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Sarah Arndt ’14 was awarded the 2012 Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society undergraduate student paper award for her Honors Forum project, “Building a real food system: the challenges and successes on the college campus.” Her project was presented at the annual meetings of the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society (AFHVS) and the Society for Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN), both in June 2012 in New York, and at Seneca College. She was awarded the Student Opportunity Fund for Travel to Conferences in order to attend these meetings.

Jen Harfmann ’14 , an ES minor, was awarded a competitive grant from the Schupf Scholar Program to conduct collaborative research with Professor Cathy Gibson. Details of her summer research are

Eliza Sherpa ’14 won a prestigious EPA Greater Research Opportunities (GRO) Undergraduate Student Fellowship. Recipients of this award receive financial support for their junior and senior years of undergraduate study as well as an internship at an EPA facility during the summer of their junior year. Eliza, an environmental activist, hopes that her GRO internship will shed light on the legal and regulatory proceedings of the agencies meant to ensure human and environmental safety.

Sondra Lipshutz ’13 presented a talk entitled “Nutrient uptake in Catskill headwater streams” at the Society for Freshwater Science Annual Meeting last summer in Louisville KY. Her talk was based on research she did with Assistant Professor Cathy Gibson and several others, including Andrea Conine (Biology ‘13) and Dr. Catherine O’Reilly of Illinois State University.

Gwyn Harris ‘13 won a grant from Skidmore’s new SEE-Beyond program, which offers students funding to apply their academic learning to real-world challenges. Gwyn spent last summer taking classes and learning sustainable design and architecture at

Yestermorrow Design/Build School in Warren, VT. The summer was a great opportunity for Gwyn to clarify her post-baccalaureate goals;

Faculty Highlights (continued)

Assistant Professor Nurcan Atalan-Helicke and Professor Monica Raveret-Richter (Biology) were Honors Forum advisors for Sarah Arndt ’14 last school year for her project, “Building a real food system: the challenges and successes on the college campus.” Nurcan also published three articles this past year. The first, “Conserving diversity at the dinner table: plants, food security, and gene banks,” was published in January 2012 in Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, an online monthly history journal. A paper co-authored with Becky Mansfield from Ohio State University, entitled “Seed governance at the intersection of multiple global nation-state priorities: modernizing seeds in Turkey”, was published in November 2012 in the journal Global Environmental Politics. The third article, a book review of Food policy for developing countries: the role of government in global, national, and local food systems by Per Pinstrup-Andersen and Derrill D. Watson II, will come out in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.

Visiting Assistant Professor AJ Schneller had a paper accepted in the journal Hidrobiologica entitled “Socioeconomic diagnosis of the 2010 ephemeral jumbo squid ( Dosidicus gigas ) artisanal fishery near Bahia Magnalena, Baja California Sur, Mexico”.

Assistant Professor Amy Frappier (Geology) just returned from a semester-long sabbatical. She spent her fall doing writing two journal

articles describing the latest results from studying stalagmites from tropical caves. She and her husband, lab manager Brian Frappier, along with Kyle Nichols (Geosciences), got a three-year, $830,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a high-tech Stable-isotope and Paleoclimate Analysis Laboratory (SPA Lab for short). The new instrumentation was installed in the SPA Lab this summer, including a light stable isotope ratio mass spectrometer, elemental analyzer, and Kiel carbonate device.

Professor Judy Halstead (Chemistry) gave several presentations this past fall at local conferences and academic institutes, discussing water chemistry and land use patterns in Saratoga County lakes and streams, particularly the Kayaderosseras Creek. All of the research was co-authored by past ES majors Kristina Connolly ’07, Alicea Cock-Esteb ’09, and Sabrina Kliman ’09, along with Daniel de la Puente-Ranea (visiting graduate student), Professor Catherine Berheide (Sociology), and Alex Chaucer (GIS Center).

Assistant Professor Eric Morser (History) published an article “Beyond the memory of Nathan Myrick: the federal origins of frontier La Crosse”, discussing how federal officials took actions, such as funding early geological expeditions to southwestern Wisconsin, that helped Myrick’s Indian trading post develop into the city of La Crosse in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Student Awards and Accomplishments

given in the “2012 Summer Collaborative Research Projects” section.

Jen displays a poster of her summer research

Gwyn poses in front of a timber frame she helped build as part of one of her classes at Yestermorrow.

she found that “spending this summer at Yestermorrow is the single most influential experience I’ve had to reassure me that I really want to pursue a career in the sustainable building field.”

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