Tanner Bixler, a third-year economics major and a student firefighter, hopes to climb Mount Everest this spring. At 29,035 feet, Everest stands as the tallest mountain in the world, sitting on the border of Tibet and Nepal. "For as long as I can remember, climbing this mountain has been a dream of mine," Bixler says on his Web site at tannerbixler.com. "The pure challenge of climbing it, the two month duration, and the highly spiritual culture surrounding the mountain have always appealed to me." He first became interested in mountains at age 10, and has climbed Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in California. ... International Education Week was a "smashing success," according to development analyst Jennifer Wong and outreach coordinator Jake Hosier, both of University Outreach and International Programs. Wong and Hosier helped coordinate the campus's involvement in International Education Week during Nov. 7-16. IEW is an annual event exposing students to the global studies experience. At UC Davis, more than 700 students and community members turned out for performances by a variety of student organizations and exhibit information from more than 50 organizations (see uoip.ucdavis.edu/iew/iew_participants.cfm). Students Jacqueline Lum and Jamie Banta each won $500 travel vouchers in a raffle. ... Richard Rojo, the former director of marketing for the Mondavi Center, recently accepted a new position as executive director of marketing and university communications at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. Previously he served as the director of strategic communications for California State University, Sacramento. At the University of the Pacific, Rojo will work on marketing and communication campaigns, internal communications, Web site operations and messaging. ... A group of Middle Eastern plant scientists recently visited UC Davis to network with campus faculty in the agricultural, food, and natural resource sciences. The goal is to bring together scientists of Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian origins and use agricultural research for peace in that part of the world. "We discussed the need for political solutions to coincide with technical solutions of water problems," said Wes Wallender, professor in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources. "Engineering solutions need to be communicated to economists and policymakers. ... Poet and faculty member Sandra McPherson gave a reading to a packed house Dec. 5 at Bistro 33 for its bi-monthly Poetry Night. McPherson, who has taught at UC Davis for more than 30 years, read selections mostly from her new book, Expectation Days as well as material from older works. ... Campus volunteers are trying to decipher nearly a million pages of notes on long-gone Native Californians, hoping to bring to life more than 100 languages from the past. The documents are from John Peabody Harrington, a linguist who in the early 1900s ventured throughout California interviewing Native Americans. Martha Macri, director of the UC Davis Native American Language Center and co-director of the effort to computerize Harrington's papers, said of Harrington, "He was totally obsessive. We've become a bit obsessive ourselves."

— Clifton B. Parker