Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Geneva Laurita is the recipient of a major National Science Foundation grant of $581,984.

The NSF CAREER award, considered to be one of the foundation’s most prestigious awards for faculty members who are just beginning their teaching and research careers, is based on both her scientific research in solid state materials and how she brings undergraduates into that vital area of scientific exploration.

“Receiving a National Science Foundation CAREER award is a milestone accomplishment, and provides clear evidence of the high quality work that Geneva Laurita is conducting,” says Dean of the Faculty and Vice President for Academic Affairs Malcolm Hill. “�ֲ���ý defines excellent teachers as individuals who are active scholars and experts in their fields, and this award is the clearest indication of both.”

For Laurita, who joined the �ֲ���ý faculty in 2017, the award means being able to do more of what she came to �ֲ���ý to do: introduce students to concepts and research work that is typically available only to graduate students and rarely seen at primarily undergraduate institutions like �ֲ���ý.

“I’ve always been passionate about undergraduate research, and this is a place where the undergraduates are doing research with faculty members, and it is high impact, high level research at the top of the field, working on the questions that everybody is asking. And �ֲ���ý has the resources to get to do that kind of research.”

Laurita, who received the grant news just a few weeks ago, is still taking it all in. “I still am like, ‘What? Did this really happen?’ Because this is amazing.” She said this was the last year she was eligible to apply for this grant, which is intended to vault scientists into the next phase of their careers, and the only time she applied for it. “I had never applied for it because honestly, I didn’t quite have the idea yet.” 

The idea came to her as a result of wanting to connect �ֲ���ý undergraduates with graduate students elsewhere, and also has a direct connection to an earlier, 2019 NSF grant of $193,405 Laurita received to study a group of materials called pyrochlore oxides. 

Described by Laurita to the NSF as a “poorly understood family of materials,” pyrochlore oxides have potential for many technology-driven applications, particularly replacing lead-based materials that are highly useful — and used — in technology but full of challenges because of their inherent toxicities. Pyrochlores present an opportunity for less-toxic, potentially lead-free materials.

How do you pronounce “pyrochlores”?

Listen to Geneva Laurita sound it out: “PIE-ro-klors.”

“The science component is actually based off of some things that we discovered in my current NSF grant,” Laurita says. “The thing about the CAREER grant is that it needs to have a really strong science idea as well as a really strong educational component. And it took awhile for those two things to come together for me.” 

This is only the second time a �ֲ���ý faculty member has received an NSF CAREER award. In 2016 neuroscience faculty Jason Castro received a Faculty CAREER award for his work in studying brain structure.  

The language for Laurita’s grant specifically refers to the “national need to educate and train future generations of material scientists,” and cites Laurita’s intention to promote “participation of individuals from historically excluded and underrepresented groups.” Additionally, the program will play “a role in long-term and broader goals to diversify academic faculty, particularly at PUIs,” which stands for primarily undergraduate institutions.

The award is supported by the Solid State and Materials Chemistry program in the NSF’s Division of Materials Research, which recognizes how Laurita’s group at �ֲ���ý has already been working with pyrochlores, a name that refers to the particular arrangement of atoms in this family of materials, which are formed in a crystal structure.

“We’re going to be looking at materials that we can use for energy and electronic applications,” says Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Geneva Laurita.

Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College

“Pyrochlores can be metals, they can be insulators, they can have magnetic properties or non-magnetic properties, it all depends on what atom you put in,” Laurita explains. They’re so adaptable that they provide what she describes as a “nice playground for chemistry.”

But this playground has serious potential for use within energy and electronic applications. “We want to think about how we can manipulate these materials, using external things such as electric and magnetic fields,” Laurita says. 

That includes using advanced neutron and synchrotron X-ray scattering techniques to learn more about the structure of these materials. Laurita’s research emphasizes scattering experiments performed at national laboratories, which she was first introduced to herself in college, inspiring the career she has today.  

When Laurita was an undergraduate student at the University of Northern Colorado, she did some casting around for a direction. She considered being a music major at one point and going into pharmacy at another. Then, during her junior year, she took inorganic chemistry with a professor named Robin Macaluso, who introduced her to the concept of superconductors. “Things really clicked into place,” Laurita remembers. “I was like, this is amazing.” She ended up taking a fifth year, and focusing on research with Macaluso.

In that fifth year, Macaluso sent Laurita to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in Gaithersburg, Md., to do her first neutron-scattering experiment. “I point to that particular trip as why I am doing everything that I’m doing today. It really sparked my love for neutron science, and also this passion that I really do feel for undergraduate exposure to the national labs, because that’s when I got it.”

She flew to D.C. by herself, then took a train to Gaithersburg, arriving alone at NIST, where she was met by someone Macaluso had worked with as a post-doc. She was awestruck by the facility, by the giant instrumentation, and  the sense of proximity to real, high-stakes science. She had to tag in and out of experimental areas before exposing the sample to neutrons and be trained on every kind of safety protocol. 

“You get to talk to the scientists as well. And I think that the scientists are really excited to work with undergraduates because I think that they don’t get to work with that population very often.”

Recipient of a major NSF award recognizing her early-career accomplishments, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Geneva Laurita explains what drew her to �ֲ���ý: “a place where the undergraduates are doing research and it is a high impact, high level research.”

Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College

Today one of her favorite things is bringing �ֲ���ý students into these kinds of national research facilities, such as the famed Oak Ridge National Laboratory and seeing their own reactions, those gasps of, “Oh my gosh, this is so cool.” 

“One of my pillars is giving undergraduates ,” she says, referring to the powerhouse network of 17 research laboratories under the Department of Energy. “A lot of times people don’t understand that they even exist until they’re halfway through their graduate career. They think it’s just done in institutions like universities or colleges. This grant supports travel for undergraduate students to these National Labs where we can do some of these really cool experiments,” she says.

“I do feel that sometimes, people don’t expect as high level research from undergraduates. They think you have to water down the projects, or you can’t work on such high level projects.”

Laurita was drawn to work at �ֲ���ý precisely because it seemed to her that �ֲ���ý faculty was engaged in “really impactful research with undergraduates.” Being able to present her data to colleagues outside of �ֲ���ý, to share findings and then drop the origin story of that data into the narrative is another of her favorite things: “To be like, ‘By the way, this is all done by undergraduates.’ I just love that feeling.” 

Geneva Laurita explains why, in tackling big problems, including renewable energy, “we really need to bring everybody to the table.”

Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College

As is often the case at �ֲ���ý, undergraduates who do research in Laurita’s lab are now showing up as her co-authors in academic journals. 

Former lab researcher Jake O’Hara ’21, a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan, is a co-author on the article . And Owen Bailey ’22, also in graduate school, and Maddie Murphy ’20, a high school teacher, are co-authors of an article .

Courtesy of this five-year NSF CAREER grant, not only will more �ֲ���ý undergraduates get this kind of experience, they’ll have a unique opportunity to work with graduate students, something Laurita herself looks forward to.

“I do spend a lot of time talking to graduate students on Zoom about what it’s like to work at a place like �ֲ���ý. But you don’t really know what it’s like to be a faculty member, especially at a place like �ֲ���ý where we’re doing really impactful undergraduate research as well as teaching.”

The NSF grant will change that, by providing funding to recruit and hire two graduate student interns to come to �ֲ���ý during Short Term and teach a class with Laurita and then continue through the summer research with four �ֲ���ý students in her lab.

“There’s going to be a lot of learning, on all different levels, which should be really exciting.” 

Geneva Laurita

The idea is for the graduate students to “actually see what it’s like to work at a place like �ֲ���ý.” And her �ֲ���ý students will have the experience of “getting to interface with graduate students as well.” The grand plan is for Laurita to teach this Short Term course four times, collaborating and coteaching with graduate students from underrepresented groups and schools.

“It’s going to be an opportunity for everybody to get to interact with a population at different stages that we don’t usually get to interact with. There’s going to be a lot of learning, on all different levels, which should be really exciting.” 

She’s gearing up to find her first set of interns, to bring in for Short Term 2024. “I’m going to try and activate my whole network.”

“The award will allow Geneva more opportunities to provide transformative educational experiences for our students with access to cutting-edge research and national laboratory experiences,” says Malcolm Hill.

“This is one of the reasons that �ֲ���ý is such a great place for our students to train to become scientists within a liberal arts context. I look forward to watching this remarkable grant proposal come to fruition over the next several years.”

The NSF grant runs through 2028. 

�ֲ���ý College has received a National Science Foundation grant of $3.97 million to create a groundbreaking Visual Experience Database to support research in fields that rely on the analysis and recognition of images, such as neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene is the principal investigator for the project to create a Visual Experience Database (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

The largest-ever federal grant awarded to �ֲ���ý, the four-year award will fuel the creation of a vast gallery of videos that depict what, and how, people see as they go about daily activities. �ֲ���ý developed the grant proposal collaboratively with researchers at North Dakota State University and the University of Nevada, Reno.

Michelle R. Greene, an assistant professor of neuroscience at �ֲ���ý who studies how the brain makes sense of what we see, is the principal investigator for the project.

“I’m delighted and overwhelmed,” said Greene, “and intensely excited. I have a terrific team of co-principal investigators, so fostering and furthering those connections will make these next four years really fun.”

The co-principal investigators are Benjamin Balas, a neuroscientist and associate professor of psychology at North Dakota, and Paul MacNeilage and Mark Lescroart, neuroscientists and assistant professors of psychology at Nevada.

“We are honored to be the lead partner in this multi-state collaboration,” said �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer. “This grant is important for Maine, Nevada, and North Dakota, and it also has the potential for significant impact on the future of vision research, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.”

“It’s meaningful that the National Science Foundation has chosen a national liberal arts college like �ֲ���ý to take the lead on this project.”

“This grant brings deserved recognition to Professor Greene, an exemplary member of the �ֲ���ý faculty who has contributed significantly to the body of published work on visual perception and who engages students extensively in her research,” said Malcolm Hill, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

“It’s meaningful that the National Science Foundation has chosen a national liberal arts college like �ֲ���ý to take the lead on this project,” Hill added. “Indeed, �ֲ���ý is well-positioned to collaborate on the work to create a Visual Experience Database to support researchers around the world as they grapple with, and bring greater understanding to, the social and ethical consequences of computer vision and artificial intelligence.”

Student researcher Hanna De Bruyn ’18 (left) works with Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Michelle Greene to prepare an EEG test in March 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Maine’s colleges and universities are consistently at the forefront of groundbreaking research that improves people’s lives and enhances our understanding of the world around us,” said U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King of Maine in a joint statement.

They added, “Through this funding, �ֲ���ý College will partner with two other universities to build a database to study human behavior and development through first-person experiences. We applaud the NSF’s investment in �ֲ���ý’ project, which will help advance the field of vision science.”

The VED will comprise more than 240 hours of video created specifically for this project and findable through a publicly accessible database. Wearing cameras that simulate human vision, as well as devices to track head and eye movements, observers will undertake routine activities such as walking, shopping, or touring a museum.

Because they were not intended for research purposes, existing still and moving images are compromised by the many biases their creators bring to them.

By enlisting diverse observers local to each of the three participating institutions, the project will record how changes in environment, age, and task affect the act of looking.

Much of the data used in such fields as visual neuroscience, psychology, computer vision (a branch of artificial intelligence), and computational sociology consists of vast collections of still and moving images. These are curated largely from public online resources such as YouTube and Google — but because they were not intended for research purposes, they are compromised by the many biases their creators bring to them.

Artificial intelligence systems have biases because they’re not being fed enough solid data, says Michelle Greene.

The reasons someone may choose a particular photo subject, frame an image a certain way, or upload one image and not another are all biases that diminish the material’s value as data. Such “biases exist at every level,” said Greene, “and all of the databases that we’ve been using for years are subject to them.” The VED assets, in contrast, will be created specifically to represent ordinary scenes and will be subject to experimental controls.

Undergraduates at all three schools, including 28 at �ֲ���ý over the four-year grant period, will take part in the research. Among other roles, students will serve as videographers, creating assets for the VED, Greene said.

“I can imagine that next summer there’s going to be a small army of folks going out into various parts of the world, seeing what the world looks like when we’re hiking, when we’re at the beach, when we’re grocery shopping, and all kinds of more mundane things.”

The project to create a Visual Experience Database will benefit �ֲ���ý students “at all levels,” says Michelle Greene, an assistant professor of neuroscience at �ֲ���ý who is the principal investigator for the project.

Students will benefit from the many research questions that the VED will engender. “A database like this essentially means there will be thesis projects for decades to come,” said Greene. “There are many basic questions that we haven’t been able to answer because we haven’t had the data.”

She said that �ֲ���ý’ being a liberal arts college will enrich the VED project in distinctive ways. “One is our focus on equity and inclusion. We’re trying to get a diverse set of visual experiences to catalog in the VED, and I think that holding that in the forefront is something a liberal arts college can do that might be a somewhat harder sell” at other types of institutions.

Innovation in artificial intelligence, in particular, stands to benefit from the VED.

�ֲ���ý’ intimate scale, coupled with the liberal arts approach to education, “allows us to engage in some multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary thinking,” she added. “And one of the things I particularly love about �ֲ���ý is that I engage in conversations with faculty members across the college — if I were at a larger institution, we probably wouldn’t touch paths and learn from one another.

“So I’m particularly excited about the ways in which this type of data can be used across disciplines.”

Innovation in artificial intelligence, in particular, stands to benefit from the VED. Model systems in computer vision “are very data-hungry,” said Greene. “They tend to require tens of millions of images, and have been downloading these tens of millions of images from the internet. We will now give them tens of millions of images that are more representative of daily-life experience.”

The VED will be a public resource. “This is taxpayer-supported,” Greene said, which means that it should be publicly accessible, both for the sake of transparency and simply because it should be a public good.

She added, “We see throughout digital life that when a resource is available, people appropriate it in really interesting ways. I’m hoping that there may be artists, digital historians, computational sociologists that might want to use this database. And, as such, it should be available to everybody.”

Michelle Greene explains why it is important and valuable for society that the Visual Experience Database will be publicly available.

The VED grant was made through the NSF’s Research Infrastructure Improvement Program, part of the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research. These initiatives are designed to build research capabilities in underserved regions of the country and thereby make those regions more competitive in seeking other federal R&D funding.

The project team will release a suite of software tools for using the database. The team will also establish a program of “Big Data Skills Summer Workshops” to give students basic programming and computational literacy skills that will not only support their contributions to this project, but help prepare them for a variety of STEM occupations.

“If we can take the next generation of students and get them the best skills, the kind of experience I wish I’d had as a student early on, that is a key part of the workforce development component of the grant,” Greene said.

In 1960, a doctoral student from California conducted an archaeological dig at a coastal site in southwest Alaska.

It was old-school archaeology, archaeologist as auteur. He excavated, took away more than 4,000 items including three sets of human remains, and in his dissertation characterized the site as a midden — essentially a dump — although his own field drawings suggested that a good-sized settlement had previously existed there.

More than 50 years later, in 2011, another doctoral student — an Alaska Native and future �ֲ���ý professor — brought a very different style of archaeology to the site, known as Temyiq Tuyuryaq in the native Yup’ik language and Old Togiak in English.

Archaeologist and Lecturer in Anthropology Kristen Barnett. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

Kristen Barnett, in contrast to the 1960 visitor, returned to her native state to conduct what’s called indigenous archaeology: research that’s collaborative, driven by the needs and interests of the indigenous host community, and that addresses inequities in archaeological practice.

The community in this case, located across Bristol Bay from the archaeological site, is the Yup’ik village of Tuyuryaq, or Togiak. A lecturer in anthropology at �ֲ���ý since 2016, Barnett has twice brought students to Togiak for fieldwork.

And now Barnett’s achievements in indigenous archaeology have been recognized with major grant funding from the National Science Foundation: She recently received a three-year grant from the NSF worth $706,000 in cash and equipment to continue that work.

The grant is the foundation’s first, Barnett notes, to support what’s known as a research sovereignty model, in which “indigenous peoples engage with scientific study as active participants and sovereign decision-makers, rather than passive objects of study.”

During an 2017 anthropology Short Term course taught by Kristen Barnett, students head to work at an archaeological site in Old Togiak, Alaska. (Kristen Barnett/�ֲ���ý College)

Her Togiak project is “deeply ingrained in the community in every sense,” she says. Crucially, the research is guided by the residents’ interest in the ways their ancestors lived — including their adaptations to climate and ecology, responses to colonial influence, and, as Barnett says, how the ancestral culture is continued in “the traditions and practices of their contemporary descendants.”

‘A cousin village to my own’

Starting in the late 19th century, inhabitants of Old Togiak began crossing the bay and resettling at the site of today’s village.

A grassy shore with striking views of mountains across the water, Togiak sits at the top of Bristol Bay. There’s plenty of wind and precipitation, and temperature extremes range from the high 60s in July to the low teens in the winter. (Barnett’s pre-trip instructions to her Short Term students include a warning to leave the cotton socks at home — this is a place for wool.)

“Everybody knew that if an archeologist was there, it meant that things had been taken.”

The village is accessible only by water or air. Getting there from �ֲ���ý takes a series of flights, the last requiring a charter plane that holds six, necessitating multiple trips to get the full complement of a Short Term class there from the nearest large settlement, Dillingham (pop. approximately 2,400).

Salmon and herring are abundant, supporting both traditional subsistence lifestyles and a Togiak Fisheries cannery at the archaeological site — “built on top of the old village,” says Barnett.

About 85 percent of the residents are Alaska Native, as is Barnett. A member of Alaska’s Unangax (or Aleut) people, inhabitants of the Aleutian Islands and coastal mainland shared with Yup’ik territory, she describes Togiak as “kind of a cousin village to my own.”

During the 2018 experiential learning week at the Togiak School, local and �ֲ���ý students learn to map with GPS. (Kristen Barnett/�ֲ���ý College)

Barnett was a doctoral student at the University of Montana when she first conducted research there, in 2011. “I wanted to go home and work in my own community,” she says. Given the 1960 research effort, “this seemed like an obvious place to start.”

The 2011 visit led her to recover some of the items removed from the old village in 1960, including the human remains. Not many Togiak residents knew about the old dig 50 years after the fact — but nevertheless, Barnett says, “everybody knew that if an archeologist was there, it meant that things had been taken.”

She says, “We spent a year and a half tracking things down. And after the repatriation of those, the Traditional Council of Togiak decided that they wanted to explore more archeology there as a way of reclaiming their former village as a village rather than a dump.”

With NSF support, Barnett returned in 2015 to conduct preliminary geophysical work — soil core sampling, and subsurface and surface mapping. She joined �ֲ���ý in 2016, and brought 12 students to Togiak for Short Term in 2017.

A fox skull in the grid in a 2018 point-plotting exercise. (Kristen Barnett/�ֲ���ý College)

That visit and a second one, last spring, each began with a week in Togiak, coinciding with a scheduled experiential learning week at the K-12 Togiak School. The �ֲ���ý team resided at the school, gave local students a hands-on introduction to archaeology — and reversed roles with the locals when they could.

“We tried to incorporate activities where they were also teaching us,” such as village tours in which the Togiak students kids pointed out places meaningful to them, says one of the seven students who went in 2018, Carter Ros ’21 of Hailey, Idaho. (Six were taking the course and another student went along as a research assistant.) The �ֲ���ý group also ate seal and beaver caught and cooked by the Togiak students.

Fieldwork at Old Togiak followed the village stays. In addition to soil sampling, that work included site mapping that used GPS to assign coordinates to such landmarks as former houses. (The traditional houses consisted of circular pits roofed over with logs and sod, and decades after abandonment, what’s left are depressions often concealed by tall coarse grass.) This past year, the group laid a grid for excavation and even started to dig, but was thwarted by rain.

“We tried to incorporate activities where they were also teaching us.”

As a matter of fact, though, Barnett hadn’t originally intended to excavate at all. But at the end of the 2017 visit, the village’s Traditional Council invited her to come back and excavate — an invitation that resulted in the current NSF grant.

The 2017 visit was pivotal in another way: Three local students took part in the Old Togiak fieldwork and, Barnett says, their contributions “changed everything.” Their knowledge of the site’s stories and history threw into sharp relief the cultural conflict that has shaped so many places like Togiak: the clash between native communities and colonial expansion.

The Togiak students knew which families had owned buildings still standing in the old village. Something that “looked like just a piece of aluminum roofing in tall grass used to be a fish drying rack that belonged to a specific family.”

And, Barnett says, “there were numerous stories about the building of the cannery — skulls and long bones just coming out of disturbed burial sites.” (Two of the three Togiak students are at �ֲ���ý this week, attending A Model for Decolonizing Learning on College Campuses, an international conference organized by Barnett. An additional $50,000 NSF grant is supporting the conference.)

�ֲ���ý and Togiak students learn the basics of excavation together during the 2018 experiential learning week. (Kristen Barnett/�ֲ���ý College)

At the time of the 2001 Census, there were about 24,000 Yup’ik in the U.S., most of them in Alaska. (A different source adds that about 1,700 live in Russia.) Historically, Barnett explains, archaeologists have tended to think of the Yup’ik mostly in terms of who they are and how they live today — in a sense, severing them from their past.

But a site like Old Togiak bolsters the argument for taking the long view. As Barnett points out, radiocarbon dating has produced evidence of human activity taking place there as long as 3,000 years ago.

“Instead of going in with preconditioned ideas, we can actually look at the community in terms of a cultural landscape. We can think about the stories of elders — there are elders in the village who were raised over at the old village in pit houses — and think about the community a little bit differently,” she says.

Until recent years and the advent of indigenous archaeology, says Barnett’s student Carter Ros, “it’s just been archeologists going in, excavating someone else’s culture, and saying, ‘This is what happened and this is what went on here.’

“People like Kristen are starting to change that. It was refreshing to see how archeology could function, and do so much good, within a community.”

After all, Barnett says, “If we’re not integrating with community needs, we should probably rethink what we’re doing.”

The Bristol Bay Air Service plane that brought the �ֲ���ý group on the final leg to Togiak in 2017. (Kristen Barnett/�ֲ���ý College)

Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry Tom Wenzel. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

There’s a time to be passive and a time to be active.

When you’re hoping to learn something, passive is sitting in a classroom and (hopefully) soaking in the lecture.

And there’s active, where you’re taking a hands-on approach to solving problems that have their roots in real-world situations. Sometimes, especially in the sciences, that’s the best way to learn.

Tom Wenzel, Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry at �ֲ���ý, favors that second approach in his teaching. And the National Science Foundation agrees with him: The NSF recently awarded Wenzel and a collaborator at the University of Iowa $900,000 to further a practice called “active learning” at schools across the country.

In a 2013 file image, Tom Wenzel consults with Cira Mollings Puentes ’16 of Kingston, Jamaica (at left), and Mira Carey-Hatch ’14 of Laconia, N.H. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“This is a way to help faculty meaningfully change the way they teach,” Wenzel says. “To move away from lectures to doing in-class group work, and away from ‘recipe-driven’ laboratories to more open-ended experiments. And to move toward enabling students to design experiments, and figure out what the data means and whether it’s supporting their hypothesis.”

Provided through the NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program, the grant supports Wenzel’s longtime leadership in creating an adaptable analytical chemistry curriculum that will enable instructors at all types of colleges and universities to implement active learning.

In this latest phase of the project, teachers of analytical chemistry from different institutions will take part in a series of workshops and follow-up activities designed to instill the methods and goals of active learning in the classroom and lab.

�ֲ���ý will receive some $632,000 over three years. It’s the third and final NSF grant for the project, which the foundation funded in 2008 and again in 2011 to support the development of online curriculum materials.

The balance from the latest award will go to Wenzel’s collaborator, Associate Professor Renee Cole of the University of Iowa, a specialist in chemistry education. Cole will assess how effectively workshop participants assimilated the active-learning approach, and how effective that approach was with teaching their students.

Wenzel is something of a pioneer in active learning, says Professor of Chemistry Paula Schlax, this year’s recipient of �ֲ���ý’ Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

“Tom teaches analytical chemistry using methods that are original, and before his outreach through this curriculum project, quite unusual,” says Schlax.

“The approaches that he uses — active-learning exercises in the classroom, laboratory experiments that are inquiry-based and involve ‘real-world problems’ — are repeatedly reported to be among the best in helping students succeed in science courses and develop a sense of belonging in the community of scientists.”

“Tom teaches using methods that are original, and before his outreach through this curriculum project, quite unusual.”

Wenzel describes this latest phase of the project as a pilot to test the efficacy of multiple active-learning training sessions for chemistry instructors. “For a lot of people, a half-day symposium doesn’t get them to say, ‘I’m going to totally change the way I teach,'” he notes.

Instead, the training will entail successive sessions — national workshops followed by regional events, in turn bolstered by follow-ups such as visits to participants’ home institutions.

“If, three years from now, we can provide data saying that what we’re doing works — people are actually changing the way they teach — that could set the rest of the group up to continue this project,” Wenzel says.

“It could serve as a model for other areas in chemistry, and maybe other STEM fields in general.” He adds that the project is also designed to increase diversity in chemical instruction and, by extension, other realms of math and science.

“We have now run two workshops for faculty at historically black or Hispanic-serving institutions,” Wenzel says. “We had 52 participants, and many of them have great stories about how they’ve incorporated more active learning in their classes and labs. Several have gotten grants funded for curriculum work that came out of our workshops.”

A member of �ֲ���ý’ chemistry faculty since 1981, Wenzel’s research involves sophisticated techniques for identifying enantiomers — molecules that are mirror images of each other but, despite that similarity, can have very different reactive effects.

Earlier this year, Wenzel received a new entry on his long list of professional honors and achievements as the American Chemical Society designated him an ACS Fellow — a designation recognizing contributions to both the society and the field of chemistry as a whole.

The designation came as Wenzel, appointed Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry at �ֲ���ý in 1997, anticipates retirement within a few years.

�ֲ���ý neuroscientist Jason Castro’s early-career award is considered the “NSF’s most prestigious grant for junior faculty scientists,” says Matt Auer, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In 2013, �ֲ���ý neuroscientist Jason Castro was one of a group of researchers whose approach to categorizing odors made international headlines.

Castro’s latest red-letter achievement may not stop presses around the globe, but its impact on �ֲ���ý students will likely last much longer than the typical newshound’s attention span.

A recent $720,000 award from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program will not only support Castro’s research into brain structure but also, in alignment with the college’s new Digital and Computational Studies Program, the creation of new computationally oriented class modules for �ֲ���ý’ introductory neuroscience course.

“The Faculy Early Career award is the NSF’s most prestigious grant for junior faculty scientists,” says Matt Auer, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at �ֲ���ý.

The award, designed to help establish young faculty as leaders in their fields, “increases the probability that the awardees make lasting impacts through their scholarship,” says Auer.

“This makes a pretty powerful case that �ֲ���ý is a destination for students serious about STEM.”

Typically awarded to faculty at larger research universities, Castro’s early career NSF grant is the first for a �ֲ���ý faculty member. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Castro’s is the first Faculty Early Career (aka CAREER) grant awarded to a �ֲ���ý faculty member. Typically the NSF directs the grants to faculty at large research universities, as opposed to small liberal arts schools like �ֲ���ý.

“In the comparatively uncommon instances when scientists at liberal arts colleges receive CAREER awards, the funding enables them to pursue ambitious projects that couldn’t be contemplated without substantial external support,” Auer says.

In addition, he adds, considering that �ֲ���ý STEM faculty are “remarkable instructors who embed their own research directly into student coursework and lab work, this makes a pretty powerful case that �ֲ���ý is a destination for students serious about STEM.”

Because applications for CAREER grants are evaluated by peers in an applicant’s particular field of study, says Castro, the award is “a vote of confidence from colleagues in your research area, and I’m very honored that my work was recognized in this way.”

Castro’s current research still involves the sense of smell, but more tangentially. He and his students are developing computational techniques for researching the organization of the olfactory bulb of the brain, a region dedicated to processing smells.

Advancing Castro’s efforts toward several goals, the CAREER grant will help support:

• student thesis research related to Castro’s project;
• the hiring of research personnel;
• a redesign of �ֲ���ý’ introductory neuroscience curriculum to be more practice-based and centered on the use of digital resources — an endeavor that could result in a textbook or lab workbook by Castro;
• and possibly the establishment of a summer brain-research program for high school students in the Lewiston-Auburn region.

“This award testifies to Jason’s particular, remarkable strengths as a neuroscientist who is pursuing vital research questions,” says Dean of the Faculty Auer. “But it also speaks, more broadly, to �ֲ���ý as an institution that attracts and supports the careers of scientists at Jason’s high level.”

Professors Michael Retelle, at left, and William Ambrose on the island of Ingøya, Norway. (© Randall Hyman)

An oceanographer and a geologist at �ֲ���ý have received a National Science Foundation grant to create a 1,000-year record of changing sea and climate conditions in the Norwegian Arctic.

Professor of Biology William Ambrose and Professor of Geology Michael Retelle received $337,228 from the NSF for their three-year research project, which will analyze the natural record archived in clamshells over the course of a millennium to plot changes in sea temperature where the Barents and Norwegian seas meet.

The researchers hope that this history of water conditions, which will span two historic periods of significant, naturally occurring temperature shifts in addition to contemporary climate change, can provide insight into major ocean currents and other phenomena related to climate.

“We’re interested in what triggers rapid climate change, and changes in the ocean conditions and currents may be a key,” says Ambrose.

Arctica islandica, older and younger. (Dan Frost ’05)

Ambrose and Retelle are focusing on the ocean quahog or Iceland quahog, aka Arctica islandica, a mollusk found across the North Atlantic. This species, Ambrose explains, “is the longest-lived multicellular animal” — one specimen caught off Iceland was more than 500 years old — “and so we get a very long history of growth and environmental conditions embedded in the shell.”

Clams and other bivalves produce annual lines in their shells, similar to the rings in tree trunks, that can be used to measure growth and that closely reflect conditions, notably temperature, that prevailed during the course of a year. (Perhaps counterintuitively, warmer water results in slower growth and narrower growth lines in the quahogs Ambrose and Retelle are studying.)

In combination with other techniques such as carbon-dating, growth-line patterns from living and dead clams can be matched up and strung together into long chronologies. An Arctica chronology in Iceland dating back 1,357 years was created by a team including University of Iowa paleoclimatologist Alan Wanamaker, who is partnering with Ambrose and Retelle on the Norway project. Wanamaker has done similar work with clams from the Gulf of Maine.

Retelle and Ambrose are doing their field research on Ingøya and Rolvsøya, islands in Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost county. Not only are Arctica islandica abundant and easily harvested there, but also favorable to the research is the islands’ location relative to the Norwegian and Barents seas and to major currents including the Gulf Stream.

The shell of an ocean quahog in cross-section, showing growth lines. (William Locke/�ֲ���ý College)

The islands’ geology, too, favors this research. Ingøya and Rolvsøya were once covered with glaciers, Retelle explains, and at its greatest extent during the last glaciation, the weight of the ice depressed the earth’s crust below sea level. As the glaciers melted and retreated, the land surface rebounded, leaving a succession of former beaches that are progressively older with increasing elevation.

“We have this staircase of beaches that go down to the present sea level,” Retelle says. “We think that they might go back 6,000 years or more. We’re able to trace beaches from higher elevations, like 20 meters above sea level, down to modern sea level.

“And the beaches contain a really nice assortment of these clamshells.”

Ambrose and Retelle’s 1,000-year chronology will cover the Medieval Climate Optimum, a warm period that lasted from about 950 to 1250, and the Little Ice Age, which ran from 1550 to 1850.

These old beaches rebounded above sea level as melting glaciers retreated and released them from heavy ice. (Michael Retelle/�ֲ���ý College)

A fair amount is known about the climate during these periods from other sources and other regions, Retelle explains. But these clamshell records are valuable because they represent known climate events year by year. “If we can see those events in the annual record in the clams, then we can actually pin down the timing — and maybe causes — of climate change in the last millennium.”

And Arctica islandica‘s broad geographical range provides the potential for a portfolio of such chronologies that would clarify regional variation in the impacts of climatic phenomena. Wanamaker, says Retelle, “has worked with the same species everywhere from the Gulf of Maine up to Finnmark.”

The Ambrose-Retelle research team for this project consists of 10 scientists from the U.S., Norway and the Netherlands. �ֲ���ý students will take part in the research starting next year, the second year of the three-year effort.

The project will incorporate public educational programming in Iowa and in Maine — thanks in part to the efforts of �ֲ���ý graduate Dan Frost, a math teacher at Thornton Academy.

Dan Frost ’05, left, and �ֲ���ý geologist Mike Retelle off the coast of Norway. (Julie Retelle/�ֲ���ý College)

A member of the �ֲ���ý class of 2005 who studied with Retelle, Farmington native Frost served as teacher-in-residence with the research team during its first session of field work last summer. “He was involved in every aspect” of the research, Retelle says. Frost will use material from the field in both his classes and in public lectures.

Ambrose is the principal investigator and Retelle is the co-principal investigator for the project, titled “Collaborative research: Exploring the role of oceanic and atmospheric forcing on Arctic marine climate from newly developed annual shell based records in coastal Norway.”

“Many lakes in Maine are clear and have relatively small amounts of nutrients coming in from outside,” says Holly Ewing, assistant professor of environmental studies at �ֲ���ý College.

“Those of us who like to live on clear lakes, take drinking water from them and use them for recreation want to see them remain clear,” Ewing says. But a process called lake eutrophication is spoiling clearwater lakes in Maine and elsewhere as higher levels of nutrients encourage blooms of algae and bacteria, many of which form scums or mats on lakes.

When these organisms die and decompose, their decomposition can use up the oxygen in the water — bad news for fish and other organisms that need oxygen.

Now, thanks to National Science Foundation funding awarded this fall, Ewing and a team of collaborators are investigating lake eutrophication and especially the role of a particular cyanobacterium. In September, the NSF awarded Ewing $367,046 over three years to research Gloeotrichia echinulata, nicknamed Gloeo. This cyanobacterium, Ewing and her collaborators hypothesize, could help make nutrients more available for other undesirable organisms in eutrophying lakes.

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The research involves observational and experimental work at lakes in Maine and New Hampshire, notably the latter’s Lake Sunapee. Ewing is collaborating with ecologists Kathryn Cottingham of Dartmouth College and Kathleen Weathers of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y. Each institution has a separate but linked grant, with the three totaling nearly $1 million.

“One of the exciting things about this project is its collaborative nature,” Ewing says. “It brings together undergraduate students from �ֲ���ý and Dartmouth, graduate students from Dartmouth and Cornell, established researchers from �ֲ���ý, Dartmouth and the Cary Institute, and managers from the Lake Sunapee Protective Association.”

“Students are involved as research assistants during the school year and in the summer, and several are completing theses on projects related to our big study.”

Known for its large size and spherical structure, Gloeo is a nuisance cyanobacterium commonly found in lakes where high levels of nutrients occur naturally. Yet during the past 30 years, it has bloomed in formerly pristine bodies of water and in some of these, it appears that Gloeo may have become more common.

Human activity, such as deforestation, agriculture and residential development in the watershed and particularly along lake shores, is a prime cause of elevated nutrient levels in water. The researchers want to know if the cyanobacterium’s ability to free up nutrients from its environment — nitrogen from the atmosphere and phosphorous from lake-bottom sediment — also plays a significant role in the early phases of lake eutrophication.

Gloeo blooms have been reported in at least 20 low-nutrient lakes across northern New England during the past decade. Most of these lakes are important for recreation, and at least two are major sources of drinking water.

Funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the NSF grant will fund a host of research operations. “We’ll be making field measurements, collecting samples to analyze for their chemical and biological constituents, completing experiments, collecting sediment cores to look at changes over time and modeling the dynamics of these systems,” Ewing says.

Thomas Wenzel, Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry at �ֲ���ý, has received a grant worth nearly $100,000 to support a curriculum development project in analytical chemistry.

The awarded Wenzel a $99,278 “Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement” grant for a project titled “Collaborative Research: Development of Contextual E-Learning Modules for Analytical Chemistry.”

Working with professor of the University of California, Riverside, Wenzel is developing an entire online undergraduate curriculum in analytical chemistry that will be disseminated via the .

The Analytical Sciences Digital Library is a NSF-funded digital resource that collects and publishes discovery materials pertinent to curricular innovations and technical resources in the analytical sciences. Wenzel has been involved with the ASDL since its inception and is a member of its advisory board. Larive is a managing director of the library.

The key to the curriculum “is the use of collaborative learning in place of a lecture mode of instruction,” Wenzel says, “and problem-based or project-based labs in place of the traditional ‘cookbook labs’ that tend to characterize chemistry courses.”

The collaborative learning model means that topics will be developed through small-group activities in class, with instructors serving as facilitators to help students work through the problems.

The lab component will eschew a traditional approach that favors prescribed, step-by-step confirmation of predetermined outcomes. Instead, the lab work will comprise real chemical analysis problems for which students will have to design and implement their own measurement techniques and methods.

Wenzel, a 1999 recipient of the American Chemical Society’s National Analytical Chemistry Education Award, already employs collaborative learning and project-based labs in his courses.

The NSF grant is a so-called Phase 1 award. If the foundation deems the development and progress of this project successful, Wenzel, Larive and their collaborators may request a Phase 2 award for an additional $500,000 in two years.

That funding will enable them to continue developing topical units included within an analytical chemistry curriculum. “What I will do is expand my materials to fulfill the breadth of topics taught across the spectrum of analytical chemistry courses,” Wenzel explains. He’ll also write instructor manuals for the material.

“The expansion of topics and the manuals will facilitate the adoption of these methods and materials by other instructors throughout the country and the world.”

By Catherine Green ’10

Peter Wong, a professor of mathematics at �ֲ���ý, has received a grant of nearly $110,000 to support his research in topology.

Topology is the branch of mathematics studying the properties of a space that are preserved under continuous deformations. A common example is a clay “doughnut” that is reshaped into a coffee cup: The hole in the handle, corresponding to that in the doughnut, is preserved during the reshaping.

Wong’s particular research, supported by the $107,226 National Science Foundation grant, is in fixed-point topology — a concept better explained with sheets of paper than coffee mugs and doughnuts.

“If you crumple a piece of paper and then compare it to the space the paper originally occupied, fixed-point theory says that somewhere there’s a point on the crumpled piece of paper that will be in the exact same space it originally occupied,” Wong explains.

Paper is one tool for visualizing the complex mathematics in Wong’s field. Fixed-point theory generated much research in algebraic topology in the first half of the 20th century. Wong is using that classical algebraic topology — but with a twist, so to speak. To address the problem of finding the minimum number of fixed points a given transformation can have, he is comparing a geometric method with an algebraic method.

This interest in the overlap of algebraic and geometric methods is an example of Wong’s eye for connections, and may have given him an edge in winning the highly competitive NSF grant.

“Grants usually focus more on current topics, but because I am connecting algebraic topology with more ‘fashionable’ areas in mathematics, I’m showing that it’s still useful,” he says.

Wong also speculates that the NSF considered his grant proposal favorably because of his success in using topology to involve undergraduates in mathematics. “Some problems in topology don’t require highly technical training, so with some help from me, students have been very involved in research,” he says.

Interest in fixed-point theory extends beyond the offices of a few math experts scattered around the world. While his own work is highly theoretical, Wong explains, in general “this kind of mathematics has real applications for economics” — for example, in determining equilibriums, or states when opposing economic forces are in balance.

Wong earned his undergraduate degree in mathematics and Ph.D. in algebraic topology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has taught at �ֲ���ý for 20 years.