Frederic Wills '19Johan "Joop" Varekamp, the Howard T. Stearns Professor in Earth Science, led an invited talk at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in San Francisco, Dec. 2015. The earth and space science community participated in discussions of emerging trends and the latest research. The session, which was co-authored by former Wesleyan E&ES graduate student Lauren Camfield, focused on the 2012 eruption of the Copahue volcano in Argentina. Due to the success of the invited talk on Volcanic Hydrothermal Systems, Varekamp will be a co-editor for a special issue of a journal based on that session. As part of his role as…
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Professor Francis Starr, graduate student Hamad Emamy and collaborators from the Brookhaven National Lab have co-authored a paper titled "Diamond Family of Nanoparticle Superlattices" published in the prestigious journal Science on Feb. 5. Starr is professor of physics and director of the College of Integrative Sciences. Their work proposed a solution to a decades-long challenge to self-assemble a diamond-structured lattice at will from nanoscale particles. "Such a diamond-lattice structure has long been sought after due to its potential applications as a light controlling device, including optical transistors, color-changing materials, and optical — as opposed to electronic — computing," Starr said. To solve this challenge,…
PhD candidate in biology Jacob Herman received a V. Dropkin Postdoctoral Fellowship to research the epigenetics of plant response to pathogen infection at the University of Chicago’s Department of Ecology and Evolution. The V. Dropkin fellowship funds a postdoctoral researcher for up to four years to study the ecology and evolution of plant-pathogen interactions. Herman will begin the post-doctoral position after completing his dissertation defense this April. His advisor at Wesleyan is Sonia Sultan, professor of biology, professor of environmental studies. (more…)
More than 200 women undergraduates from the Northeast attended the American Physical Society Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) Jan. 15-17 at Wesleyan. Wesleyan was one of nine institutions from around the country to host a conference.
The APS CUWiP provides female physics majors with the opportunity to experience a professional conference, information about graduate school and professions in physics, and access to other women in physics with whom they can share experiences, advice and ideas.
The program included panel discussions about graduate school and careers in physics, presentations and discussions about women in physics, laboratory tours, student research talks, a student poster session, banquet and career fair.
Lauren Rubenstein"As far as relationships go, parasitism may seem particularly selfish: one partner benefits at the expense of another. Many parasites even alter the behavior of their hosts to get what they need. Parasitoids are similar, but they usually spend a significant portion of their lives living inside or on their hosts' bodies and controlling them from the inside-out, before ultimately killing and often consuming them." So begins an article in Science Daily featuring research by Melissa Bernardo, a PhD student in biology working with Michael Singer, associate professor of biology, associate professor of environmental studies. Bernardo has been studying how parasites and…
Laurie KenneyJoop Varekamp, the Harold T. Stearns Professor of Earth Science, professor of earth and environmental sciences, and Marty Gilmore, the George I. Seney Professor of Geology, professor and chair of professor of earth and environmental sciences, are the co-authors of two book chapters published in Copahue Volcano (Springer Publishers, September 2015) Copahue Volcano is part of Springer Publishers' "Active Volcanos of the World" series. Varekamp is the lead author on a chapter with Jim Zareski MA‘14 and Lauren Camfield MA’15. Gilmore and Tristan Kading MA’11 are co-authors with Varekamp on another chapter dealing with terrestrial environments as analogs for Mars. A third chapter,…
Wesleyan’s graduate students participated in New Graduate Orientation Sept. 1-2 in Woodhead Lounge. The orientation included a meet and greet with each other and faculty members, tours of campus and the Office of Graduate Student Services, a session on graduate pedagogy, a chemical hygiene/lab safety training for science students, and a picnic lunch. Wesleyan has 11 PhD candidates in the Departments of Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, and Physics; 13 MA students in Astronomy, E&ES and Music; and 18 BA/MAs who received a Wesleyan BA in May 2015 and are staying for one additional year to earn an MA. The graduate students come from…
#THISISWHY In this News @ Wesleyan story, we speak with Sam Factor '14, a graduate student in astronomy. Q: Sam, congratulations on completing your master’s thesis in astronomy! We understand you took your first astronomy class in the fall of your senior year at Wesleyan. What was your undergraduate major and how did your late-developing interest in astronomy come about? A: Thank you very much! As an undergrad, I majored in physics and computer science. During the fall of my senior year I took Introductory Astronomy (ASTR 155). I signed up for the course mainly because I wanted an interesting and relatively easy…
Erika Taylor, assistant professor of chemistry, assistant professor of environmental studies, has co-authored a paper published in FEBS Letters, an international journal established for the rapid publication of final short reports in the fields of molecular biosciences. The paper, which is an expansion of her lab’s work on the enzyme Heptosyltransferase I, is titled "Cloning and Characterization of the Escherichia coli Heptosyltransferase III: Exploring Substrate Specificity in Lipopolysaccharide Core Biosynthesis," The paper is co-authored by her former graduate student Jagadesh Mudapaka. FEBS Letters is published by Elsevier on behalf of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies. Taylor also is the co-author of “Improving Alternate Lignin Catabolite Utilization of LigAB…