Notable

Nanditha Balasubramanian, interim director of annual giving at the SIU Foundation, received an award for excellence in the annual giving program from the Council for the Advancement and Support (CASE) Region V conference in Chicago, Dec. 11-13. She submitted the 2005 annual calendar mailing, which is a direct mail appeal mailed to donors in late November. The award recognizes outstanding work in a program for annual giving, and entries are judged on criteria that includes the program's success in meeting stated goals, the project's fit into overall institutional and advancement goals, the audience the project is targeted toward, documented results, and number of professional staff who worked on the project. CASE Region V consists of higher education institutions in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Leslie A. Duram, chair and associate professor in the Department of Geography, will be the keynote speaker at the Upper Midwest Organic Farming Conference Feb. 23-25 in LaCrosse, Wis. The conference is the largest of its type in the country, with about 1,800 attendees in 2005. Duram is the author of "Good Growing: Why Organic Farming Works," published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2004.

Salah-Eldin Mohammed, professor of mathematics, was an invited lecturer at the International Conference on Mathematical Analysis and its Applications held in Assiut, Egypt, Jan.3-6. Mohammed's 40-minute address was titled "Dynamics of semilinear stochastic partial differential equations."

Walter D. Wallis, professor of mathematics, was an invited speaker at the 30th Australasian Conference in Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing held at the University of Queensland, Australia, Dec. 5-9. Wallis' hour-long address was titled "Latin squares with and without orthogonal mates."