Posted on Sep 12, 2003

Christina Sorum, dean of faculty and Frank Bailey Professor of
Classics, and Tom Werner, Florence
B. Sherwood Professor of Physical Sciences, Department of Chemistry, were
coauthors of an article, “Enriching Undergraduate Research and Scholarly Activity
Opportunities in All Disciplines at Union College” in the June 2003 issue of
the Council on Undergraduate Research
Quarterly. The five-page article, with photos of Union projects, details
the history of research at Union, institutional funding and incentives, Union's
involvement with the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, the
Steinmetz Symposium and summer undergraduate research at Union. Werner also recently gave a talk, “Undergraduate Research: Past, Present and Future” at the 31st
Northeast Region Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Saratoga Springs, and participated in an NIH-funded curriculum development
workshop at the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study in Colorado Springs. The workshop developed a curriculum supplement on
scientific inquiry for the middle school level.

Posted on Sep 12, 2003

The dragonfly, it turns out, is
one of the most accurate prey capturers in nature, and one of the best fliers
too.

In an instant, it darts from a
perch atop a cattail to intercept a tiny insect – the mosquito – for a quick
meal.

So you can imagine how difficult
it is for researchers like Prof. Rob Olberg and his students Rebecca Seaman '04
and Jon Jackson '04 to capture the predators on film.

This summer, in the southwest
corner of the Science and Engineering Courtyard, they set up a “Dragonfly
Flight Cage,” a contraption that looks a lot like one of those screen
gazebos favored by the lakeside party set. But inside is a miniature ecosystem
complete with a pond (read: kiddie pool) and an assortment of vegetation that
comes natural to Odonoatarium.

The researchers tempt the fliers
with tiny glass beads that resemble a mosquito, and record the action on
high-speed video. Back in the lab, they analyze the footage, paying special
attention to head motion before and after it catches its food. Their goal:
learn as much as possible about how the dragonfly can so effectively catch food
in mid-air.

The project is supported by a
grant from the National Science Foundation.

Olberg notes that the experiment
went well, except that they had to change test subjects every few days. Besides
being great predators, the dragonfly, it turns out, can learn a thing or two
about glass beads and researchers.

Posted on Sep 12, 2003

This fall, the College announces the following 12 new
faculty members:

            Jay P. Carlson – assistant professor at
GMI/GCUU. He earned a doctorate in marketing and a cognate in psychology from
the University of South
Carolina. His teaching interests include consumer
behavior, marketing research, retailing, principles of marketing, and marketing
management.

            Aaron G. Cass – instructor in computer
science, is anticipating his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
As a research assistant at UMass, he worked on software processes and process
technology.

            Brian Cohen – visiting assistant
professor of biology, holds a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology
from Albany Medical
College. Most recently, he
conducted postdoctoral research at the Wadsworth
Center in Albany.

            Zhilan Feng – an instructor at
GMI/GCUU, is anticipating her doctorate in finance from the University
of Connecticut. Her research areas
include corporate control, asset pricing in capital markets, and the impact of
corporate decisions on common stock prices.

            Tracyann Henry – a visiting instructor
in economics, was anticipating a doctorate in economics from the State
University of New York-Stony Brook. Her fields of concentration are economics
of education, labor economics and applied econometrics.

            Jennifer Milioto Matsue – instructor in
performing arts, is working on her doctorate in music (ethnomusicology) at the University
of Chicago. Among her teaching
interests are popular and traditional Japanese music; modern Japanese history
and popular culture; and modern opera and western music of the 20th
century.

            Sheila L. McClain – returns to the
College as a visiting instructor in sociology after a stint as an adjunct in
2002-2003. She is a doctoral candidate at the State University of New
York-Albany. Her academic specializations are social psychology, deviance,
theory, and culture.

            Andrew J. F. Morris – is an assistant
professor of history. He earned a Ph.D. from the University
of Virginia, Corcoran Department if
History. His major field is 20th century U.S.
history.

            Brian Postow – assistant professor of
computer science, holds a doctorate in computer science from the University
of Maryland. His teaching interests
include artificial intelligence, semantics, and algorithms.

            Paul Rose – is a visiting assistant
professor in psychology. He earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New
York-Buffalo and his primary specialization is social-personality psychology.

            Jill S. Smith – visiting instructor of
German, is anticipating a Ph.D. in Germanic studies at Indiana
University. Her research and
teaching areas include Jewish studies, language pedagogy, and German
literature.

            Emily O. Walsh – a visiting assistant
professor of geology, earned a Ph.D. in geological sciences from the University
of California-Santa Barbara. Her specialization is petrology of
high-pressure/high-temperature rocks.

Posted on Sep 12, 2003

Perhaps the most frequently asked
question of Jeremy Dibbell '04 upon his return from Israel
this summer was, “How do they cope with the terrorism?”

“They deal with it,” he said after
returning from a trip with a dozen college journalists from the 11th annual
Anti-Defamation League Albert Finkelstein Memorial Study Mission to Israel,
Poland and Bulgaria.

“They deal with it because they
have to,” he said. “They are a very strong people. They know what they have to
get through and they do it.”

Dibbell, who at one point could
hear Israeli shelling in response to Palestinian terror strikes, said, “You don't
get used to it, but you get used to knowing that it could happen and to move
on.”

He said his group was
accompanied by an armed guard (as are most tours, he said) and that they never
felt in danger.

Dibbell, a political science major
and editor-in-chief of Concordiensis, met
with government officials, historians, journalists and others to learn about
the Israeli-Palestinian situation and the history of Jewish communities in Europe
and the Holocaust.

The group toured the Auschwitz
death camp, and visited Bulgaria,
which has a proud history of resistance against the Nazis, Dibbell said.

Bulgarian officials, Dibbell
noted, also talked of their tolerance. “They talked a good talk, but the
difference between talk and reality are huge,” he said. One poverty-stricken
community had no running water, while a prosperous adjacent community was
watering the lawns on their golf courses, he said.

Dibbell, who took copious journal notes
and photographs, said he plans to run a story on the experience in Concordiensis this fall.

He and others in the group
were chosen from about 100 applicants nationwide.

Posted on Sep 12, 2003

Colleagues, former students and
other friends gathered Aug. 30 to memorialize the man known to all as
“Charlie,” whose passion for enriching lives with science spilled off campus
and into hundreds of elementary school classrooms throughout the country.

Prof. Charles
Scaife died of cancer on Aug. 24 at his Schenectady
home. Over the past decade, he reached an estimated 40,000 children through the
science workshops he did with his wife, Priscilla.

Scaife, 65, joined the chemistry
department in 1972 and retired in 2001. The professor had a reputation for a
keen interest in the welfare of his students; he frequently hosted them in his
home for dinners, joined them on hiking trips and at least once gave them a
lesson in making ice cream. Regardless of the weather, he walked briskly to and
from campus – often with his wife – from his home nearly a mile away on Ardsley
Road.

In 1986, while visiting classrooms
to talk about an experiment he designed for a space shuttle mission, Scaife
solidified his conviction that children take to science when they can do it
with their own hands and experience a sense of surprise. “The kids realize
they are going to have fun,” he once said. “But they don't always
know they will accidentally learn something along the way.”

So in 1994, Scaife used a
sabbatical to become what one newspaper called “a latter-day Merlin”
with “Johnny Appleseed wanderings.” With his wife, a social worker,
he hit the road in the family minivan, doing demonstrations in youngsters'
science classes by day, holding evening science workshops for parents and
children, and sleeping wherever they could get a free bed.

Starting in the Northeast, they
later expanded their travels to include the entire country, using additional
sabbaticals as well as vacation time. After he retired, the Scaifes had done a
number of workshops and were planning more.

In one favorite experiment,
someone would hold up a Ziploc bag filled with water, and Prof. Scaife would
push a pencil into it from the youngster's side. But no one would get wet, the
polymer providing an instant seal.

In another, students would pass a
magnet over a fortified breakfast cereal to discover that it did indeed contain
iron. “I can't believe I eat that for breakfast,” one adult commented.

Scaife would always appear in his trademark white lab coat, adorned with colorful scientific diagrams and nomenclature. 

The Scaifes' school visits had a
dual purpose — to permit children and their parents to experience close up the
sense of surprise that is science's essential excitement and to encourage
teachers, some of whom have little knowledge of science, to be more adventurous
in the classroom.

In the schools they visited, the
Scaifes trained a team of volunteers to take over where they left off. Through
school visits, teacher workshops, and a web site (http://www.kids.union.edu), they built a corps of
volunteers across the country dedicated to improved science teaching.

The couple's exploits also caught
the eye of the national media, inspiring a front-page story in The Wall
Street Journal, as well as subsequent stories in USA Today, the Christian
Science Monitor, and Education Week.

In 1999, Scaife received the Community
Service Award from the Hudson Mohawk Consortium of Colleges and Universities.
He accepted the award by acknowledging all the students “who wear their
enthusiasm right out in front.”

Scaife, who specialized in
inorganic chemistry, taught a range of courses in inorganic chemistry and
designed laboratory experiments for chemistry majors at Union.
He published a number of papers in chemistry journals. He was a member of the
American Chemical Society, a Danforth Associate, and a member of Sigma Xi, an honorary
dedicated to scientific research.

Charles Scaife
received a B.A. degree in chemistry from Cornell
University in 1959 and a Ph.D.
there in inorganic chemistry in 1965. He was a commissioned officer in the Navy
from 1959 to 1961 and a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the
University of York, England, in 1967. He taught at Middlebury
College before joining Union
in 1972.

Scaife was distinguished in his
younger years for having collected the most milkweed pods in his native Williamsport,
Pa.; the material was used in the
manufacture of military flotation devices. An Eagle Scout, he also helped build
the 56-mile Loyalsock Trail near his family farm in Pennsylvania.
Scaife and his family vacationed there often.

Surviving, in addition to
Priscilla, are two daughters, Rebecca Sanders of Lyndon, Vt., (and her husband,
James), and Jennifer Craig of Lakeville, Conn., (and her husband, Ken); a
sister, Betty Scorese of Pennsylvania; and seven grandchildren. He was
predeceased by his sister, Laura.

Memorial contributions may be made
to family and youth ministry programs at Our Savior's Lutheran
Church, 63
Mountain View Ave., Colonie, N.Y.,
12205; to Community Hospice of
Schenectady, 1411 Union St., Schenectady,
N.Y. 12308;
or to City Mission of Schenectady, 425 Hamilton St.,
Schenectady, N.Y. 12305.