The American Society of Engineering Education accepted a conference paper, “Collaborative Dynamics in Undergraduate Research: Group-Based Engineering Projects across a Three-Year Span,” by Will Allison (physics and engineering).
Scott Anderson (art), this year’s selected poster artist for the annual California Avocado Festival in Carpinteria, also completed a portrait of new Paramount CEO David Ellison for the Hollywood Reporter.
Kristi Lazar Cantrell (chemistry) and her collaborators, including Joshua Jang ’25, published an article, “Amyloid Oligomers: Expediting Crystal Growth and Revisiting the Corkscrew Structures,” in Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Theresa Covich (library) participated in an AI Roundtable at LOEX, a library instruction conference in Pasadena, and completed an AI Literacy for Library Workers course online.
Leanne Dzubinski (provost’s office) spoke about “Women in Christian Work: Opportunities and Obstacles to Thriving” at the Overseas Ministries Study Center at Princeton Theological Seminary’s Seminar Series on Topics in Mission & World Christianity.
David Emanuel (religious studies) published an essay, “Psalm 147 and the Poetics of Repopulating Jerusalem,” in a book, “Bring Them into the Land: Studies in Honor of R. Steven Notley.” He reflected on several pieces of artwork in “Psalms 77-78: The Twists and Turns of Israel” for the Visual Commentary on Scripture.
Elizabeth Gardner (communication studies) published an article, “Children Redefining Childhood in the Bolivian Código Niña, Niño y Adolescente,” in the journal Rhetoric & Public Affairs.
Jennifer Gee (physics) received a $10,000 Sloan Scholars Mentoring Network Seed Grant from the Social Science Research Council through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation supporting her physics education research on developing an activity module to effectively teach forces in introductory physics courses.
Bob Haring-Kaye (physics) and student co-authors Reese Toepfer ’26, Kirsten Potts ’24 and Natalie Fogg ’24 published an article, “Quenching of the octupole rotational band in 71Ge,” in Physical Review C.
Russell Howell (mathematics and computer science) organized a special session, “Looking at Complex Analysis and Geometry through the Lenses of Research, History, and Pedagogy,” and presented “A Probabilistic Query in Complex Analysis” at the annual summer meeting of the Mathematical Association of America in Sacramento. A distinguished visiting professor in the mathematical sciences department this year at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, he gave the first lecture, “Complementary Partial Orders, or How to Pack a Suitcase,” for the department’s colloquium series.
Nathan Huff (art) presented a solo exhibition, “Home, and Other Foreign Places,” at Stanislaus State University and gave an artist lecture at the gallery, which published a catalog. His fourth solo exhibition at Sullivan Goss, “Within Wilds,” juxtaposes images and objects from the domestic spaces with awe for the sublime natural world.
Blake Victor Kent (sociology and anthropology) co-authored three publications from his ongoing work with a Harvard Medical School project examining religion and health: “Who Turns to God, and How? Religious and Spiritual Identity Differentially Predict Religious Coping Strategy Use in the Study on Stress, Spirituality, and Health” in International Journal for the Psychology of Religion; “Religious Affiliations, Religious Practices, and Health Behaviors in U.S. South Asians” in Annals of Behavioral Medicine; and “The Structure of Religion and Spirituality among Six Cohorts in the United States: Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Study on Stress, Spirituality, and Health” in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.
The Otis M. Williams and Evelynn Freeman Williams Fund of the Santa Barbara Foundation renewed a grant to Yi-Fan Lu (biology) to support his research about SARS-CoV-2 proteins and their impact on immunological markers and gene expression patterns.
Nicole Marsh (biology) published research from her doctoral thesis, “Mitochondrial calcium signaling regulates branched-chain amino acid catabolism in fibrolamellar carcinoma,” in the journal Science Advances, finding that calcium in the mitochondria regulates amino acid metabolism and contributes to several pathological features observed in a form of adolescent liver cancer.
Paul Mena (communication studies) published a paper, “Reducing Misinformation Credibility: How Explanations Impact the Effectiveness of Social Media Warning Labels and Fact-Checking Source Recall,” in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He found that explanations may enhance the effectiveness of social media warning labels in reducing the credibility of misinformation and may also increase the perceived utility of warning labels and boost the recall of fact-checking sources.
Sara Morrisset (history) published two book chapters on Inca architecture and waterworks in an interdisciplinary volume, “Saqsayhuaman: House of the Sun,” highlighting the collaborative work of engineers and archaeologists.
Zig Reichwald (music) presented “Psalms without Words: What Mendelssohn’s Late Chamber Music Can Teach Us About Psalms” at the inaugural meeting of the International Network for Music Theology at Durham University.
Sandra Richter (religious studies) continues her work on environmental theology, speaking at major conferences last summer and touring the parishes of ministers in the Appalachian coal country to advance her research on how environmental degradation affects the “widow and the orphan” first.
Mike Ryu (mathematics and computer science) presented preliminary outcomes of his adapted Socially Responsible Computing course at the Faculty Learning Community at CSU Dominguez Hills. He and a team of eight students produced an early prototype of Agentic AI platform for ĂŰĚŇ´«Ă˝ and earned an invitation to present at Arizona State University’s Agentic AI and Student Experience conference.
Jeff Schloss (biology) was nominated to membership in Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society and reelected to the executive council as a fellow of the International Society of Science and Religion, was invited to serve on the review committee for the global Templeton Prize. He has been appointed senior consultant to Oxford University’s Biotechnology and the Humanities Project and as external adviser for Stanford’s interdisciplinary project on “The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, and Machines in an Age of Biotech.”
Alastair Su (history) published “The Opiated Ocean: Drugs, Addiction, and Disease in La Trata Amarilla” in the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the historical discipline. Frontiers in Social and Behavioral Science featured Su’s article in this collection of the world’s leading research published by the Social Science Research Council.
David Vander Laan (philosophy) published a paper, “Satisfaction in the End Without End,” in Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion (Vol. 11). The paper won the American Philosophical Association’s Alvin Plantinga Prize.
Maryke van der Walt (mathematics and computer science) spoke about her research on blood glucose prediction at a virtual colloquium for Nevada State University’s Math/Data Science Club.
Laura Walter (music) conducted two week-long summer Music and Art Bravo camps for ages 5-16, collaborating with the Ojai Music Festival where 130 children sang, played and painted.
Professor Emeritus Paul Willis (English) has published a new chapbook of poems, “Orvieto,” gathered from his teaching visits to that small Italian city.