For the Record - Week of Sept 6, 2024

Publication Date

Allison Malatesta '24 presented an invited talk at the 2024 New York ReLeaf Conference in Albany, NY entitled, "Analyzing Street Tree Diversity Over Redlining Districts in Schenectady, NY.” This presentation, co-authored by Florence B. Sherwood Professor of Life Sciences Jeff Corbin, showed the legacy of past racist housing policies on the urban forest of Schenectady.

Corbin also presented a poster at the 2024 Ecological Society of America Conference in Long Beach, CA entitled, "Crowdsourcing invasion threats: Coordinating local priority lists to identify future invaders." This poster described a novel method to identify future invaders in the West Indies using existing local lists of problematic species.

Bunkong Tuon, associate professor of English, has recently published his debut novel, "Koan Khmer", with Northwestern UP/Curbstone Books. In conjunction, Literary Hub published his essay on the recent Cambodian American literary boom.

Francis Wilkin, senior lecturer in physics and astronomy, has published "Lightcurves And Solar Phase Coefficients for Koronis Family Member (1725) CrAO from Union College Observatory" in the Minor Planet Bulletin, with co-authors Stephen Slivan and Jason Sindoni '24. Wilkin also attended the TESS Science Conference III, at MIT in Cambridge, MA from July 29-August 2 with presentation "Union College Contributions to Exoplanet Science through the TESS Follow-up Observing Program (TFOP)." Since joining the TFOP Science Group 1 (SG1) in June 2019, seventeen undergraduate students and their faculty advisor have analyzed ~86 exoplanet planet candidates using observations from the Union College Observatory (UCO) and remote telescopes operated by Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO), iTelescope.net, and Telescope.Live.

Tommaso Gazzarri, associate professor of classics, published both an article and a note de lecture in the journal Latomus. These works propose a conjectural emendation to an otherwise obscure passage from the first-century CE philosophical treatise "De Tranquillitate Animi". The article is titled "A Textual Observation on Imperia Praeceptorum at De Tranquillitate Animi 1.10," and the note is titled "A Note on Seneca's De Tranquillitate Animi 1.10."

Additionally, Gazzarri participated in the XXV World Congress of Philosophy, held in Rome, Italy, where he presented a paper on the concept of "vita beata" ("happiness") as understood between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE.

An essay, "Grandeur and Splendor" by Kimmo Rosenthal, professor emeritus of mathematics, will appear in the Fall issue of the journal After the Art. Works in this journal must relate a work of art to a literary work. In this case, the painting is from 1696 by the Dutch painter Adriaen Coorte, entitled "Four Apricots on a Stone Plinth." This is related to the poetry of Nobel Laureate Louise Glück, specifically her poem "The Ripe Peach and also The Quince Tree."

Christopher Whitehead had a paper published in the journal, Journal of Physical Chemistry C entitled "Platinum Nanoparticle Formation Kinetics and Mechanistic Studies: Evidence for an Alternative 4-Step Mechanism Involving Size-Dependent Growth and Chloride Anion and Room-Dust-Dependent Nucleation".