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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.

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 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”.

Bailey and Student Receive Undergraduate Research Grant for Brain Research Study

April 7, 2017

Aileen Bailey – Professor of Psychology

Aileen Bailey, Professor of Psychology and recipient of the college’s Aldom-Plansoen Distinguished Professorship, and Zoey Forrester-Fronstin ’17 were selected as recipients of a Psi Chi 2016-2017 Spring Undergraduate Research Grant for Forrester-Fronstin’s project, “The influence of Orexin Antagonist, SB-334867, on Cognition.” Bailey described the project as an extension of research previously done in her lab and published as “Orexin receptor activity in the basal forebrain alters performance on an olfactory discrimination task” in Brain Research, 1594, 215-222 (Piantadosi, P.T., Holmes, A., Roberts, B.M., & Bailey, A.M., 2015).

Bailey said Forrester-Fronstin is looking at the connection between the neuropeptide orexin and its modulation of cognitive flexibility. Her research is loosely tied to research on Alzheimer’s disease as it focuses on one area of the brain that deteriorates in the disease. “Understanding how this area of the brain works to control cognitive ability may lead to a better understanding of Alzheimer’s disease,” Bailey said.

Bowers and Research Student Selected for National Lab Program

April 2, 2017

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Geoff Bowers was recently named one of four faculty from across the nation that will be participating in the Visiting Faculty Program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) this summer. This program is operated by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists in collaboration with the Department of Energy laboratories. The goal of the program is to bring faculty from institutions traditionally underrepresented in the research community to the national laboratories, expanding their workforce and giving faculty and their students opportunities to engage in and augment their professional scholarship. The competitive program requires a research proposal co-written with a PNNL scientist and involves working ten weeks this summer at the national lab.

Image of shale with an inset of microscopic elements

Shale in central New York with an inset showing a colorized helium ion microscope image of clay with cartoons of carbon dioxide and methane

Dr. Bowers will be working with H. Todd Schaef and his collaborators studying the interactions of minerals and organic matter in the subsurface with supercritical methane and carbon dioxide, work relevant to non-conventional gas extraction and sequestration. One of Dr. Bowers’s research students, Sydney Cunniff ‘17, will also be at the lab this summer working with Dr. Schaef and colleagues through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships program.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland Professor Wins MIPS Award for Research Innovation

January 20, 2017

Dr Troy Townsend and Solar Tech project manager Jeff Croisetiere shake hands

Troy Townsend, assistant professor of chemistry at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, left, and Jeff Croisetiere, ’04 SMCM alumnus and project manager for Solar Tech Inc. are working together to develop a proof-of-concept process to print low-cost and lightweight solar modules.

Troy Townsend, assistant professor of chemistry at St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM), was awarded a $100,000 technology product development grant through the Maryland Industrial Partnerships Program. Townsend will be working closely with Solar Tech Inc., a Maryland-based startup company, to develop a proof-of-concept process to print low-cost and lightweight solar modules from the bottom up.

Townsend explained that with this process in place, Solar Tech Inc. aims to produce solar panels faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional silicon-based photovoltaics.

“We are very excited to partner with the College to develop new solar technology that can be applied both for commercial and residential applications,” said Jeff Croisetiere, ’04 SMCM alumnus and project manager for Solar Tech Inc.

Solar Tech Inc. specializes in solar electric and solar thermal systems for residential, business and municipal applications. The company has served the Southern Maryland area since 2005.

Townsend said the project involves using inorganic nanocrystal inks in air under ambient conditions to produce printable solar modules. This comes in contrast to current solar modules, which are created using high-purity silicon under vacuum and high temperatures.

“It’s mostly about getting solar power to people in a more cost effective way. Solar cells right now are a little bit too expensive for the average person,” he said. “By reducing the cost of fabrication and installation, solar companies will be able to sell more affordable systems.”

“The collaboration between our research group at St. Mary’s College and Solar Tech Inc. strengthens the college’s ties with the community and offers our students first-hand experiences bringing new technology out into the entrepreneurial market.” Townsend said, “We predict that this partnership will create jobs in Maryland in the next few years as we develop our process.”

Along with this project comes more opportunities for state-of-the-art undergraduate research, while students also benefit from the broad liberal arts college experience. Elena Donahue, a rising senior chemistry major and math minor, is the lead research student on this project. She has been working on synthesizing nanocrystal inks and fabricating devices since her freshman year. “I was very fortunate to begin research early in my undergrad career, and under the guidance of Dr. Townsend I have learned many useful skills in the lab,” Donahue said. Solar Tech Inc. and Dr. Townsend expect that this project will lead to more undergraduate research opportunities and future collaboration.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland, 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.

St. Mary’s College Receives NIH Grant to Support Research Infrastructure

August 19, 2015

St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the state’s public honors college, was one of only six institutions awarded a grant in the 2014-15 award cycle from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Sabine L Dillingham, Director of Research and Sponsored Programs

The $435,620 award will be distributed over a five-year period and will support faculty and staff professional development at St. Mary’s College, as well as infrastructure upgrades for the college’s Office of Research and Sponsored Programs. Sabine L. Dillingham, Director of Research and Sponsored Programs, will serve as principal investigator.

The award’s specific aims are to:

Increase faculty research productivity and competitiveness through faculty development activities and improved mentor/collaborator networks, and
Improve support for research and research administration services by providing leadership, internal policy changes, and enhanced research administration competencies.