Faculty/Staff News of Note
April 2001
Dr. Stephen Ferucci, lecturer in English, presented "Teaching the Apocalypse, Writing the Apocalypse: Questions of Literacy, Questions of Faith" at the National Conference on College Composition and Communication held March 16 in Denver, Colorado.
Head Women's Basketball Coach Roz Fornari attended the Division III NCAA Women's Basketball Championships in Connecticut on March 16-18. She was one of twelve coaches nationally to be invited to instruct at a Youth Education Through Sports (YES) clinic during the playoffs, and she presented on the morning of the championship game. Katie Weigold, a junior guard from Penn State Behrend's team, accompanied her to the clinic, which included more than 230 players. The pair received tickets to watch the Final Four, and their expenses were paid by the NCAA.
Dr. Gregory Fowler, assistant professor of literature and American studies, has his paper, "A Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience: On Religion" accepted for publication in the June 2001 issue of the Indian Journal of American Studies, which is published by the Indo-American Center of International Studies.
Dr. Diana Hume George, professor of English and women's studies, was a visiting writer at Alfred University in Hornell, New York, for a two-day symposium called "Writing for Your Life." As a keynote speaker, she gave readings, a presentation on balancing work and family, ran workshops, and met with students and faculty members. George will be a writer-in-residence at Chautauqua Institution this summer, offering a course on letter writing that she developed with grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Fetzer Institute. George is also now on the board of the Chautauqua Writers' Center, and she also teaches MFA students at Goucher in August. She mentors several writers who continue to work on manuscripts after a residency period. At this summer's Mid-Atlantic Writing Conference, in association with the Goucher summer residency program, George will be on the program with writers such as Richard Selzer, Francine Prose, and National Public Radio's Susan Stamberg and Andrei Codrescu.
Dr. Robert Gray, assistant professor of electrical engineering technology, was an invited participant in discussions regarding precision terrain-aided navigation for all United States Air Force fixed-wing aircraft at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. He also participated in other meetings over a three-day period, including an electro-optics interchange meeting for uninhabited aerospace vehicles and a United States Air Force Future Air Navigation Systems meeting for all C-5, C-130, C-135, and C-17 transport aircraft. Gray also has had his paper, "A Performance Evaluation of Database Integrity Monitors for Synthetic Vision Systems" accepted for presentation at the eighth St. Petersburg (Russia) International Conference on Integrated Navigation Systems in May. His co-authors are Maarten Ujit de Haag of Ohio University and Steve Young of NASA's Langley Research Campus in Hampton, Virginia. Gray is also co-author of a paper that won the Best Paper Award at the 2000 IEEE/AIAA 19th Digital Avionics System Conference. The paper, written with M. Ujit de Haag and J. Campbell, is titled "Terrain Database Integrity Monitor for Synthetic Vision Systems."
Cathy Sargent Mester, senior lecturer in speech communication, presented "Presentation Software: It's Not Your Grandmother's Visual Aid," at the Ninth Annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium, held April 7 at Penn State University Park.
Dr. Ido Millet, associate professor of MIS, had a book chapter, "Accommodating Hierarchies in Relational Databases," published in Developing Complex Database Systems: Practices, Techniques, and Technologies.
Dr. Diane H. Parente, assistant professor of management, and Dr. Mary Beth Pinto, assistant professor of marketing, presented "Patient Satisfaction with Healthcare Delivery: The Impact of Cycle Time and Perceived Physician Contact" at the annual meeting of the Production Operations Management Society held April 8 in Orlando, Florida.
Dr. Jeffery K. Pinto, Samuel A. and Elizabeth B. Breene Fellow in Management, had his latest book, "Building Customer-Based Project Organizations," published this spring by Wiley. This is Pinto's twelfth book and was co-authored with Dr. Pelka Rouhiainen, project manager for CSO Aker Maritime, Inc. Pinto also recently signed a contract to write a second edition of his book Managing Geographic Information Systems, for Guilford Press.
Dr. Clare Porac, professor of psychology and director of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and a colleague, Dr. Alan Searleman of St. Lawrence University, have submitted their paper, "Quality of Life Among Older Adult Right- and Left-handers: A Study of Psychological and Physical Well-Being and Cognitive Performance." Porac also gave a talk to the Lawrence Park Historical Society on March 19. Her presentation was titled "Visual Illusions in Everyday Life."
Dr. Mark Pyron, assistant professor of biology, and Eric Obert, coastal environmental specialist with Pennsylvania Sea Grant, had their paper "Tumor Rates and Population Estimates of Brown Bullhead (Ameirus nebulosis) in Presque Isle Bay, Lake Erie, published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research 27:185-190 2001.
Dr. Robert Weissbach, assistant professor of electrical engineering technology, had his article, "A Combined Uninterruptible Power Supply and Dynamic Voltage Compensator Using a Flywheel Energy Storage System," published in the April 2001 IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery. Weissbach also presented a paper he co-authored with Kevin Torres, lecturer in engineering, titled "A Non-Inverting Buck-Boost Converter with Reduced Components Using a Microcontroller," a IEEE Southeastcon 2001, held March 31 in Clemson, South Carolina.
Several members of the mathematics faculty attended the meeting of the Allegheny Mountain Section of the Mathematics Association of America on April 6 and 7 in Altoona. Attending were Paul Becker, Terry Blakney, David Falvo, Paul Olsen, and Barbara Power. Blakney supervised student researcher Lee Swartzfager, who presented "Exploring the Winner/Loser Mentality of Day Trading;" Falvo presented "Teaching by a Dummy;" Olson presented "Addition of Combinatorial Games," and Powers presented "Identifying the Domain of Composite Functions: A Precalculus Group Project."
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