Mellon Endowment Established for Graduate Students
The Graduate School is proud to announce the Andrew W. Mellon Endowment for Graduate Students in the Humanities and History, a permanently endowed fund of $4.5 million, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.  This endowment will serve to increase and help support new Mellon Interdisciplinary Cluster Fellowships in our recently launched Interdisciplinary Cluster Initiative.  The Mellon Endowment will also facilitate several Mellon Research Grants, available to graduate students in the humanities and history, for research related travel, materials that are not available locally, artistic supplies beyond what is normal or customary in the field, or construction, rental, or purchase of special equipment not available on campus. Read more about the Mellon endowment at the Northwestern University NewsCenter.

One Book One Northwestern Public Lectures Continue
This year's One Book One Northwestern selection is The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen. One Book One Northwestern is a series of lectures presented by scholars with national and international reputations in the study of Charles Darwin, the science of evolution, and the history and philosophy of science. The goal of the lecture series is to educate the public and the university community about the science of evolution and the continued impact of Charles Darwin's research on modern society. The lectures are co-sponsored by the Office of the President and the Interdisciplinary Committee on Evolutionary Processes, and are open to the public as well as Northwestern faculty, students, and staff. Please see the One Book One Northwestern Web site for more details.

Legal Services for Graduate Students Available
The Graduate School is committed to giving graduate students continued access to legal services, providing an attorney with offices at The Graduate School on the Evanston campus. Due the the upcoming holidays, during the months of November and December the attorney will be available November 4, November 20, December 2, and December 18, from 10:00am -4:00pm. Students in need of legal services are encouraged to contact tgsattorney@northwestern.edu to schedule an appointment.

Media, Technology, 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.