TGS Alumna Selected for AHA's Extraordinary Service Award
The Graduate School is proud to recognize Dr. Elise Lipkowitz, a recent doctoral graduate of the Department of History, for receiving the Extraordinary Service Award of the American Historical Association (AHA). Elise has been instrumental in creating and coordinating the Graduate Student and Early Career Caucuses of the AHA and has also edited AHA publications aimed at providing help and information to graduate students and beginning assistant professors.

H1N1 Vaccine Available to Northwestern Graduate Students
The University Health Service will be offering H1N1 vaccinations to Northwestern students with valid WildCARDS. It is no longer necessary for students to meet CDC priority criteria in order to obtain vaccination. The availability of the vaccine is limited; graduate students wishing to receive the H1N1 vaccine must schedule an appointment. For more information about the H1N1 vaccine, please visit the University Health Service Web site.

TGS Announces New Dependent Care Grant
The Graduate School is establishing a new Dependent Care Grant in order to assist PhD and MFA student caregivers in participating as fully as possible in the wealth of professional development opportunities available to them in their time at Northwestern. The Grant provides funds to graduate students to offset the financial burdens of dependent care that arise because of a student’s participation in learned society meetings, academic conferences, workshops or other events on Northwestern’s campus or beyond, that extend beyond the normal academic responsibilities of the student’s home department or of The Graduate School. Graduate students interested in learning more about - and applying for - the Dependent Care Grant can access the application guidelines and form online.

Call for 2009/10 Ver Steeg Faculty and Staff Award Nominations
Has your adviser gone above and beyond the call of duty, not only academically but in making you feel a welcome member of the Northwestern community? Has your graduate program assistant or other staff member ever saved you from academic disaster? Do you wish there was a way to recognize someone’s dedication to graduate students? We want you to choose your department’s Ver Steeg Faculty and Staff Award nominees. The Award offers graduate students in TGS an opportunity to recognize outstanding Northwestern faculty and staff for their contributions to graduate education and service in support of graduate students. TGS is now accepting nominations from graduate students for the 2009/10 Clarence L. Ver Steeg Graduate Faculty and Staff Awards. Each year, the graduate students in each TGS academic program may nominate one faculty member and one staff member per department or program. Nominations are due by 12:00 noon on Friday, February 12, 2010. For more information see the Ver Steeg Awards page.

Media, Technolgy, and Society
Brooke Foucault

Brooke Foucault is a doctoral student studying with Professor Justine Cassell in the Media, Technology, and Society Program. Her research focuses on the role that technology can play in understanding and reducing response bias in survey interviews. We know that for survey data to be useful respondents must give honest answers, even to sensitive questions. However, there is considerable disagreement in the literature about how survey interviewers can increase the chances that respondents will answer openly and honestly.  On one hand, some researchers believe that when interviewers establish rapport with respondents, respondents will be less likely to lie about their sensitive behaviors. But, on the other hand, some researchers have demonstrated the opposite effect – in their studies rapport increases respondents' likelihood of distorting their answers to sensitive questions in order to get interviewers to like them. Until recently, it has been very difficult to conduct reliable empirical studies of the true effect of rapport in survey interviews because the behaviors associated with rapport are very hard for human interviewers to control.  However, using highly-controllable virtual human interviewers who interact with respondents using both speech and gestures, Brooke aims to isolate and test different interviewer behaviors in order to identify precisely how various verbal and non-verbal behaviors contribute to interview rapport and affect survey responding. She hopes to use the findings of her research to develop training and interviewing tools that will help improve survey response validity. This work is sponsored by an Innovations grant from the School of Communication, and by a grant from the Charles Cannell fund in Survey Metholodogy. For more information, please visit the department of Media, Technology, and Society and the ArticuLab