Newsbriefs ----------------------------------------------------------------- Black business students win National Case honors For the second straight year, students in the School of Continuing Studies Division of Business and Management won a top honor in the annual National Black MBA Association Student Case Competition. Brandi Chaffin, Thom Corbin and David Simpkins won second prize in the fourth annual competition, which this year matched Hopkins against 29 other business schools from across the country, including such top-rated ones as the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford and MIT. Each of the winning students received a $2,000 scholarship from the sponsoring organization. "It's especially impressive that our graduate students, who study part time, were able to defeat teams of full-time MBA candidates from a group that included 15 of the nation's top 25 business schools," said SCS dean Stanley C. Gabor. "It's a wonderful testimony to their training and ability." The team was coached by Christina Rodriquez, a faculty member in the division's management program. The competition requires students to develop a comprehensive strategy for a national business. This year, the three students had one month to prepare a strategy for Chrysler Corp.'s Neon automobile line and its direct competitive position with a Taiwanese car manufacturer. The competition takes place in two 30-minute rounds, featuring a 20-minute presentation and a 10-minute question-and-answer period. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- West breaks all-time soccer scoring record Sophomore forward Eric West has accomplished in less than two years what it took Hopkins great Greg Cunningham ('77) three full seasons to achieve. When a teammate, senior Matt Coleman, scored on a West pass in the first half of the Oct. 5 game against York College, West became the Blue Jays all-time leading scorer with 75 points (32 goals, 11 assists). West's 11th goal of the season against Haverford on Oct. 7 extended the record to 77 points, and West tied Cunningham's record for career goals (33). The men's soccer team is 11-4 for the season, and 4-3 in conference play through the Oct. 18 game against Washington College, which they won 2-0. West scored both goals. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hopkins photographer creates new method to reproduce Egyptian art Hopkins photographer Jay VanRensselaer didn't expect to become part of a science team when Egyptologist Betsy Bryan called him one day in 1994. She needed photographs of sheets of plastic on which her research team had traced the intricate paintings that line the walls of an Egyptian tomb chapel in ancient Thebes. When VanRensselaer, a senior medical photographer at Hopkins for nearly nine years, tried to photograph the large tracings, he found there was no established method for doing so because the sheets were too large--the largest being 35 feet long--to handle with traditional methods. And without backlighting, they couldn't be photographed well. So he invented a new method. In the attic of his home, he custom-built a vertical light box, using angle iron, plate glass and white plexiglass. The result: vivid, large-format color transparencies that can be made into prints or scanned into a computer for publication or refinement. VanRensselaer recently presented a research paper about his innovation during a meeting of the Biological Photographic Association in San Antonio, Texas. -----------------------------------------------------------------