Jennifer Guckel Porter ’88

Jennifer Porter ’88 of the Boda Group.

“Building candor and feedback into any [workplace] culture is challenging,” in Harvard Business Review, and it can be particularly difficult when a company’s culture is “nice, respectful, cordial, warm, relationship-focused, and calm.”

Porter, who is , a leadership and team development firm, offers seven tips for leaders who want to instill a culture that’s a bit more feedback- and candor-driven.

The goal must always be to help.

It’s important for leaders to know that giving feedback “is not about venting or getting something off our chest,” she writes.

Instead, the goal must always be to help, whether that’s helping “someone else develop and be more effective” or helping along a “conversation, decision, or group be more productive.” Honest, constructive feedback is “in service of other people…It has nothing to do with us feeling better.”

Julia Sleeper ’08

Julia Sleeper ’08 (right), co-founder and executive director of Tree Street Youth, speaks with Lewiston High student Binto Matan and Gene Geiger, whose family announced a major gift on March 16 to support Tree Street’s expansion. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Co-founded by Julia Sleeper ’08 and Kim Sullivan ’13 in 2011, the former “two-room summer youth program tucked into a building,” in the words of reporter , is close to completing a $1.3 million fundraising campaign to renovate and expand its downtown headquarters at the corner of Howe and Birch streets.

The Sun Journal covered the March 16 announcement that the nonprofit would expand its offerings and facility, which currently occupies a former daycare center and painter’s storage building.

Tree Street Youth now has 12 paid staffers and serves up to 150 children each day, kindergarten to high school, including a college-prep program that achieved a 95 percent college acceptance rate in 2015.

Will Ambrose

An international expert in gathering valuable climate information stored in ancient clam shells, Professor of Biology Will Ambrose has learned yet another secret from his clam connection.

Namely, that around the end of the last Ice Age, a 1,000-year-long methane release occurred from the Arctic Ocean floor near Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the high Arctic.

It’s the first time oceanographers have been able to measure the duration of an ancient methane release, in a story originally published by the Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment, and Climate.

A curious fact about bivalves that live near deep-sea methane seeps: they’re not part of a photosynthetic food chain. Instead, they survive on bacteria that use methane to turn ocean carbon into sugars. These are present-day methane-dependent mussels. (Image courtesy of Deepwater Canyons 2013 Expedition NOAA-OER/BOEM/USGS)

Analyzing shells taken from a sediment core pulled from the ocean floor allows Ambrose and fellow researchers to know “when the clams lived,” around 17,000 years ago.

Then, by looking at depth of clam shells in the core sample, they were able to conclude that “methane had to persistently leak out of its natural reservoir at this particular site for a thousand years,” Ambros said.

Ambrose serving as a National Science Foundation program director, leading the Arctic Observing Network program, through 2017.

Jess Nevins ’88

Jess Nevins ’88 is a reference librarian and faculty member at Lone Star College–Tomball. (Lone Star College photograph)

Jess Nevins ’88 is a librarian at Lone Star College–Tomball “and a man obsessed — with ,” writes Nora Olabi of the Houston Chronicle.

Nevins has spent a decade “scouring every corner of the world for popular literature in all different languages,” Olabi writes, “uncovering Egyptian and Indonesian dime novels, a Burmese equivalent to the popular British detective Sherlock Holmes, and even a Japanese King Kong.”

This spring, Nevins’ research will culminate with the publication of The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes.

Nevins is an expert in Victoriana and pulp fiction — he published the Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana in 2005 — and is well-known for his comic book annotations.

He tells the Chronicle that people think of pop culture as “the purview of Americans.” Hardly; it is “gloriously varied and complex….What we know about in America is really limited compared to what’s out there.”

To the surprise of researchers, the Arctic ecosystem stays busy during the polar night. This shrimp, Lebbeus polaris, is seen on the blade of a kelp species. (Geir Johnsen NTNU/UNIS)

“Sleep…in silent darkness born,” wrote the 16th-century poet Samuel Daniel, using verse to express a fundamental notion about life on this planet: that nighttime is a close cousin of slumber and quietude.

But in this era of climate change, longstanding truths fall by the wayside.

Professor of Biology Will Ambrose contributed a major finding to the Svalbard polar night project.

For example, the researchers who study marine life around Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the high Arctic (79 degrees north latitude), used to suspend their fieldwork each winter when night lasts from October to February.

They believed that darkness put the ecosystem to sleep.

But over the last three winters, a group of about 100 scientists, including �ֲ���ý Professor of Biology Will Ambrose, have proven that assumption wrong.

Their surprise at their discovery, published recently in the journal Current Biology, is right there in the title of their paper: “”

The findings, notes the paper, “unequivocally oppose the classical paradigm of an ecosystem in resting mode” during the polar night.

As the , the researchers saw that “many species of tiny critters were actively reproducing, shellfish continued to feed and grow, and even many species of predators were still chasing down their meals.”

Some seabirds, too, are staying around rather than flying south, fishing for meals in the pitch dark.

Bird species, like this black guillemot, were observed foraging for food in complete darkness. That activity, the researchers say, raises a question: How is it that species known to be “visual predators other times of the year” can “find their prey during the polar night”? (Geir Johnsen NTNU/UNIS)

The paper’s title also indicates that any findings must be considered against the backdrop of global climate change, even if the role of our warming planet in their discoveries is unknown. “Low ice cover and warm water temperatures alone do not explain our observations,” the researchers say.

The warming Arctic did affect the project in one basic way, said lead researcher Jørgen Berge of UiT the Arctic University of Norway. The project, based in and around a Svalbard fjord, would not have been possible a decade ago because “the fjords would freeze up at that time of year,” he told the BBC.

Ambrose, who is currently on leave from �ֲ���ý as a National Science Foundation program director in charge of the Arctic Observing Network program, is one of the lead authors of the paper.

Researchers used a prototype hyperspectral imager, which collects and processes information from across the electromagnetic spectrum, to create optical “fingerprints” of different species on the sea floor during the polar night. (Geir Johnsen NTNU/UNIS)

He contributed one of the paper’s major findings, that clams, Ambrose’s specialty, continued to grow during the long and dark winter. “The continual growth of the bivalves really surprised me,” Ambrose says.

The clam data are part of a larger project dubbed “Talking Clams,” in which researchers are receiving “continuous data on the behavior and growth” of bivalves from the area, “delivered by means of a data connection.”

(It’s called high-frequency noninvasive valvometry, where electrodes attached to the mollusks’ valves tell scientists when the valves move, which can indicate stress, a pollutant, or a change in water quality or temperature.)

Mostly, the Svalbard researchers want to emphasize that, in Ambrose’s words, “many of the generalizations about the functioning of the Arctic marine ecosystem need to be re-evaluated.”

“Patterns and processes occurring during the important spring bloom”— a time of rapid growth of phytoplankton, a food source for other organisms higher on the food chain — “are impossible to fully comprehend without a thorough understanding of the polar night,” he adds.

And as these Arctic scientists are rethinking fundamental ideas about darkness and ecosystems, they’re also having to adjust how they think about seasons in general.

At least in the Arctic, basic routines of marine life, like reproduction or migration, may someday stop being linked primarily with the changing seasons. That time “will come,” say the researchers.

�ֲ���ý College faculty members William Ambrose, of Poland, and Rebecca Herzig, of Lewiston, have been named this year’s recipients of the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

�ֲ���ý students and recent alumni nominate Kroepsch Award recipients on the basis of their outstanding performance as teachers.

Ambrose is an associate professor of biology. Herzig is associate professor in the women and gender studies program.

Ambrose’s research interests include issues affecting food supplies for organisms living on the Arctic Ocean floor and, of particular interest to Maine residents, the environmental impacts of commercial harvesting of marine worms such as bloodworms.

“The wonderful thing about Dr. Ambrose is, he facilitates our problem-solving,” wrote one of his nominators. “He allows us to find our own answers and I believe this is where some of the most important learning takes place.”

Ambrose has an A.B. degree from Princeton and a doctorate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He started at �ֲ���ý in 1994.

Herzig holds the only full-time faculty appointment in the Program in Women and Gender Studies at �ֲ���ý. She teaches a range of interdisciplinary courses on science, technology and medicine, as well as core courses in the WGS program.

She is currently completing two books: Suffering for Science: Will, Reason, and Sacrifice in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Rutgers University Press) and The Nature of Difference: Readings in the History of Science, Race, and Sex, co-edited with Evelynn Hammonds and Abigail Bass (MIT Press).

“I always left class amazed at the insightful conclusions we had reached as a group, and at the intellectual integrity of our discussions,” a former student of Herzig’s told the Kroepsch selection committee. “This kind of collective academic achievement was possible because Professor Herzig had motivated us to read, write and think at a very high level.”

Herzig earned her B.A. in American cultural and environmental studies in 1993 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998, the year she arrived at �ֲ���ý.

Kroepsch honorees are selected from the nominees by a committee of previous recipients. The annual award is funded by an endowment established in 1985 by the late Robert H. Kroepsch, a member of the �ֲ���ý class of 1933.