cITe FEATURE
cITe TAKES STUDENTS TO NEW HEIGHTS Recognizing the importance of data in all professions, cITe helps students reach their peak potential with an interdisciplinary curriculum that also provides opportunities to work on technical solutions for the common good. By Zachary Petit The cicadas just kept coming. This summer, red-eyed stowaways perpetually popped up in pant legs, homes, cars, businesses. The 17-year Brood X cicadas had exploded onto the scene, and their presence was allencompassing. But nowhere was that more apparent than at the Mount, specifically within the Center for IT Engagement (cITe) Scholars program. And perhaps no one was more energized by the frenzy than Gene Kritsky, Ph.D., the man dubbed “The Indiana Jones of Cicadas.”
14 MOUNT ST. JOSEPH UNIVERSITY
Kritsky, dean of Behavioral and Natural Sciences, attributes the nickname in part to his days as a Fulbright Scholar in Egypt when he was locked in a tomb— but the rest is pure passion for all things periodical cicadas (after all, he first came to Cincinnati in 1983 for three reasons: trilobite fossils, Major League Baseball, and, yes, the indigenous insects). With the historic brood emerging, Kritsky and cITe had decided to launch a Cicada Safari—quite literally. The team developed an app and mobilized an army of camera-phone-toting everyday citizen
scientists to help document and research the emergence. And while many in Cincinnati had perhaps underestimated the sheer volume of cicadas that would ascend upon the city, the cITe team had perhaps underestimated the sheer volume of people who would embrace the app. Yes, the cicadas just kept coming— and so, too, did the photos of them. Thousands and thousands and thousands, offering a groundbreaking look at the Great Eastern Brood like never before.
