Updates about the latest accomplishments—including latest research, publications, and awards—by students, faculty, and staff
Prof. Janet Winston (English and Critical Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) presented research at the 27th Annual British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference in Savannah, Georgia on February 17, 2018. Her paper—“Rainbow Flags, Lizard People, and Me: Unpacking the Visual Rhetorics of Contemporary Antisemitism and Pro-Israelism”—examines how current forms of antisemitism, charges of antisemitism, and responses to antisemitism circulate in public discourse.
Emily Cobb recently returned from exhibiting her latest artwork in Sirens: New Work by the JV Collective during Munich Jewellery Week in Germany. Munich Jewellery Week is one of the most significant international events for contemporary jewelers, collectors, gallerists, curators and jewelry artists from around the world. Sirens is an interactive exhibition, and during opening night the podcast Percieved Value recorded several interviews in the gallery space. Listen soon at: https://www.perceivedvaluepodcast.com. The Sirens exhibition will travel to the Baltimore Jewelry Center in Maryland this April and New York City Jewelry Week in November.
Mark Hemphill-Haley (Geology) returned from two-week investigation of the 2016 M 7.8 Kaikoura earthquake, South Island, New Zealand. He joined HSU alumni Russ Van Dissen ('83) and Jessica Vermeer ('13 BS, '16 MS) and NZ researchers to investigate the deformation associated with more than 9 m (27 ft) of offset during the earthquake. The investigation involved trenching across the fault to assess fault structure and timing of previous earthquakes.
HSU's Soil Judging Team places 3rd in Region 6!
Humboldt State University's first Soil Judging Team braved snowy roads to travel to Butte College on Saturday, March 3 and placed 3rd in Team and Group categories. Team members Miles Ritch (Rangeland Resource Science), Monica Pina (Wildland Soils), and Yoselyn Ayala (Ecological Restoration) ventured into wet, muddy soil pits to evaluate soil textures, colors, and structures, then classified and rated soils for several land uses.
During the afternoon, hail and heavy rain-storms pummeled contestants from CalPoly San Luis Obispo, Cal State Fresno, Cal State Chico, and Humboldt State University. Thanks to Dr. Garrett Liles of CSU Chico for hosting the event. Region 6 of the Agronomy Society of America-sponsored contest includes universities from Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Nevada, although only four teams from California competed this year. Teams from CalPoly SLO and CSU Fresno will compete at the National Competition March 18-23 at the University of Tennessee. The National Collegiate Soils Contest will hosted by CalPoly SLO in 2019.
Maral N. Attallah (Lecturer in the Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies Department) was honored as one of the keynote speakers for the 35th Annual Sonoma State University 2018 Holocaust and Genocide Lecture Series. Her lecture, “Armenian Genocide: Legacies of Denial” - was presented on March 13th in Warren Auditorium at Sonoma State University.
Professor of Art Nicole Jean Hill was invited by the Center for Prairies Studies at Grinnell College to be an artist-in-residence for the month of March. She is developing a series of photographs and animations about the ecology of the restored and remnant tallgrass prairies at the Conard Environmental Research Area in Kellogg, Iowa.
The Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists will award Professor Marcy Burstiner a James Madison Freedom of Information Award March 27 in San Francisco for significant contributions to advancing freedom of information or expression. Burstiner will receive the Beverly Kees Educator Award for guiding students to harness the power of the California Public Records Act.
Undergraduate student Ely Boone received a second place award in the best science poster category at the 52nd annual American Fisheries Society Cal-Neva conference held in San Luis Obispo last week. Ely presented his summer 2017 research on environmental DNA, which he completed in the Rroulou'sik Program.
Christina Accomando co-authored the article "The Cynical Red Herring of Arming Teachers," with Kristin Anderson of the University of Houston. Posted in Psychology Today blog "Benign" Bigotry: The Psychology of Subtle Prejudice, Feb 28, 2018.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/benign-bigotry/201802/the-cynical-…
On March 8 at 7pm, Dr. Ray will be talking on "Coming of Age at the End of the World: Eco-Grief, College Students, and Climate Change" for the "My Favorite Lecture" series at the Plaza Grill in Arcata.
Assistant Professor of Chemistry Claire Till was awarded an NSF Ocean Sciences grant in collaboration with a group at Texas A&M. The $116,500 grant to HSU will fund the analysis of samples taken along a transect from Alaska to Tahiti for a suite of trace elements.
Professor of Chemistry Joshua Smith was awarded a Fulbright scholar award to study triplet ground state aromatic compounds at Angstrom Laboratories, Uppsala University, Sweden during the 2018-19 academic year.
Associate professor of Geography Matthew Derrick presented a paper titled "Mosques and Monumentality in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan" at the South and Central Asia Fulbright conference, held in New Delhi, India, February 26-28. Derrick is currently a Fulbright scholar based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.
Karen Kiemnec-Tyburczy (Lecturer, Biological Sciences) and co-authors recently published a peer-reviewed article entitled "Genetic variation and selection of MHC class I loci differ in two congeneric frogs" in the journal Genetica.
This article is "in press" and available online at: https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10709-018-0016-0
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.