The Office of Institutional Research, Planning and Effectiveness sponsored a poster session, which took place in the Cox Ball Room on Monday.
This poster session featured several different research posters correlating to various initiatives that form part of the University's 10-year Strategic Plan.
The posters demonstrated a wide range of faculty, student and staff research projects relating to topics such as public health, religion, art history and architecture – all of which are subjects pertaining to the plan's initiatives.
The goal of the first ever poster session was to celebrate the accomplishments of the midpoint of the Strategic Plan, as the plan was implemented six years ago, Assistant Director of University Strategic Planning Ruth Leinfellner said.
The Strategic Plan consists of several initiatives that aim to guide faculty and staff toward achieving the five goals of the Strategic Plan, according to the University's Strategic Plan website.
The five goals include obtaining a world-class faculty, an exemplary student body, an enriching cultural environment, a scholarly community as well as maintaining an efficient use of financial resources.
In terms of academic areas of growth and expansion, the Strategic Plan allows for growth in areas such as religion, race, global health, predictive health and life sciences.
One initiative, for instance, includes a program that intendes to focus on religion, public health and spirituality.
"The Strategic Plan is the roadmap to achieve Emory University's vision, and our vision is to become a destination university for faculty, students and staff," said Makeba Morgan Hill, assistant provost for planning and accreditation. "Becoming a destination university is the best way to create positive change in the world."
To showcase the progress of the plan, the University decided to hold an event that would allow students, faculty and staff to display research initiatives taking place around campus.
"The poster session is part of the Strategic Plan, which is a visionary process intended to bring Emory University to the greatest potential of a preeminent university," Leinfellner said. "This event is a wonderful opportunity to highlight the accomplishments of the past six years."
Each initiative has been allocated a certain number of posters to display at the poster session.
Faculty members fulfilled their quotas with enthusiasm, Leinfellner said.
The posters represent academic research in each of these different areas.
Students and faculty stood in front of their posters and discussed the material with passersby.
College senior Rebecca Levitan, an art history major who was part of the team that created the poster "Passage and Perception in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothrace," traveled to Greece twice through research fellowships to work on the poster with her faculty advisor.
She said her role in the project was to create traditional drawings of artifacts that her adviser, the head faculty member on the project, uploaded to a computer program.
The program would then generate a virtual experience of touring the building that once stood thousands of years ago.
"It was exciting to see that the arts are getting showcased with other types of research," Levitan said. "Many people only think of undergraduate and graduate research in terms of sciences, so I'm glad that innovative, progressive arts research is also being shown."
Gretchen Van Ess, a program assistant for the Global Health Institute, presented a poster displaying the programs and research that the Global Health Institute has worked on during the past six years, since it became a part of the University's Strategic Plan.
"The biggest accomplishment we've achieved is drawing in students from all the disciplines," she said. "We focus on students working together and approaching every issue from a different perspective."
Chen Zhang, an Emory staff member at the Global Health Institute, said she enjoyed the poster session because it allowed her to network with other staff members at Emory and learn about research taking place in other departments.
"Because I am an immigrant, I really liked the interesting studies in immigration and health," she said.
– By Anusha Ravi
