Archives for 2020

Assistant Professor Brownlee Awarded Collaborative Research Grant from NSF

September 18, 2020

Assistant Professor of Biology Emily Brownlee was recently awarded a $21,840 grant from the National Science Foundation for her project titled: Collaborative Research FSML: PhytoChop: An estuarine phytoplankton observatory (Award Number: 2022966). The two-year award began August 1, and will help fund Brownlee’s collaborative research with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES- Horn Point Laboratory).

With this grant, the researchers will establish the PhytoChop Coastal Observatory, an advanced autonomous instrument array designed to monitor the composition and photosynthetic activity of the phytoplankton community, together with water column nutrient and optical properties. The PhytoChop Coastal Observatory will be housed at Horn Point Laboratory’s research pier situated on the Choptank River, a tidal sub-estuary of the Chesapeake Bay.

Brownlee will be responsible for setting up and analyzing instrumentation data, and will help curate and expand the imaging library. Furthermore, Brownlee will coordinate with her collaborators at UMCES to synthesize results from the integration of Imaging FlowCytobot data with other PhytoChop instrumentation.

I’m excited to be a part of founding one of the first observatories to combine high-resolution plankton imaging and plankton health measurements at very small timescales. Along with measuring environmental parameters, this can provide unprecedented insight into how phytoplankton, such as those contributing to harmful algal blooms, are responding to long-term environmental and climate change. To have such an observatory on the Chesapeake Bay is a long-time dream of mine and I look forward to integrating observatory data into my courses and supplying St. Mary’s Project students with a lot of data in years to come!

Professor Julia King Awarded Archeology Grant from National Park Service

September 16, 2020

Professor of Anthropology, Julia (Julie) King, was recently awarded a $110,000 grant from the National Park Service to fund a complete archeological overview and assessment of Piscataway Park in Prince George’s County, Maryland. This project will be conducted through a Cooperative Agreement under the Chesapeake Watershed Cooperative Ecosystems Study Unit. The Cooperative Agreement was signed August 14, 2020 and the project is expected to be completed by December 31, 2021.

Piscataway Park is a unit of the National Park Service administered by National Capital Parks—East. The park is located in Southern Maryland along the banks of the Potomac River. This park is significant because of the rich archeological resources located within the park and their impact on our modern understanding of Native American societies in the Eastern Middle Atlantic. Situated approximately 25 miles downriver from Washington D.C., lands within the park were home to the Potomac Valley’s indigenous inhabitants for thousands of years—dating as far back as 6,000 years ago and through the 1500s. Among the occupants were the Piscataway Indians of Southern Maryland whose ancestors still live nearby today.

Piscataway Park is the greatest resource of pre-contact and contact period American Indian archeological resources in the National Capital Region of the National Park Service. The park has been the subject of several archeological investigations, but there has never been a synthetic report of this work or a formal organization of this material for management needs. The scope and breadth of existing archeological collections also lend themselves to addressing future research questions related not only to the history of Piscataway Park, but also the Native American communities that once lived there.

The archeological overview and assessment will describe and assess the known and potential archeological resources at Piscataway Park. The overview reviews, summarizes and synthesizes existing archeological data in detail, assesses past work, identifies gaps in our understanding of the archeological data, and determines the need for and recommendations for future studies. The document will be a core baseline archeological resources management reference for the National Capital Parks—East unit. This project will also critically examine and evaluate museum collections from archeological sites in the park to assist in understanding the history of the park. Furthermore, this work will develop recommendations for future research for management of park resources and public education. Julie King is the Principal Investigator for the project, with Scott Strickland (’08) serving as Research and GIS Coordinator. The grant also includes funding for an assistant archaeologist, likely to be an SMCM alum, and two student assistants.

Pending available funding, King and NPS may continue the project into 2022 and beyond with a new cooperative agreement. Additional work will likely entail reviewing and assessing archaeological collections, completion of updating state site forms, and updating archeological site condition assessments for the National Park System’s online Cultural Resources Inventory System. Further work may also involve the production of a publicly accessible document (excluding sensitive archeological information) that will provide a detailed history of the Native American experience as linked to Piscataway Park, along with a Finding Aid/Collections Assessment document to complement the Archeological Overview and Assessment Document.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland Receives Scientific Equipment Grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation

September 3, 2020

St. Mary’s College of Maryland announces a SEP Phase XV Scientific Equipment grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation to support, improve and broaden the access and impact of undergraduate science education at the College.

This grant will supply the equipment to establish two new laboratory spaces on campus, a fabrication laboratory and an imaging center, as well as the acquisition of observational astronomy and chemical imaging equipment that will support and expand current curricular and research offerings to both science and non-science majors.

Engaging students through experiential learning is a major component of the College’s new Learning through Experiential and Applied Discovery (LEAD) initiative. Through LEAD, faculty work across disciplines to blend together a thoughtful and purposeful academic experience for students with hands-on learning opportunities intertwined with credit-bearing professional skill development courses.

“We are grateful to the Sherman Fairchild Foundation for investing in St. Mary’s College of Maryland as we continue to work toward integrating practical and professional skills for students through our LEAD initiative promoting success beyond college,” said President Tuajuanda C. Jordan.

Scientific equipment like that provided through the grant from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation also enables the College to recruit and retain more talented high school students to the College by increasing and diversifying undergraduate research and hands-on learning opportunities for both science and non-science majors.

The St. Mary’s College of Maryland Foundation is a private, nonprofit organization that supports the College through sound fiscal management of a growing endowment portfolio. It is governed by a board of directors that gives its expertise and time in service to the College without compensation.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the National Public Honors College, is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education through 2024-2025. St. Mary’s College is ranked one of the best public liberal arts schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Approximately 1,600 students attend the college, nestled on the St. Mary’s River in Southern Maryland.

Professors Grossman and Johnson Awarded Grant to Recruit Future Physics Teachers

August 25, 2020

Professor of Physics Josh Grossman

Professor of Physics Josh Grossman and Professor of Educational Studies Angela Johnson were recently awarded a $24,749 grant from the American Physical Society to participate in the APS project titled: PhysTEC: Building a Solution to the National Physics Teacher Shortage. The grant is pass-through funding originating from a large grant with the National Science Foundation (Award Number: 1707990). The two-year award began July 1 and will help expand preparation of physics teachers at SMCM by pairing formalization of the Physics Teacher Education Program with recruitment activities and more high-quality early teaching experiences.

Professor of Educational Studies Angela Johnson

The physics program at SMCM has achieved high-profile successes in several areas of student education. The College’s Masters of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program and its alumni have likewise received accolades. Still, the two programs have not yet realized their potential for preparing more physics teachers.

United States school districts consistently list physics as a discipline with a considerable shortage of high school teachers. With this funding, Grossman and Johnson will work with the SMCM physics and educational studies departments to formalize a Physics Teacher Education Program, informed by standards presented in the American Physical Society’s Physics Teacher Education Program Analysis. Grossman, Johnson and collaborators will recruit high school students matriculating to SMCM, along with current SMCM undergraduate students to the new program. In addition to visiting high schools, STEM festivals, and similar events to reach high school students and more explicitly including the Physics Teacher Education Program and teaching careers in the physics career curriculum, Grossman and Johnson will formalize classroom assistantships into a Learning Assistant program and increase pay for these early teaching experiences to make them more attractive.

Grossman commented, “With this project, we’re expanding opportunities for students, helping them see the advantages of a career teaching physics, and making the path to that career more attractive.”

Assistant Professor Kohl Awarded Grant from Environmental Data and Governance Initiative

August 25, 2020

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Ellen Kohl was recently awarded a $14,117 grant from the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) for her project titled: Implications of Trump Administration policies on Environmental Justice Activists. The award is part of a larger project sponsored by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

Kohl will lead a team of EDGI scholars to draw on interview data to research the responses of environmental justice activists to the actions of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Trump Administration. EDGI researchers have begun and continue to conduct interviews with environmental justice activists across the United States. During the funding period, Kohl will use the time allotted to her by a course release to:

use qualitative research methods to analyze interview data and documents received through an ongoing Freedom of Information Act request, and
spearhead an EDGI white paper and a peer reviewed manuscript.

The EDGI interview and policy project leads have done extensive research, interviews, and writing on the impact that Trump administration policies have on EPA, EPA employees, and how these changes have impacted implementation of environmental policies. This project complements EDGI’s ongoing research by examining how changes within the EPA impact those on the ground who are most vulnerable to the changes brought about by the Trump administration. By analyzing interview data from environmental justice activists, this research can contribute to EDGI’s goal of centering justice and equity in environmental, climate, and data governance. The grant began August 1, 2020.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland joins the Maryland State Arts Council as a Regional Folklife Center

August 20, 2020

St. Mary’s College of Maryland was recently awarded a Maryland State Arts Council Folklife Network grant totaling $40,500 to represent Southern Maryland as a Maryland Regional Folklife Center in the Maryland State Arts Council’s Folklife Network. Regional folklife centers serve to continue “programmatic or educational efforts made by an organization to support folklife, or community-based living cultural traditions handed down by example or word of mouth.”

The College will create a Southern Maryland Folklife Summer Institute as the key feature of the Regional Folklife Center. The annual summer institute will be held at St. Mary’s College and will add unique opportunities to the rich and vibrant array of folklife events already operating in the region by celebrating and supporting community-based living cultural traditions of Southern Maryland (St. Mary’s, Calvert and Charles Counties). The institute will achieve this goal by offering a raft of workshops centered around broad folklife activities and their Southern Maryland components. Some proposed workshops will be specific to Southern Maryland (genealogy, cuisines such as stuffed ham and soul food), while others will reflect activities of Marylanders (landscape painting, beekeeping, oral history), while broader workshops will focus on the Mid-Atlantic region (bluegrass folk music, small farm entrepreneurship).

In preparing the grant, the team collaborated with the arts councils and organizations of the tri-county region in a community survey to learn about regional folklife needs and the kind of programming the community would like represented in a folklife institute.

The institute will pilot in June of 2021 with two days of exciting workshops and will close with a public exhibition and celebration event in the SMCM Boyden Gallery (pandemic permitting). The gallery event will allow participants to display their work and efforts learned in the workshops and may include such elements as short readings of oral histories, displays of family genealogies, landscape paintings, live folk music, and samples of culinary dishes. Campus residential housing will be available to participants. The institute will dovetail with the widely popular, community-centered Southern Maryland River Concert Series that draws thousands of people from the region for weekly outdoor summer concerts and the prestigious Chesapeake Writers’ Conference, therefore providing additional visibility and extra-curricular activities for participants.

In addition to the College’s Boyden Gallery, the SlackWater Center will also be a key participant in the folklife center as the institute’s activities will be featured in, and may also produce content for, the SlackWater journal. In addition to the journal, the SlackWater Center also provides students and community members with opportunities to conduct oral histories, hundreds of which are transcribed and available online on the Archive’s website as the SlackWater Oral History Collection. The activities of the institute may produce writing features, images (art and photography), oral history interviews, genealogies, and recordings of lectures that will then be added to the SMCM Archive.

Over the coming years, the College aims to incrementally build upon annual institute offerings and community engagement, by soliciting candid assessment and suggestions from all participants of the pilot and subsequent institutes.

Assistant Professor Gurbisz Awarded Grant from the Ferry Cove Project

August 10, 2020

Cassie Gurbisz, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, has received a grant for $19,073 from the Ferry Cove Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to expanding the Chesapeake Bay oyster aquaculture industry. Partnering with Dr. Jeremy Testa from University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, Dr. Gurbisz will collect measurements in the waterways around Tilghman Island, MD to quantify the effects of a new oyster hatchery on the local coastal environment.

The hatchery, to be located on an 80-acre farm with several hundred feet of shoreline, will include a floating oyster conditioning area and a 400-foot oyster reef breakwater. Measurements in and around the conditioning area, which includes floating oyster cages to be installed atop beds of submersed aquatic vegetation (SAV), provide an excellent opportunity to investigate the ways in which oyster aquaculture interacts with SAV. This has recently become a hot topic as both SAV abundance and aquaculture leases expand and therefore compete for space in shallow regions of the Chesapeake Bay. Data collected prior to and after the construction of the oyster breakwater and the adjacent marsh will generate information about the ways in which this increasingly popular but understudied shoreline defense structure modifies physical and ecological processes at the land-water interface. While each of these objectives is valuable individually, together they will constitute a unique case study of how the coastal environment responds to multiple human uses from a holistic, integrated perspective.

The goal of the current project is to collect baseline environmental data before hatchery construction begins. Over the next several years, Gurbisz and Testa hope to continue the project to collect post-construction data and make more detailed measurements. This project complements Gurbisz and Testa’s ongoing work funded by Maryland Sea Grant to study the effects of bottom cage oyster aquaculture on SAV. Ultimately, their goal is to provide scientifically sound information to guide regional environmental policy and management decisions related to SAV-oyster aquaculture interactions.

Associate Professor Muchnick Collaborating on NSF Grant to Develop Interdisciplinary Systems Thinking Assessment Tool

August 5, 2020

Barry Muchnick, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, was recently awarded a three-year, $18,110 subaward as part of a $1.077 million National Science Foundation grant for a project titled: Developing a Next Generation Concept Inventory to Help Environmental Programs Evaluate Student Knowledge of Complex Food-Energy-Water Systems (NSF award number 2013373). The collaborative research project brings together researchers from University of Northern Colorado, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and nine other higher-education institutions across the country to develop a machine-learning program to assess students’ understanding of the connections among food-energy-water concepts in their classes. Their ultimate goal is to improve teaching in college-level environmental studies courses by helping instructors make evidence-based decisions on how to best shape their students’ understanding of complex systems thinking and sustainability concepts.

The 11 colleges and universities participating in the concept inventory development research. Graphic used with permission from University of Northern Colorado.

“Big data and the power of machine learning drive this project,” Muchnick said, “but ultimately we are interested in how best to reinforce interdisciplinary connections, especially with regard to food, energy, and water systems.” “I’m thrilled that St. Mary’s College of Maryland environmental studies students are part of a national research effort to more effectively train the next generation of environmental leaders.”

Muchnick’s teaching and scholarship is concerned with how natural and cultural systems interact to form our ecosystems, experiences, institutions, and imaginations.

Professor of Biology Karen Crawford featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered”

August 3, 2020

Professor of Biology Karen Crawford’s milestone study on achieving the first gene knockout in a cephalopod using the squid Doryteuthis pealeii was featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Crawford, who was the Whitman Scientist this summer on a team at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, is first author of the study reported in the July 30 issue of Current Biology. The NPR story is available online.

Professor of Anthropology Julia King and Collaborators Continue Archaeological Research Along Rappahannock River

July 28, 2020

Professor of Anthropology Julia King, Instructor of Anthropology Scott Strickland and SMCM students Caitlin Hall, Sarah Kifer and Danielle Harris-Burnett are featured in a July 25, 2020 Fredericksburg.com article focusing on their Rappahannock Tribe project called “Indigenous Borderlands of the Chesapeake.” The team is doing historical archaeology in Virginia to find spots where Native American villages existed along the Rappahannock River.

King and her crew have been working recently at a land tract above the Rappahannock River called Fones Cliffs. The site had been considered for development but was acquired instead in 2019 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Fones Cliffs has a rich cultural history, as well as important ecological habitat and a beautiful white cliff landscape.

The team of archaeologists has found clues of Native Americans at Fones Cliffs and King said the main objective will continue to be finding evidence of the three large villages that exist in both the Rappahannock Tribe’s oral histories and in Captain John Smith’s journals, describing his journey up the river in 1608. King notes that an earlier round of exploration on the Fones Cliffs site was funded by The Conservation Fund, while this year’s two weeks of digging and exploration were paid for by the refuge.