Faculty&Staff News Biotech center grant to enhance undergraduate research
Geography and global studies professor David Abernathy received a grant from UNCA’s National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center and the UNCA engagement site of the Renaissance Computing Institute to research 3D modeling of the Swannanoa watershed. The grant includes funds for a paid student internship.
Warren Wilson College and Western Carolina University received a $62,010 grant from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center for a new light microscopy system and expanded DNA analysis equipment for undergraduate research. Directed by biology professors Paul Bartels of Warren Wilson and Sean O’Connell of Western Carolina, biology and environmental studies students will be engaged in identifying microorganisms in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park as part of the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (www.dlia.org/atbi).
Two papers by biology professor Paul Bartels have been accepted for publication. “An evaluation of species richness estimators for tardigrades of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN and NC, USA,” will appear in the journal Hydrobiologia; “ ‘Smoky Bears’— Tardigrades of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park” will appear in Southeastern Naturalist.
Bartels and a team of 20 undergraduates have found 70 new park records of tardigrade species over the past several years, including 14 that likely are new to science. (Tardigrades are sediment-dwelling micro invertebrates commonly known as water bears.) O’Connell, working with 160 undergraduates, has found 386 new bacterial species in the Smokies.
Chemistry professor John Brock’s article “Improved quantitative detection of 11 urinary phthalate metabolites in humans using liquid chromatography-atmospheric pressure chemical ionization tandem mass spectrometry,” published in 2003 in the Journal of Chromatography B, won the journal’s Top Cited Article 2001-2006 Award. Brock also published his 54th peerreviewed paper in the journal Toxicology.
“We’re very excited about this grant,” Bartels said. “Sean O’Connell and I have been working for several years on different organisms in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and our work should move forward much more rapidly now. Additionally, the microscope we are getting is a very powerful instrument that can do five types of microscopy, all in one system.” The microscope system will be housed at Warren Wilson. The DNA analysis laboratory is at Western Carolina.
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Religious studies professor J. Michael Clark’s paper “Revelation/Apocalypse” was published in The Queer Bible Commentary. The Environmental Leadership Center’s Phillip Ray Gibson was selected to serve as the chair of the housing and transportation committee and member of the aging coordinating consortium (ACC) planning task force. This group is developing a livable senior-friendly community plan for Buncombe County. Gibson also joined Church Relations Director Julie Lehman to give a presentation at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Atlanta on the sustainable activities of the College. At the 2007 North Carolina Academy of Science (NCAS) annual meeting in Greenville, North Carolina, Gibson, as chair of the government advisory committee of the NCAS, served as moderator of the panel discussion on science and public policy. He organized one of 1,400 national rallies for the national Step It Up campaign
and was appointed by the Buncombe County Board of Commissioners to their environmental advisory board. Christine Hale, the 2006-2007 Joan Beebe Graduate Teaching Fellow, has four publications appearing in 2007: “Heavy Sex,” an excerpt from a memoir-in-progress forthcoming in the fall in the North Dakota Quarterly; “Virgins, Again,” a short fiction piece forthcoming this fall in Arts & Letters; “Almost Home,” a nonfiction short-short in this spring’s “Native Genius” issue of Rivendell; and “Some people need to be kicked,” flash fiction in Peal (WWC’s literary arts magazine). In addition to teaching fiction and first-year writing at Warren Wilson, she teaches a prose workshop for the Great Smokies Writing Program and returns to the Sewanee Young Writers Conference as fiction faculty this summer. A practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Christine was guest speaker at BE, WWC’s on-campus Buddhist fellowship, and made a trip to Tibet this summer along with other College alumni, faculty, friends and family. English professor Carol Howard is serving as an advisory editor to the journal New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century. She also attended the annual American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference in Atlanta in March. Janet Jones, North Carolina Campus Compact Vista Volunteer in the Service Learning Office, led three trips to New Orleans during the 2006-2007 academic year. Over 70 Warren Wilson students performed 3,285 hours of service on these trips, gutting and rebuilding homes in the Seventh Ward, Nineth Ward and Slidell. She has organized over a dozen presentations for the Asheville/Buncombe County community and raised funds for a Summer Youth Program in New Orleans. The Campus Compact also awarded her a grant for Global Youth Service Day. English professor Michael Matin chaired a panel titled “Anxieties and Influences in the Nineteenth Century” at the International Conference of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature in Washington, D.C. OWL & SPADE