The university community is invited to participate in "Exploring Health, Discovering Wellness," a first-of-its kind interactive health and wellness event beginning at 11 a.m. tomorrow (Friday, Feb. 21) in the University Center.

One of the highlights of the daylong event is an inaugural-year symposium at 12:30 p.m. in Rangos 1 and 2, titled Research into Practice: Health and Wellness for Ourselves and for Our Community.

The discussion will engage public health professionals and CMU faculty whose research reveals fascinating insights about how we make decisions about our health and our community. 

President Subra Suresh will provide opening remarks and Mary Suresh will moderate the discussion. Panelists are:

• Karen Hacker, director, Allegheny County Health Department;
• Baruch Fischhoff, Howard Heinz University Professor, Social and Decision Sciences, and Engineering and Public Policy; 
• Sheldon Cohen, Robert E. Doherty Professor of Psychology; 
• Rema Padman, professor of management science and healthcare informatics, Heinz College; and 
• Kristen Kurland, teaching professor, School of Architecture and Heinz College.

The event also includes healthy foods and cooking demos, fitness instruction and free exercise classes, crafting, massages and relaxation techniques.

"Exploring Health, Discovering Wellness" is part of "Crossing Boundaries, Transforming Lives," the yearlong celebration of the inauguration of Dr. Suresh as Carnegie Mellon's ninth president.

See more details and the full schedule of events.

The School of Drama, the oldest degree-granting conservatory training program in the U.S., will recognize its contributions to the entertainment industry with three 100th anniversary celebrations this semester, the first of which is this Saturday, Feb. 22.

The evening opens with a Centennial Dinner in the College of Fine Arts Great Hall followed by a performance of "The Wild Party," the story of a reckless relationship between a vaudeville dancer and a clown enjoying one wild evening in a Manhattan apartment.

Afterward, the school will celebrate with its own wild party in the lobby of the Purnell Center. It is open to current students, faculty, staff and alumni of the School of Drama, as well as season subscribers and attendees of the Centennial Dinner.

Similar celebrations will take place March 10 at Steiner Studios at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City and May 8 at Universal Studios in Los Angeles.

Learn more.

Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade, the political debate over abortion in America continues, but it often involves misunderstandings of its history and laws.

To provide Carnegie Mellon students with a full understanding of the abortion issue, the Office of Student Life's MOSAIC program and the Program for Deliberative Democracy will hold a daylong campus event, titled "Reproductive Rights Since Roe," this Sunday, Feb. 23 in Rangos Hall, University Center.

The sessions will give CMU students and the Pittsburgh community the opportunity to learn from local experts about the history of sexuality and choice laws; medical facts pertaining to abortions; religious and philosophical perspectives; case studies; and more.

See the schedule and register.

Carnegie Mellon's Metin Sitti and his research team have created a synthetic gecko-adhesive and are commercializing it for use in several industries, including defense, consumer products, sports, automotive, medicine, aerospace and robotics.

To create the adhesive, Sitti's research team emulated how the gecko sheds contaminants with each step to keep its feet sticky and clean in dirty environments.

"We performed contact self-cleaning experiments with three different sizes of mushroom-shaped elastomer microfibers and five different sizes of spherical silica contaminants. Using a load-drag-unload dry contact cleaning process similar to the loads acting on the gecko foot during climbing, our fully-contaminated synthetic gecko-adhesive could recover lost stickiness and lost adhesion at a rate comparable with that of the gecko," said Sitti, a professor of mechanical engineering and head of CMU's NanoRobotics Lab.

The research team's work appeared in the Feb. 19 Interface Journal of the British Royal Society.

Learn more.