On a beautiful September morning, 15 �ֲ���ý students hike a quarter mile through the woods of Freeport, Maine, shovels in hand, before emerging into a sunlit clearing.

Spread before them is Pettengill Farm, a historic saltwater farm perched on an estuary of the Harraseeket River. Now owned by the Freeport Historical Society, the 140-acre property features a circa-1800 saltbox farmhouse plus fields, woods, apple trees, and a salt marsh.

It’s a stunning vista.

Guided by Holly Ewing, the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, the students are part of “Soils,” an environmental studies course that digs into the science of dirt.

Farm Stand

This fall, faculty had the choice to offer their courses in person or remotely. For Ewing, “Soils” needed to be taught in person.

“The course absolutely relies on students being able to see, smell, and feel soils in a variety of landscapes,” she says. “These field explorations make the properties of the soil tactile and help the students come to see soils as bodies in the landscape.”

The characteristics of soils are shaped by a variety of factors, she explains, ranging from vegetation, slope, drainage, and the parent materials from which they form.

“The physical, chemical, and biological properties we discuss in the classroom can be connected to what we have seen and done in the field — something that can clarify and connect concepts in a way that no textbook can.”

Off to Dig

At Pettengill, the students explored transitions in soil characteristics on the landscape and compared what they found in the field to how the soils are mapped in the areas’s soil survey, which .

Students looked closely at soil structure, texture, and color among the different soil “horizons” — parallel layers of soil that have different characteristics from those above and below — that they unearthed.

“The changes that can occur within just a few feet of each other are incredible,” says environmental studies major Sam Gilman ’22 of Mendham, N.J. He and his lab partner, Zoe Knauss ’23 of Buffalo, N.Y., dug about eight holes during the course of the morning.

Ewing had prepared students (including one studying remotely in New Hampshire, who dug her own holes there) for their fieldwork by teaching them about differences in soils and what causes those differences, from redox reactions to erosion. “It’s really cool to then have the ability to get outside and actually see how what we’re learning in class applies to real landscapes,” Gilman says.

Fieldwork in Ewing’s class, including a recent trip to the local Thorncrag Bird Sanctuary, has been a blessing during a semester where so much has been curtailed due to the college’s public health measures.

“I’ve just been really thankful to have the opportunity to get off campus and get my hands dirty,” Gilman says.

Guided by a Mentor

As the students spread across the old farmland in Freeport with their analysis assignment in hand, Ewing, joined by Camille Parrish, a lecturer in environmental studies, moved from one group to another to check in and give feedback.

Stopping to talk to Sophia Miller ’21 of New York City, Ewing used a knife to scrape off the face of the pit to expose a fresh surface for examination before departing to work with a group down at the river.

Ewing is Miller’s senior thesis advisor and the duo have been working together intensely this fall. Because of the unusual semester, students are taking just two courses for 7.5 weeks (Module A) and then will take two more during Module B, which concludes in December with winter break.

Miller’s two classes, the soils course and her thesis work, are both led by Ewing. “She’s my only professor at the moment,” Miller says. That’s an interesting dynamic, she says, but “it’s been pretty incredible to get to know a professor on that level.”

Further Afield

As Miller takes notes, she explains what she’s learned. This part of Pettingill was cultivated so the soil was often plowed up, mixing everything at the surface into one deeper horizon. Below that is clay, which might have been originally deposited when this area was covered by the ocean after the glaciers left. “There is a lot of clay that’s pretty hard to dig through because it’s so dense.”

No matter, says Miller. “Experiential learning has always been big for me,” she says. “That’s part of why I came to �ֲ���ý.” And particularly welcome this fall, when she’s been spending so much time in her room.

“I’m socially more isolated than I have been in past years,” she says. “So the opportunity to be around peers in a socially distant way, to get off campus, and be learning from Holly is especially special.”

This fall’s fieldwork, and its collaborative nature, helped solidify Zoe Knauss’ decision to declare her major in environmental studies. “It was super cool to be able to relate what we learn about in the classroom to the actual environment we are living in,” she says.

Andrew Kennedy, Gabrielle Chua ’18, and �ֲ���ý students

Molecule created by �ֲ���ý students could lead to more effective treatment for cancer and Alzheimer’s patients — Multiple outlets

A variety of news organizations reported the invention at �ֲ���ý of Bobcat339, a molecule created by students that could have implications for research and treatment of cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Andrew Kennedy and seven students co-authored a paper describing the molecule, which inhibits the ability of a certain enzyme to regulate genes. This class of so-called TET inhibitors could one day limit the aggressiveness of cancers.

With their professor, Andrew Kennedy (right), three of the seven student coauthors of the scholarly article describing Bobcat339 posed last May in a Dana Chemistry lab: from left, Michael Bennett, Haoyu Sun, and Nathanael Kuzio, all ’19. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Gabrielle Chua ’18 was the student who ultimately structured the molecule.

“It’s big for the field of epigenetics, it’s big for cancer research, and it’s big for the field of memory,” Kennedy told local NBC affiliate WCSH-TV, whose segment on the molecule was shared on Facebook by “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt.”

Read the stories:��

• “,” WCSH-TV, Oct. 25, 2019��
• “,” Maine Public, Oct. 30, 2019

Holly Ewing

�ֲ���ý snags federal cash to help study Lake Auburn — Sun Journal

Steve Collins of the Sun Journal reported that the college will receive $842,000 of a $6 million National Science Foundation grant to figure out how to track and predict cyanobacterial blooms in lakes.

Holly Ewing, professor of environmental studies and the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, is key to the investigation, which is led by Alberto Quattrini Li of Dartmouth College.

Often important sources of drinking water, U.S. lakes are experiencing increases in cyanobacterial blooms, says Holly Ewing. The NSF project will allow better water-quality monitoring than ever before.

The multi-institution, multidisciplinary team will use boats and aerial drones to collect a wide variety of data on several lakes, including Lake Auburn. The project requires understanding communities’ relationships with their lakes, Ewing said.

“Understanding people’s values with respect to how we pay attention to lakes, how we interact with lakes — there’s definitely a cultural and place-based component to that,” she said. “And all of this is intimately related to the science.”

Read the story:��

• “,” Sun Journal, Oct. 25, 2019

Ryan Smith

Auburn’s Ryan Smith wins marathon, qualifies for U.S. Olympic Trials — Sun Journal

�ֲ���ý staff member Ryan Smith talked to the Lewiston Sun Journal’s Adam Robinson about his victory in the Hartford Marathon in October, which qualifies him for the U.S. Olympic Team marathon trials.

Smith, manager of purchasing, accounting, and licensing for �ֲ���ý Information and Library Services, ran the marathon in 2 hours and 18 minutes.

He’s now headed to Atlanta for the Feb. 29 trials, where he hopes to break the top 50 (the top three in each gender make the Olympic team).

“I’m certainly excited to see the full-time professionals, as always,” Smith said. “In terms of nerves, I think the pressure of trying to qualify is much more nerve-wracking than actually competing there. I’m just going to try and beat as many people as possible.

“That sounds more fun than nerve-wracking, especially because it’s a hilly course and I’m really good on hills.”

Read the story:��

• “,” Sun Journal, Oct. 18, 2019

Nolwazi Nosisa Ngwenyama ’16

UCT’s 2020 Mandela Rhodes scholars — University of Cape Town News

The University of Cape Town announced that Nolwazi Nosisa Ngwenyama ’16, a �ֲ���ý graduate and graduate student in gender studies, has won a prestigious Mandela-Rhodes scholarship.

Nolwazi Ngwenyama ’16 listens to a speaker at the Office of Intercultural Education at �ֲ���ý in 2014. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The scholarships are awarded to African citizens with “exceptional leadership capacity” and provide funding for postgraduate study in South Africa.

Ngwenyama triple-majored in politics, anthropology, and women and gender studies at �ֲ���ý. A native of Eswatini, she volunteers with the United World Colleges Eswatini National Committee.

Read the story:��

• “,” University of Cape Town News, Nov. 7, 2019

Rebecca Herzig

For Millennial women, body hair presents a complicated choice — HuffPost

In the HuffPost, Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies Rebecca Herzig helped guest writer Sofia Barrett-Ibarria round out her argument that while choosing not to remove body hair might be a “feminist” choice, body hair is more complicated than a “to shave or not to shave” binary.

In 2014, Rebecca Herzig heads to the lectern to deliver a talk. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Herzig is the author of Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. In the HuffPost, she pointed out that while there is some mainstream acceptance of body hair on women, the stigma around body hair can have real, negative consequences, especially for women who are not “able-bodied, white, young, thin and toned, expensively dressed, etc. — in every other way,” she told Barrett-Ibarria.

Read the story:��

• “,” HuffPost, Nov. 5, 2019��

Peter Weyand ’83

Inside the six-figure project to solve the mystery of NBA flopping — The Guardian

It’s a phenomenon that baffles and frustrates basketball fans: flopping. And from a science perspective, Peter Weyand ’83, a professor of applied physiology and biomechanics at Southern Methodist University, knows more about it than almost anyone, writes The Guardian’s Patrick Hruby.

Funded by Houston Rockets owner Mark Cuban, Weyand and his team set out in 2014 to measure how much force it takes to knock someone over and what it looks like when a basketball player is genuinely set off balance, vs. embellishing a light hit or straight-up faking a foul — that is, flopping. They ran tests using first a dummy, then real people wearing heavy padding.

Turns out, it doesn’t take much force to knock someone over. “In many cases, if the defender just doesn’t move their feet, then down they go,” Weyand said. “I’ve been through thousands of charge-block collisions, and never realized how easy it was.”

A rather obvious indication of a flop, the SMU team found, is when players stick their arms straight up as they go down — that doesn’t happen naturally.

Read the story:��

• “,” The Guardian, Oct. 30, 2019

Renee Leduc ’98

Will 5G Affect Weather Forecasts? — BBC Click

The program quotes Renee Leduc ’98 on how a recent Federal Communications Commission action could harm meteorologists’ ability to forecast the weather, including dangerous hurricanes.

The issue has to do with an FCC decision to auction off specific wireless radio frequencies to commercial wireless providers for next-generation 5G networks.

The scientific community, including Leduc, opposes the move. They say that giving these frequencies to 5G networks will interfere with unique measurements from weather satellites that are very important to weather forecasting models, the two most well-known being the American model (GFS) and the European model (the ECMWF). The FCC says the interference is not a threat.

Renee Leduc is quoted in this BBC Click story about how turning over specific radio frequencies to wireless providers could harm weather forecasting.

Founder and principal of the consulting firm Narayan Strategy, Leduc is a member of the American Meteorological Society’s Board on Enterprise Economic Development and its International Affairs and Radio Frequency Allocation committees.

She told The Washington Post that it’s “crucial” that the question of interference is “decided in a way that is informed by atmospheric science since the measurements are so crucial to sound weather predictions.”

The issue is front and center at the World Radiocommunications Conference, which ends Nov. 22 and where “for the past month they have been working to coordinate the deployment of 5G technologies across the world,” Leduc tells �ֲ���ýNews.

Read the stories:

• “,” The Washington Post, March 8, 2019
• “” Nature, Nov. 22, 2019

Carrie Jones ’93

The unstoppable Carrie Jones; New thriller ‘In the Woods’ released — Mount Desert Islander

Down East arts journalist Nan Lincoln spoke with author Carrie Jones ’93 about her new young-adult thriller, In the Woods.

The novel, co-written with Steven E. Wedel, follows a teenage girl as she investigates possibly paranormal events. The two writers’ conversation, however, ventured into Jones’ other projects, from the children’s book festival she helped organize to her prolific books and blogs.

“I have to write — all the time,” Jones said. “If I don’t get my ideas onto the page they pile up. But I love seeing where my characters will take me. It’s always a new adventure.”

Read the story:��

• “,” Mount Desert Islander, Oct. 27, 2019��

Matt Moretti ’06

Pioneering mussel farmer buys rival, plans expansion — Portland Press Herald

The Portland Press Herald reported that Bangs Island Mussels, a Portland, Maine-based producer of rope-grown mussels, bought local competitor Calendar Island Mussel Co.

Bangs Island Mussels is owned by Matt Moretti ’06.

In 2016, Matt Moretti ’06 feeds mussels into a machine that works to break apart tissue connecting many of the clusters. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

The company produces mussels by growing them on ropes suspended from rafts, selling the product to Portland restaurants as well as wholesalers. The key to sustainable mussel farming, Moretti told PPH reporter Peter McGuire, is scale, and with the new acquisition Bangs Island Mussels can double its production and workforce.

“The economics of it are such that the faster you can add on volume to your production, the sooner your costs drop and profits go up,” he said.

Read the story:��

• “,” Portland Press Herald, Nov. 18, 2019����

Elizabeth Strout ’77

Oprah reveals Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout as new book club pick — CBS This Morning

With bestselling author Elizabeth Strout ’77 sitting next to her, Oprah Winfrey announced on CBS This Morning that Strout’s new novel, Olive, Again, is her new book club selection.

Olive, Again is the sequel to Strout’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Olive Kitteridge.

Winfrey said she admires Strout’s ability to take “the simplest of things and turn them into something that feels real to us.”

Oprah Winfrey talks with Elizabeth Strout ’77 on CBS This Morning.

Melissa Wong ’01

Women Of The C-Suite: “Fear is a liar; fear will tell you the craziest things” with Melissa Wong, CEO of Retail Zipline — Authority Magazine

Carly Martinetti of Authority Magazine, a publication on the platform Medium, interviewed Melissa Wong ’01, co-founder of Retail Zipline.

Building a company, Wong said, requires fearlessness — even when you think you should be afraid.

“Fear is a liar,” she said. “Fear will tell you the craziest things. When I first started, I legitimately feared our company would fail. … When you’re in the moment, don’t let feelings of fear lead your actions or choices.”

Working in communications for Old Navy showed Wong how hard it is for large retail brands to get their own stores to implement ideas. So she and a co-founder started Retail Zipline, which streamlines that kind of communication.

Read the story:��

• “,” Authority Magazine, Nov. 3, 2019��

A �ֲ���ý College professor is central to a four-state effort, supported by a $5.9 million, four-year National Science Foundation grant, to use high technology against a low-tech problem: the increasing hazard posed by cyanobacterial blooms in lakes.

An expert in lake ecosystems, Holly Ewing is collaborating with scientists specializing in computer science, robotics, sensor technology, and “big data” to create models for predicting harmful blooms of organisms called cyanobacteria (formerly known as “blue-green algae”).

The question of data about lake conditions — how to get a lot more data and then how to make use of it — is the crux of the NSF-funded project.

Naturally occurring in lakes, these organisms under certain conditions undergo population explosions that produce, among other problems, toxins at levels that may be hazardous to people and pets. These pose a particular threat for communities that take their public drinking water from lakes, as �ֲ���ý’ hometown of Lewiston and its twin city Auburn do from Lake Auburn.

Professor of Environmental Studies Holly Ewing (left) and environmental studies major Topher Castaneda ’20 take water samples from Lake Auburn, the source of Lewiston and Auburn’s drinking water, on Aug. 15, 2019. Ewing is central to a five-state effort, supported by a $5.9 million National Science Foundation grant, to use high technology to better predict cyanobacterial blooms in lakes. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

While it’s generally understood that climate change and changes in land use drive cyanobacterial blooms, there’s still much to learn about what provokes blooms in individual lakes.

So the question of data about lake conditions — how to get a lot more data and then how to make use of it — is the crux of the NSF-funded project, titled “Computational Methods and Autonomous Robotics Systems for Modeling and Predicting Harmful Cyanobacterial Blooms.”

The project team will devise analytical and modeling tools that can rapidly integrate masses of varied data (for instance, dissolved oxygen levels, pH, and water temperature) into real-time assessments of a lake’s vulnerability to a bloom.

The project will use as test sites four lakes in Maine, including Lake Auburn and nearby Sabattus Pond, as well as lakes in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and South Carolina.

Often critical sources of drinking water, U.S. lakes are experiencing increases in cyanobacterial blooms, says Holly Ewing. The NSF project will allow better water-quality monitoring than ever before.

Some data will come from existing sources, such as ongoing water sampling programs and an automated sensor buoy that Ewing placed in Lake Auburn in 2013.

But, in an innovation that’s key to the project, the researchers will deploy sensor-equipped autonomous robots — boats and aerial drones — that can gather information with minimal human oversight and, ideally, adapt instantaneously to changing circumstances.

“The hope is that the larger amount of data and the models that it can drive will help us understand blooms better.”

Which leads to another major project goal: how to interpret all that data quickly enough to anticipate a harmful cyanobacteria bloom. “Across these different platforms, the data will be collected at different temporal scales, at different spatial scales, and they represent different kinds of information,” Ewing says. “Some data will be meaningful instantaneously, and others will require additional processing.

“So data integration is a major task. And then the hope is that the larger amount of data and the models that it can drive will help us understand blooms better.”

Principal investigator for the project is Alberto Quattrini Li, an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College and a specialist in the field of autonomous mobile robotics. Ewing, a professor of environmental studies and the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at �ֲ���ý, is one of four co-principal investigators.

By employing cutting-edge technologies, the NSF-funded project will expand scientists’ abilities to better understand lake systems, says Holly Ewing.��

Of the other three, two hail from the University of South Carolina: Annie Bourbonnais, a biogeochemist and environmental sensor expert, and Ioannis Rekleitis, a computer scientist. The third co-PI is Paolo Stegagno, a roboticist at the University of Rhode Island. Michael Palace, an environmental scientist at the University of New Hampshire, and Denise Bruesewitz, an environmental scientist at Colby College, will also have leading roles in the project.

“It is rare to have teams from so many different specialties converge to study a problem like this,” says Quattrini Li. “By working together, we can increase the amount of data that can be collected and increase prediction capabilities.”

“Something that’s really important about this project is how collaborative it has to be to succeed,” Ewing agrees. “The people who are interested in robotics alone could not do this project, and those of us who study lakes and water quality alone could not do this project. It requires the integration of the tools and the perspectives from both of those areas.”

�ֲ���ý’ portion of the NSF grant is $841,776. Out of 11 seven-figure grants made so far in 2019 through the NSF’s EPSCoR program (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research), designed to build research competitiveness in selected regions, this is the second in which �ֲ���ý is involved. (The other, led by �ֲ���ý neuroscientist Michelle Greene, is the creation of a first-of-its-kind visual experience database.)

The field of environmental studies is inherently collaborative. “It’s the way science happens. You have to be able to collaborate,” says Holly Ewing.

Ewing has a key role in coordinating the overall effort, aligning the needs of the lake research with the capabilities of the robotic and computing technology.

“My role has been to frame the ecological questions, frame the lake science that needs to happen, and guide the integration of science with the robotics,” she says. “I’m trying to help identify how the technology can best be used in the service of the science itself.”

In addition, Ewing will coordinate the Maine activities, which also involve Bruesewitz, who specializes in aquatic ecosystems. Ewing will lead water sampling efforts at Lake Auburn and Sabattus Pond, and Bruesewitz will oversee sampling at China Lake, near Maine’s capital of Augusta, and Great Pond near Waterville (one of six Great Ponds in Maine).

Ewing, who joined �ֲ���ý in 2004, brings to the project a long dedication to the study of lakes (aka limnology), particularly questions around water quality. Lake Auburn has been a focus of her efforts.

In 2013, as part of an earlier NSF-funded study of cyanobacteria, she obtained the sensor buoy that continues to measure oxygen levels and thermal stratification in Lake Auburn, . Operating the buoy requires a collaboration among Ewing, the Auburn Water District, and Lewiston Water Division, and all parties have an interest in the data.

Holly Ewing describes her role in the new NSF grant as “trying to help identify how the technology can best be used in the service of the science itself.” (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

An objective of the autonomous vehicles in the new cyanobacterial project is to both expand sampling capacity, in terms of both time and especially space, and also help direct monitoring resources where they’re most needed.

For example, the team will test drones equipped with special cameras that can conceivably, in effect, “see” where blooms are occurring, and thus where additional sampling might be wanted.

“It’s very time- and money-intensive to monitor, and yet monitoring data are what tell us how the system is functioning,” Ewing says. “To the extent that we can better identify how the system functions, we can become more targeted in the way we monitor.”

“�ֲ���ý undergraduates will come away with experience in how you work in diverse teams.”

The project team hopes that their findings will ultimately translate into technology and practices useful to the people and organizations who protect the public’s interest in clean waters. Looking locally, Ewing says, “having a better understanding of what drives different events in Lake Auburn would be hugely beneficial to the management of our unfiltered drinking water supply.”

Having conducted preliminary drone imaging tests at the Maine lakes this past summer, the team will begin full-scale testing of robotic sampling technologies next summer.

The NSF grant includes funding for student researchers (as well as a postdoctoral researcher beginning at �ֲ���ý in the second year of the grant), and Ewing foresees students taking part in water sampling and analysis as well as any aspects of the computational and robotic technology for which they’re suited.

�ֲ���ý students will be involved in myriad aspects of the NSF project, from field sampling and robotics to communicating with stakeholders, says Holly Ewing.

In addition to valuable hands-on experience, the project will provide profound lessons about the nature of environmental science, especially as it is taught at �ֲ���ý, where collaboration — with the community and across academic disciplines — is central.

“This project requires understanding of community needs and what’s going on in these watersheds, which is very much socially driven,” Ewing says. “And understanding people’s values with respect to how we pay attention to lakes, how we interact with lakes — there’s definitely a cultural and place-based component to that. And all of this is intimately related to the science.”

She adds, “Undergraduates will come away with experience in how you work in diverse teams. How do you come to understand other people’s languages, other people’s needs, other people’s foci? And what is it that makes something successful for them?”

A member of the �ֲ���ý faculty since 2004, Professor of Environmental Studies Holly Ewing is the new Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies.

Endowed by the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation, now the Endeavor Foundation, this chair celebrates the central role of interdisciplinary studies in the liberal arts and recognizes a faculty member who has made transformative contributions to interdisciplinary teaching, learning, and scholarship.

Holly Ewing explains what the appointment means to her:

I was completely surprised to receive an envelope in the mail with the news of my appointment to the Christian A. Johnson Professorship — I had no idea how or when it passed from person to person. It meant a great deal to me to be able to share this letter with my family last Thanksgiving by physically handing it to my parents in a hospital room in Oklahoma during a period when my father was gravely ill and in and out of the hospital.

Over my years at �ֲ���ý, faculty whose work I greatly respect — Jane Costlow, Michael Jones, and Rebecca Herzig — have held the professorship, so I am honored to be named the next holder of it.

Since so much of the expansion of knowledge has been happening in interdisciplinary spaces that we did not previously consider, it seems especially fitting that there is a professorship that acknowledges that work and the opportunities that exist in our scholarship, teaching, and even the organization of the academy.

Working with students, colleagues, and collaborators in these spaces and thinking about how they are structured and how we can create in them is some of the most satisfying work I do, so I am grateful to the Endeavor Foundation for the recognition of its importance.

About Holly Ewing

Holly Ewing uses the college’s Maine location to great advantage in her research and field courses. Her courses provide the natural science core of the Program in Environmental Studies, the college’s most interdisciplinary major.

Her research, often with student collaborators, investigates the interconnections among atmospheric, terrestrial, and aquatic ecosystems — such as how ecosystems in Acadia National Park respond to air pollution, or the processes of algae growth in Lake Auburn, the area’s source of drinking water.

In partnership with faculty colleague Rebecca Herzig, she has worked to improve faculty procedures for tenure and promotion reviews by regularizing the process for all faculty, better accommodating a diversity of ways people are appointed, and recognizing the role and contributions of interdisciplinary work. The recent chair of the Program in Environmental Studies, Ewing also is a member of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

�ֲ���ý has announced faculty promotions, including tenure awards and full professorships, effective for the 2016-17 academic year.

“These promotions recognize the achievements of faculty members who personify what it means to be an outstanding teacher and scholar at �ֲ���ý College,” said Matthew Auer, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

“These faculty members teach with passion and purpose, they cross academic and scholarly boundaries with skill, and they are fully engaged members of our liberal arts community and leaders in the academy.”

Recommended by the faculty’s Committee on Personnel and approved by the �ֲ���ý College Board of Trustees, the promotions have been awarded to faculty members in the fields of dance, economics, English, environmental studies, politics, psychology, and religious studies.

Promotions to associate professor with tenure

+Eden Osucha

Eden Osucha has been promoted to associate professor of English at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Rachel Boggia

Rachel Boggia has been promoted to associate professor of dance at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Senem Aslan

Senem Aslan has been promoted to associate professor of politics at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Clarisa Pérez-Armendáríz

Clarisa Pérez-Armendáríz has been promoted to associate professor of politics at �ֲ���ý. (Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

+Paul Shea

Paul Shea has been promoted to associate professor of economics at �ֲ���ý. (Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

+Nate Tefft

Nathan Tefft has been promoted to associate professor of economics at �ֲ���ý. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Promotions to full professor

+Cynthia Baker

Cynthia Baker has been promoted to professor of religious studies at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Holly Ewing

Holly Ewing (center) has been promoted to professor of environmental studies at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Sylvia Federico

Sylvia Federico has been promoted to professor of English at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Nancy Koven

Nancy Koven (center) has been promoted to professor of psychology at �ֲ���ý. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Have You Been Served?

By Doug Hubley
Illustration by James Steinberg

As a focus group of Lewiston residents discussed obstacles to laying hands on nutritious food, a young woman had an epiphany: “You can put food in the freezer and it will keep longer?”

“It was like a light bulb went on in her head,” says Julia Lee ’10, a sociology major who attended the meeting two years ago. “And I was just, like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ I couldn’t imagine someone not knowing that.”

Illustration by James Steinberg.

But if someone can reach adulthood in America without learning that freezers preserve food, there may be more to the problem than one person’s ignorance of kitchen basics. Which was exactly why Lee was present.

For her senior thesis, Lee was observing focus groups convened to explore the reasons that many local households — low-income, single-parent, homeless, refugee, elderly, infirm — don’t have enough healthful food.

Lee recorded the barriers the groups discussed and correlated these findings with literature on so-called food deserts: neighborhoods where healthful food cannot be bought.

And that new work was an important contribution to Good Food for Lewiston-Auburn, an initiative that’s improving access to wholesome food in a region encompassing some of Maine’s poorest neighborhoods.

A broadly collaborative program launched in 2009, GFLA’s research has involved more than 130 students and their professors from �ֲ���ý and the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn College. At �ֲ���ý, students and faculty in sociology, psychology and environmental studies joined the initiative in various ways, with the Harward Center for Community Partnerships helping to harmonize the college’s academic goals with GFLA’s research needs.

�ֲ���ý students gathered, analyzed and helped present the information that got the initiative under way. They surveyed residents and emergency food providers, analyzed news coverage of food insecurity and used GIS technology to plot which food sources are serving which neighborhoods. They even rode city buses to understand how, exactly, the grocery shopping gets done when you don’t own a car.

GFLA, which has U.S. Department of Agriculture support, is the brainchild of Kirsten Walter ’00, director of the Nutrition Center of Maine, part of Lewiston-based St. Mary’s Health System. As a student, Walter founded Lots to Gardens, an urban agriculture and youth leadership program that’s now part of the center. As a teenager, Walter found her interest in environmental sustainability crystallizing around environmental justice.

“I realized that you can’t talk just about the environment without talking about people,” she says. More to the point, working on a project in her native California that helps migrant farm workers start their own organic farms, she realized that all manner of environmental and social justice issues come together in the realm of food.

Access to good food is simply a human right, Walter says, albeit one enjoyed by far too few. Healthy fruits and vegetables and minimally processed foods constitute an expensive portion of the grocery basket, especially in low-income neighborhoods — if you can find them there at all.

The least-healthy food is the food most available to the people at highest risk for health problems.

In the Lewiston-Auburn area, small independent grocery stores are still neighborhood fixtures, but their offerings of wholesome foods tend to be small and costly. Moreover, GFLA research indicates that in Lewiston, fewer than 5 percent of single-parent households live less than half a kilometer from the two local chain groceries, Shaw’s and Hannaford, where they might access healthy foods at more affordable prices.

“But 78 percent live within a half-mile of at least three fast-food restaurants,” Walter says.

So the menu that’s most accessible to disadvantaged people is likely to be dominated by fatty, salty, sweetened and chemical-laden fare. In other words, the least-healthy food is the food most available to people who are already more likely to suffer ill health and die young.

“That just seems like an absolute injustice,” Walter says.

Psychology professor Kathryn Low estimates that individual poverty rates in downtown Lewiston have spiked as high as 46 percent in recent years. Lewiston has the highest child poverty rate in the state, with 41.7 percent of children meeting federal guidelines, says Low, whose public-health students have helped GFLA with the public presentation of its goals and findings.

Downtown, the Trinity Jubilee Center is a social-services provider where students both volunteer and undertake community-based learning projects. Families making use of the food pantry have increased from 30 or so in the late 1990s to 200 or 250 now, says development director Erin Reed ’08.

Other obstacles, too, are symbiotically entangled with poverty and food insecurity, from language barriers among refugees to cultural factors, such as ignorance about nutrition and food prep- aration (and preservation, for instance, by freezing), that become entrenched in families over the generations.

Untangling the strands of this knot of cause-and-effect has been the goal of much of the student research. For instance, students in sociology professor Emily Kane’s “Research Methods for Sociology” course have:

• observed and transcribed GFLA interviews with residents at risk for food insecurity and residents who are well-off;
• surveyed Sun Journal articles to assess perceptions of food insecurity;
• interviewed officials in government, healthcare and charitable organizations;
• and performed systematic field observations at convenience stores and emergency food providers, in GFLA focus groups and on the region’s purple CityLink buses.

“The point of the course is to teach them to collect and analyze data using methods that sociologists use,” says Kane. “This is an opportunity to focus on the methods, but along the way, give them some real substance, as well.”

This is the important meta-lesson, says Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Holly Ewing. Students broaden their communication skills — and perhaps more important, their perspective — because they must present their findings in ways that resonate with a non-academic readership.
“Understanding that they’re trying to do work for two different audiences is really new for them,” Ewing says, “and good for them.”

“It’s so important for the development of a whole person to have academic work that addresses real-life, place-based issues.”

Rebecca Dugan ’12, who held internships with GFLA in summer 2011 and took part in a related environmental studies course, puts it this way: “When you can talk to the people that you’re working with and better appreciate what they go through on a daily basis, it really complements the academic research.”

The real-world experience also piques career interests and introduces students to the rewards and challenges of being a civic-minded and engaged adult.

As Walter says, “It’s so important for the development of a whole person to have academic work that addresses real-life, place-based issues.”

Armed with reams of information and analysis, Good Food for Lewiston-Auburn is poised for its next big push: involving as many stakeholders as possible in creating a comprehensive action plan.

But even as the plan is a-brewing, concrete steps are being taken. For instance, a program introduced last year provides clients at the B Street Health Center, a community clinic in Lewiston, with “veggie prescriptions” worth $1 per family member per day toward fresh produce at downtown farmers markets.

Funded by Maine Health Access Foundation and the Connecticut-based Wholesome Wave Foundation, the “prescriptions” come with routine health checkups that enable GFLA to correlate increased produce consumption with improved client health. These results will be aggregated to data from similar programs elsewhere in the country.

Indeed, gone are the days when noble intentions were their own reward. “A goal is to be able to have more strategic and responsive activities — and to implement not just what we think might be good ideas,” Walter says with a laugh, “but also be more data-driven and tied to innovative, larger initiatives.”

For many students, this potential for making a lasting, measurable change is one of the best things about working with GFLA. “It raises the bar for them,” says sociologist Kane.

“They feel motivated by the thought that they’re producing something for someone other than just their professor, and for something other than just a grade.”