Updates about the latest accomplishments—including latest research, publications, and awards—by students, faculty, and staff
Wildlife students Korinna Domingo and Ximena Gil's abstract was accepted for the Aquarium of the Pacific's Citizen Science for Conservation in Southern California Symposium (March 24th). They will be presenting a Lightning Talk titled, ‘Using citizen science to estimate frequency of latrine site usage along tributaries of Humboldt Bay by North American river otters.’
Wildlife undergraduate student Korinna Domingo’s abstract was accepted for the Wildlife Society Western Section Conference in Santa Rosa, CA (Feb 5-9th). She presented a poster titled, ‘Informing local government regarding wildlife activity in a recreational area through inexpensive and noninvasive trail camera methodology.’ See the poster here: bit.ly/TrailCameraPoster
Through his work with research scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute Jacob Partida recently published his first co-authored article in a scientific journal. The article “The Changing Nature of Shelf-Break Exchange Revealed by the OOI Pioneer Array” can be found in the most recent volume (31) of Oceanography.
Dr. Alison Holmes - International Studies, Loren Collins - ACAC, and Morgan Barker - Academic Technology will present a poster at the 20th Annual CSU Symposium on University Teaching, Cal Poly Pamona PolyTeach 2018, titled “Career Curriculum as a ‘Classic’ Productive Disruption: utilizing Canvas to assess student learning mastery in a cross-disciplinary model” on April 13 & 14, 2018. The objective of the project was to develop a model that would facilitate the dissemination of the collaborative ACAC/CAHSS curriculum and feedback/assessment mechanisms, allowing faculty to customize content, while enabling closer connections between students, faculty, career staff.
Graduate student Keith Parker's abstract was accepted and he was awarded a travel scholarship for the NSF/AAAS Emerging Researchers Network Conference in Washington D.C. (Feb 23-24) to present his thesis research, 'Evidence for the genetic-basis and inheritance of ocean- and river-maturing life histories of Pacific Lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus) in the Klamath River, California.' Parker will also present at the American Fisheries Society CAL-NEVA annual meeting March 1 in San Luis Obispo, CA.
Kezia Rasmussen received a Siering/Wilson Research Endowment award to conduct exploratory data analysis on her own microbiome. She will use contemporary data science techniques in this analysis. Her faculty mentor is Kamila Larripa (Mathematics).
Humboldt State University's Range Plant Identification team placed 1st in the U.S. and 3rd overall in a contest during the Society for Range Management Meetings in Reno, Nevada. Deedee Soto, HSU Botany major with a range minor, placed 5th in the individual category. Coached by lecturer/NRCS Rangeland Specialist Todd Golder, team members include Corina Godoy, Amanda Albright, Deedee Soto, Eric Bo Garcia, Michael Rada, Sarah Nolan, Melissa Chase, Tess Palmer, Sierra Berry, Miles Ritch, SRM President Larry Howery, Thomas Mendoza, Darren Pinnegar, Abigail Price, Don Hijar (Pawnee Buttes Seed, Inc.), and Todd Golder. These students practice plant identification skills in RRS 475 Advanced Study of Range Plants, offered every semester.
The team owes much to HSU's excellent range and botany courses, including the Agrostology course (BOT 354) offered alternate years.
In addition, Professor Susan Edinger Marshall was interviewed and approved as a candidate for the 2018-2019 ballot for the SRM Board of Directors.
Four FWR & ESM undergraduate students (Forestry: Alex Gorman & Joey Wright; ESM: Chelsea Obeidy & Holly Powell) coauthored a peer-reviewed journal article with forestry faculty Pascal Berrill & Christa Dagley on field research at HSU's L.W. Schatz Tree Farm: "Variable-density Retention Promotes Spatial Heterogeneity and Structural Complexity in a Douglas-fir/Tanoak Stand" published in Current Trends in Forest Research.
Yoon Kim (Mathematics), Christa Dagley & Pascal Berrill (Forestry) coauthored a peer-reviewed article in the journal Restoration Ecology: "Restoration thinning enhances growth and diversity in mixed redwood/Douglas-fir stands in northern California, USA."
Jenn Tarlton has been recognized as the National Association of Interpretation Region 9 Interpreter of the month. It was posted in the Feb 2018 edition of Further WestWinds which will be available here: https://nairegion9.wordpress.com/member-services/further-westwinds-archive/
The HSU Student Veterans Association was awarded $2,000 from the national SVA organization to cover travel costs to the SVA national convention in San Antonio, Texas. The club will be sharing photos, videos, and live broadcasts for the entirety
of the trip and the conference in an effort to recruit more students and benefit the community.
Fisheries graduate student Grace Ghrist was awarded the Council on Ocean Affairs, Science & Technology (COAST) Graduate Student Research Award. This award will support Grace’s research looking at how freshwater habitat use affects marine survival of threatened coho salmon.
Prof. John Powell, Philosophy, will present an invited paper 28 March in San Diego at the North American Wittgenstein Society's session of the Pacific Division American Philosophical Association. The paper aims to clarify the issue of whether language is conventional and sides with Heraclitus in claiming the currently widely-endorsed conventionalism is baseless and empty and supported by a tissue of begged questions. The paper also surveys stakes involved for current accounts of language as signs. with a fair amount of name-dropping. A draft will be posted to the APA Pacific Division Program website.
Rosemary Sherriff, Geography faculty and chair, has two new publications in disturbance ecology. (1) A co-authored article on bark beetle impacts on socio-ecological systems in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (January 2018, volume 16, doi: 10.1002/fee.1754). (2) A co-authored chapter on deciphering the complexity of historical fire regimes in the co-edited book: Dendroecology: Tree-ring Analyses Applied to Ecological Studies (2017, doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61669-8_8).
Mark Colwell and Allie Patrick published a (Dec 2017) paper in Wader Study, an international journal dedicated to the ecology and conservation of shorebirds. Their work summarized a 12-year dataset on breeding Snowy Plovers in Humboldt County and showed that plovers nest in loose aggregations, especially when population size increase.
ESM graduate student Monique Silva Crossman was awarded the Council on Ocean Affairs, Science & Technology (COAST) Graduate Student Research Award. This award will support Monique's research that explores the effects of manual and mechanical Ammophila arenaria removal techniques on coastal dune plant communities and dune morphology.
ESM graduate student Lara Jansen was awarded the Council on Ocean Affairs, Science & Technology (COAST) Graduate Student Research Award. This award will support Lara's research that explores the effects of dam-regulated flow on primary and secondary productivity in the upper Eel River.
Andrea Robinson, the Department of Social Work SWSA (Social Work Student Association) President, was spotlighted this month by the National Association of Social Workers California chapter. Read an interview with Andrea by following this link: https://naswcanews.org/student-spotlight-2/
With the help of the Center for Community Based Learning, Drs. Chelsea Teale and Amy Rock of the Geography Department facilitated lesson planning and school pairings for 50 students as part of Geography Awareness Week (November 13-17). Groups of future educators enrolled in GEOG 470, Geography for Teachers, took giant floor maps into nine K-12 schools to conduct interactive lessons including a "tour" of indigenous lands in Humboldt County, California’s climate and weather, Coronado's quest for gold in the Southwest, the American Revolution, and the European theater of World War II.
Graduate student Keith Parker was selected by the National Science Foundation, Graduate Research Internship Program as an intern scientist with NOAA Fisheries, Salmon Ecology Lab. He was concurrently awarded an internship with the EPA, which was declined. The internship begins this month and will compliment his current genetic work under the NSF GRFP at HSU.
Dr. Renée M. Byrd, Assistant Professor of Sociology, has a new peer-reviewed journal article out in Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics. Titled 'Prison Treated Me Way Better Than You': Reentry, Perplexity and the Naturalization of Mass Imprisonment, the article can be read at: https://abolitionjournal.org/prison-treated-me-way-better/
Leslie Rossman presented at the National Communication Association convention in Dallas TX, November 15-19. Presentations included:
A paper in the first Communication, Economics, and Society preconference titled: "When Neoliberal Discourse Takes a Material Turn Through the Performances of Labor."
A paper at the titled: "The Labor of Neoliberalism is all a Performance: Working to Find Security in the State of Insecurity Through the Discipline of Production"
And finally, Rossman was involved in a symposium titled: "The Legacy of Intersectional Feminism in The Classroom: Teaching Gender and Communication in Trump’s America."
Leena Dallasheh, Department of History, was invited to present a paper entitled “Here We Stay: Palestinians under the Military Regime.” (Hebrew) at a conference on Israel in the First Decade: Socio-Historical Research. The conference was held at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, on January 1, 2018.
HSU hosted the annual recovery meeting for the Western Snowy Plover, held in the Native American Forum, 10 & 11 January 2018. HSU alumnus Dr. Luke Eberhart-Phillips of the Max Planck Institute, Germany delivered the keynote lecture, which was a comparative examination of plover demography and breeding systems. Colwell, Feucht, and Papian also presented their work.
Joshua Frye recently published a peer-reviewed journal article in the KB Journal. The KB journal is the journal of the Kenneth Burke Society and is an online scholarly journal dedicated to the study of 20th Century rhetorical theorist and critic Kenneth Burke. Frye's article examines the ascendent rhetoric of the transhumanist movement. In particular, the essay critiques transhumanism's teleological assumption of a technological utopia and the profound political implications for its entelechy of human-machine convergence. The article can be accessed at kbjournal.org/frye
Leena Dallasheh, Department of History, was invited to give a public talk at the Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem. Entitled "Nazareth: The City the Survived the Nakba," the talk explored the strategies and discourses that Nazareth residents utilized to persevere in the aftermath of the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948.
Leena Dallasheh, Department of History, presented a paper entitled "For a United Front: Palestinians Confronting Colonial Sectarian Policies, at the Arab-Traditions of Anti-Sectarianism Conference at Rice University/University of Houston on December 2, 2017.
Kamila Larripa was awarded an Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) travel grant to help support her visit to Oberwolfach, Germany to study Mathematical Modeling in Systems Biology.
Rosemary Sherriff published "Warming drives a front of white spruce recruitment near western treeline, Alaska" with National Park Service collaborators in Global Change Biology. Warming has increased productivity near the boreal forest margin in Alaska. However, the effects on seedling recruitment has received little attention, in spite of forecasted forest expansion. The study of 95 sites across a longitudinal gradient in southwest Alaska shows a differential relationship between longitude and life-stage (seedling, sapling, tree) abundance that suggests a moving front of white spruce establishment through time, driven by changes in environmental conditions near the species’ range limit. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.13814/full
Alum Zav Grabinski (MS, 2015) and Professors Rosemary Sherriff and Jeff Kane published "Controls of reburn severity vary with fire interval in the Klamath Mountains, California, USA" in the journal Ecosphere. A unique component of the study was evaluation of different scales of analysis within the ecoregion. In the context of recent increases in fire activity, results underscore a self-reinforcing pattern of fire severity related to the Klamath Mountains biophysical setting, but also highlight the importance of spatial and temporal scale of evaluation and interactions of vegetation, time since fire, and weather on reburn severity. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.2012/abstract
At its Executive Board meeting in Spokane, the Pacific Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (PACRAO) announced that HSU Registrar Clint Rebik would be the Program Chair for the 2018 annual conference in Sacramento next fall.
Rebik’s responsibilities include guiding a team in developing all program content, and procuring keynote speakers for the four-day conference. Noted Rebik, “I’m honored to be invited to lead a diverse group of colleagues from across our region; the depth and breadth of professional topics we’re organizing is formidable!”
PACRAO represents over 1500 members in 350 institutions across ten US States, four Canadian Provinces, and the Territory of Guam.
Sarah Peters directed The Grasshopper and the Aunt at the Arcata Playhouse. The show is in a theatre style known as British Pantomime, which is a form of comedy that's been around for 300 years.
Dr. Ray has been invited to give two public talks in December. At Evergreen State College on December 6, she will present "What Do the Arts and Humanities Have to Do with Our Environmental Crisis?" for Evergreen's Art Lecture Series. On December 7, she will present on her new research, "Coming of Age in the Anthropocene: Climate Justice Pedagogies for Resilience" for the Anthropocene Interdisciplinary Cluster at the University of Washington.
Gregory M. Pitch (student) and Robert W. Zoellner (faculty member) have published an article detailing their computational chemistry research results. The article is "Bonding modes in bis(benzene)beryllium(0): A density functional and Moller-Plesset computational investigation", and will be published in 2018 in the journal "Inorganica Chimica Acta", volume 470, pages 68-73.
An RHA delegation from HSU recently was awarded Best Program at the Pacific Affiliate of College and University Residence Halls Conference in Eugene, Oregon. The conference is dedicated to promoting student intellectual, educational, cultural, physical and social welfare. Attendees design and facilitate programs that provide an avenue for existing students to achieve full participation in the life of the college community. This is the first time that HSU has won any award at the regional level in the history of HSU's attendance.
HSU gave two presentations: "Dia de los Muertos" by Jose Balderrama, Stephanie Brito and Lizeth Guzman; and "Problems with Porn" by Joshua Sales, Selena Canchola, and Lola Mora. "Problems with Porn" won Best Program.
The entire HSU Delegation included:
Hernan Rico - Advisor
Destiny Mendoza - President of RHA
Nicole Laureano - National Communications Coordinator for RHA
Joshua Sales - Vice President of Administration for RHA
Lizeth Guzman - President of NRHH
Jose Balderrama - National Communications Coordinator for NRHH
Selena Canchola - President of Creekview Council
Lola Mora - First year delegate
Stephanie Brito - First year delegate
Susan Abbey, lecturer in the Theatre, Film, and Dance department, recently served as a judge on the CSU Faculty Pre-Screening Committee for the CSU Media Arts Festival held Nov.4 at CSU Dominguez Hills.
Geoscientists Without Borders funded a two year $100k project to complete a sustainable water project in the highlands of Perú. Jasper Oshun and Margaret Lang will lead a small group of students to Perú next summer to map the geology, explore surface runoff patterns and learn novel shallow geophysical techniques to determine the extent of the aquifer. These data will be used to design a water reservoir and agricultural canal system. They will return in the summer of 2019 to support the community in the construction phase. The canal will allow for year round agriculture, directly benefitting over 120 families.
Congratulations to Derrick Murrietta and Justin Andrew for winning First Place in the CSU Media Arts Festival for the short screenplay One in the Chamber.
Congratulations to Gabriel Haffner for receiving Fourth Place in the CSU Media Arts Festival for the short screenplay Change.
Barbara has been invited to present at the Experimental Archaeology Conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, November 16-18, 2017. The title of her presentation is "Experimental Archaeology: Experiments in String, Stone, Wood and Clay". She will talk about the experiments conducted by students in ANTH 358 - Archaeology Lab, which included the hands-on construction of tools to create textiles and baskets and the creation of textiles themselves.
Journalism & Mass Communication Professor Kirby Moss recently was awarded a $4,000 Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activities award. He will use the funding to launch a new research project exploring cross cultural conversations.
In his research, Moss combines his expertise in anthropology with his experience in journalism. He’s the author of “The Color of Class: Poor Whites and the Paradox of Privilege,” which explores the incongruities of social class in a Midwest city.
The Rural County Representatives of California (RCRC) is a thirty-five member county strong service organization that champions policies on behalf of California’s rural counties. This year, RCRC President and CEO Greg Norton recognized Ms. Connie Stewart as the recipient of the 2017 RCRC President’s Award.
Presented during RCRC’s Annual Meeting each September, the RCRC President’s Award was born out of the desire to publicly acknowledge individuals that take the time to go above and beyond their everyday roles to further advance the cause of rural counties.
There are two key public policy areas that Ms. Stewart brings much-needed expertise: rural health care, and broadband deployment.
Political Science major Nick Thomas recently returned from his internship with the Panetta Institute, which hosts students for its Congressional Internship Program beginning in mid-August with an intensive two-week course at the Institute and continues with a two-and-a-half month assignment with a California Congress member in Washington, D.C.
Janelle Adsit's book *Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing: Threshold Concepts to Guide the Literary Writing Curriculum" is now available from Bloomsbury. The book makes the argument that creative writing stands upon problematic assumptions about what counts as valid artistic production, and these implicit beliefs result in exclusionary pedagogical practices. To counter this tendency of creative writing, this book proposes a revised curriculum that rests upon 12 threshold concepts that can serve to transform the teaching of literary writing craft.
Monique Silva Crossman, NR graduate student working with Dr. Alison O'Dowd, presented her research at the California Invasive Plant Council Symposium in Palm Springs, CA on Oct 25, 2017. The title of her poster was "Effects of manual and mechanical removal of Ammophila arenaria on coastal plant communities and dune morphology."
Biology graduate student Mason London presented his research at the California Chapter of the Society for Freshwater Science meeting in Davis, CA on Oct 25, 2017. The title of his talk was "A comparison of benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages in perennial and intermittent headwater streams of the Mattole River in northern California, USA."
Lara Jansen, NR graduate student working with Dr. Alison O'Dowd, presented her research at the California Chapter of the Society for Freshwater Science meeting in Davis, CA on Oct 25, 2017. The title of her talk was "Integration of Western Science and Indigenous Science to Inform Management of the Upper Eel River." Lara's co-presenter was Leke Hutchins, a UC Berkeley undergraduate who participated in HSU's Rroulou'sik REU program last summer.
On October 25, 2017 Dr. Armeda Reitzel was elected to the position of Chair of the Access Humboldt Board of Directors for 2017-2018. This is Dr. Reitzel's fourth year in a row to serve as the Chair of the Board of Directors.
Kerri J. Malloy, Lecturer in Native American Studies, presented his paper “Dividing and Affixing Identity: Public Law 100-580 The Hoopa-Yurok Settlement Act” as part of the Law in Native North America Panel at the American Society for Legal History Annual Meeting (October 26-29, 2017) in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Diana is one of 20 students selected nationwide for the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program, which exposes early-career college students to the field of environmental conservation through research, leadership and professional training. Doris Duke Scholars participate in an intensive eight-week summer course integrating conservation leadership and research experiences, then the following summer pursue conservation internships in small groups at nationally recognized conservation organizations and agencies. In September Diana ran a workshop entitled “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Conservation & the Outdoors” at the Uplift Climate Conference in Moab, Utah. conservationscholars.ucsc.edu
Dr. Armeda Reitzel presented the paper that she and Dr. Michael Bruner co-authored titled "I Have a Farm to Run: Climate Change Discourse in the Midwest" at the Midwest Popular Culture Association conference on October 19, 2017. Dr. Reitzel is subject area chair of the Midwestern Culture area of the Midwest Popular Culture Association.