Olivia Drake(Article submitted by Raghu Appasani) Many Wesleyan students have ambitions to create positive social change and make an impact. This summer, two Wesleyan undergraduates, Lennox Byer ’12 and Alexander Small ’13, travelled to the state of Gujarat in India. Specifically, they travelled to the district of Vadodara where they resided at the Sumandeep Vidyapeeth University (MINDS collaborator) as MINDS Ambassadors. Lennox and Alex have been core members of The MINDS (Mental Illness & Neurological Disorders) Foundation since its incorporation in 2010. The MINDS Foundation is an organization founded by Wesleyan undergraduate Raghu Appasani ’12. The organization has a persistent commitment to…
University Professor of Music Sumarsam is the author of a paper titled "Binary Division in Javanese Gamelan and Socio-Cosmological Order," which was published in the Proceedings 1st Symposium Singapore: ICTM Study Group on Performing Arts of Southeast Asia. The abstract of the paper is online here. According to the abstract, “The paper presented by Sumarsam exhibited a firm commitment to indepth musicological analysis of aspects of gamelan music, yet strongly connecting the music analysis to aspects of cultural studies, that is, the social and cosmological order of Javanese society.” In addition, BBC quoted Sumarsam in their broadcasting on "A History of…
Charles Sanislow, assistant professor of psychology, co-authored a study that was published the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in July 2011. The research suggests self-report assessment measures of personality pathology are more stable and orderly than those obtained by clinical diagnostic interviews, and informs Sanislow’s larger research agenda involving approaches to diagnosing mental disorders. Read the study, titled "Comparing the Temporal Stability of Self-Report and Interview Assessed Personality Disorder" online.
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[youtube width="640" height="420"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oX_mhLB1gG0[/youtube] Wesleyan welcomed 87 international students to campus Aug. 28-31. International Student Orientation is held prior to new student orientation in order for international students to recover from travel, often from across the globe. ISO also offers sessions that address health and medical insurance issues, programs about cultural adaptation, weather adjustment, and liberal arts education, (more…)
There's something fishy about one of Connecticut's minnows, and the topic hooked researchers in the Department of Biology. During the last ice age, Connecticut was covered by layers of snow and ice, forcing organisms to seek refuge elsewhere. After the glaciers retreated, recolonization of the fauna and flora resulted in the diversity of native species that inhabit the state today. "But where did they come from? How did they come back to the Northeast to give us all the organisms we see today?" asks biology graduate student Michelle Tipton. "These questions are of particular interest to the ichthyologists at Wesleyan with…
The Center for the Humanities advisory board awarded eight Wesleyan seniors with a Student Fellowship for 2011-12. These fellows will explore the themes “Fact and Artifact” and “Visceral States: Affect and Civic Life." Four Student Fellowships are awarded by the center’s advisory board each semester. During the fall semester, fellows Conan Cheong, Kevin Donohoe, Bridget Read and Alexandra Wang will will explore the theme "Fact and Artifact." They will examine the career of the modern fact and its uncomfortable companion, the artifact. The fellows will question, "Under what conditions can facts be created?" "How do efforts to pin down empirical…
The Center for African-American Studies (CAAS) is hosting a First Book series during the Fall 2011 semester. The series features trailblazing junior scholar-authors whose projects are and will make significant contributions to the field of African-American Studies. Gina Athena Ulysse, the new director of the Center for African American Studies, associate professor of African American Studies, associate professor of anthropology, created the series as the main initiative of her directorship to coincide with the AFAM junior colloquium that she is teaching. Ulysse's interests and concerns were to economically achieve three goals: 1) give AFAM incoming majors the opportunity to engage directly with scholars who are impacting the…
An article by Katie McConnell '13 and Emma Leonard '13 was featured in a recent Permaculture Institute of the Northeast newsletter. McConnell and Leonard are members of the new student group WILD Wes (Working for Intelligent Landscape Design). They've been vying for permacultural principles to be adopted into the University’s landscaping practices. In the past year, the group hosted its first annual Sustainable Landscaping Design Charrette, where Wesleyan faculty, administrative members, permaculturists, landscaping experts, and students from Wesleyan and nearby Northeastern colleges converged. In the newsletter, McConnell and Leonard explain how at the conference, groups collaborated to develop permacultural and sustainable…
Enrollment for the Wesleyan Institute for Lifelong Learning (WILL) Fall 2011 semester is open. WILL is chartered to provide educational opportunities outside of formal degree-granting programs to members of the broader community. WILL classes are taken for interest, not for credit. Classes are small with an informal atmosphere. Faculty include Wesleyan faculty, emeriti faculty, and similarly qualified members of the community. The courses are short, intellectually-stimulating and lively. The course offerings cover the arts, social sciences, literature, science and mathematics. (more…)
This issue, we ask "5 Questions" of Scott Holmes, associate professor of molecular biology and biochemistry. He received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support his research on epigenetic silencing of gene expression. Gene expression refers to the observable characteristics generated on a molecular level by a particular sequence of DNA or gene; epigenetic controls are essential in maintaining the specific patterns of gene expression that distinguish hundreds of distinct cell types in skin, muscles and other types of tissue. Epigenetic mechanisms also explain how humans can have more than 200 distinct cell types. Q: Professor Holmes,…