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A glance at the research and professional activities of some of the faculty members who are on leave in 2007-08:
Rexford Ahene, professor of economics and business, is senior technical adviser to the Uganda Private Sector Competitiveness Project and is continuing research on land policy and land markets in Africa.
Paul Barclay, associate professor of history, did research in Kyoto this summer and will travel to Taiwan this fall. He holds a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for work on “Imperial Centrifuge: Japan’s Colonial Subalterns and the Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan, 1873-1930,” a political and cultural history of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan’s highlands.
Susan Basow, Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychology, has a research appointment at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Ethan Berkove, associate professor of mathematics, is spending the fall semester as a member at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, Calif., participating in a focus semester on geometric group theory.
Jamila Bookwala, associate professor of psychology, presented research at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association. She will give a paper in Melbourne based on a grant from the National Institute on Aging and will present other research at the annual meeting of the Gerontological Society of America.
David Brandes, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, is a visiting scientist at the Acopian Center for Conservation Learning, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, Kempton, Pa. He’s conducting cross-disciplinary research on mathematical modeling of raptor migration.
James Dearworth, assistant professor of biology, will make a presentation on “Pupil Constriction in the Turtle Evoked by Microstimulation of the Oculomotor Nerve” at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. He is revising a proposal to the National Eye Institute (National Institutes of Health) entitled “The Pupillary Light Response in Turtle: a Novel Reptilian System” and plans to submit papers to Visual Neuroscience, Veterinary Ophthalmology, and the Journal of Neurophysiology. He is also supervising four student projects.
Edward Gamber, professor of economics and business, is a visiting scholar in the Department of Economics at George Washington University. He has been a member of the university’s Research Program on Forecasting for a decade.
Sharon Jones, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, was appointed visiting research scholar in the Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Jones, Christopher Ruebeck, assistant professor of economics and business, and Jeffrey Pfaffman, assistant professor of computer science, were awarded a National Science Foundation grant to integrate agent-based modeling and life-cycle analyses to enhance environmental policy making. Jones received the 2007 Engineering Education Excellence Award from the National Society of Professional Engineers.
Chawne Kimber, associate professor of mathematics, is VanVleck Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Wesleyan University. She is also spending time at University of Florida seminars and conferences on research in algebra, number theory, and combinatorics.
John Meier, professor of mathematics, is spending the fall semester as a member at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, Calif., participating in a focus semester on geometric group theory. He has signed a contract with Cambridge University Press for a book on geometric group theory that is accessible at an undergraduate level.
Steven Mylon, assistant professor of chemistry, is conducting research at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Mylon, Javad Tavakoli, professor of chemical engineering; Arthur Kney, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering; and Laurie Caslake, assistant professor of biology hold a $200,000 National Science Foundation grant to support a research into removing the contaminant perchlorate from groundwater. Mylon was awarded an additional $25,000 International Research and Education in Engineering grant from NSF.
Alix Ohlin, assistant professor of English, was selected to deliver the annual Campbell Lectures on literature at Rice University, where she will discuss “The Tempest of Nature and Art” in three talks. She served a summer a residency at the Chateau de Lavigny International Writers’ Residence in Lausanne, Switzerland. Westminster College, Salt Lake City, selected her novel The Missing Person as the reading assignment for incoming honors students.
Robin Rinehart, associate professor of religious studies, presented research on the Sikh text Dasam Granth at the Conference on the Study of Religion in India at Albion College and will do so again at the annual meeting of American Academy of Religion. She plans a short trip to India this fall. She is also a member of a working group of the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion that is developing a set of best practices and other resources for undergraduate research in religion. She spent time at Elon University in September in connection with that and will give a presentation on the work at the AAR meeting.
George Rosa, professor of foreign languages and literatures, is researching Stendhal this fall at the Centro Stendhaliano of the Biblioteca Comunale di Milano (Palazzo Sormani) in Milan. His book project is tentatively entitled Marginal Stendhal.
Helena Silverstein, professor of government and law, will research legal disputes over public religious displays in Rhode Island, site of the landmark 1984 Supreme Court ruling in Lynch v. Donnelly, the first major case questioning the constitutionality of placing a religious holiday display on public property. Since that ruling, Rhode Island has been at the center of several localized battles over nativity scene exhibits. One of her research projects will take her to Rhode Island to interview the players who are at the center of these legal conflicts. She will also travel to conferences in Buffalo and Montreal.
Derek Smith, associate professor of mathematics, is based in Krakow, Poland, until next June, working with mathematicians at the University of Warsaw, the University of Silesia in Katowice, and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He has also been invited to work with a mathematician in Prague (on quantum logic) during the spring semester.
Todd Wey, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, is working with new equipment acquired through a $257,762 National Science Foundation grant. Wey, William Jemison ’85, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Andrew Kortyna, assistant professor of physics, were awarded the grant to purchase equipment to continue research in electronic and optical telecommunications.