Dianne Baker, Venitta McCall, and Kelli Slunt attended the National Science Foundation Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program 2014 Grantees Conference in Washington, D.C. March 5 to 7, 2014. On Thursday, March 6, the three principal investigators for the grant presented a poster entitled STEM Talent Expansion Through Research, Engagement, Preparation, and Scholarship.
Barrenechea Selected for Jessie Ball duPont Summer Seminar
Antonio Barrenechea, Associate Professor of English, has been selected to participate in one of the two 2014 Jessie Ball duPont Summer Seminars sponsored by the National Humanities Center. That seminar, “Globalization and the Varieties of Modern Capitalism,” will meet June 1 to 20 in Research Triangle Park, N.C. His application was approved in conjunction with a new project on the poetics and politics of excess in the cinema of the Americas.
Cate Brewer Co-Chairs National Theatre Conference
Cate Brewer, Lecturer in Theatre in the Department of Theatre and Dance, co-chaired the Practice/Production Symposium of The Mid-America Theatre Conference. She also presented her paper entitled: “Contemporizing Commedia: Re-envisioning the Renaissance.” Cate has presented at The Mid-America Theatre Conference for the last six years.
Professors and Student Publish Collaborative Column
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and international affairs and director for the Center for Leadership and Media Studies, and Steve Hanna, professor and chair of the department of geography, published a collaborative column with UMW senior political science major Benjamin Harris in the Richmond Times Dispatch. The article is about the Medicaid expansion debate in Virginia.
Professor Sharpless Publishes Articles
Chemistry Professor Charles Sharpless is the co-author of two recently published articles. The first, entitled “Photooxidation-induced changes in optical, electrochemical, and photochemical properties of humic substances,” was co-authored with colleagues from U.C. Berkeley and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and appears in the current issue of the American Chemical Society journal, Environmental Science & Technology. A research article, it focuses on how prolonged exposure to solar radiation alters the photochemical and electrochemical properties of natural dissolved organic matter, ubiquitous brown “stuff” in surface waters that participates in many aspects of environmental aquatic chemistry. The second article, entitled “The importance of charge-transfer interactions in determining chromophoric dissolved organic matter (CDOM) optical and photochemical properties,” was co-authored with Professor Neil Blough (Chemistry, U. MD College Park). This was an invited review for the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal, Environmental Sciences: Processes and Impacts, formerly The Journal of Environmental Modeling. The review, containing 247 references, deals with the optical and photochemical properties of natural dissolved organic matter, how those properties are related, and the relevance of these relationships for current research in environmental photochemistry. The article is currently in advance electronic format and will be published later this year in a specially-themed journal issue devoted to aquatic photochemical processes.
Kashef Majid and UMW Business Major Madeleine Bate Present at Conference
Kashef Majid, Assistant Professor of Marketing in the College of Business, and UMW business major Madeleine Bate, presented “Breadth vs. Depth – Linking Network Shape to Revenues, a Study of the Dispersion of Film Trailers via Twitter,” at the American Marketing Association Winter Educators Conference in Orlando from Feb. 21 to 23, 2014. To view a copy of the presentation please visit http://kashefmajid.com.
Martha Burtis and Jim Groom Present at Symposium
On Feb. 21 Martha Burtis and Jim Groom were invited to present about the open, online Digital Storytelling course ds106 at the OpenVCU Symposium. The presentation, “Open is as Open Does,” lays bare the various levels an open course like ds106 operates through. This talk breaks down teaching openly online into three parts: open platforms, open pedagogy, and open community. You can read about the presentation in more detail here or view the slide deck below.
Randall Helmstutler Publishes Article
Associate Professor and Chair of Mathematics, Randall Helmstutler, published the article “Conjugate pairs of categories and Quillen equivalent stable model categories of functors.” It appears in a recent issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Pure and Applied Algebra.
Farnsworth Gives U.S. Department of State Lecture
Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the University’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, recently gave a lecture entitled, “Journalism and U.S. Foreign Policy: Global Media and Politics in Transition,” to visiting journalists from Yemen who were part of a recent Institute for International Education Visitor Leadership Program. The Washington-based program was sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.
Fallon Presents at Afroasiatic Linguistics Conference
Paul Fallon, Associate Professor of Linguistics, presented the paper “The Lexicostatistics of Central Cushitic (Agaw)” at the 42nd annual meeting of the North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics (NACAL), held this year at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands, Feb. 14-16, 2014.