IN BRIEF

FACULTY AND STAFF

Donna Adomat, assistant professor of special education, language and literacy, was named "Distinguished Finalist" for the Oustanding Dissertation of the Year Award for 2007 by the International Reading Association.

Lorraine Allen, director of the Small Business Development Center at TCNJ, was named Middlesex County Chamber of Commerce 2007 Business Woman of the Year.  Her achievement will be celebrated at the Middlesex Business Awards Breakfast at the Sheraton in Edison on March 13 as part of Middlesex County's Business Week celebration.

Students from the Science Academy of Morristown High School visited TCNJ on December 14, 2006, to experience a day of college-level science. Georgia Arvanitis, chair of the chemistry department, hosted the group. The students attended two lectures and performed an experiment, all under the supervision of TCNJ faculty members. 

Several faculty and staff members were inducted into Golden Key, an international honor society. Janis Blayne Paul (assistant director of community and major events),  Kevin Ewell (our new advisor and assistant dean of education), Deborah Hutton (art), Glenn Steinberg (English), and Diana Lygas (alumni office). The new inductees were selected after being nominated and voted on by members of Golden Key's executive board for their service to the TCNJ community or a particular service to the honor society. 

Tim Clydesdale, associate professor of sociology, received a $511,929 grant from the Lilly Endowment for his “Life and Vocation of American Youth Project.” He will oversee a national study of the ways college students and recent college alumni form their vocational plans, and how such plans are shaped by the educational and religious engagaements of emerging adults. The four-year national evaluation will employ several co-investigators, numerous TCNJ student assistants, and will ultimately produce two books. Lilly Endowment Inc. is an Indianapolis-based, private philanthropic foundation created in 1937 by three members of the Lilly family -- J.K. Lilly Sr. and sons J.K. Jr. and Eli -- through gifts of stock in their pharmaceutical business, Eli Lilly and Company. 

Nancy Hingston, professor of mathematics and statistics, was invited to participate in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Geometry Seminar Series on December 11, 2006. Hingston spoke on “Periodic Solutions of Hamilton's Equations on Tori.” Other seminar participants included mathematicians from Stanford, the University of Tokyo, Munich, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. On January 18, 2007, Hingston spoke at the Geometry-Topology Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. Her topic was “Loop Products and Closed Geodesics.” Also, Hingston has had a paper published by the Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici, a journal of the Swiss Mathematical Society. The title is “Geodesic Laminations with Closed Ends on Surfaces and Morse Index” and it was co-authored by Tobias Colding. 

Teresa Nakra of the music department, Ursula Wolz of the computer science department, and Christopher Ault of the interactive multimedia department had a paper accepted by the Microsoft Game Development Conference. The paper, which is titled "Teaching Game Design through Cross-Disciplinary Content and Individualized Student Deliverables," details professional experiences that the professors gained in teaching a games course at the College. Also accepted at the conference was a poster on music in games, co-authored by Nakra and Robert McMahon of the music department. 

Ann Marie Nicolosi, associate professor of history and women’s and gender studies, has received a curriculum development grant from the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military. Nicolosi was awarded the grant for incorporating GBLT (gay, bisexual, lesbian, and transgender) military history in her course “Gender in the 20th Century United States." The Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities is incorporated into the Michael D. Palm Center, a research institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

Emmanuel Osagie, dean of the College’s School of Business, has been appointed as chancellor of Penn State University’s Fayette campus and, consequently, will be leaving his current position after many years of service to the College. Jack Kirnan of Rutgers University's School of Business, has agreed to serve as interim dean of the School of Business, effective February 26, 2007. At Rutgers, Jack is senior director of MBA programs. He has also served as an adjunct faculty member or visiting lecturer at Fordham, Seton Hall, and Monmouth Universities, as well as Iona College and TCNJ. Jack brings a wealth of professional experience derived from his work at Schwab, Credit Suisse First Boston, Salomon Smith Barney, Kidder Peabody, Merrill Lynch, and Texaco.

"Human Ability: Unplugged," a new course taught by Jerry Petroff, assistant professor of special education, language and literacy, received recognition in the January 19 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education. The freshman seminar course was featured in the "Syllabus" column. The course looks at the portrayal of mental disabilities in literature and film, and invites middle-aged developmentally impaired guests to speak to the class and be interviewed by small groups of students who produce short oral histories. Six students in the Career and Community Studies program wok alongside their freshmen peers in the course.

Assistant professor of English Catie Rosemurgy was recently awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. With over 2,000 applicants in the pool, Rosemurgy was one of just 50 candidates selected for this honor. Creative Writing Fellowships are awarded to published creative writers of exceptional talent in the areas of prose and poetry to advance the Arts Endowment’s goal of encouraging and supporting artistic creativity. The Art Endowment offers fellowships to scholars who exemplify and contribute to “our diverse cultural heritage.”

Thulsi Wickramasinghe, associate professor of physics, has begun a collaboration with Dr. Michael Mumma, director of the Astro-Biology Institute at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. They will work on a project to investigate the possibility of the existence of microbial life on Mars. TCNJ physics majors Justin Neiusma and John Gannon will be a part of this study. The group from TCNJ will visit NASA for their first meeting on February 14.

STUDENTS

Aaron McKeon-Fish and Peter Treitler, juniors in the Department of Biology, presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology, Phoenix, AZ Jan 3-7, 2007. Their research, under the direction of professor Donald Lovett, was conducted as part of the Biology Summer Research Program at TCNJ supported by the Office of Academic Affairs. Their research was on the modification of the α-subunit modulates Na+,K+-ATPase activity in gills of the euryhaline crabs and the results were published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology (2006).

Kathleen Seneca, BSN, RN received the Aspiring Nurse Leader Award on December 7, 2006 from the New Jersey Chapter of the Organization of Nurse Executives. According to the organization, this award is presented to an aspiring nurse leader who demonstrates exceptional leadership and service to their institution and to the profession of nursing. Kathleen is enrolled in TCNJ’s MSN in nursing program, in the clinical nurse leader track. She is also a staff nurse at University Medical Center in Princeton.

Sara Tomczuk, a junior history and sociology major, was recently awarded a prestigious and highly competitive internship, the Lipper Internship at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Tomczuk, who just returned from studying abroad in Prague, completed an intense training over winter break on Holocaust education and Jewish history and will visit schools in the TCNJ area to present the museum's program.

The College of New Jersey’s Phi Alpha Delta Fraternity recently sent out a team of six brothers to New Orleans to lend a hand in reconstruction efforts. The team worked on the gutting and reconstruction of three houses that had been severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina.  Michael Strom, Dan Adami, Bryan Vale, Balvir Singh, Joe Ramalho and Kevin Busch drove down to New Orleans during the winter break to perform the service for the East Bank Recovery Center, a division of the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR).