Dean of Engineering Cherrice Traver and Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies Doug Klein co-chaired a panel on Engineering and Liberal Education at the 2010 American Association of Colleges and Universities meeting in Washington, D.C. The panel included participants from Dartmouth, Hope, Lafayette and Smith colleges, who discussed different aspects of integrating engineering, technology and the traditional liberal arts. The panelists all participated in Union’s 2009 Symposium on Engineering and Liberal Education. For more information, click here.
Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies Doug Klein, Assistant Professor of Classics Stacie Raucci and Dean of Engineering Cherrice Traver were joined by Sharon Jones, director of Engineering at Lafayette, in presenting a participatory session, “Inventive Courses: Blending Engineering and the Liberal Arts,” at the 2009 Frontiers of Engineering conference in San Antonio, Texas in the fall. Building upon Union’s annual Symposium on Engineering and Liberal Education, they followed a theme of the symposia, addressing C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” problem in the context of the undergraduate curriculum. Participants worked in small groups to design new upper-level undergraduate courses that would appeal to both engineering and non-engineering students, aiming specifically to explore ideas for courses beyond the introductory level.
The March issue of Allure magazine, a Condé Nast women’s publication, includes a blurb on research published last year by George Bizer, assistant professor of psychology, and Jacquelyn Raftery ’08, a graduate student at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. The research, on reframing disappointment as a positive challenge, was Raftery’s senior thesis.
Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Rebecca Koopmann '89 and Katelyn O'Brien '11 traveled to Washington, D.C. last month to present the results of their research on the gas properties of galaxies, as traced by radio observations at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, at the 2010 American Astronomical Society meeting. O’Brien presented a poster with Union co-authors SreyNoch Chin '12 and Schuyler Smith titled "ALFALFA HI Observations Of The NGC 5846 Galaxy Group," reporting the gas properties of galaxies located in an intermediate density region of the ALFALFA survey area.
Also at the AAS meeting, Koopmann presented two posters. “ALFALFA HI Content and Star Formation of Early-type Dwarfs in The Virgo Cluster" describes Koopmann's work on gas and star formation in low-mass galaxies in a dense environment. Co-authors are R. Giovanelli and M. P. Haynes of Cornell University, B. R. Kent of the National Radio Astronomy Observatories and N. Brosch of Wise Observatory and Tel Aviv University. Koopmann’s second poster, “The Undergraduate ALFALFA Team,” reported results from the first two years of the NSF-sponsored grant program that encourages undergraduate activities within the ALFALFA program. Co-authors are S. Higdon of Georgia Southern University, T. J. Balonek of Colgate University and Cornell’s Haynes and Giovanelli. More than 50 undergraduates across the United States have participated so far. Activities include annual workshops, organized by Koopmann, and observing runs at Arecibo Observatory as well as summer and academic year research programs. For more information, click here.