In Brief

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Faculty/Staff

David Blake, associate professor of English and author of Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, contributed an essay to TomPaine.com about the 1957 film A Face in the Crowd, a movie about the power of media and celebrity. Blake wrote that A Face in the Crowd “was astonishingly prophetic in understanding the role that television would play in shaping political campaigns.” He is currently writing a book about democracy and fame in the television age.

Mimi Cappelli, assistant professor in the School of Nursing, will receive one of the 11 Diva and Don awards given this December by the Institute for Nursing. The institute gives the awards to people who help advance health care in New Jersey and make an extraordinary impact on the nursing profession and the community. For more information, visit http://www.tcnj.edu/~ccr/news/2007/cappelli.htm.

Ryan Gladysiewicz, user support services manager in information technology, delivered a presentation at the fourth annual NJEDge Technology in Education Conference on November 1. He spoke about how IT departments decide when to implement upgrades for operating systems. The presentation covered the decision-making process, the rollout procedure, the follow-up including faculty and staff feedback, and recommendations for improvement.

John Kuiphoff, web application developer in information technology, and Matthew Winkel, communications officer in public affairs, co-presented the "Lightweight Campus Portal" at HighEdWebDev in Rochester, NY, a national conference for higher education web development.

Chu Kim-Prieto, assistant professor of psychology, was the co-author of a multicultural study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The study found that European-Americans are happier than their Asian-American, Korean, and Japanese counterparts, although European-Americans are more likely to be affected by, and recover slower from, negative events than those of Asian descent.

Donald Lovett, professor of biology, spoke on “Crabs as a model organism for studying osmoregulation: What a crab can tell us about how our cells function,” at this fall’s Collquium for Faculty Research and Creative Activity, held on Wednesday, November 7. Listen to a podcast of Lovett's speech. [Play Audio]

Christopher Totten, assistant professor of criminology and justice studies, and Nicholas Tyler ’07 co-authored the article, “Arguing for an Integrated Approach to Resolving the Crisis in Darfur—The Challenges of Complementarity, Enforcement and Related Issues in the International Criminal Court,” which was accepted for publication in Northwestern University’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 98, No. 1 (2008).

Students

TCNJ’s Fed Challenge Team—made up of seniors Jonathan Campos and Flamur Rama, junior Brian Yarzab, and sophomores Matthew Ravaioli and Manan Sampat, all from the School of Business, and advised by Joseph Cerenzio, adjunct professor of business—advanced to the semi-finals of the College Fed Challenge, to be held on November 16. The Fed Challenge is intended to help students become more knowledgeable about the Fed and the decision-making process of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve's monetary policy-setting group.

William Otto Katt, Sara Tomczuk, Christopher Emerson and Brad Hendricks, all senior history majors and members of Phi Alpha Theta, the history honor society, will be presenting papers at Phi Alpha Theta’s 2008 Biennial Conference. The conference will take place in January in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Rob Wilson, Jakey Voytko, seniors, and Steve Lombardi, junior, all computer science majors, placed fourth overall at the ACM Greater New York Regional Collegiate Programming Contest at Kean University on November 4. They finished behind a Cornell and two Princeton teams. A second TCNJ team—Bryce Liskovec, senior, Andrew Timmes, junior, and Autumn Breese, sophomore, also all computer science majors—placed 15th overall. Fifty-one schools attended the ACM event. Out of the eight schools that placed in the top 15 spots, The College of New Jersey was the only primarily undergraduate institution.

Tamra Wroblesky, a sophomore international studies major who is also in the WILL Program, was chosen by Seeds of Peace to attend the 15th anniversary Leadership Summit in Casablanca, Morocco, December 18–23, 2007. Tamra is one of 120 students selected from 600 applicants. At the summit, she will focus on developing skills as an ambassador for peace and participate in sessions that include advanced coexistence dialogue, facilitation, workshops in making presentations and working with the media, as well as meeting with Moroccan diplomats.