Professor Emeritus of Art George Roland had a work of computational art accepted for an exhibition, “Anything Goes,” at the Art Center Sarasota. The juror, Tom Casmer, awarded Roland’s entry an honorable mention. The exhibition runs from January 27 to March 5, 2022.
Student Aaron Adsit was invited to speak at the Geological Society of America Northeast sectional conference in March. Adsit will give a 20-minute presentation on his senior comp research, titled “Interdiffusion of Zn-Mn-Fe in pyroxene, spinel, and garnet during Grenville granulite facies metamorphism at Sterling Hill, NJ.” The presentation will be given in front of geologists from all across the northeastern United States.
Professor of Political Science and International Studies Shannan Mattiace and her co-author, Sandra Ley (CIDE-Mexico City), presented a webinar/seminar on their recent paper, “Yucatán as an Exception to the Rise of Criminal Violence in Mexico,” as part of a seminar series on Violence and Human Rights sponsored by the National University of Mexico, Mérida. The presentation (in Spanish) was live-streamed on Facebook and is available here.
Professor Emerita of Chemistry Ann Sheffield presented a paper on “Potions and Poisons: ‘Magical’ Drinks in Medieval Norse Literature” at the virtual Performing Magic in the Pre-Modern North conference. The conference was hosted by the Centre for Scandinavian Studies at the University of Aberdeen on December 8 and 9, 2021.
Professor of Theatre Mark Cosdon spent the month of December in residence at Sicily’s University of Palermo. With students from the Laboratorio Universitario Studio Teatro (LUST), Cosdon directed an evening-long Broadway Musical Revue, featuring songs from the American musical. The production was staged at the historic Sala delle Verifiche al Palazzo Chiaramonte-Steri.
Professor of Environmental Science and Sustainability Richard Bowden and colleagues at Oregon State and U. Michigan coauthored the paper “Competing processes drive the resistance of soil carbon to alterations in organic inputs,” published in Frontiers in Environmental Science. The paper is based on two decades of study in a 400-year-old Douglas fir forest at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Oregon.
The findings confirm previous results at the Allegheny Bousson Experimental Forest and elsewhere that it is unlikely that forest managers can manipulate mature temperate forests in a manner that will increase the ability of forests to store carbon in soils and help reduce climate change.
Associate Professor of Biology Matt Venesky and colleagues from John Carroll University recently had a scientific paper published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology Part A, an international and peer-reviewed journal that publishes original research articles (Venesky, MD., J. DeMarchi, C. Hickerson, and CD. Anthony, 2022, “Does the thermal mismatch hypothesis predict disease outcomes in different morphs of a terrestrial salamander?”).
This research is part of an ongoing research program in Venesky’s laboratory, and it presents results of an experiment in which Venesky and colleagues tested whether cool-acclimated hosts are most susceptible to pathogen infection during warm temperature periods and whether warm-acclimated hosts are most susceptible to pathogens during periods of cool temperatures.
Assistant Professor of Psychology Christopher Normile recently published an article with his colleague in the journal Law and Human Behavior. Entitled “False Confessions Predict a Delay between Release from Incarceration and Official Exoneration,” the researchers found that exonerations that involve false confessions are associated with longer delays in the critical window between innocent people’s release and official exoneration—a time during which these innocent people are precluded from accessing reintegration aids and may struggle to find housing and employment.
Fenn Kathman ’23 recently received the Broadening Representation, Inclusivity, Diversity, and Global Equity (BRIDGE) committee Diversity Travel Award to present their research at the annual conference of the American Psychology-Law Society (AP-LS) in Denver, CO.
Kathman’s project, entitled “Effects of Race and Gender on Perception of Exonerees: An Intersectional Approach,” was completed during the summer of 2021 with Professor Christopher Normile, in collaboration with Professor Lupita Gonzalez and Professor Rosita Scerbo. Together, they examined how race and gender of a wrongfully convicted exoneree would affect people’s perceptions of the exoneree’s innocence and support for reintegration services.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Marketing and Neuromarketing Gaia Rancati published the paper “Neurophysiological Responses to Robot-Human Interactions in Retail Stores” in the Journal of Services Marketing. The paper applies for the first time neuro-tools to human-robot interactions. The paper has been presented at the 50th Annual Conference of the Academy of Marketing Science (2021). It has won the Best Paper Award in International Conference Convergence (2021) and the Honorable Mention from the Chair in the International Conference on Contemporary Business Trends (2021).
Rancati also presented a paper at the American Marketing Association Winter Academic Conference in Las Vegas on January 10, 2022. The paper was co-written with Prof. Schultz (Hagen University) and entitled “The Voices We Hear – Gender and Voice in Technology Acceptance of Digital Voice Assistants.” The present study answers the research call on the social experience of artificial intelligence, particularly related to gender relations in the online digital environment.
Brigit Stack ’17 wrote and published a short piece entitled “Protest” about the enduring social and political implications of composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s music to America’s current sociopolitical climate, particularly in protest of racial violence. Shostakovich’s music helps to understand and empathize with how protest takes different forms and how the experiences of the oppressed can be found, heard, and understood through music. The piece has been published in a journal dedicated to the life and works of Shostakovich, DSCH Journal.
