Faculty Garner Summer Accolades
Several members of the Middlebury College faculty received grants and awards this summer. Professor of Geology Pat Manley was awarded a grant by the U.S. Geological Survey to further her research on Lake Champlain for a project about "Abrupt Climate Change in the Eastern United States." Assistant Professor of Economics William Pyle will be a Teaching Fellow with the Eurasia Program of the Social Science Research Council in order to develop a course on "Legal Institutions and Post-Soviet Economic Development."
In the physics department, Associate Professor Susan Watson was awarded supplemental funding from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates program in order to support expenses for her undergraduate students participating in an NSF program at Harvard with researchers from Middlebury, Harvard and the University of Minnesota.
Professor of Spanish Chela Andreu-Sprigg will travel to Spain to research Corin Tellado, the most well-known female Spanish writer of the twentieth century, with a grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture and American universities. Finally, Associate Professor of English Timothy Billings received a grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation to publish a translation and critical analysis of "Steles," which is a collection of French and Chinese poetry by Victor Segalen.
College Named Climate Champion
Middlebury College was recently award a 2005 Climate Champion Award for the College's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat global warming. The award was issued by Clean Air-Cool Planet (CA-CP), a Portsmouth, N.H., non-profit organization dedicated to fighting global warming and greenhouse gas emissions.
Middlebury's Carbon Reduction Working Group, "Path to Carbon Neutrality" and "Building the New Climate Movement," J-Term courses and a spring course in "Environmental Economics" were all cited as evidence of the institutional commitment to reducing heat-trapping gases and solving the climate change problem that we would like all colleges and universities to emulate," according to CA-CP Executive Director Adam Markham. "They have worked to reduce greenhouse gases and educate people in every aspect of their mission, from the trustees to faculty and staff, to students and alumni."
Accepting the award on behalf of the College were Middlebury College Trustee Linda Whitton, Assistant Professor of Economics Jon Isham, Jacob Whitcomb '06, Andrew Rossmeissl '05, John Hanley '05, Lindsey Corbin '05 and Michael DiRaimondo '05.
Additional awards were given to Governors John Maldacci of Maine and George Pataki of New York, the Bank of America, the Timberland Company and the City of Stamford, Conn.
College Wins Mass Spectrometer with a Liquid Chromatograph
Students majoring in the physical sciences will have access to new equipment and research funding this year, thanks to grants several Middlebury professors received from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NSF awarded a Major Research Instrumentation grant for the purchase of an LC/MS System and will support research of four faculty members and 10 students in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry each year.
In addition, the NIH announced that Middlebury will be one of the baccalaureate partners of the University of Vermont on a five-year research project entitled Vermont IDeA Networks of Biomedical Excellence. Among the faculty receiving one-year research grants from the program is Assistant Professor of Biology Jeremy Ward, who will study the identification and characterization of the Mammalian Meiotic Mutation mei4.
In the Chemistry and Biochemistry department, Associate Professor Roger Sandwick received a grand to study the Maillard Reaction between Ribose 5-Phosphate and Cellular Amines, in order to determine whether the natural system is capable of producing chemical poisons or cancer initiators. Professor Robert Cluss will study Lyme disease, specifically whether the two proteins produced by the Lyme disease spirochete are able to damage target cells.
Finally in that department, Professor Sunhee Choi will advance anticancer drug research through her work on Mechanism and Kinetics of Oxidation of Guanosine Derivatives by Pt(IV) Complexes, in order to understand how platinum anticancer drugs interact with DNA.
Written by KATE DOORLEY
