Faculty/Staff News of Note
October 2003
Dr. Christopher R. McNeil, assistant professor of finance, presented a paper titled "Risk Reduction Motives and Conglomerate Investment Policy" at the Financial Management Association's annual meeting in Denver, Colorado, on October 9, 2003. The paper was co-authored by Tim Burch of the University of Miami. McNeil also discussed a paper titled "Executive Compensation and Managerial Risk-Taking."
Dr. Shobha Oruganti, assistant professor of mathematics, presented a paper titled "An Existence Result for a Class of p-Laplacian Semipositone Equations" at the 23rd Annual Southeastern-Atlantic Regional Conference on Differential Equations on October 17-18.
Dr. Thomas M. Spudich, assistant professor of chemistry, spoke at the FACSS conference in Four Lauderdale, Florida, on October 23. The title of his presentation is "The Development of Cross-Discipline Undergraduate Research: Trace Metal Analysis of Snapping Turtles Collected from Erie County, Pennsylvania." Spudich also received an award on October 21 from the Society for Applied Spectroscopy on behalf of the Cleveland Chapter of Spectroscopy for best chapter 2002-2003.
Dr. Chuck Yeung, associate professor of physics, and Kim Herrmann, a recent Behrend graduate and now a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics at University Park, were acknowledged for their research titled "Molecular Dynamics Simulation of Reactive Compatibilization of Polymer Blends" in the Council on Undergraduate Research Quarterly. Their research was published in Macromolecutes 2003, chapter 36, pages 229-237. The research was supported through a NSF-RUI grant and funds from Penn State Erie.
Dr. Bill Baxter, associate professor of physics, is co-author of "Gaussian Statistics in Granular Gases," an article published in the October 16, 2003, issue of Nature. Co-author is J.F. Olafsen of the University of Kansas.
Two photos by Dr. Leigh-Ann Bedal, lecturer in anthropology, are included in the recently opened exhibition on the Petra, Jordan, excavation site at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The exhibition got feature coverage from the New York Times. An additional image by Bedal is included in a brochure issued by the museum's educational division.
Mary C. Connerty, lecturer of English, published a book titled Judeo-Greek: The Language The Culture, and gave a presentation titled "Judeo-Greek - Linguistic and Sociolinguistic Features of Yevanic" on October 26 at Kehila Kedosha Janina Museum and Synagogue in New York.
Dr. James Kurre, associate professor of economics and co-director of the Economic Research Institute of Erie, attended the 57th AUBER Fall Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana. AUBER is the Association for University Business and Economic Research, and is composed of units from all over the country that are similar to the Economic Research Institute of Erie. Kurre presented a poster session titled "Measuring Productivity at the Local Level," co-co-authored with Travis Gonser and Michael Hammill. Gonser and Jammill were both Penn State Behrend undergraduate economics students at the time this research was done. Their projects were supported by the Behrend Undergraduate Research Program and were done jointly with ERIE.
Dr. Sudarshan Nelatury, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, wrote a paper titled "Electromagnetic Optimization Using a Mixed Parameter Self-Adaptive Evolutionary Algorithm," published in Microwave and Optical Technology Letters, vol.39, No.4, pp.267-271, November 20, 2003. Co-authors were Ahmed Hoorfar and Jinhui.
Dr. Clare Porac, professor of psychology, gave an invited talk in the psychology department at Brock University in St. Catherine's, Ontario, on October 24. The talk was titled "Are there age differences in the prevalence of left-handedness? A new look based on data from converted left-hand writers."
Marty Dropik, lecturer in engineering,
and his wife, Kathy, gave a presentation September 18 at University
Park in ME101S Toy FUNdamentals. The course is co-taught by Dr.
Richard Benson, mechanical engineering department head, and Cheryl
Knobloch, program development specialist. Toy FUNdamentals is a
first-year seminar intending to be an introduction to engineering
design and prototyping through a product type everyone has used: toys.
This five-week class explores the history of toys, toy marketing, and
toy design for different ages, and includes toy dissection, design,
prototyping and field testing. Marty and Kathy Dropik were both former
employees of Fisher-Price, and some of the subjects covered in the
presentation included the toy industry's fast-paced, competitive
nature; the use of high-end technologies to gain a competitive edge
globally; definition of a good toy design from the viewpoints of the
child, the purchasing parent/grandparent, and the toy designer.
Mary-Ellen Madigan, director of Admissions and Financial Aid;
Jane Brady, assistant director of Admissions and Financial Aid;
and Giselle Hudson, staff assistant in the Financial Aid
Office, presented during separate sessions at the recent Penn State
University Undergraduate Admissions and Student Aid Conference held at
University Park on September 22 and 23. Mary-Ellen served on a panel
that discussed how Admissions and Financial Aid Offices work together
successfully. Jane was part of a panel that discussed how scholarships
are awarded at Penn State. Giselle gave an overview of veterans'
education benefits and how they are processed within Penn State.
Dr. Boon W. Ong, lecturer in mathematics, is the author of an article, "The Homotopy Type of the Symmetric Products of Bouquets of Circles," which was recently published in International Journal of Mathematics, Volume 14, Number 5.
Sudarshan Rao Nelatury, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, presented a paper titled "A New Error Function for Fast Phase Recovery of QAM signals in CMA blind equalizers" at the 2003 IEEE Workshop on Statistical Signal Processing held in St. Louis, Missouri, September 28-October 1. Co-authors were Sushmita Rao Thakallapalli and Sathyanarayan S. Rao.
Michael Christofferson, assistant professor of history, had his article "French Intellectuals and the Repression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956: The Politics of a Protest Reconsidered" accepted for the volume After the Deluge: New Perspectives in French Intellectual and Cultural History, edited by Julian Bourg with a preface by Dominick LaCapra (Lexington Books).
Dr. Antonella Cupillari, associate professor of mathematics, attended the Mathematics Conference at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio October 3-4.
Dr. Greg Morris, professor of American Literature, led a group of Behrend students to Stratford, Ontario, on October 4, where they attended a performance of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew at the Stratford Festival Theatre. This annual trip was sponsored by the Round Table Society and supported with funds awarded by the Student Government Association.
Carrie Payne, assistant director of the Career Development Center and internship coordinator, will be a presenter at "Best Practices Workshop: The Impact of Internships" on Monday, November 3, from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. at the Waldron Center, Gannon University. The workshop, designed for employers and others who want to learn how internships can benefit their organizations, is sponsored by the Erie Civic Coordinating Committee and the Technology Council of Northwest Pennsylvania. A member of the Erie Civic Coordinating Committee's Knowledge Worker Task Force (CCC), Payne led a small sub-group that revamped and edited internship guides from Central Pennsylvania and the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance. Dr. James A. Kurre, associate professor of economics, also served on the Knowledge Worker Task Force. Payne also serves on a subcommittee of the CCC's Workforce Development Task Force, which is charged with increasing skilled job and internship opportunities for underrepresented populations within the Erie community.
Dr. Michelle Previte, assistant professor of mathematics, had her article "The Topological Dimension of Limits of Graph Substitutions" published in the Forum Mathematicum 15:477-487 (2003).
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