Pitt undergraduate student Brooke Riscoe (left) and graduate student Emi Finkelstein have been named to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), translated in English as the German Academic Exchange Service.

The DAAD is Germany’s national agency for the support of international academic cooperation. The agency provides a variety of educational and research opportunities, including support of study abroad experiences within German laboratories and research institutions.

Two Pitt PhD students have been named Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellows by the American Council of Learned Societies. The fellowships support promising doctoral students in the humanities and interpretive social sciences with a year of funding designed to help them complete projects that will form the foundations of their scholarly careers. The program, now in its fifteenth year, is made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The Office of the Provost recently awarded Open Educational Resources (OER) funding to seven projects during the spring 2021 term.

OER funding supports faculty to adapt, adopt or create OER for an existing course. These projects will enhance the educational experiences of Pitt students, save students money on course materials and provide faculty with the ability to customize their courses.

This year’s winners are:

Classmates Raeanne Heuler, Beth King and Samson Love have revived plogging at Pitt as part of their work in Geology and Environmental Science instructor Ward Allebach’s sustainability course this spring. 

Plogging is a combination of running or walking while picking up trash along the way.

The trio’s team project, Plogging for Health, focused on cleaning up the campus while improving mental health awareness and support through fitness activities.

Two teams from the Pitt Policy Debate organization qualified for and competed in the National Debate Tournament (NDT) at the end of March. 

Qualifying for the National Debate Tournament is no easy feat: In order for Pitt’s teams to compete they had to win against other teams in their district, from schools such as Georgetown University and James Madison University. Each district can qualify 5-8 teams, and Pitt qualified two teams.