People & Places: August 2023
People & Places is a monthly highlight of the ongoing professional activities and achievements of faculty, staff, and students of the College.
Adrienne Krone, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science & Sustainability and Religious Studies, and Brittany Davis, previously Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Black Studies at Allegheny, published a chapter in the book Key Competencies: Practical Approaches to Sustainability.
Their chapter, “Stop Telling People What to Do: Teaching Sustainability Through Cultural Learning,” uses two Allegheny courses, Judaism, Justice, and Food and Culture, Power, Environment, as case studies to discuss methods for increasing cultural competency and encouraging students to engage in collaborative sustainability work. The book is available online and can be accessed here.
Krone also published an article in Contemporary Jewry, “Jewish Environmentalism in the Jewish Americans in 2020 Study and Beyond,” in response to a recent Pew Research Center study.
Her colleagues Christopher Normile and Megan Bertholomey from the Psychology Department and Tarah Williams from the Political Science Department provided expert assistance as Krone worked through the statistical analysis required for this article, and she is grateful for their support! This article is available online and can be accessed here.
At the invitation of Robert Langham, Senior Editor at Routledge, Guo Wu, Associate Professor of History, edited a collection of his published research articles about the Chinese revolution and socialist culture and politics spanning 1920 to 1970 and completed the final proofreading and indexing this summer.
The volume, now under the title “Chinese Revolution in Practice: From Movement to the State,” contains six case studies plus a newly written introduction and conclusion, and it will be the fourth book published by Guo Wu.
It is forthcoming as part of Routledge’s Studies in Modern History series and will appear in October 2023. Additional information can be found here.
Tricia Humphreys, Professor of Biology and Schwartz Professor of Life Sciences, received the Sigma Xi Award for Faculty Mentorship of Student Research at the 31st Annual Undergraduate Research and Creative Accomplishment Conference co-sponsored by Sigma Xi and Penn State Behrend.
Candidates are drawn from faculty who bring their students to the conference from area schools and are voted on by members of the NW PA chapter of Sigma Xi. Humphreys gave a presentation at the conference highlighting research projects Allegheny students have carried out with the bacterial pathogen Haemophilus ducreyi.
Erin O’Neill ’24 recently completed a ten-week-long internship at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS: NIH) in Durham, North Carolina, where she had the opportunity to work with leading scientists in the cell and molecular biology field.
She conducted high-quality research using state-of-the-art resources to address the gap in our understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in ocular inflammation and how a specific receptor combines with steroids to combat that inflammation.
O’Neill’s project was on “The Effects of the Glucocorticoid Receptors in Macrophages During the Inflammatory Cornea Neovascularization,” which she completed with Dr. David Diaz-Jimenez. She presented this research in a poster format at the NIEHS and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.
Tamara Lakins, Professor of Mathematics, was a member of the panel “The Art of Publishing in MAA Journals” at the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) conference MathFest, held in Tampa from August 1 to 5.
Lakins is currently editor-elect of The College Mathematics Journal, published by the MAA, and will begin her 5-year term as editor in January 2024. The CMJ is an “international, peer-reviewed journal publishing high-quality exposition on mathematical topics related to the undergraduate curriculum.”
On August 12, Shannan Mattiace virtually presented a keynote address at a Forum on Security and Justice in Mérida, Yucatán, sponsored by the Compañía de Jesús (Jesuits) in Mexico. The title of her presentation was “Yucatan: a national exception in criminal violence and a destination for ‘security migrants’,” based on articles she has published with Sandra Ley (Mexico Evalúa, Mexico) and Tomas Nonnenmacher.
Ninety people were in attendance, and press coverage of the event can be viewed here in Spanish.