The Morris K. Udall Foundation has honored four Allegheny students, the highest number of combined scholarship and honorable mention recipients from any single college. Carlyn Johnson ’11 and Ali Trunzo ’11 have been selected as 2009 Udall Scholars. Brandon Goeller ’10 and Sandra Wayman ’10 received honorable mention awards. A 14-member independent review committee selected this year’s group of scholars and honorable mention recipients on the basis of commitment to careers in the environment, health care or tribal public policy; leadership potential; and academic achievement.
On April 3 Becky Egg ’09 gave a talk titled “Geometrical Structures Associated to a Finite Group” at the annual meeting of the Allegheny Mountain Section of the Mathematical Association of America. The meeting was held at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia.
Meredith (Molly) Hanlon ‘09 was chosen in a nationally competitive process to represent Allegheny College at the 13th annual undergraduate poster session on Capitol Hill. The event, hosted by the Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR), aims to educate those in the U.S. Congress who provide funding for science and science education about the importance of undergraduate research. Student presenters are selected based on the quality of their project and ability to communicate clearly. Molly will be presenting a poster titled “A Role for the Plant Hormone Auxin in Arbuscular Mycorrhiza, and Agriculturally Important Symbiosis,” in which she summarizes two years of research conducted in collaboration with Associate Professor of Biology Catharina Coenen. Molly also won a travel grant from Penn State University to present a poster titled “Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Symbiosis in Tomato: Genetic Evidence for Auxin Control” at the 17th Penn State Plant Biology Symposium, Plant-Soil Interactions in Future Climates, on May 19-21.
Twenty one Allegheny students participated in the Sigma Xi undergraduate research conference held at Penn State Behrend on April 18. They are (with their faculty advisors listed in parentheses): David Barlow (Paula Treckel), Casey Brown (Jeff Cross), Sara Brown (Gwen Kenney-Benson, Patricia Rutledge, Rodney Clark), Devin Click (Milton Ostrofsky), Amelia Conte (Rodney Clark), Katherine Eriksen (Rodney Clark), Jennifer Evans (Milt Ostrofsky), Lucas Glover (Jeffrey Cross, Amy Wiseman), Meredith Hanlon (Catharina Coenen), Ryan Hanson (Lee Coates), Shane Hennessy (Lee Coates), Jessica Kenemuth (Lee Coates), Chrysanthemum Mattison (Melissa Comber), Brittany Pierce (Alice Deckert), Marina Rezk (Lee Coates), Emily Ricotta (Tricia Humphreys), Lesley Sevcik (Alice Deckert), Stephen Shinsky (Catharina Coenen), George Swinston (Jeff Cross), Christopher Wahlmark (Ann Kleinschmidt, Jennifer Dearden) and Ashleigh Welko (Lauren French, Lee Coates). Students whose names appear in boldface italic were given awards for best presentations in their sessions. A total of 224 students from colleges in western Pennsylvania participated in the conference.
Allegheny seniors Elizabeth Andrews and Christina Walrond, both student fellows with the Center for Political Participation, along with CPP Program Coordinator Mary Solberg, attended “Advocating for Change,” a two-day conference sponsored by the National Campaign for Political and Civic Engagement at Harvard University. The April 3-5 conference generated thought-provoking discussion among colleges throughout the country on ways to increase civic/political involvement by students through hands-on public advocacy projects. Marshall Ganz, a Harvard lecturer in public policy and a recognized civil rights organizer, was a featured presenter.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Carla Bluhm, Ashley Crosby ’10, Michelle Pastor ’11, and Daniel Tate ’12 presented a paper at “Teachers, Teaching, and the Movies: Representations and Pedagogy in Film, Television, and New Media” called “Teaching by Tweets: New Media in the Psychology Classroom” at St. Mary’s College of California.
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Amy Wiseman and three of her students, Ann Schellberg ‘09, Bahar Noorbakhsh ‘09, and Laura Erbelding ‘09, presented a poster titled “Training Older Adults to Reduce False Recognition” at the annual Eastern Psychological Association meeting in Pittsburgh in March.
Jessica Kenemuth ’09, Andrea Hoke ’09, and Associate Professor of Biology and Neuroscience Lee Coates presented research at the Association of Chemoreception Sciences meeting held in Sarasota, Florida in April. The title of the presentation was “The Effects of Membrane Permeant and Impermeant Carbonic Anhydrase Inhibitors on the Olfactory and Trigeminal Responses to CO2 in Mice.” This research investigated the transduction mechanism of olfactory CO2 receptors, which is part of Dr. Coates’s research on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
The Department of History is pleased to announce this year’s recipient of funding from the Jonathan E. and Nancy L. Helmreich Research and Book Grant Fund. Assistant Professor Guo Wu will utilize funding from the Helmreich Grant to travel this summer to Shanghai and Guiyang, China, where he will conduct research on the role of bookstores in transforming the culture of inland China in the 1910s and 1920s. He will investigate how bookstores, selling new journals, books and translation works to teachers, students, and workers, fostered cultural change. At the same time, he will explore how the bookstores were appropriated by their founders as a site to implement their ideology of mutual aid and anarchism. This work is for Professor Wu’s new research project, “Reading Rooms, Book Stores and Early Chinese Marxists, 1919-1920.”
The Department of History is pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Kale Haywood is the recipient of a grant from the Edwin Van Duesen Selden Fund. This grant permitted her to attend the Southwest Social Science Association annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, where she presented the paper “Into the Sunset: Travelers’ Perceptions of the Diocese of Michoacan, 1760-1900.” This paper is an outgrowth of her manuscript on the colonial Michoacano cathedral chapter and explores foreigners’ perceptions of the region. In her paper Haywood argued that outsiders viewed the region as lagging behind national economic development standards while retaining a rustic, colonial charm. Haywood also served as chair and commentator on a panel titled “War and Society in Nineteenth Century Latin America” at the conference and chaired the F. Bullitt Lowry Prize Committee, which selected the most accomplished paper submitted to the conference in the area of African and Latin American history.
Assistant Professor of History Ian Binnington will publish an article titled “‘Standing Upon a Volcano’: Cincinnati’s Newspapers Debate Emancipation, 1860–1862″ in the journal American Nineteenth Century History in June 2009.
Professor of Environmental Science Richard Bowden presented “Earth, Wind, and Fire: Singing the Praises of Geothermal, Wind, and Biodiesel Energy at Allegheny College” during the National Wildlife Federation Campus Ecology Web Conference held March 12. Bowden’s presentation described Allegheny’s initiatives on geothermal heating, wind energy purchases and local partnerships, and the College’s Center for Economic and Environmental Development collaboration with the City of Meadville on a biodiesel program.
Professor of Computer Science and Economics Robert Cupper gave a presentation as part of a panel at SIGCSE 2009, the 40th Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, in Chattanooga, Tennessee in March. Cupper’s contribution included a description of the software infrastructure developed here with the support of a grant from the Buhl Foundation. This software, when used in conjunction with our high tech multimedia classroom/laboratory, facilitates an interactive learning-by-doing component in the introductory course in computer science.
Director of Human Resources Pat Ferrey has been elected president of the Southwestern PA CUPA-HR chapter (College and University Professional Association for Human Resources) for 2008-2010. The president serves as the chapter’s chief volunteer and partners with the regional and national boards to achieve the association and chapter’s mission and goals, provides leadership to the board of directors, chairs meetings of the board, and helps guide and mediate board actions with respect to organizational priorities and governance concerns.
In February, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Matt Jadud was invited to give a talk at Carnegie Mellon at the computer science department’s Colloquium on Computer Science Pedagogy. The talk, “Exploring the Behavior of Novice Programmers,” as well as a video of the talk, is available at http://www.intro.cs.cmu.edu/events/colloquium.html). Jadud’s paper “Affective and Behavioral Predictors of Novice Programmer Achievement,” co-authored with colleagues at the University de Ateneo in the Philippines, was accepted to ITiCSE (the conference Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education). Jadud has also been invited to speak at USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association’s large, annual conference. The talk is titled “Towards Designing Usable Languages,” and the abstract is available at http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/tech.html#jadud.
Associate Professor of Mathematics Tamara Lakins was awarded the 2009 Allegheny Mountain Section Service Award at the Spring 2009 meeting of the Allegheny Mountain Section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). The Section Service Award recognizes “a consistent record of excellence in service to the section over a period of time.” Lakins has served the Allegheny Mountain Section MAA in the following capacities: second vice-chair (2000-01), first vice-chair (2001-02), chair-elect (2002-03), chair (2003-05), co-coordinator of the Allegheny Mountain Section NExT (2000-03, 2008-present).
Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of the Black Studies Minor Aisha Damali Lockridge presented papers at two conferences this April. She presented “Mystical Mammies and Séance Sisters: Examining the Magical Negress” on April 10 at the annual PCA/ACA conference. The second, “Uplifted Out DuBois: Ntozake Shange and the Talented Tenth,” was given on April 18 at the annual African Literature Association conference. Lockridge was also recently nominated to serve on the executive board of the African Literature Association.
Associate Professor of Computer Science Bob Roos served as a judge for the 33rd World Finals of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Collegiate Programming Contest, held April 18-21 in Stockholm, Sweden. More than 7,100 teams representing 1,838 colleges and universities from 88 countries participated in regional contests held last fall. The top one hundred teams qualified for positions at the 2009 World Finals championships. This was Roos’s fourteenth year serving as a World Finals judge.
Richard Sayer and Josh Tysiachney served as panelists at Edinboro University’s High School Journalism Day on April 15. Sayer, who is an adjunct faculty member at Allegheny and a photographer for the Meadville Tribune, was on the panel “Photojournalism: Capturing the Moment.” Tysiachney, who is assistant director of public affairs and co-editor of Allegheny magazine, was on the panel “Technological Trends in Student Media l.”
English instructor and Campus newspaper advisor Penni Schaefer won a second-place award in the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association’s annual Keystone Awards competition in the category of Special Projects. Her entry was a look into the money earned by the state through gambling taxes and how it wasn’t going where it was promised in the initial proposals to legalize gambling. The story was completed while Schaefer was a reporter for the Meadville Tribune. Richard Sayer, an adjunct faculty member in the art department, was awarded a second place for a graphic/photo illustration for a page one feature in the Tribune on the first day of high school basketball season. Sayer has been a photojournalist at the paper for 11 years.
Meadville Fine Art Prints held an exhibition of pen-and-ink drawings by Associate Professor of Art Richard A. Schindler. The exhibition, titled “Awash in Angels,” was held April 1-30.
Assistant Professor of History Guo Wu contributed two Chinese-English translations, “The New View of Historical Evolvement and the Modernizing Process in East Asia” and “Modern Chinese Historical Studies in the Light of the Modernization Theory,” to Chinese Studies in History: A Journal of Translations (M.E. Sharpe) at the invitation of its editor.
People & Places, published monthly during the academic year by the Office of the President, reports on the professional activities of members of the College community and highlights student achievements. Please submit items to people@allegheny.edu. We reserve the right to edit copy for length.
