faculty notes & student news Timm Adams, associate professor of Music, is on sabbatical for Fall 2015 to direct, music direct, and perform in Pump Boys & Dinettes at the Chestnut Fine Arts Center in the Kansas City area. In addition to this show that ran through October, he worked with two high schools in the Kansas City area to conduct audition workshops and prepare students for upcoming auditions and competitions. From Kansas City, Adams travels to New York City, Shenandoah Conservatory, Pump Boys & Dinettes, Timm and Penn State University Adams pictured at far right. to conduct research on vocal pedagogy for musical theater voice, which is his primary focus at RU. John Burns, Ph.D., Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Religion chair, global faculty fellow, and associate professor of Spanish, participated in the Eighth Annual Lecture Series at the University of Maine campus on September 17. His presentation was titled “Aesthetic of the Rain: Translating the Work of Contemporary Chilean Poet Raúl Hernández.” Dr. Burns’ talk on English translations of Chilean poet Raúl Hernández featured critical 12

reflections on the practice of literary translation and were interspersed with a concise overview of contemporary Chilean poetry and readings of some of Hernández’s work in translation. Dr. Burns has also accepted an invitation to become a permanent board member of the journal Confluencia, a journal on Spanish language, literature and culture. Mehmet Dik, Ph.D., professor of Mathematics, has completed two book proposal reviews: “Zweier I-Convergent Sequence Spaces and Their Properties,” Mathematics & Statistics, Springer, 2015; and “Discrete Methods in Functional Analysis,” Mathematics at CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, 2015. Dr. Dik also continues to referee and review several research papers for a variety of industry journals. Jeff Fahrenwald, associate professor of Economics, Business and Accounting, and director of the MBA program, is completing 10 cases that will be included in a new text book entitled Operations Management: A Supply Chain Approach by Joel Wisner to be published in 2016 by Sage Publications. Professor Fahrenwald was also one of the reviewers for this text book. He made a presentation to the local Financial Executives group on Leadership Forecasting and continues to work with Transform Rockford and Alignment Rockford, along with serving as a consultant for all of SupplyCore’s businesses, which include Rocktown Adventures, MPOWR, SupplyCore Logistics and JJP Development.