IN THE NEWS

AUGUST 2009

Louie Gong, M.Ed., one of the NINLHE's past presenters, has a hit with his art that opened up doors to Indian Country Today. Who is the man behind the shoes? Gong is a mixed heritage person (Nooksack, Chinese, French, Scottish) who works as an activist “on behalf of people who walk in multiple worlds.” In addition to his day job as the educational resource coordinator at Muckleshoot Tribal College, he is board president of MAVIN, one of the nation’s leading mixed race organizations. His racial identity work has been featured on MSNBC.com, and he recently provided a keynote presentation for the National Tribal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families conference. According to Gong, designing custom shoes is an extension of his activism. See http://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/53845647.html.

JULY 2009

Jim Larimore one of the NINLHE Founders in 1993, who for the last 3 years has been working as the Dean of Students at Swarthmore College, is on his way to new adventures. Jim has has accepted a position as Dean at NYU Abu Dhabi, a new liberal arts and sciences campus being built in the United Arab Emirates, Dubai. Congratulations to Jim! We wish he the very best!

JUNE 2009

LeManuel Lee Bitsoi, Ed.D., one of our long time NINLHE supporters has devoted his career to enhancing opportunities for Native Americans to become scientists, science educators and scientifically-informed community members. He served as Director of Minority Training in Bioinformatics & Genomics at Harvard University

He has now taken a new position at Georgetown University. LeManuel is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and currently serves in a joint appointment at GeorgetownUniversity, as a Research Fellow in the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law, and as Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing and Health Studies. At Georgetown, Lee serves as a Co-Investigator for research initiatives regarding ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of genomic research and their impact on indigenous people of the US and Canada, Australia, India, Mexico and New Zealand. He also continues to be an Associate in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University.