Faculty/Staff News of Note
November 2001
Dr. Daniel Barnard, lecturer in music, has learned that his composition, Three Short Choral Works on Texts by E. E. Cummings, was named runner-up in the 2001 Virginia Chorale Composition Contest. Discussions are ongoing with the Chorale about including his work in next year's program.
Dr. Michael A. Campbell, associate professor of biology, and several student co-authors have had their paper published in Plant Physiology Biochemistry, vol. 39, 855-860 (2001). The article is titled "Genes Encoding for Branched-chain Amino Acid Aminotransferase are Differentially Expressed in Plants." Student authors are Jignesh Patel, Julie Meyers, Lindsey Myrick, and Jeffrey Gustin.
Dr. Michael Christofferson, assistant professor of history, recently attended the annual conference of the Western Society for French History in Indianapolis, Indiana. While there he provided comment for a panel on the "French Social Cinema in the 1990s."
Mary Connerty, lecturer in English, has received notice that her book Yevanic: Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Features of Judeo-Greek, will be published next spring by Jay Street Publishers in New York City. Connerty also competed in the Dublin Marathon October 29, completing the race and raising $4,200 for the Arthritis Foundation.
Dr. Ralph Ford, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, recently completed a $15,500 grant to develop advanced algorithms for plastic bottle inspection. He received the grant from AGR International in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Dr. Anthony Foyle, assistant professor of geology, attended the 113th Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America November 4-7 in Boston, Massachusetts. While there he presented a paper, "The Floridian Aquifer on the Georgia/South Carolina Coast: Using High-Resolution Geophysics to Locate Areas Susceptible to Sea Water Intrusion," and a poster, "An Integrated GIS-based Approach to Quantifying the Rates of Erosion."
Dr. Thomas Hemminger, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, chaired a session and presented at paper titled "Validating Digital Terrain Elevation Data with Neural Networks" at the Artificial Neural Networks in Engineering (ANNIE) Conference, held November 7 in St. Louis, Missouri. His co-author was Dr. Robert Gray, assistant professor of engineering.
Dr. Victoria Kazmerski and Dr. Dawn Blasko, associate professors of psychology, and student Banchi Dessalegn presented "Age Differences in an ERP Spatial Stroop Task" at the annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research held October 13 in Montreal, Canada.
John Kerwin, assistant professor of communication, presented his research at the Urban Mission Conference on Innovative Methods of Teaching, October 26 at Jersey City University in Jersey City, New Jersey. His paper, "Teaching Gender Sensitivity and Communication to Non-traditional Students in Non-traditional Classrooms," relates his experience teaching maximum-security inmates at the Walla Walla, Washington, penitentiary.
Dr. James A. Kurre, associate professor of economics, attended the Forty-eighth North American Meetings of the Regional Science Association International November 15-17 in Charleston, South Carolina. The meetings included 280 participants from around the world, and 230 papers were presented. While there Kurre presented "Can Foreign Trade Help to Stabilize a Metro Economy?" which he co-authored with Dr. Barry Weller, associate professor of economics, and Jennifer Warner, a December 2000 business economics graduate. The paper was based on work done by Warner, who was funded by a summer undergraduate research grant, to identify foreign countries whose business cycle patterns are opposite of Erie's. The paper hypothesizes that expanding trade with such countries could help reduce Erie's cyclical fluctuations.
Dr. William C. Lasher, associate professor of mechanical engineering, has submitted a proposal titled "Experimental Determination of Downwind Sail Force Coefficients" to the Council on Undergraduate Research. His proposal requests $4,000.
Eric Obert, coastal environmental specialist and associate director of Pennsylvania Sea Grant, will chair the committee of Sea Grant Extension Directors for the coming year. The position rotates among Sea Grant leaders in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and the combined Sea Grant office of Illinois and Indiana.
Dr. Boon Wee Ong, lecturer in mathematics, attended the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics November 2-4 in Baltimore, Maryland.
Dr. Clare Porac, professor of psychology, attended the Psychonomics Society meeting in Orlando, Florida, November 15-18. While there she gave a presentation on her paper titled "Handedness Profiles of Individuals with Successful and Unsuccessful Switches of Left-hand Writing."
Dr. Yorke Rowan, lecturer in anthropology, and J. Ebeling presented "Continuity and Change: Ritual Associations of Ground Stone Artifacts from Late Prehistory Through the Late Bronze Age" at the Annual Meetings of the American Schools of Oriental Research, held November 17 in Boulder, Colorado. Their presentation was part of a panel organized by Rowan and Ebeling titled "Not the Same Old Grind: Recent Studies of Ground Stone Artifacts in the Southern Levant."
Dr. Kimberly A. Skarupski, director of research at CORE, presented her paper titled "Health Status of African Americans in 'White' Nursing Homes vs. 'Black' Nursing Homes" at the Fifty-fourth Annual Scientific Meeting of the Gerontological Society of America, held in Chicago, Illinois, on November 18.
Dr. Meng Su, assistant professor of computer science, attended the ACM Tenth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management November 5-8 in Atlanta, Georgia. While there he presented a paper, "An Optimal Construction of Invalidation Reports for Mobile Databases." Also, he has had his article, "A Non-Linear Parameter Dependent Boundary Value Problem," published in volume 63, number 3 of Semigroup Forum, a journal published by Springer. He co-authored the article with Dr. Ron Grimmer.
Dr. James Warren, assistant professor of biology, attended the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience November 9-14 in San Diego, California. While there he presented a poster, "Cloning and Characterization of a Putative FRGX-related Protein Gene from Zebrafish."
Tom Wortman, special assistant to the Interim provost and dean, presented the paper, "Psychosocial Outcomes of Study Abroad: Increasing Openness to Diversity," at the Twenty-sixth Conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) in Richmond, Virginia. As part of the program, Wortman also conducted a roundtable discussion with Dr. Lew Jillings, Penn State's associate dean of international programs, titled "Internationalizing the Curriculum: Challenges in the New Millennium."
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