Colleen Connelly, assistant professor of chemistry, presented a poster, “Development of Chemical Tools to Investigate Alternative Structures in Disease Relevant Precursor MicroRNAs," at the spring 2023 meeting of the American Chemical Society in Indianapolis, Ind. in March. Contributing to this research were Sophie M. Hurwitz ’21, Emma Devaney ’22 and Morgan Duffany ’23. Also at the ACS meeting, Ellen Robertson, assistant professor of chemistry, presented a poster ("Metal cation modification of graphene oxide membranes: Effects on membrane assembly, structure, and stability") and gave a talk ("Testing the limits of nanoparticle-embedded peptoid nanosheet formation through an oil-water interface assembly mechanism").
C’Lannye James ’25, a chemistry major, presented a poster, "Incorporating Octanethiol-functionalized Gold Nanoparticles into the Interior of Bilayer Peptoid Nanosheets."
Donald T Rodbell, the Jane and John Wold Professor of Geosciences, co-authored a paper, “Pleistocene megafaunal extinction in the grasslands of Junín-Peru,” in the Journal of Biogeography. The project, with Angela Rozas-Davila and Mark Bush of Florida Tech, analyzed sediments from the edge of Lake Junin, Peru, to determine that the timing of the collapse of megafaunal populations in high grasslands was similar to that of lower, now-forested settings. It also found that upticks in fire activity, during what is generally seen to be a wet period, formed the backdrop to extinction and are strongly associated with human activity.
Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini, assistant professor of philosophy, has been awarded a visiting fellowship from the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Technology Ethics Lab for her project, “New Tools for Ethical Risk Analysis and Risk Mitigation in the Use of AI.” As a visiting fellow at the Notre Dame-IBM Technology Ethics Lab, she will focus on how organizations can determine the risks their artificial intelligence poses and how they can address and prevent them.
Send For the Record entries to Charlie Casey at caseyc@union.edu.
