Dr. Michele Wheatly to Speak on STEM

Science - Technology - Engineering - Math

An excerpt from Dr. Wheatly's speach given in September of 2007 provides some insight as to what will be presented at the Barn Gang on July 21.

There has been a growing national and regional
awareness that STEMM, long acknowledged for providing post WWII economic
prosperity, has become threatened by the STEMM competitiveness of other nations.
There is now serious concern about the lack of preparation and lack of interest
in students at all levels going into STEMM fields. This has been sensationalized
in both the popular press, for example, Thomas Friedman's best seller, "The
World is Flat" and the National Academies "Rising Above the Gathering Storm".
Technological and social shifts have leveled the economic world, enabling less
developed nations to compete with the United States for corporate investment and
jobs. For the first time since the Sputnik era, STEMM has become the focus of
the national agenda and conversation with The America Competes act authorizing
$43 billion dollars over 3 years for a plethora of math and science education,
research and development initiatives.
Following suit, the Ohio General
Assembly has recently made a historic investment in higher education,
appreciating that Ohio's competitiveness in the global economy is directly
related to the knowledge skills and creativity of our workforce. It is
anticipated that eighty percent of the students in Ohio who pursue higher
education will be educated in our public universities. WSU, therefore, is poised
to play a major role in growing the knowledge economy in the Dayton region
through State initiatives such as Turnaround Ohio, Third Frontier and most
recently "House Bill 119", better known as "the Ohio Innovation Partnership".
This latter program is a $250 million dollar investment in the next biennium to
make an unprecedented commitment to statewide STEMM education spanning from the
early childhood classroom to the university research laboratory. These
initiatives all point to the impetus to grow research in fields that will lead
to economic development, and to graduate more Ohioans with higher education
degrees particularly in the STEMM fields. Over the next few months Ohioans will
be galvanized by the media attention to these initiatives, and nowhere is this
more needed than the greater Dayton region.

The additional M is for Medicine.