People and Places: May 2022
Join the Office of URSCA in congratulating the many Allegheny students who recently presented their research at the Sigma Xi Undergraduate Research and Creative Accomplishment Conference, held on April 23 at Penn State Behrend. In particular, the Office of URSCA would like to highlight the following students for their outstanding achievements in either winning or earning 2nd place in their subdiscipline:
- Gannon McDonough ’22 (& Prof. Yee Mon Thu)
2nd place in Biology — oral presentation - Grace Hemmelgarn ’22 (& Prof. Casey Bradshaw-Wilson)
1st place in Environmental Science — oral presentation - Raymond Englert ’22 (& Prof. Gaia Rancati)
1st place in Marketing and Economics — oral presentation - Thi Thu Thao Nguyen ’23 (& Prof. Gaia Rancati)
2nd place in Marketing and Economics — oral presentation - Jordan Mehalko ’22 (& Profs. Lauren French and Lauren Rudolph)
2nd place in Biology — poster presentation
Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Rod Clark was presented with the Faculty Research Award for outstanding mentorship of undergraduate research at the Sigma Xi annual conference at Penn State Behrend.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Music Michael Dolan presented “An Unexpected Perk: Lessons in Score Study for Ensemble Musicians Post-COVID” at three state music education conferences in 2022. The Massachusetts Music Educators Association Conference took place in March, and both the New Hampshire Music Educators Association Spring Conference and the Tennessee Music Education Association Conference convened in April. The New Hampshire MEA published the article on which Dolan’s presentation was based in the Spring 2022 volume of its quarterly journal New Hampshire Quarter Notes: The Official Publication of the New Hampshire Music Educators Association.
The Crawford County Community Council recently presented the Professional/Volunteer of the Year Award to Associate Professor of Biology & Global Health Studies Becky Dawson ’00.
Members of the Council acknowledged the countless hours Dawson spent (and continues to spend) educating the community about COVID-19 during the past two years. In addition to the award, Dawson received citations from the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and Senate.
Associate Professor of History Guo Wu’s 2019 book Narrating Southern Chinese Minority Nationalities. Politics, Disciplines, and Public History was reviewed by scholar Dr. Francisco Miguel Ortiz Delgado at UAM Cuajimalpa, Mexico, who shared the Spanish-language review on ResearchGate. The review, appearing in ESPACIALIDADES. Volumen 11, Núm. 01, enero-junio de 2021, can be found here.
Ken Pinnow, professor of history and Henry B. and Patricia Bush Tippie Professor, presented an invited paper at the Socialist Studies Seminar at Carnegie Mellon University on April 22. His paper, “Bad Doctors, Bad Patients: Law, Ethics, and the Negotiation of Medical Authority in the Early Soviet Union,” explores the often violent conflicts between Soviet patients and their doctors and analyzes them in terms of the competing claims associated with efforts to promote universal public health and specific notions of biological citizenship within the context of Soviet socialism. It represents part of his continuing work on the history of medical ethics in the Soviet Union and integrates collaborative research done with Emily Peters ’24.
Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Adrienne Krone published an article in a special issue of Religions called “Religions, Animals, and Technology.” Her article details the intersection and co-constitutive nature of religion, animals, and technology through a case study of Jewish engagements with cultured meat. The article is open access and is available online here. Krone is grateful for the Allegheny College Writing Accountability Group, which gave her space, time, and a supportive community that enabled her to research, write, and revise this article throughout the 2021-2022 academic year.
Associate Professor of Biology and Geology Lisa Whitenack published two papers in May 2022. The first, “The Core Concepts, Competencies and Grand Challenges of Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy and Morphology,” was published in Integrative and Comparative Biology and is co-authored with researchers from the University of San Diego and McDaniel College. The authors undertook a two-year iterative process of surveying faculty teaching comparative vertebrate anatomy and refining the core concepts and competencies for the subject. They also issued a grand challenge of acknowledging racism, homophobia, genocide, slavery, and other influences on the field. This paper is open access and can be found here.
The second paper, “What Can Professional Scientific Societies Do to Improve Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: A Case Study of the American Elasmobranch Society (AES),” was published in a special issue of Frontiers in Education on professional and scientific societies impacting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in STEMM. Whitenack was part of a team of 18 researchers from the U.S., Canada, and Panama that analyzed the demographics of AES members, leaders, and award winners, evaluated a diversity initiative run by the AES, and synthesized recommendations of steps AES and similarly sized societies can take to better support DEI goals. This open access paper can be found here.