H&S faculty members are rightly respected for their commitment to high-quality teaching, but many also inform their classroom work with significant research projects. Often supported by substantial grants from outside agencies, some fascinating research is helping to "push back the frontiers of knowledge" in a number of disciplines.
Biology professors Jack Bernard and Imre Tamas are working with a colleague from the Rochester Institute of Technology and researchers from the Czech Republic under the auspices of a grant from the National Science Foundation. Their three-year project is studying the effect of pollution such as acid rain on clonal plant development in the United States and the Czech Republic. Clonal plant species constitute the dominant component of the earth's flora. They are usually among the surviving species in forested areas seriously damaged by acid rain. The Czech Republic was chosen for the field research component of the study because it is the site of some of the world's most severe acid rain damage. In the mountainous sites there, all trees are dead and only two species of grasses grow.
Bernard and Tamas's collaboration is unusual in that it combines the field techniques of the environmental biologist with the laboratory techniques of the plant physiologist. Using the sophisticated, controlled-environment growth facilities on campus, they hope to be able to study under controlled conditions various affected species found in the field. This study also allows students from Ithaca to travel to the Czech Republic to conduct the research, with their Czech colleagues coming to Ithaca for the laboratory portions of the work.
The NSF is also supporting the work of another biology professor, Marc Servetnick. His research focuses on embryonic development in frogs.
During development the fertilized egg first divides to form a "ball" of thousands of cells. These cells then specialize, with some cells forming the brain, others skin, muscle, and so on. In the embryo the cells coordinate their activities to make sure that all the organs are made and that they are in the correct proportions and in the right places. Certain cells in the embryo release chemical signals that tell their neighbors both what the signaling cells are doing and how the neighbors should develop.
Servetnick's research centers on "receptor molecules," which sit on the cell's surface like ears, listening for the signals that are released by nearby cells. Because the same signals and receptors are used in many different organisms, from fruit flies, worms, leeches, frogs, and mice to humans, research on organisms like flies and frogs is expected to be applicable to humans as well.
English professor James Swafford reports that "according to Oscar Wilde, poet, novelist, playwright, wit, and public personality, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." Swafford and 15 American schoolteachers will make sure Wilde doesn't suffer that fate when they convene in June and July at the London Center for a seminar supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the seminar Wilde will be sharing the spotlight with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painter, poet, and one of the leaders of the Pre-Raphaelite group, who set out in 1848 to shock the English art establishment.
Swafford hopes to approach the Wilde and Rossetti texts through contemporary attacks-parodies, cartoons, polemical essays-that label them and their authors as subversive. He wants seminar participants to explore the purpose and social responsibilities of art, with a particular focus on these issues in relation to the secondary school curriculum. The group will take full advantage of the College's London Center, using it as a base for their exploration of the city's treasure trove of historic sites that formed the milieu for Rossetti and Wilde's work.
Taking full advantage of the emerging possibilities of computer technology, art history professor Lauren O'Connell is working as the reviews editor for Architronic: The Electronic Journal of Architecture. With support from a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, O'Connell and colleagues from Kent State University are pioneering this electronic publishing venture to foster the rapid exchange of scholarly and critical ideas about architecture. Recent issues have included photography, drawings, video segments of buildings "in action," and audio clips recording sounds that affect the "livability" of a modern building. O'Connell commissions and edits reviews of recent books and buildings, plus new CD-ROM products. Interested readers can find Architronic on the World Wide Web at http://www.kent.edu/homepage.html.
Ithaca College's Gerontology Institute has provided the grant support for anthropologist Joel Savishinsky and psychologist Janet Kalinowski to collaborate on a multiyear, longitudinal study, "Retirement as a Life Passage." Savishinsky secured the cooperation of local people who were about to retire, studying their "retirement rituals" and the way retirement has affected their family and interpersonal relationships, their health and finances, their levels of involvement in the community, and their sense of purpose. Kalinowski has been looking at the differences in daily activities between the final year of work and the first year of retirement. In both cases publications and paper presentations have resulted, often with students as coauthors.
Psychologist Michael McCall has received a very large grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to study the problem of underage drinking. The five-year grant will support a series of studies. The first examines the decision-making strategies employed by people who are responsible for enforcing the minimum drinking-age laws. McCall is particularly interested in the effectiveness of the "community gatekeeping mechanism" represented by drinking-age laws. As with most of the other projects mentioned here, significant portions of his grant support student researchers, who gain first-hand experience with applied research.
Ithaca College Home Page --- ICQ Home Page
The ICQ on the Web is maintained by Andrejs Ozolins