AICURI

When she visited campus in early November as part of RISD’s Social Equity and Inclusion Initiative, playwright, screenwriter, producer and director Lynn Nottage took time to answer a question that she’s been fielding a lot lately: Why be a theater artist in a time of crisis?

It’s striking that a writer whose honors include two Pulitzer prizes (Nottage is the only woman to have received the award twice) and a MacArthur “genius” grant grapples with an existential question as basic as this one, but such is our current political climate. Creative professionals are taking stock of whether or not their work is bettering the world around them, and whether or not they feel it should.

Throughout her career, Nottage has used her art to reveal and elevate instances of social and economic inequity. She won her first Pulitzer Prize for Ruined, a play about the wave of sexual violence that accompanied the Congolese Civil War, and has also written plays dramatizing the garment industry, the illegal ivory trade and domestic service. For Nottage, a major call to action came in 2008 at the beginning of the financial crisis when a close friend admitted to being in economic dire straits. For catharsis and clarity, she and her friend spent some time in NYC’s Zuccotti Park talking with Occupy Wall Street protestors. The experience “forced [her] to realize that we all live within shouting distance of someone in crisis.”…Click to Read More

11/13/18 | The combined power of two of the region’s prominent higher education institutions — one an internationally recognized food authority, one an internationally recognized design authority — and a venerable local food hub is changing the way college students eat.

Johnson & Wales University (JWU), Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Farm Fresh RI will share a 2018 New England Food Vision Prize, a $250,000 award from the Henry P. Kendall Foundation, to encourage colleges and universities to increase the amount of regionally-produced food on campus menus.

The award will support a two-year collaboration to research and develop food products that will be tested and integrated into the dining services at each campus with subsequent plans for distribution through Farm Fresh RI….Click to Read More

It’s become one of Bryant’s best-known annual student-alumni events, combining a student learning day on Wall Street with a networking event organized by Bryant’s Wall Street Council.

A full bus of students made the trek to New York City Oct. 25, where they heard from a variety of speakers and networked with alumni, parents, and friends in the finance industry. Popular with students from finance majors and members of the Smart Women in Finance group and the Archway Investment Fund, the Walk Down Wall Street is organized by the Amica Center for Career Education and sponsored by the Finance Association.

The first event of the day was a panel discussion hosted at US Trust and led by Joseph C. “Joe” Capezza, Jr. ’08, Vice President and Portfolio Manager at US Trust. The panelists, including William Brian Gowen ’13, Financial Analyst and Bank Examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Garrett Hayward ’16 MBA, Equity Research Analyst at Douglass Winthrop Advisors; and Samantha Merwin ’12, Vice President at BlackRock, shared stories, offered advice, and answered questions from the students…Click to Read More

ROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — News of mass shootings has become devastatingly common in the United States, and at the same time the rate of suicide-by-firearm is silently increasing. The need to treat gun violence as a public health crisis has never been more urgent, many experts argue.

In that context, Dr. Megan Ranney — an emergency physician who is also an associate professor at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School and School of Public Health — wrote an editorial with two co-authors that examines the explosive spread of the Twitter hashtag, #ThisIsOurLane, born after a November tweet from the National Rifle Association. The three authors were among thousands of health care professionals across the country who assert that firearm injury prevention is, in fact, their lane.

The editorial was published on Wednesday, Dec. 5, in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

“We are working together, across the political spectrum, to solve this epidemic,” said Ranney, who is also an emergency physician and injury prevention researcher at Rhode Island Hospital. “As a physician and a researcher, I know that it doesn’t have to be this way. We can create innovative solutions to reduce firearm injury, the same way we’ve done for car crash deaths and HIV.”…Click to Read More