Olivia DrakeThe Wesleyan Board of Trustees has awarded tenure to eight faculty members. Additionally, four associate professors and two adjunct faculty members also have been promoted. Wesleyan President Michael Roth and Rob Rosenthal, provost and vice president for Academic Affairs, announced the promotions, which were effective July 1. Newly tenured faculty, promoted from Assistant to Associate Professor Gloster Aaron, associate professor of biology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior, arrived at Wesleyan in 2006, following five years as a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University. Aaron studies the brain’s synaptic circuitry to better understand communication patterns in the neocortex. His most recent…
Lauren RubensteinJohn Kirn, professor of biology, professor and chair of the neuroscience and behavior program, in May published an article in the Journal of Neuroscience on neurogenesis in songbirds. He recently spoke about his research on WNPR public radio and in The Hartford Courant. Q: Professor Kirn, you study the neuroscience behind song learning and production in zebra finches. Please tell us about your research, and the surprising findings to come out of your most recent work. A: I’m interested in the normal functions of adult neurogenesis—the continual addition and replacement of neurons. This happens to a limited extent in humans but…
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Cynthia RockwellElizabeth “Beezer” Clarkson ’94 has joined SAP Ventures as Chief Operating Officer and Managing Director. SAP Ventures is an independent venture capital firm affiliated with SAP AG, a global enterprise software company. Clarkson will be based in the company’s Palo Alto, Calif., office and in charge of worldwide operations. She will also be managing the newly announced "SAP HANA Real-Time Fund," which is focused on early-stage venture capital funds globally, and scheduled to launch this month. Previously, Clarkson was a Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, Calif., where she managed the DFJ Global Network of 16 venture funds with $7 billion…
David LowLily Raff McCaulou ’02 is the author of the memoir Call of the Mild: Learning to Hunt My Own Dinner (Grand Central Publishing), which was published in June. She was raised as a gun-fearing environmentalist and an animal lover and stuck by the principle that harming animals is wrong. But her views changed when she left an indie film production career in New York to take a reporting job in central Oregon. For her articles, she began spending weekends fly-fishing and weekdays interviewing hunters and found that some of them were quite thoughtful about their relationship with animals and the…
David Nixon ’53, senior partner of the Manchester, N.H., law firm of Nixon, Vogelman, Barry, Slawsky & Simoneau, P.A., received the Chief Justice Frank Rowe Kenison Award from the New Hampshire Bar Foundation. Selected by vote of the Board of Directors of the New Hampshire Bar Foundation, Nixon was chosen for his “substantial contributions to the betterment of New Hampshire citizens through the administration of justice, the legal profession, and the advancement of legal thought.” Nixon, an economics major at Wesleyan, earned his law degree with honors from the University of Michigan Law School. He was voted one of New…
Benjamin TraversJeffrey Richards '69, Broadway producer and 2012 Tony Award winner for the Best Musical Revival (The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess) discusses life, his work on Broadway, and his love for Wesleyan in this video: [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkDItIlWqCA[/youtube]
In the Spring semester of 2012, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Gillian Goslinga and Creative Campus Fellow Jill Sigman, co-taught a course titled Ritual, Health and Healing. The course consisted of a weekly seminar and movement lab where the students explored the moral and material worlds of ritual and religious healing through assigned reading, writing and physical exercises. A video of the class is below: [youtube width="640" height="420"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83YTKlRWl0A[/youtube]
Assistant Professor Maria Ospina, who recently completed her first year in the Romance Languages and Literatures Department at Wesleyan, can trace her academic interests directly back to her childhood in Colombia and her longtime interest in history. “My interests in violence, memory and culture stem in part from my own experiences growing up in Colombia during the 1980s and 90s, in a very complex region that has been marked by armed conflict, the hemispheric War on Drugs and different waves of migration. The combination of political turmoil and a vibrant cultural production that actively reflected on the histories of violence…