do something, so I start-ed
working with the UNICEF club
here at Lehigh.”
UNICEF, which stands for the
United Nations Children’s Fund, is
a humanitarian organization run
by the United Nations. Lehigh’s
sect of the organization has made
efforts to promote awareness with-in
the Lehigh community about
Courtesy of Fayaz Amiri and Faith Aktas
Fayaz Amiri, ’14 (far left), and
Fatih Aktas, ’11 (center), stand
with the rest of their club
after winning their respective
UNICEF awards. Fayaz Amiri
was awarded “Best Public
Speaker” and Fatih Aktas won
“Best UNICEF Member.”