Category: Professional Notes

Assistant Professor of Music Mark Snyder was recently elected to the Fredericksburg Festival of the Performing Arts Board of Directors.

Founded in 1988 by internationally renowned harpist Heidi Lehwalder and other visionary arts lovers in Fredericksburg, the Fredericksburg Festival of the Arts has evolved from a small, world-class chamber music festival into a premier, year-round presenter of the performing arts in the Rappahannock region.

The work of FFPA is made possible through the efforts of volunteers and the contributions from community-minded individuals and businesses, government grants and funds provided by the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Fredericksburg Festival of the Arts is a 501(c)(3) non profit organization.

Associate Professors of Psychology Miriam Liss and Holly Schiffrin’s study “Helping or Hovering? The Effects of Helicopter Parenting on College Students’ Well-Being” examines the impact over-controlling parents have on college students.

The study, published in Springer’s Journal of Child and Family Studies, shows that college students who have “helicopter parents” are more likely to be depressed and less satisfied with their lives. This type of parenting negatively affects students’ well-being by infringing on their need to feel both autonomous and competent.

Articles and segments about the study have appeared in national and international outlets, including Reuters, CBS, WTOP, and The Daily Mail (U.K.).

Associate Professor of Psychology Mindy Erchull, Haley Miles-McLean ’13, Katherine A. Geary ’12 and Taryn Tashner ’12 also contributed to the study.

Stephen Farnsworth, professor of political science and director of the university’s Center for Leadership and Media Studies, spoke recently about the prospects for President Obama’s second term as part of the “2013 American Leadership Program: Inaugural Visions,” a nation-wide cable program broadcast from George Washington’s Mount Vernon. The program aired on public and educational television channels around the country.

In addition, Farnsworth has been interviewed recently by several news outlets for stories relating to Obama’s State of the Union speech and his second term, including Businessweek, CTV Television News of Canada, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Inside Higher Education,  NewsChannel 8 DC, and area radio stations WFVA and WFLS.

Dave Toth (assistant professor of computer science) and Theresa Grana (assistant professor of biological sciences) have received a grant for 60,000 hours of compute time on the world’s 7th fastest computer for “Teaching Undergraduates to Use Supercomputing in the Sciences.”  Following a talk that Toth’s drug discovery research partners from Merrimack College will give on March 25 at UMW, Toth and Grana will use some of the compute time to teach the students in Grana’s Bioinformatics course (BIOL 471v) how to perform one phase of the drug discovery process using a supercomputer.  The remainder of the compute time from the grant will be used to educate other UMW science students about how to increase the pace of scientific discovery using a supercomputer.

Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, has co-authored a research article, Centralizers in the full transformation semigroup, published in the journal Semigroup Forum.