Two Eller schools in world’s top 10

Two schools in the Eller College of Management received global top-10 rankings yesterday.

The Financial Times has ranked Eller’s Chris and Carol McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship and the Department of Management Information Systems No. 6 and 9 in the world, respectively.

The 2008 rankings used alumni feedback as their sole criterion.

Eller’s MBA program received a No. 27 national ranking.

Alumna creates endowment chair for dance school

UA alumna Stevie Eller is funding an endowed faculty chair in the School of Dance, UA President Robert Shelton announced Thursday.

The endowment, a permanent source of funding and the school’s first, is intended to keep Jory Hancock in his position as the dance program’s head, according to a Feb. 7 university press release.

Hancock will hold the Stevie Eller Chair for the Director of Dance. He has led the school since 1990.

Stevie and husband Karl made a financial gift to the Stevie Eller Dance Theatre in 2004. In November, the building was named one of Arizona’s 18 Greatest Architecture Achievements, a list compiled by the American Institute of Architects.

Stevie Eller was a member of Orchesis, a UA dance club, in the 1950s. She graduated in 1952.

Surgery department gains new professor, vice-chief

Dr. John F. Renz has joined the Department of Surgery as a professor and the vice-chief of the section of transplantation.

Renz was part of the first surgical team to perform a combined heart-liver transplant in the New York region, according to a Feb. 5 university press release.

Renz last worked with the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. He was surgical director for the Liver Transplantation Program at the Center for Liver Disease and Transplantation.

Renz specializes in procedures involving organs that don’t meet conventional criteria for transplants due to defects but which have yielded acceptable survival rates, according to the release.

Renz also performs kidney and intestinal transplants.

Professor promoted to chairman of radiology department

Tim B. Hunter, a UA faculty member for the last 33 years, was named chairman of the Department of Radiology, according to a Jan. 29 university press release.

Hunter had been vice chairman of the department. He is a professor of radiology and orthopedic surgery.

Hunter earned his medical degree from Northwestern University in 1968 and a bachelor’s degree in math from the UA in 1980 while working full time in radiology.

He also received a master’s in astronomy from Melbourne, Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology in 2006.

He has researched light pollution and, in 1987, co-founded the International Dark-Sky Association, which has about 10,000 members.