College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Faculty Research Colloquia

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is sponsoring a series of six CLAS research colloquia again this year. To try to accommodate more schedules, the colloquia will be held on Fridays in the Fall semester and Thursdays in the Winter semester. They will all be held in PAD 308 and will begin at 2:30 pm with refreshments followed by four or five 20-minute presentations (15 min plus 5 min for discussion).

We especially encourage new faculty and faculty who have been on sabbatical recently to make presentations.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Thursday, March 15, 2012.

  

CLAS Faculty Research Colloquium Thursday, January 19, 2012

PAD 308; Refreshments begin at 2:30 – Talks begin at 3pm

Speakers include:

 

Figen Mekik –  “How has climate changed in Earth’s past and how does modern climate change compare?”

Craig Benjamin – “Big history and global climate change.”

Shaily Menon – “Forecasting global change: the ‘super wicked problems’ of land, sea, and climate change”

Elena Lioubimtseva – “Russia's role in the post-2012 climate change policy: uncertainties and contradictions.”

 

 

March 17. 2011 Speakers were:

Thomas C. Pentecost (Chemistry)

Virginia Peterson (Geology

John Bender (Chemistry)

Mark Luttenton (Biology)

 

 Feb 17 colloquium speakers were:

Joel Stillerman (Sociology)

James McNair (Annis Water Resources Institute)

Jodee Hunt (Biology)

David Kurjiaka (Biomedical Sciences)

 

January 20, speakers were:

Figen Mekik (Geology)

Dan Golembeski (Modern Languages and Literatures)

Renee Zettle-Sterling (Art and Design)

Yakuta Bhagat (Annis Water Resources Institute)

Download abstracts

October 15, 2010 Colloquium speakers 

Austin Bunn (Writing) “Devised Playwriting: Experiments in New Play Collaboration”

The "devised play" -- constructed from interviews, improvisations, and historical research - has become an established, new feature of contemporary American and British theatre, with the successes of Frost/Nixon, This Beautiful City, The Laramie Project, and Anna Deveare Smith's ground-breaking monologues. In the winter of 2010, fifteen students in Advanced Drama Workshop (WRT 440) began writing a play together about the founding of Grand Valley State University , timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary. ("Founding" opened Nov. 12th on campus.) But what does the collaboration between faculty and students in the arts look like? What can the experience of this devised play tell us about the best (and worst) practices of the form? This presentation will overview “Founding's” development, in light of the recent production on campus.

    

 Brian Lakey (Psychology) “To what extent is mentoring quality an objective property of mentors?”

Discussions of mentoring quality often include the implicit assumption that quality is an objective property of mentors. That is, some mentors are better than others and mentors can be trained to be more effective. Testing this assumption requires quantifying objective mentoring quality. This can be achieved when multiple observers rate the same mentors. In addition to objective quality, one can also quantify the extent to which such ratings reflect the perceptual biases of observers as well as the unique relationships between specific mentors and observers. A study will be described in which medical residents rated the same faculty members on mentoring quality. The findings were inconsistent with many assumptions about mentoring.

 

 Daniel A. Bergman (Biomedical Sciences) “Crayfish olfaction: why all the stink?”

Olfaction is an ancient sensory system used to detect odor molecules in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. Olfactory receptors, regardless of the environmental surroundings, largely work in a similar manner by interacting with odors (chemicals) that cause specific responses in olfactory sensory neurons. My lab examines how odors are spatially and temporally dispersed within an environment, in what we call a complex odor landscape. We then examine how these odors provide useful contextual information to ultimately cause behavioral responses. Much of this research is accomplished using crayfish as a model research organism. My lab investigates their olfactory and other sensory systems in the context of aggressive interactions, orientation strategies when finding food or mates, neuronal function, development, and pollution effects on chemoreception.

 

 Margaret Dietrich (Cell and MolecularBiology) “Flowering (in the lab) in the Sonoran Desert ”

My sabbatical work at the University of Arizona combined two areas of significance in plant biology – salt tolerance and flowering. The CBL10 gene with which I was concerned was originally identified as being important in conveying the ability of Arabidopsis plants to grow in salt. Most crop plants are not tolerant to even moderate levels of salt in the soil. However, heavily irrigated fields, particularly in arid and semi-arid areas, become very salty and cannot support the growth of further crops. An understanding of the basis for salt tolerance by certain plants could aid in the development of crops which are able to grow on less than optimal soils. Plants defective in this particular gene also produce defective flowers. Since the outcome of successful flowering is fruit production, this aspect also directly impacts food supplies. CBL10 encodes a calcineurin B-like protein known to be involved in signal transduction – the process by which cells perceive a signal/cue from outside the cell and convert that information into a cellular response, such as being able to tolerate salt in the soil. I will describe my work directed at understanding the role of CBL10 in flowering and will indicate how undergraduate students will continue this work here at GVSU.

 

 Geoff Lenters (Physics) “A Statistical Smorgasborg: Automated Decision Processes and Image Processing”

The contents of this talk are based upon my recent year long sabbatical hosted by Dynetics, an engineering company headquartered in Huntsville, AL. My work was mainly Missile Defense related, but I will focus on some statistical techniques, that I learned while working there. The first part will be a brief, conceptual introduction to Bayesian Classfiers, which are used quite frequently in data mining/automated decision making processes, while the second part will focus on one of the techniques used by X-ray astronomers to process X-ray images.

Speakers of the second CLAS Research Colloquium were:

James N. McNair

Lisa Feurzeig

David Eaton

Michael Lombardo

The first CLAS faculty research colloquium of the academic year featured these speakers:

Toni Perrine "Nuclear Terrorism and Docudrama: Dirty War."

Brian Hatzel "Clinical Implications for Shoulder Stability: How can we incorporate current research."

Paul Cornish "John Adams' Contribution to the Republican Tradition."

Giuseppe Lupis "How to organize a successful International Music Festival in Italy with no funding: the Grumo Festival 2010"