Archives for 2017

St. Mary’s College Participates in Council on Undergraduate Research Transformations Project

October 31, 2017

Pamela Mertz, Professor of Chemistry and CBC Chair, with St. Mary’s College students

The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Transformations Project will kick off this weekend, October 27-29, at The College of New Jersey, where the CUR-recruited consultants and departmental teams will begin their sustained work together for the next four years. Attending the meeting on behalf of St. Mary’s College is administrative co-lead of the project, Christine Wooley, interim associate dean of curriculum, and departmental co-leads Aileen Bailey, Pamela Mertz, and Kelly Neiles.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland is one of only 12 institutions selected by CUR for its Transformations Project, funded by the National Science Foundation. The Transformations Project will revise traditional four-year undergraduate curricula in biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology by focusing on high-quality undergraduate research throughout the four years of a student’s major. Participants from institutions around the country will directly engage in novel research to study the student, faculty, departmental, and disciplinary influences on the process of integrating and scaffolding undergraduate research experiences throughout the curriculum in two of the four possible disciplines.

A team of 16 faculty and staff members at St. Mary’s College are participating, including principal investigator and co-lead Sabine Loew Dillingham, director of the office of research & sponsored programs.

The full team is comprised of:

Michael Wick, provost and dean of faculty
Anne Marie Himmelheber Brady, director of the office of institutional research
Pamela Mertz, CBC’s chair & professor of chemistry
Kelly Neiles, assistant professor of chemistry
Andrew Koch, professor of chemistry
Randolph Larsen, professor of chemistry
Daniel Chase, assistant professor of chemistry
Geoffrey Bowers, assistant professor of chemistry
Aileen Bailey, Aldom-Planseon Honors College Professor of psychology
Nathaniel Foster, assistant professor of psychology
Cynthia Koenig, associate professor of psychology
James Mantell, assistant professor of psychology
Jennifer Tickle, associate professor of psychology
Elizabeth Nutt Williams, professor of psychology & chair of the psychology department
Christine Wooley, interim associate dean of curriculum
Sabine Loew Dillingham, director of the office of research & sponsored programs

SMCM Title IX Coordinator Michael Dunn Awarded Grant from the Maryland Department of Health

September 8, 2017

Michael Dunn, SMCM Title IX Coordinator

Michael Dunn, SMCM’s Director of Title IX Compliance and Training/Title IX Coordinator, was recently awarded funding from the Center for Injury and Sexual Assault Prevention at the Maryland Department of Health as part of a competitive application process. The funding comes from the Maryland Rape and Sexual Assault Prevention College Initiative which seeks to enhance campus-based sexual violence prevention activities.

SMCM will use the $8,000 grant to partner with the national violence prevention organization, A Call to Men, to offer a series of workshops on campus during the fall 2017 semester. Trained advisors from A Call to Men will lead multiple workshops on two occasions during the fall semester – aimed in particular at male members of the community – to address the prevalence, impact, prevention, and rejection of sexual violence on campus. All students, faculty, and staff will be invited and encouraged to attend. The Title IX Coordinator and the Implementation Team’s goal is to include preexisting communities of men on campus – athletic, academic, social, etc. – and to create a welcoming environment for any other individuals interested in attending. The focus on educating men is a result of College and national data that indicate that the majority of sexual misconduct incidents are committed by males. In addition, community partners through the St. Mary’s County Sexual Assault Response Team, including advocacy groups, medical responders, and law enforcement personnel, will be invited to attend.

The Title IX Coordinator and the Implementation Team will lead follow-up events on campus and will engage in an ongoing messaging campaign to reinforce and build on the training materials shared at the workshops. This important award from the Maryland Department of Health will help increase sexual violence prevention activities that are grounded in the best available evidence and utilize the principles of effective prevention.

SMCM Professor of Chinese Jingqi Fu Awarded Major Language Documentation Project Grant

August 24, 2017

Dr. Jingqi Fu, SMCM Professor of Chinese, in Yunnan Province, Summer 2016

Dr. Jingqi Fu, Professor of Chinese at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, was awarded funding in April 2017 from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme through SOAS, University of London for her project titled: Documentation and Preservation of an Endangered Ethnic Minority Language in China. Fu will travel to China extensively over the next three years to document the Lemo language that, to date, has no written script. “Lemo is the oldest dialect of Bai and is known to have separated from the Bai some 300-400 years ago,” explains Fu. “Its study will give clues as to the evolution of the Bai language as a whole.”

Dr. Fu’s linguistic research interests carry on work conducted by her mother, Lin Xu, who spoke the ethnic minority language of Bai during her childhood. Fu’s linguistic knowledge of the Bai dialect and structure, learned alongside her mother, provides a framework for the documentation effort she will lead as principal investigator on the three-year grant.

The research goal is both a linguistic study of the Lemo dialect and an enhancement of the status of Lemo language and culture. According to Fu, the Chinese government wants to document the culture by way of costumes in a museum but is not trying to keep the culture (and language) alive. The Endangered Languages Documentation Programme “supports keeping endangered languages alive and emphasizes that their documentation should be done in natural, everyday settings and situations, to best characterize the language and its cultural role” Fu remarks. All recordings will be archived in the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS and thereby preserved for posterity. The archive makes this invaluable resource available to the community, the public, and to the scientific community.

Fu spent three weeks in China during the summer of 2016 to prepare for the project, with the work beginning in earnest in summer 2017. A second summer in 2018, followed by a five-month stretch during spring 2019, will bring the project to completion.

Fu is principal investigator but will enlist a team to help with the research and data gathering. Representatives from the Yunnan Nationality Affair Commission and Dali Bai Research Institute, plus a technician and speaker-consultants recruited from the Lemo Community in Nujiang will form the research team.

The first two weeks in Nujiang will be spent making contacts with relevant people and conducting a week-long workshop on language documentation for speaker-consultants to learn to document their own language and culture. Afterwards, team members, equipped with recorders and cameras will gather data in different Lemo-speaking villages. Members will film and record in a variety of settings and contexts: story-telling, interviews, folksongs and dances, speeches, everyday situations, and, if permitted, religious ceremonies.

Once audio/video is captured, researchers and speaker-consultants will work to transcribe the data using open source software developed to annotate text, audio, and video media and generate the lexicon/dictionary of the language. In addition to the dictionary, the team will also build a grammar sketch. Both the dictionary and grammar sketch use data generated from the recorded audio/video. A working orthography (the way a language is expressed in written form, with symbols, punctuation, spelling) will be developed together with the Lemo community and a short language manual will be made based on the orthography. The manual, intended for first-grade children, will include cultural material relevant to their living environment.

Fu is grateful for the support she’s received to get this research funded. A summer grant from the St. Mary’s College Board of Trustees enabled her to travel to China this past summer in preparation for the work she’ll do under the current grant.

Fu has taken SMCM students on study tours to study and interact with Yunnan minority groups including Bai, as recently as 2015. In 2014, her students Megan Dower ’14, Naomi Garcia ’15, and Meng Fei Chen ’16 helped with the research on folksong translations.

Professor of Anthropology Julia King Awarded $240,000 Grant for Native American Study

August 24, 2017

Dr. Julia King (third from left), collaborators, and project participants

St. Mary’s College of Maryland Professor of Anthropology Julia King was awarded a $240,000 grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to trace the history and development of the Rappahannock Indians in early American history (200-1850 AD) in collaboration with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources (DHR), Chesapeake Conservancy, and the state-recognized Rappahannock Tribe of Virginia. The grant was one of 245 humanities projects from across the country awarded a combined $39.3 million from the NEH.

The anthropology department at St. Mary’s College first began studying the Rappahannock River Valley’s history in 2016 at the request of the National Park Service Chesapeake Bay office with funds administered by the Chesapeake Conservancy. The work was undertaken to provide interpretive support for the Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail.

Conventional wisdom has long held that the Rappahannock Indians moved to the north side of the Rappahannock River to escape the politically powerful Powhatan Indians in the York River Valley. Research by the St. Mary’s College team, however, suggests that ecological factors, including agricultural soils, marshlands, and clays suitable for pottery manufacture, and not political factors, better explain the Rappahannock’s decisions about where to settle. This discovery, which was made using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology, revealed the need for further archaeological study of the river valley. The NEH grant will allow this study on these tribal groups to continue.

Professor of Anthropology Julia King leads the research team, comprised of anthropology instructor Scott Strickland, an assistant archaeologist, and two archaeology technicians (St. Mary’s College undergraduate students) who will assist with field and laboratory work. They are joined by Chief G. Anne Richardson of the Rappahannock Tribe, who, along with tribal members, will assist with the field and laboratory work.

The continuing study will focus on the trajectories of movement into and within the Rappahannock valley, how the Rappahannock people used landscape and other forms of material culture to forge group and/or political identities between 200 and 1600 CE, and the reaction of the people living in the river valley to European contact and colonization.

“Thanks to the NEH grant, we will be able to start addressing some of the recommendations from the original study we conducted in 2016,” King said. “We hope to assemble a detailed culture history for the Rappahannock Indians in the river valley over the last 2,000 years, including archaeological collections-based analysis and a regional survey.”

Chief Richardson notes that her tribe’s oral history recalls the Powhatan as neighbors with whom they shared winter hunting grounds. “The Rappahannock’s history has been overlooked in almost every history book. We are grateful to the NEH for recognizing this serious gap in American history and providing the resources for us to address it.”

This research tracing the history and development of the Rappahannock indigenous cultural landscape is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. NEH supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this press release, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education through 2024-2025. St. Mary’s College, designated the Maryland state honors college in 1992, is ranked one of the best public liberal arts schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Approximately 1,700 students attend the college, nestled on the St. Mary’s River in Southern Maryland.

SMCM’s Ellen Kohl Awarded Funding for March 2018 Conference at University of Louisville

June 20, 2017

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Ellen Kohl

SMCM Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Ellen Kohl and collaborators Dr. Priscilla McCutcheon and Tanisha Stanford at the University of Louisville were awarded funding in June 2017 from the Antipode Foundation to host a conference titled: Let Justice Roll Down Like Waters: The role of spirituality in African American Environmental Activism in the U.S. South. The conference will explore the complicated connections between spirituality and environmental activism among African Americans in the U.S. South.

Dr. Kohl and collaborators seek to address four key questions through the conference: 1) How does spirituality influence African American involvement in environmental activism? 2) What specific spiritual expressions do we see in African American environmentalism? 3) How do African Americans spiritual engagement with the environment helps us to expand our definition of spirituality more broadly? 4) How does an engagement with spirituality expand our understanding of what activism is? The conference will bring together scholars, activists, and faith leaders to expand the conversation beyond the confines of academia, incorporating the people who are engaging with questions of African American spirituality and the environment through their daily work.

The conference will be held at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky from Thursday, March 1 – Saturday, March 3, 2018. Participants will present papers during several thematic sessions, providing ample time for discussions to occur between the presenters and between the presenters and the audience. A portion of the conference sessions will be available via livestream on the conference website and the University website, with appropriate care given to providing a safe space for conference participants to discuss what may be deeply personal experiences with spiritualty and environmentalism. The final product for this conference will be an edited volume on race, spirituality, and environmental activism, co-edited by Dr. McCutcheon and Dr. Kohl, and ideally published in the University of Georgia Press’ Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation series.

The Antipode Foundation is a UK registered charity that publishes Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, a peer-reviewed scientific journal released five times per year by Wiley-Blackwell, typically focusing on social justice issues.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Liza Gijanto Awarded Prestigious Howard Foundation Fellowship

June 19, 2017

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Liza Gijanto

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Liza Gijanto was awarded a highly-competitive Howard Foundation Fellowship in April 2017 for her project titled: Emancipation and Commerce: The Gambia Colony and American Plantations in the Age of British Abolition. The $33,000 fellowship for the 2017-2018 academic year will support Dr. Gijanto’s research which examines the nature of the impact of the Atlantic trade on the Gambia River. Dr. Gijanto was one of just eight nationwide 2017-2018 fellowship recipients and the only recipient in the field of archaeology. Other 2017-2018 fellowship recipients were selected from the fields of photography and anthropology and range from professors at large institutions such as UCLA to independent artists collaborating with organizations such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

This distinguished award will allow Dr. Gijanto to complete data-gathering for the Emancipation and Commerce project and begin writing a monograph describing the work. The project will advance understanding of the complex history of abolition in West Africa, a program that was ironically undermined by the continued consumption of goods produced by enslaved laborers in the Americas within an African colony founded to end the traffic of slaves. Dr. Gijanto will travel to two archives: the Peter Strickland Archive in Mystic, Connecticut and the British National Archives in Kew, London, during Fall 2017 and begin work on the monograph in Spring 2018.

The Howard Foundation is associated with Brown University and is one of few funders dedicated “to furthering the personal development of promising individuals at the crucial middle stages of their careers in the liberal and creative arts”. The Howard Foundation awards a limited number of fellowships each year for independent projects in selected fields, targeting its support specifically to early mid-career individuals and those who have achieved recognition for at least one major project.

Assistant Professor Kristy A. Lewis’ Collaborative Research Project Investigates Community and Ecological Impacts after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill

June 7, 2017

Kristy A. Lewis, Assistant Professor of Coastal Ecology

Kristy A. Lewis, Assistant Professor of Coastal Ecology at SMCM, received highly competitive funding from a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Gulf Research Program Synthesis Grant to participate in a collaborative project titled: Community Cohesion and Recovery after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill. The work is crucial to disaster management as it examines a community’s ability to self-organize and mobilize after a major disruption such as the oil spill occurring in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Dr. Lewis’ two-year $77,000 award is part of a larger overall NAS award ($590,000; NAS Award # 200007629) directed by principal investigator Dr. So-Min Cheong at the University of Kansas Center for Research. Dr. Lewis will be the key personnel driving the ecological analyses while also working closely with collaborator Jacob Model of Stanford University to develop a comprehensive database of social and ecological data, called the Community Response Inventory (CRI). Dr. Lewis and collaborators will then develop statistical models to assess the association between the presence of local nonprofits, density of those networks, and how the ecological health of the system drives the ability of nonprofits, and thus communities, to respond to oil spills.

Specifically, the planned research uses environmental data in combination with community-level social and economic data to generate novel insights on community impact from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It fills an important gap in social capital and community resilience literature by bringing attention to organizations and nonprofits, and helps develop community skills to mobilize and coordinate. This project will also provide funding for an undergraduate research assistant at SMCM to support Dr. Lewis with her research. Dr. Lewis transitioned from a visiting assistant professor position to a tenure-track assistant professor position in July 2017 and will continue this research into 2018.

Research reported in this article was supported by the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine under award number: 200007629.

Julia A. King Awarded Funding to Host Book-Preparation Conference

May 19, 2017

Dr. Julia A. King (far right) and collaborators including SMCM alumni Strickland ’08 (back row third from right), Mansius ’13 (front row third from right), and Webster ’16 (front row second from right)

Julia A. King, Professor of Anthropology, recently received a prestigious grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Dr. King received $4,000 from the NEH Chairman’s office to help fund a small two-day conference in May 2017 which brought together participants from a previous NEH-funded Collaborative Research Grant entitled: The Lower Potomac River Valley at Contact (ca. 1500-1720 AD). The conference provided an opportunity for collaborators to review, critique, and better integrate individual essays for a peer-reviewed manuscript with a hopeful submission date in September 2017. The book will describe the archaeological research focused on the history and development of the lower Potomac River valley before the age of George Washington. Dr. Barbara J. Heath, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, will serve as co-editor along with Dr. King. The conference was held at Stratford Hall, a historic house museum in Westmoreland County, Virginia and was additionally supported by the SMCM Provost’s office.

The book will consist of 14-15 chapters by different authors, all of whom participated in the original project which began in 2012. Collaborators, staff, and consultants assembled collections from 34 previously-excavated archaeological sites on both sides of the Potomac and used these assemblages to address three major topics related to Anglo-Native interaction: economic exchange and the rise of consumerism; the role of conflict, violence, and the threat of violence in the competition for resources; and the use of material culture to maintain or broker new or hybrid identities in a colonial setting. The project has resulted in several peer-reviewed articles, symposia at professional meetings, and the website colonialencounters.org. SMCM alumni Scott M. Strickland ’08, Mary Kate Mansius ’13, and Rebecca Webster ’16 attended the conference as participants and are preparing chapters for the book.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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SMCM Rising Senior Biochemistry Major Receives Research Award for Summer Project

May 4, 2017

SMCM student Elizabeth Johnson holds a white-throated sparrow

Elizabeth Johnson holds a white-throated sparrow on the St. Mary’s College of Maryland campus

Elizabeth Johnson, a rising senior biochemistry major, was awarded $1,000 from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) to support her 2017 summer research project. Johnson will be working on a cross-disciplinary project with Dr. Pamela Mertz, Chair and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Dr. Jessica Malisch, Assistant Professor of Biology, as part of SMCM’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF). The title of her project is “Oh Say Can you CBG? A New Technique for Evaluating Stress Responses in Birds” which capitalizes on the expertise of biochemical mechanisms and methodology available in Dr. Mertz’s lab to help answer important biology research questions being explored in Dr. Malisch’s lab.

Corticosteroid binding globulin (CBG) is a protein involved in vertebrate animals’ response to stressors. CBG and the hormone corticosterone help coordinate organismal responses to changes in the environment, but most field biologists do not account for CBG due to difficulty obtaining accurate measurements. Johnson’s research as part of the SURF program in June and July, 2017 will attempt to make CBG quantification more practical. Better understanding of the role of CBG will help ecologists interpret physiological data collected in the field and may help lead to medical advances in treating human stress disorders.

The SURF program at SMCM involves students, mentored by a faculty member, engaging in scholarly or creative work for eight-weeks over the summer. The ASBMB is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization whose mission is to advance the science of biochemistry and molecular biology and to promote the understanding of the molecular nature of life processes.

SMCM Student Research Projects Generating Steady Interest

May 2, 2017

The team of student and professors working on vCalc projects

The team of students and professors working on vCalc projects

A grant jointly funded by the Maryland Industrial Partnerships program and vCalc LLC in 2016 continues to generate steady interest at vCalc.com. St. Mary’s College of Maryland was awarded $97,361 to support student projects for vCalc.

The Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program promotes the development and commercialization of products and processes through industry/university research partnerships. MIPS provides matching funds to help Maryland companies pay for the university research. Projects are initiated by the companies to meet research and development goals.

vCalc (see 90 second YouTube video here) is a fast-growing calculator, equation and dataset library that helps users create, collaborate and quickly calculate. Topics range from complex scientific equations to practical everyday equations. vCalc has hundreds of calculators and thousands of equations created by engineers, professors and students from around the world.

The St. Mary’s research team developed equations for vCalc.com in math, chemistry, psychology, physics, and economics during the summer of 2016. The team was composed of students Caleb Svobodny, Austin Schlegel, Daria Vaseneva, Emma Skekel, Tyler Jones, Caroline Robertson, Savannah Bergen and Chris Lynch. Professors Emek Kose, Josh Grossman, Richard Platt, Randolph Larsen and Shizuka Nishikawa supported the project.

Kurt Heckman, president of vCalc, recently reported that several of the calculators created by SMCM students posted at vCalc.com are generating significant regular traffic to the site, including Savannah Bergen’s Characteristic Polynomial of a 3×3 matrix, which regularly gets used over 1,000 times per month, and Emma Skekel’s chemistry calculator to compute Kp from Kc, which sees 1,700 page hits per month, with an average time on page of 12 minutes and 38 seconds! According to Heckman, “that’s terrific engagement, and clearly an indication of how useful this calculator has become to chemistry students”.