Kimmo Rosenthal, professor emeritus of mathematics, has three new publications. Alejandra's Garden, a poem about the work of the Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik, appeared in The Fib Review. “Pondering Proust: Echoes, Loops, and Associations,” a book review of Christopher Prendergast's Living and Dying with Marcel Proust, appeared in Tears in the Fence, and Enigma in the Sun, an essay which uses the work of the author Gerald Murrnane to consider Edward Hopper's painting People in the Sun, is in the September issue of After the Art.
Dan Venning, associate professor of theater and dance, was accepted into the Faculty Resource Network Scholar-in-Residence fellowship program for the fall term. The program includes privileges at New York University’s libraries, faculty housing and meetings with an NYU faculty research consultant. Venning, a specialist in dramatic literature, theater history and performance criticism, will use his residency to craft and submit his first book proposal. He was also accepted into the FRN's year-long Leadership Initiative 2023-24, which “prepares emerging leaders to transform their own campuses by getting them to recognize opportunities to lead up, down, and sideways.”
Francis Wilkin, senior lecturer in physics and astronomy, and Devin Ramos '25 attended the Transiting Extrasolar Survey Satellite Team Meeting at MIT in June. They are using the Union College Observatory and additional telescopes to vet extrasolar planet candidates as part of the NASA TESS Follow-up collaboration. Wilkin published three papers - "Rotation Period of Koronis Family Member (1497) Tampere" in the March 2023 issue of the Minor Planet Bulletin and included Niha Das ‘26 and data from the College Observatory. "Spin vectors in the Koronis family: IV. Completing the sample of its largest members after 35 years of study" appeared in the April 2023 issue of the journal Icarus and "Spin vectors in the Koronis family: V. Resolving the ambiguous rotation period of (3032) Evans" in the Nov 15 issue of the same journal.
Jeff Corbin, professor of biology, published two papers during the summer. The first, "Climate education that builds hope and agency, not fear," in the journal Eos, calls on educators to reframe climate change education around a message of "hopeful alarm" rather than fear. It includes specific tools that educators can use to inspire young people to act on behalf of the climate. The second, "Macroscale analyses suggest invasive plant impacts depend more on the composition of invading plants than on environmental context," in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography, carried out a continental-scale analysis of the impacts of invasive species on native biodiversity. The presence of a dominant species, rather than such environmental conditions as climate or human land-use, was the most important threat to native biodiversity.
Faculty and students from the Chemistry Department attended the Northeastern Regional meeting of the American Chemical Society at Northeastern University. Those in attendance were Timothy Barnum, assistant professor; Colleen Connelly, assistant professor; Lee Pedzisa, visiting assistant professor; Christopher Whitehead, assistant professor; Mary Carroll ‘86, the Dwane W. Crichton Professor of Chemistry and current president-elect of ACS. Students who attended included: Ella Brinkley '24, William Zimmer '24, Rubab Raza '24, Lillian Woods '24, Jannie Pham '25, Kennedy Alexis '26 and Nathan Riordon '26.
Timothy Barnum, assistant professor of chemistry, was awarded a $55,000 American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Undergraduate New Investigator Grant for his research, “Identification and structure determination of reactive intermediates in the reactions of NOx and resonance-stabilized hydrocarbon radicals.”
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