News Center

Feb. 2, 2012 – Students and faculty at Allegheny College have recently authored works or participated in professional activities across a wide range of disciplines.

Joe Brennan ’13 was awarded the prize for best internship report at Boston University’s Paris Internship Program. Brennan’s report, “La Chasse du Bushmeat,” summarizes the research project he was involved in at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. Using molecular typing, he was charged with identifying endangered hunted species from parts of Africa.

Sam Ginsburg ’12 was joint author of the poster “Exploring Theta_k-embeddings,” presented at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston held this past January. His poster was based on research conducted in summer 2011 at an NSF REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Also presenting at the Joint Meetings was Julie Woods ’11, who was part of a team of students presenting the talk “The rainbow domination number of a graph,” a report on research the students conducted at Smith College’s post-baccalaureate program for women in mathematics.

Elyse Schmitt ’12 presented at a conference at Westminster College designed to showcase projects being conducted in the environmental science departments at local colleges and universities. Schmitt’s poster on urban commercial aquaponic system case studies was awarded first place in the nonscience poster judging.

Professors of Environmental Science Terry Bensel and Richard Bowden, Stacia-Fe Gillen ’14, Lauren Deem ’13, Kelsey Ream ’13, Alessandra Trunzo ’11, and Taylor Weiss ’11 co-presented “The Penn’s Woods Project: Forest Science Education for High School Students” at the Pennsylvania Forest Festival, held at Pennsylvania State University, and also at the 2011 Annual Convention of the Society of American Foresters. The hands-on demonstration illustrated modules and activities included as part of the recently launched Penn’s Woods Project, which provides forest science teaching resources for high school teachers across Pennsylvania.

Assistant Professor of Biology Lisa Whitenack and Anthony Hessel ’12 presented posters at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting in Charleston, S.C., along with their collaborator at the University of Connecticut. Whitenack’s poster was titled “Jumping kinematics in the Plethodontidae I: performance, morphology, and scaling.” Hessel’s was titled “Jumping kinematics in the Plethodontidae II: the effects of tail loss.” Both presentations stemmed from Anthony’s research this past summer.

Annie Ginty ’09 and Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Sarah Conklin have a paper published in the current issue of Biological Psychology. The paper, “Preliminary evidence that acute, low-dose supplementation of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids reduce cardiovascular reactivity to mental stress: A placebo controlled trial,” reports data collected at Allegheny a few years ago.

Head Tennis Coach Jared Luteran has been named the 2011 USTA Allegheny Mountain District Collegiate Coach of the Year. Luteran, who has been at the helm of the Allegheny tennis program since the 2002-2003 season, was selected as NCAC Co-Coach of the Year in 2007. The USTA Allegheny Mountain District Collegiate Coach of the Year honor is given to one college coach in the Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania, and Wheeling, West Virginia area who exemplifies the spirit of tennis both on and off the court.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Rachel Weir gave two talks at the 2012 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston. She was invited to give the talk “Weighted Reproducing Kernels and the Bergman Space” in the special session Operator Theory on Analytic Function Spaces. The second talk, “Applications of Wavelets: A Sophomore-level Seminar Course,” was a contributed talk in the session Wavelets in Undergraduate Education.

Professor of Biology and Environmental Science Scott Wissinger and Howard Whiteman ’88, professor of biology and director of the Watershed Studies Institute at Murray State University, and co-authors recently published the article “Larval growth in polyphenic salamanders: making the best of a bad lot” in the journal Oecologia. The paper reports on 22 years of collaborative research by the lead authors on how environmental factors during larval development affect whether salamanders metamorphose into terrestrial adults or remain in ponds for life as sexually mature larvae.

Assistant Professor of History Guo Wu published a Chinese essay, “Fushan dui Zhongguo zhengzhi shi de sikao” [Francis Fukuyama’s Thoughts on Chinese Political History], in the December issue of the Dushu [Readings] monthly, China’s most influential journal of academic and intellectual inquiry. The essay reviews the political theorist Fukuyama’s 2011 book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, focusing on his study of China’s state-building in history. Wu also presented his paper “Discovering an Ethnic Culture in Qing China: Local Officials’ Representation of the Miao and Their Accommodating Policies in the Yongzheng Period, 1722–35” to the 126th annual conference of AHA in Chicago on January 5.