Patrick A. Guida, Esq., a graduate of Union College, is now President-Elect of the Rhode Island Bar Association. His term runs from July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025. Patrick is a partner at Duffy & Sweeney Ltd. and is part of the firm’s banking and finance, business law, and real estate law teams. He has been providing legal services to institutional banking clients throughout New England for more than three decades and previously served as in-house counsel for two major banks. In 2022, he was elected President of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers and named an Excellence in the Law Hall of Fame honoree by Rhode Island Lawyers Weekly. He was recognized by Best Lawyers as the 2019 “Lawyer of the Year” for Banking and Finance in the Providence metro region. He is an elected Fellow of the American College of Commercial Finance Lawyers and a member of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. Patrick is a member of both the Rhode Island Bar Foundation and the American Bar Foundation. In addition to serving on the Executive Committee over the last five years, he has served on the House of Delegates for more than ten years. Patrick served as chairperson of the Annual Meeting Planning Committee in 2019 and was an active member of that Committee for several years prior to that. He has been an active and enthusiastic participant in the Continuing Legal Education Committee activities since 1995. He has also been very involved as an executive in several public education-related activities since 1988.
Hasan B. Al Ba’ba’a, visiting assistant professor of mechanical engineering, published a research paper on "A blueprint for truncation resonance placement in elastic diatomic lattices with unit cell asymmetry" in JASA Express Letters. As part of a special issue on wave phenomena in periodic, near-periodic, and locally resonant systems, the paper theoretically and experimentally investigates the correlations between emergent truncation resonances (i.e., natural frequencies appearing in bandgaps) and the symmetry of unit cells that constitute the building element of a periodic structure. Effects of system parameters are also studied for a wide range of values.
Mercedes Mayna-Medrano, visiting assistant professor in modern languages, was awarded the HFRF 2023-24 to work on her project, "Building Archives: Peru-Bolivian Confederation (1836-1839)”. She spent two weeks at the Riva Agüero Archive in Lima, Peru. Her main goal was to recollect different documents related to the Peru-Bolivian Confederation, an attempt during the 19th century to reunite Peru and Bolivian into one big confederate country under the protection of Andrés de Santa Cruz. This research is significant to her because it will inform one of the chapters of a future book, tentatively titled "Melodrama and Fear: (Mis) Representing Indigenous People in 19th-Century Andean Literature."
The Tim Olsen Big Band will be opening the Fall 2024 "A Place for Jazz" concert series with a performance on Friday, September 6 at 7:30 p.m. in the Carl B. Taylor Auditorium at SUNY/Schenectady County Community College. General admission $25/students $10. Tickets are available at the door. For more information, visit https://www.aplaceforjazz.org
This event also celebrates the release of the Tim Olsen Big Band CD "Obsidian". This recording, released on the Jazz/Latino label, features nine original jazz pieces and one arrangement spanning some five decades of work. The album was recorded in the Emerson Auditorium in the Taylor Music Center during the summer of 2023. The CD will be available at the concert and can also be found at https://timolsen.bandcamp.com
Tim Olsen joined the Union faculty in 1994 and is currently a professor of music. Olsen teaches courses in music theory and music of the African diaspora; he also directs the Union College Jazz Ensemble.
