Anne Kozak received a second place award last fall from the Maine Press Association for her investigative article in the Mount Desert Islander on the Maine statewide 511 information system. Suzanne Morse was named the Elizabeth Battles Newlin Professor of Botany at COA. In April 2003, faculty member Chris Petersen and students Yaniv Brandvain ’04, Santiago Salinas ’05 and Nina Therkildsen ’05 attended the Benthic Ecology Meeting in Mobile, Alabama. Petersen spoke on reproduction in temperate rocky shore fishes while Brandvain and Salinas presented a poster on their work on mummichog reproductive biology in Northeast Creek. The students offered a similar poster at the 2004 Maine Biological and Medical Sciences Symposium at Mount Desert Island Biology Laboratory in May. In January 2005, Peterson gave a talk on his work on simultaneously hermaphroditic fishes at the Society for Comparative and Integrative Biology meeting in San Diego. Salinas also attended the meeting and gave a talk on his work with Petersen on salt marsh fishes. Among other activities, in 2004 new faculty member Nishanta Rajakaruna ’94 gave talks at the California Botanical Society Lecture Series at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Keene State College in New Hampshire and offered a year-long course called “Botanical Hikes: Trees in the Four Seasons” to the Downeast Senior College of Ellsworth, Maine. An article in the May 22 National Journal, “Issues & Answers: Profiles of more than 100 people whose ideas will help shape the debates over 10 important issues of the day,” featured Doreen Stabinsky for her work opposing genetically modified foods. A part-time COA faculty member and part-time campaigner for Greenpeace International, Stabinsky gave an invited presentation to the Pontifical Academy of Justice and Peace at the Vatican in November 2003. In February 2004, she headed a Greenpeace International delegation to the First Meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Last October, she presented before the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research in Mexico City, Mexico. Academic dean Karen Waldron spent her sabbatical working on a thousandplus page collection of short stories by nineteenth century American women. She is co-editing this volume with Monika Elbert, associate professor of English at Montclair State University. It will be published by Ironweed Press of New York.
COM M U N I T Y N OT E S The Maine Student Conference on Global AIDS, organized by Marcin Matuszek ’07, Maria Lis Baiocchi ’07, Juan Pablo Hoffmaister ’07 and Andres Jennings ’07 brought dozens of Maine college students and others to campus on October 15 and 16. Afterwards, a nursing student from University of Southern Maine wrote, “I have never in my life seen a group of students more dedicated to a cause. The conference not only held strong, it seemed to gain momentum as each event occurred.” Last September, COA and Nokomis High School in Nokomis, Maine, were given a tractor-trailerload of mounts (or prepared animals) from the Smithsonian Institution. Faculty member Steve Ressel and COA students helped unload and store the animals, some of which will be used in classes and at the George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History. Others will be offered on loan to educational institutions around the state. “Oh my God!” gasped Jessica Lach ’07 as she removed a deer specimen, “He is so beautiful! I’ve been looking forward to this for a long while.” Holding a massive hippopotamus skull, Ressel added, “Seeing these animals allows students to understand the immensity of the diversity of mammals. There’s nothing like this in Maine.”
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