At a recent event, the Schenectady County Human Rights Commission honored several members of the Union community. Five students won the Youth Award for the Empty Bowls event. They are Jennifer Sexton ’15, Gerardo Reyes ’15, Bin Chen ’15, Stefan Basile ’15 and Adam Rosenthal ’15. Angela Tatem, director of the Kenney Community Center, was honored with an Individual Award.
Rebecca Koopmann ‘89, professor of physics and astronomy, has secured a new grant through the NASA New York Space Grant Consortium at Cornell University. Union’s Space Grant kicks off with a $10,000 award to support undergraduate research activities during the first year (2015-16) of this three-year grant, which totals $24,000.
Katherine Lynes, associate professor of English and Africana Studies, has a forthcoming article in African American Review, “’a responsibility to something besides people': African-American Reclamation Ecopoetics." In June, she will present a paper at the biennial Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment in Moscow, Idaho, titled "'what did they used to grow here?': Embodying the Earth in Black Environmental Poetics." She will co-chair a panel at the Italian Association of North American Studies conference in Naples, Italy in September, where she will deliver a paper, “Wilderness as Dangerous Harbor in African-American Literature.”
Kathleen LoGiudice, associate professor of biology, delivered a talk on ticks in Vermont, co-sponsored by Bennington College and the Bennington County Sustainable Forestry Consortium. Some topics covered in her talk included how climate change has affected Lyme disease rates, other maladies transmitted by tick and Lyme rates as related to red fox populations.