UC Presents a Spectacular Showcase of Innovation and Research

UC President Nancy L. Zimpher welcomed thousands of visitors to Showcase 2006 as the two-day event – featuring more than 350 examples of how UC is making an impact around the world – got underway on April 21. President Zimpher said Showcase 2006 launches a great new tradition at UC to corral the wide-ranging research efforts at the university and bring them together into one event.

President Zimpher remarked on the plethora of reports about the urgency of innovation. “This is exactly the kind of innovation we need to showcase,” she said, pointing out the record $332 million in research funding – an all-time high – that UC received in fiscal year 2005, and UC’s 22nd ranking among public universities by the National Science Foundation for federal research expenditures. President Zimpher also highlighted UC’s economic impact of $3.6 billion and the university’s projected impact this year of $4.2 billion, as well as UC’s celebration of a century of cooperative education.

Among the 350 posters, demonstrations and displays on exhibit in TUC was one example of how UC is a world-class leader in creating and using new technologies for surgical care. The UC Center for Surgical Innovation – CSI – was the first center in the world to receive two of the most advanced four-armed da Vinci robots, thanks to a gift from Cincinnati’s own Carl Lindner. Incisions made by the tiny arms of these robots are much smaller, therefore much less invasive, than incisions made to accommodate a human hand.

Outside TUC, the car fans were ogling the Cadillac 16, a concept of UC industrial design alumnus and GM design manager Brian Smith. Nearby, students were showing off the College of Applied Science Formula Car.

Around lunchtime, the crowds needed only to follow their noses to find – and taste – a sampling from UC’s Culinary Arts and Science Program, a partnership with Cincinnati State Technical and Community College. The program, launched in 2004, is the first of its kind in Ohio and one of a handful across the nation to prepare students for careers in food service, packaging, development and research.

The College-Conservatory of Music had crowds doing double-takes with two larger-than-life exhibits – courtesy of CCM's Theater Design and Production department – spotlighting recent creative work for CCM opera productions. The first featured two original costumes by Professor of Costume Design Dean Mogle from CCM's 2003 production of Claude Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande.

Additional designs by Mogle were on display in the second exhibit, which included the costumes for the Judge and Jurors from CCM's 2005 production of Dominick Argento's The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe. Also included were the Nuns' costumes from the Giacomo Puccini's Suor Angelica (1998), designed by then-graduate student Regina Truhart. Both were set against a backdrop from Antonin Dvorak's Rusalka (2001) featuring Peter Paul Rubens's painting of Samson and Delilah, designed by Professor of Scenic Design Thomas Umfrid and painted by Scenic Artist David Fry.

Showcase 2006 keynote speaker Ed Barlow, president of Creating the Future, Inc., addressed the importance of transformation, saying technological changes in the 21st century will be 1,000 times greater than that of the last century, and 70 percent of today’s manufactured goods will be obsolete in six years. “We are in a time of incredible structural change,” he said. “Failure to transform will lead to the most significant consequences.”

Barlow cited structural changes that are making the 24/7 concept a reality in the workforce, education, information and entertainment. Creating wealth, he said, will focus on designing and implementing products into the low-income market, citing $75 computers that will be sold to low-income populations in India. He said leaders will effectively be guardians of a revolving gap analysis – developing strategies to continuously close the gap in knowledge, capacity, products and services.  And speed learning will be a future trend in education.

 “This university is positioned to be the engine connecting with all of these changes,” he said.