Category: Professional Notes

My name is Cathy Finn-Derecki and I have had the privilege of working at UMW for the past 12 years, most of the time in the capacity of managing our public web presence. Other opportunities beckon, and it’s time I move on to a position closer to home in Charlottesville. I leave with a full heart and enormous gratitude for what was given to me here. The people here had faith in me, guided me and followed along with me on a ride that was truly exciting, creative, at times infuriating, but never, ever boring.

UMW gave my life a new direction that I had not anticipated when I first arrived. As John Lennon says, “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.” No phrase defines my life at Mary Washington more succinctly than that. And the life that has happened here, for me, is far beyond any plans I could have hatched.

Thank you, UMW, for giving me a home. Keep up with my steady stream of unsolicited opinions as I move out of UMW Blogs and into my new domain, http://transparentuniversity.org. Twitter: http://twitter.com/@saracup, Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cathy.finnderecki.

One parting thought: If I could change the UMW tagline in one way, it would be this: “Where great minds get to play.” When work is play, you truly have something to be grateful for.

Three UMW mathematics majors, Morgan Brown, Peter Slattery, and Andrew Cole, traveled to the Shenandoah Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics conference – SUMS at JMU on Saturday, Sept. 29. The students presented their work completed under the direction of Dr. Leo Lee.  Morgan gave a talk “How to Win Every Time” and Peter presented his poster “The Wave Equation in One Dimension”.

Christopher Kilmartin, professor of psychology, will present three sessions at Dabney S. Lancaster Community College (DSLCC) on Wednesday, Oct. 24 in observance of Domestic Violence Awareness Month. He will present “Guy-Fi: The Fictions that Rule Men’s Lives,” a hybrid storytelling, lecture and multimedia presentation, from 9:15 to 10:15 a.m. at the Rockbridge Regional Center in Buena Vista and from 11:50 a.m. to 1 p.m. at DSLCC’s Moomaw Center in Clifton Forge.

Kilmartin will perform “Crimes Against Nature,” his original solo performance piece, from 6 to 7 p.m. at DSLCC’s Moomaw Center.

In addition to the three presentations open to the public, he will speak during classroom visits with DSLCC students enrolled in the practical nursing and massage therapy programs.

For more information, visit http://dslcc.edu/.

At the end of September, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Dave Toth and his colleagues from Merrimack College, Jimmy Franco (Chemistry) and Charlotte Berkes (Biology), were awarded two grants of supercomputing time to search for drugs to cure histoplasmosis and inhibit HIV.  Their research team was awarded a total of 1,818,365 hours of compute time on the 40th fastest computer in the world, worth about $148,778.  Toth will use the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to conduct virtual screens of millions of molecules to find the best leads.  Franco and Berkes will then test the best leads in their labs to determine how effective they are and try to devise better molecules based on the structure of the most effective molecules.  The granting entity, the NSF-funded organization known as the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), awards grants of compute time to scientists, engineers, social scientists, and humanists for computationally intensive research.

[vimeo 50547675 w=640 h=360]

A Culture of Innovation from umwnewmedia on Vimeo.

Martha Burtis, Jim Groom, Tim Owens and Andy Rush of UMW’s Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) presented on Tuesday, October 2 at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s Online Fall Focus Session on the theme of innovation in higher education. The basic question guiding the presentation, which was centered around the seven minute video above, was the following: how does a university like UMW consistently foster innovative projects like UMW Blogs, ds106, and, more recently, A Domain of One’s Own?

There’s no one adequate stock answer to such a question, so when preparing the presentation DTLT decided to interview students, faculty, and staff around campus to get a broader sense of the culture of innovation happening at UMW. What DTLT got in return for its labors was quite compelling. The video was shot and edited by Andy Rush, and it’s just a teaser for a much larger documentary that DTLT is planning on making this semester to start chronicling and narrating the culture of innovation at UMW.