The University Board of Supervisors on Thursday unanimously authorized President F. King Alexander to act on behalf of the Board as well as take on the duties of former Interim President and Chancellor William Jenkins.
The Board also unanimously voted to approve a recommendation presented by the Academic and Student Affairs, Achievement and Distinction Committee to establish a new School of Nutrition and Food Sciences in the College of Agriculture, changing the division of Textiles, Apparel Design and Merchandising into its own freestanding department and dissolving the School of Human Ecology.
Additionally, SSA Consultant Principal Christel Slaughter gave an update on its “Big Data” project recommendation, which would attempt to reorganize large amounts of data for the University, making the research process more efficient and helping the University “leapfrog” over other universities with technological capabilities.
“The digital age challenge is facing all higher education, and it is really struggling to provide the right cyber infrastructure that we need to properly support the research and creative activities of students and faculty in a major research university, like LSU,” Slaughter said.
Slaughter went on to explain that while many are familiar with using gigabytes and megabytes, the Big Data project would make “capturing, curating, archiving, analyzing, storing and sharing” much larger amounts of data an easier process.
“For example, if our two health science centers in Pennington wanted to collaborate on a research project, which is becoming more and more popular … they could pass data sets around. But we would not be able to pass around large data sets today with the capabilities that we have,” Slaughter explained.
Big Data would require a $5 million up front investment and then a $1 million annual investment for storage, which would require more qualified IT people and some library staff who could help with this.
University junior and Student Government President John Woodard also took his oath of office for his position as the new Student Board Member.
The next meeting will be held Friday, July 26.
