I wanted to pass along this notice I received earlier this week. It’s from Dr. Ronald LaPorte, who is epidemiologist and also a professor emeritus from the University of Pittsburgh. He is seeking interns or students who would be interested in doing an internship with him at the Library of Alexandria. It looks like a very interesting project.
Please contact Dr. LaPorte directly for any questions or comments regarding this.
From: ronald laporte [mailto:ronaldlaporte@gmail.
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2015 2:11 PM
To:
Subject: Library of Alexandria science
Sent: Monday, July 27, 2015 2:11 PM
To:
Subject: Library of Alexandria science
Dear Steve, Martin and other SIS Faculty and students,
I just wrote to Dr. Larsen and am not writing to selected faculty and students. I am seeking a student or two who might like to do a paid internship or paid summer student employment with me and the Library of Alexandria in Egypt. Our goal is to build the library of alexandria into the major science and health research library in Arab and African countries, as well as to double scientific publications in the next five years.
I retired last year, but now am spending virtually all of my time trying to make the library of alexadria as the center for research and health in Arab and African countries. This represents a "rebirth" of science and health at the library. We have created "BA Africa" and it is moving very well.
For those unfamiliar the Ancient Library of Alexandria was the largest, and perhaps most significant library in the Ancient world. It was the center of science and medicine 2500 years ago, and it flourished from 700 years. The library held over 700,000 scrolls, which represented over 80% of the world's knowledge. The new library of Alexandria opened in 2001. I have been collaborating with them during this whole period, and Dr. Larsen has established important research efforts.
The core to BA Africa is the building of an BA Africa Grid, which consists of 270,000 faculty world wide who are interested in Health, Agriculture, Environmental/Sustainability, Computer engineering, Library Science and Research methods. WE have about 20-30,000 faculty in each community. In addition, we have collected as part of this 96,000 faculty, 66,000 from Arab countries, and 30,000 from sub Saharan countries as part of our grid.
We have collected 163,000 powerpoint lectures and we have taught over 50 million students world wide. We are the largest educators for global health and research methods.
Vint Cerf (father of the internet) and Gil Omenn (former president of AAAS) are developing this with Dr Serageldin and I.
The first project was the establishment of a Research Methods Library of Alexandria, which is the largest virtual research library where aspiring researchers can get the statistics and methods questions answered. WE also have 193,000 powerpoint presentations from the 6 areas of interest.
I would like to find a good student to help further identify scientists for our research methods communities of interest. I would like, to identify these from Google scholar, e.g. those who have published in Agriculture in 2014, and invite them to join the agricultural arm of the Library. One would need to have expertise with Google Scholar. It appears to do this we would need to search google scholar, and then down load the searchers in Endnote, followed by the identification and extraction of emails using harvesting program.
WE could do this as a paid internship, also, i suspect that some of you students would think it most cool to work with the Library of Alexandria. We are very open for students using this project as a masters. Also we would encourage students to publish about this project with our help (We have over 500 publications in science, nature, lancet, bmj, PNAS). If the student really does a good job, we likely to bring s/he with us the next time we go to the BA to teach.
It would be ideal (but not necessary) for the intern or paid student to speak Arabic as we want to teach those at the Library our approach for building of communities of interest.
I just am not sure how to find an intern, or paid student. I would hope to have this done by the beginning of sept.
At the end of this we would have one of the largest data bases of scientists, the largest research methods library, one of the largest communities of scientific knowledge and a doubling of publications. We want the library to be the leading scientific research center in Arabic and African countries.
We would be looking for a masters or Ph.d. student with skills in google scholar, endnote, and large data base, as well as an interest in global health and science.
Before contacting me take a look at
This is a short presentation about our collaboration with the library of Alexandria.
Write to me with a brief paragraph about yourself. If interested you might also want to discuss with your advisor. Send to ronaldlaporte@mail.com
Here us a small bio of mine
ron
Global Health, so near, so far
"Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity". (WHO)
Global lecture about Library of Alexandria Health
Ronald E. LaPorte, Ph.D.
Emeritus Director WHO Collaborating Center
Professor Emeritus Epidemiology
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
I prefer to have you email at ronaldlaporte@gmail.com
