Olivia DrakeMakaela Kingsley will become director of the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship. Makaela (Steinberg) Kingsley graduated from Wesleyan in 1998 with a degree in neuroscience and behavior. After a brief stint doing public relations for the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, she returned to Wesleyan in 2000 to join the alumni and parent relations team in University Relations. During the past 13 years, she has collaborated with colleagues in U.R. and across campus, as well as students and alumni. For the past two months, she has been serving as interim director of the Patricelli Center. Her short-term goal is to…
Sharon Belden Castonguay will become director of the Wesleyan Career Center in May. An expert in career development and strategic planning, Castonguay comes to Wesleyan from Baruch College where she was director of the Graduate Career Management Center for the Zicklin School of Business. Previously, she was an independent career consultant and worked at Harvard University’s Office of Career Services. At Baruch, Castonguay managed the corporate relations team responsible for employer relationships, marketing and on-campus recruiting. She revitalized Zicklin’s career education programming, served on the admissions committee and collaborated with the advancement office to build corporate relationships. A 1993 graduate of Smith…
Wesleyan's WESlam team placed 13th out of 59 college teams from around the country in the 2013 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, held April 3-6 at Barnard College in New York City. Five students, Evan Okun '13, Lily Myers '15 , Zachary Goldberg '13, Cherkira Lashely '15 and Markeisha Hill '16 competed on the team and Emily Weitzman '14 coached. Lily Myers won the award for best love poem. "'Most moving' was the response Wesleyan got from community ," Okun said. "We were complemented for our creative manner in which we resisted the typical 'slam-poem-formula' that is often over dramatic and…
Gina Ulysse made a 13-minute presentation during "Untapped," the fourth annual TEDxUofM ideas convention at the University of Michigan on April 5. Ulysse is associate professor of African American studies, associate professor of anthropology and director of the Center for African American Studies. Ulysse, a University of Michigan alumna, was one of 20 speakers at the event. More than 1,300 guests attended. Ulysse focused her talk on untapped creativity and why she is turning to performance work at this stage of her life. "With a broad range of topics ranging from NASA funding, creativity, brain cancer research, philanthropy, a food cart…
Rosa Hayes '13 presented her paper on yield spread during The Carroll Round, an annual international economics conference at Georgetown University, in April. The Carroll Round provides a unique forum for research and discussion among the world’s top undergraduates. The goal of the Carroll Round is to foster the exchange of ideas among the leading undergraduate international economics and political economy students by encouraging and supporting the pursuit of scholarly innovation in the field. Hayes' advisor is Masami Imai, chair and associate professor of East Asian studies, associate professor of economics and director of the Freeman Center for East Asian…
A Wesleyan team scored 130th out of 402 teams at the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, administered by The Mathematical Association of America. In Dec. 2012, 4,277 students from 578 institutions took the exam. Some students competed in groups of three. Wesleyan's top scorer was Joshua Neitzel '14 with a rank of 239. Sangsan Warakkagun '15 ranked 569, and Eli Halperin '15 and Jeremy Fehr '13 ranked 870.5. The Putnam Exam is given every year on the first Saturday in December. The exam's first problem was: "A1 (2012) Let d1, d2, ..., d12 be real numbers in the open interval…
See the map. (more…)
Professor of Economics Richard Grossman was an invited discussant at a conference on “Understanding the Capital Structures of Non-Financial and Financial Corporations,” sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The conference took place in Cambridge, Mass. on April 5-6. Grossman discussed a paper titled “Short-Term Debt and Financial Crises: What can we Learn from Treasury Supply,” by Arvind Krishnamurthy and Annette Vissing-Jorgensen, both of Northwestern University. For more information see the conference's website.
Kate Shervais '13 presented her thesis research on "Examining Microroughness Evolution in Natural and Experimental Pseudotachylyte-bearing Fault Surfaces," at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in April. More than 11,000 scientists from 95 countries attended the conference, which was held in Vienna, Austria. Only 28 percent of the participants were students. Shervais completed her study with Phil Resor, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences. Resor, who received a National Science Foundation grant to study earthquakes in an Italian fault zone, also attended the conference. The NSF grant supported their travel to the conference. "I had a wonderful time and…
A book written by Assistant Professor of English Lisa Cohen was honored by the Biographers International Organization on April 22. Her book, All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was nominated for a 2012 inaugural Plutarch Award for "best biography of the year." Named after the famous Ancient Greek biographer, the prize aims to be the genre’s equivalent of the Oscar, in that the winner will be determined by secret ballot from a list of nominees selected by a committee of distinguished members of the craft. The BIO nominated 10 books for the award. The Plutarch Award will…
Watch five exciting professors at Wesleyan give talks on the ideas they can’t stop thinking about during Wesleyan Thinks Big, March 28 in Memorial Chapel. Students nominated their favorite professors earlier in the semester to give nine-minute lectures, without slides, handouts, or Moodle, on a topic of their choice. Wesleyan Thinks Big was inspired by TED Talks and encourages professors to talk about things they aren’t able to fit into class but are excited and inspired by. The videos are online here. View photos of the event here. The faculty and their topics are: Paula Matthusen, assistant professor of music,…
Between Vine Street, Cross Street and Knowles Avenue near Wesleyan, an innocuous looking triangle of land forms the “Leverett Beman Historic District,” listed on the State Register of Historic Places and part of the Connecticut Freedom Trail. This area is the site of one of the earliest planned African American communities in the United States. During the spring of 2012, Sarah Croucher, assistant professor of anthropology, assistant professor of archaeology, led an archeological excavation at the "Beman Triangle" site. Several Wesleyan students and community members participated in the dig and unearthed dozens of materials relating to healthcare and everyday practices,…