Updates about the latest accomplishments—including latest research, publications, and awards—by students, faculty, and staff
NSF has awarded a grant to Dr. Oscar Vargas to study the origin and genetics of rare plants in California. The grant includes funds for supporting a diverse students from participate in the project, and it aims to study four rare plants in the state. https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2334849
Graduate student Lily Olmo was awarded the Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation. Olmo is among 2,000 students selected nationwide to receive the fellowship from more than 16,000 applicants. This five-year award will support her current Master's research and continuation to a Ph.D. program.
CRGS assistant professor Dr. Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza publishes their first set of poetry just in time for Asian American & Pacific Islander Heritage Month. "With Love: What We Wish We Knew About Being Queer and Filipino in America" explores the intimate journey of queer Filipina/x/o individuals in America. Editor Dr. Dustin E. Domingo delves into 68 letters by 50 queer Filipino Americans, sharing triumphs, setbacks, and 10 life lessons. Currently available at https://bit.ly/BuyWithLoveBook
In May 2024, Evan Pierce, Sela Raisl, Rhiannon Red Bird, Ben Stock, Kay Vargas, and India Vekaric Eichelbaugh fulfilled the College Reading and Learning Association (CRLA) International Tutor Training Program Certification requirements and are now Level I Certified Tutors. Achieving certification means that these tutors and writing consultants have met CRLA’s high standards for participation in training, direct peer support, and evaluation in the Learning Center’s tutoring and writing assistance programs. The Learning Center has been a CRLA-certified program since 1999.
Dr. Amy Rock moderated a roundtable discussion entitled, "The Golden Compass Onward: Enabling Equitable and Inclusive Faculty Success through Supportive Departmental Leadership," held at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting. This interactive session was part of a larger initiative to support foreign-born faculty in geography and geospatial departments at US institutions of higher education, jointly supported by AAG and the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS).
Dr. Amy Rock was invited to speak on a panel on Teaching Modern GIS: Approaches and Perspectives. She also moderated a talk on Teaching Ethics in GIS and Geography Courses, both at the American Association of Geographers conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 16-20.
Students and faculty from the Promotorx Transformative Educators Program and the Department of Critical Race, Gender, & Sexuality Studies presented a panel titled "Ethnic Studies as Liberatory Joy in Rural California" at the Latinx Studies Association Conference hosted at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ, from April 17-20, 2024.
Kasandra Colwell presented “Body Doubling Study Spaces for Community Building & Student Productivity” at the Association of Colleges for Tutoring & Learning Assistance (ACTLA) conference held virtually April 17-19 2024. Her presentation incorporated the concepts of Cultural Wealth and Body Doubling as tools for productivity, and reflected upon those practices utilized in the Kick Axe Study Space Kasandra hosts for EOP/SSS students each week.
Physics & Astronomy majors Alexandra Papesh, Taylor Juchau, and Kelsey Sako presented Cal Poly Humboldt gravitational physics research at the national 2024 April Meeting of the American Physical Society in Sacramento. In addition, Papesh was recognized with a prize for an outstanding poster presentation!
Congratulations to all!
Professor Pedro Peloso was a co-author in the paper "Endemic amphibians of the Cerrado and Caatinga: species richness, geographic range and conservation" published in the Herpetological Journal. Their work highlights the distribution and conservation status of all species of amphibians that exist in two major ecoregions in Brazil (Cerrado and Caatinga). Based on geographic distribution data, they recorded 100 species that do not exist anywhere else in the world: 82 from the Cerrado and 18 from the Caatinga. They also discuss the role of formally protected areas in safeguarding threatened species in these ecoregions.
Christina Hsu Accomando, professor of CRGS and English, is the editor of the newly released 12th edition of Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Intersectional Study (Macmillan, 2024). When Paula Rothenberg published the original edition in 1988, it was one of the first textbooks to take an intersectional approach to ethnic and gender studies. This interdisciplinary anthology is used in CRGS 108 ("Power/Privilege: Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality") at Cal Poly Humboldt and in classrooms across the nation.
Dr. Gabi Kirk has two new publications out on political ecology and agrarian issues in Palestine. The first is co-authored with Dr. Paul Kohlbry, "Situating the Transnational in Agrarian Palestine," in the edited volume Resisting Domination in Palestine: Mechanisms and Techniques of Control, Coloniality and Settler Colonialism (IB Taurus/Bloomsbury). https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/resisting-domination-in-palestine-9780755…;
The second, "Trains, Trees, and Terraces: Infrastructures of Settler Colonialism and Resistance in the Refaim Valley, Palestine-Israel," is in the edited volume Gendered Infrastructures: Space, Scale, and Identity (West Virginia University Press). https://wvupressonline.com/gendered-infrastructures
Both chapters look critically at settler colonial dispossession in rural parts of the Occupied West Bank.
Justin Luong (FFRM) and colleagues recently published a paper in Functional Ecology on how plant geographic distribution influences chemical defenses in native and introduced Plantago lanceolata populations. Populations from introduced ranges were characterized by an increase in anti-herbivory chemical defense compounds without compromising plant productivity. A link to the manuscript is here.
Kenia Gomez, Gabriel Abundis & (graduate student) Ernesto Chavez-Velasco received research grants from the California Native Grassland Association to examine pressing issues on various California rangelands. Kenia will explore how drought and woody debris affect a local threatened species, North Coast Semaphore Grass; Gabriel will explore how local photovoltaic grids affect rangeland plant communities; Ernesto will work to develop field methods for selecting plants that will match with environmental characteristics for context-specific management to promote biodiversity and drought resilience on rangelands.
Rachael M. Wade, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences was awarded a grant for studying ecologically driven morphological plasticity in coralline algae. Her research focuses on the diversity of marine macroalgae and the evolutionary processes that determine and support their current distributions. Macroalgae are often poor dispersers, so understanding how they've diversified and have come to be globally distributed, in some cases. Her work often relies on the incorporation of historical specimens, with genetic resources derived from 19th-century collections, to better understand their diversity and taxonomy.
Silvia E Pavan, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences was awarded a grant for presenting research, with students, at the 2024 Meeting of the American Society of Mammologists. Sylvia is broadly interested in biodiversity, and she works with fieldwork exploration and collections-based research to discover and describe species and to understand species diversity and evolution. Her research has been focused on different groups of mammals, especially marsupials and rodents.
Christa L. Meingast, Assistant Professor from the Engineering Department, was awarded a grant for a soil remediation study in distributed environments. Infectious diseases are a significant threat to public health. Though society enacts practices to prevent the spread of these dangerous diseases, challenges remain. Therefore, continual advancements in treatment and prevention are required. Wastewater treatment and viral clearance in pharmaceutical applications are two key health measures that prevent the spread of infections.
Justin Luong, Assistant Professor of Forestry, Fire and Rangeland Management Department was awarded a grant for assessing solar panel grid impacts on coastal prairies to guide regenerative agrivoltaics. Research in Dr. Luong’s lab focuses on adapting restoration practices for changing climates and integrating socio-economic and management perspectives to understand rangeland ecology. Lab members engage in hands-on learning opportunities that inform real-world rangeland restoration and management projects to cultivate a diverse and inclusive learning environment.
Drs. Rouhollah Aghasaleh and Tristan Gleason have been named the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (JCT) Editors and Presidents of the Foundation for Curriculum Theory for 2025-2030.
JCT is recognized as one of the most prestigious journals in the field of Curriculum Studies. Notably, JCT is closely associated with the Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, a gathering that has fostered dialogues among theorists, practitioners, scholars, and cultural workers since 1969. Both the journal and the conference operate under the Foundation for Curriculum Theory, reinforcing their commitment to diverse perspectives and innovative approaches in curriculum theory.
George Washington University in Washington DC has decided to make their course on Subnational Diplomacy a permanent feature of their Executive Education/Professional development offering. As part of a 2-day pilot last summer, Professor Alison Holmes (PSCI) was invited to deliver a lecture about her research on the international affairs of the state of California to participants from across the country. She has now been asked to join scholars and practitioners from around the world as an ongoing faculty member in the new week-long course that will be offered online.
Dr. Armeda Reitzel (Professor, Communication), Julia Kurtz (Student, Communication), and Josué Valdez (Student, Communication) gave a 60-minute presentation titled “The Magazine Cover Story: LibreTexts Engages Students’ Interests and Insights through Snippets and Snapshots” on March 7, 2024 at the LibreTexts Open Education Week 2024 Conference. The three co-presenters shared their perspectives on the use of LibreTexts open educational resources as the foundation for creative semester-long projects in two different courses: interpersonal communication and intercultural communication. The talk focused on the use of open pedagogy in undergraduate education.
Dr. Roberto Mónico recently published an article entitled "Reflections of Right-Wing Leadership in the United States: From LAPD Chief William Parker to Donald Trump" in Resistance and Abolition in the Borderlands: Confronting Trump's Reign of Terror by the University of Arizona Press. The book is a collection of essays that examines the impact of Donald Trump's rhetoric and policies on migrant communities.
Vincent Biondo is co-editor of Islam in North America: An Introduction.
Congratulations to AJ Bealum, Team Flora, Library and everyone supporting the 3D Digital Herbarium for winning the Reference & User Services Association (in ALA) Best Emerging Technology Award in recognition of a technology application that directly benefits library users. The committee found 3D Digital Herbarium to be an innovative method for advancing the work of herbariums through 3D imaging. The committee found the site easy to use and accessible, and most importantly, engaging for the viewer, but also the students involved . Great timing as National Library Week is April 7-13.
AJ Bealum, Programmer & Project Manager for the Library's 3D Digital Herbarium, and Cyril Oberlander, Library Dean, presented the 3D Digital Herbarium & 3D Exhibits4Learning to the Coalition for Networked Information in San Diego on March 26, 2024. CNI promotes use of information technology to advance scholarship and education, and is an organization of higher education, publishing, information technology, scholarly organizations, libraries and foundations. To learn more about the 3D Digital Herbarium, please visit the Library website.
Emma Held was awarded a research fellowship from California Sea Grant to support her work on the life history of threatened Chinook salmon in the Mattole River. Emma's work will provide information to support ongoing conservation efforts by collaborators at the Mattole Salmon Group.
Nicolette Amann, Lecturer in English, who coordinates the Redwood Writing Project for local Humboldt teachers, and Anne Hartline from the School of Education facilitated a year-long professional development program on the untold local histories of Humboldt County and California. This project resulted in multiple sharable lessons that have been published at the National Writing Project site. Various CAHSS faculty presented as part of the program:
- Ryder Dschida (History)
- Loren Cannon (CRGS/Philosophy)
- Sarah Ray (Env Studies)
- Nicolette Amann (English)
- Dominic Corva (Sociology)
- Suzanne Pastor (History)
Humboldt's First Year Composition Program Faculty has received the CCCC's Certificate of Writing Program Excellence. They are recognized for their long-term dedication to co-create the program around research and best practices for first-year writing instruction and to provide professional development leadership across campus. CCCC will present our program with a certificate at the award presentation of the 2024 CCCC Annual Convention in Spokane, Washington, on Friday, April 4, at 6 p.m.
Sarah Ben-Zvi has worked to support local high school teachers in developing meaningful writing and literacy curricula, coordinated the annual Redwood Writing Contest for students in grades 3-12, and dedicated herself to first-year composition students. Sarah has been invited to accept the 2024 Classroom Excellence Award from the California Association of Teachers of English at the annual CATE convention in Los Angeles.
Dr. Sara K. Sterner, along with colleagues from Weber State University and Minneapolis College of Art and Design, successfully presented at the 2024 American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education annual conference. The interactive scenario planning session entitled, "Using Nudge Theory to Explore Teacher Educator Practices That Prioritize DEI in Ideologically Diverse Contexts" took place on February 16 in Denver, CO.
Dr. Stephen Cunha’s paper, Field Notes: Visualizing the Record 2022-23 Record Snowpack in the Southern Sierra Nevada, California (The California Geographer 62: 65-86) combines snow survey data from eight Sierran watersheds, NASA Landsat and NOAA imagery, and his own annotated photographs from skis, aerial outings, and roads, to portray the record snowpack in the Eastern and Southern Sierra from Yosemite south to Mt. Whitney. Every watershed exceeded 250 percent of normal, with the Kern River (326 percent) leading the Western Sierra and the Owens River (318 percent) foremost on the Eastside. Below-average spring temperatures partially mitigated high-water flooding.
Professor Alison Holmes (Politics) has been accepted to the Summer Intensive Creative Writing Program at Oxford University in the UK. A three-week residential program, the course is led by recognized authors, poets, editors, and publishers who guide a small cohort of students in the development of their writing. The course has both an intermediate and advanced level with a selection process based on a project proposal as well as a portfolio of existing work in two separate writing tracks. Holmes has been admitted to the Advanced Level course for both creative non-fiction and poetry.
Lucy Kerhoulas, Rosemary Sherriff, Erik Jules, and Michael Kauffmann were awarded a $1.1 million grant to complete extensive vegetation mapping in the Klamath Mountains Ecoregion. Project vegetation surveys will be compared to vegetation surveys from the 1960s, 1980s, and 2010s to evaluate the influences of fire and climate change on high elevation plant communities.
The work will support three graduate students and numerous undergraduate students and will contribute substantially to the Cal Poly Humboldt Vascular Plant Herbarium; Robin Bencie and the California Native Plant Society are also project collaborators. Funding comes from the CA Department of Fish & Wildlife.
Dr. Gabi Kirk was awarded the 2023 Eric Wolf Prize of the Political Ecology Society (PESO). This annual award is given to an article-length paper based in substantive field research that make an innovative contribution to political ecology to authors within two years of receiving their Ph.D.
She will deliver a keynote address, “ ‘A fairly good crop for white men’: The political ecology of agricultural science and settler colonialism between the US and Palestine” on March 28 at the Society for Applied Anthropology Conference in Santa Fe. Additionally her article is under review at the Journal of Political Ecology.
Oceanography faculty Jeffrey Abell, Tamara Barriquand, and Christine Cass presented their research at the international Ocean Sciences Meeting (New Orleans, LA) in February. This ~6,000 person conference brings together marine scientists from across disciplines. Undergraduate students Malcolm Edwards-Silva, Marcos Moreno, Carla Villanueva, Ethan Wadsworth, and Kenneth Mathe (Fall '23) also attended to present a poster on their capstone research project.
Professors Pedro Peloso (Biological Sciences) and Brandice Guerra received a grant from the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation (www.maxwell-hanrahan.org) to support an illustration internship at Cal Poly Humboldt. An international student will visit our community this spring to work in a project that aims to raise awareness about amphibian extinctions globally. You can read more about the internship here: https://now.humboldt.edu/news/new-scientific-illustration-internship-gi…
Dr. Troy Lescher recently gave an invited presentation, titled "Building & Strengthening the Ensemble: Applying Social Emotional Learning to Theatre-making," at an Arts Educator Professional Development event hosted by the Humboldt County Office of Education.
Dr. Rouhollah Aghasaleh is engaged in collaboration as a co-PI alongside Katie Whiteside (PI), within the scope of a recently awarded Leonardo Da Vinci grant totaling $15,000. This collaboration involves partnerships with Redwood Empire Public Television, Kinetic Universe, the Redwood Discovery Museum, Humboldt County Library, and Hoopa Nation.
The project is centered around the facilitation of workshops tailored for educators and communities, aimed at providing avenues for the promotion of hands-on activities. These workshops seek to cultivate creativity and innovation specifically targeting rural youth.
Kjirsten Wayman (Chemistry Department), Maralyn Renner (M.S. Biology, 1980), Alexander Wright (Washington State U.), Aaron Floden (Missouri Botanical Garden), Jayne Lampley (U. Alabama), Susan Farmer, Edward Schilling (U. Tennessee, Knoxville) published a peer-reviewed article titled “New insights into systematics of the Trillium ovatum complex” in Madroño, a journal focusing on research of the Western American flora. The article highlights Trillium oettingeri, an endemic plant to the Klamath Mountains and Cascade Range, and can be accessed at the following link: https://doi.org/10.3120/0024-9637-70.3.158
Rama Rawal received a grant to support a two-day convening of local school districts that will leverage reporting from CaliforniaColleges.edu to inform strategic outreach to CSU-eligible students, strengthening the pipeline of students enrolling in CSUs after leaving high school. CaliforniaColleges.edu is California’s official college planning and application platform, which maintains data on 6th-12th grade student progress towards meeting baseline eligibility for admission to a CSU campus. Some of the collaborators will include K-16 Collaborative, Cal Poly Admissions, College of the Redwoods, and TRIO Programs.
Funding comes from the Foundation for California Community Colleges.
Dr. Alana Chin received a grant to support research looking into factors impacting redwood tree fog-uptake. Redwood trees absorb water from fog, making it a key provider of water in the summer months. However, as the climate changes, so have fog characteristics, increasing the need to understand how redwoods are acclimating to changes in fog. The project will assess and monitor fog absorption capacity in redwoods, and is a critical next step in our ability to predict the impacts of climate change on redwoods and select nursery stock for restoration.
Funding comes from the Save the Redwoods League.
John Meyer published a journal article titled, "The People" and Climate Justice: Reconceptualizing Populism and Pluralism within Climate Politics in the journal Polity. Available to all as an open access article, it will be included in the April 2024 issue of the journal. The article explores connections between influential conceptions of political populism and climate justice organizing.
Eight students travelled to Spokane, Washington for the Region 7 Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Students entered scholarly competitions, auditions for professional companies and graduate programs, attended workshops with working professionals, and spent five days of intense training and scholarship. Theatre major David Fisher submitted and won the George R Caldwell Undergraduate Scholarly Paper Meritorious Achievement for his dramaturgical research paper.
Dan Barton (Associate Professor and Department Chair, Wildlife) was elected chair of the Pacific Seabird Group, a role in which he will serve for the next three years. Pacific Seabird Group is a society of professional seabird researchers and managers that was formed in 1972 out of a need for increased communication among academic and government seabird researchers, and currently has over 500 members from around the world. The society also publishes the journal Pacific Seabirds.
Dr. Alison Holmes (Politics) presented her chapter, "UK-US Relations: Can Subnational Diplomacy Save the 'Special Relationship?" via zoom to a Special Symposium of the Transatlantic Studies Association in the UK, organized to launch the book Locating the Transatlantic in Twentieth Century Politics, Diplomacy and Culture. The volume was edited by Dr. Gaynor Johnson (University of Kent) and published this month by Bloomsbury Press in London: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/locating-the-transatlantic-in-twentiethce….
Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy, co-director of the Rou Dalgurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Associate Professor of Native American Studies will serve as co-PI on a California Sea Grant project led by the Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation. The recent decline of California’s ghvtlh-k’vsh (kelp) forests directly affects the cultural lifeways and thus health of the Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation. This project will train and certify up to ten Natural Resources Staff and Tribal Citizens of the Tolowa Dee-ni' Nation to conduct both kelp monitoring and restoration efforts, including establishing kelp nurseries and grow-out sites.
Dr. Troy Lescher recently gave a presentation, titled "Taking the Show on the Road: An Adventure in Program Outreach and Student-Learning," at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival in Spokane, WA. The presentation was based on the Cal Poly Humboldt Theatre Arts' Spring 2023 pilot program to develop and tour a student production to public schools throughout Humboldt County.
Dr. Amy Rock was invited to participate in a panel discussion on DEI in the geospatial industry, entitled "The Geospatial Inclusion Imperative: Diverse Leadership Shaping Tomorrow" hosted by the World Geospatial Industry Council at GeoWeek 2024 in Denver, CO. The panel discussed the critical importance of fostering a diverse and inclusive geospatial industry, and included academic and industry speakers to explore insights and best practices for implementing DEI initiatives and overcoming challenges, following on WGIC's policy report on leadership diversity in the geospatial industry.
How can educators help mitigate the decline in journalism studies to support a healthy democracy? Professors Jessie Cretser-Hartenstein and Gregg J. Gold, along with student researcher Kelli Grace Belt, recently published a paper answering this pressing question. Media skepticism may play a role in discouraging CSU students from studying journalism. For journalism majors, their focus on social justice is a key motivating factor. Using these findings, CSU journalism departments can create programs that draw more students to the major. Look for the paper in the newest edition of Journalism and Mass Communication Educator.
Drs. Kerry Byrne and Catalina Cuellar-Gempeler received a grant to support a study on Applegate’s milkvetch, a federally endangered plant species found only in the lower Klamath Basin of southern Oregon. The project will investigate alternative management practices that may better promote Applegate's milkvetch recovery, and ultimately provide managers with a roadmap for optimal management of this species. Collaborators will include Oregon Parks and Recreation Department, US Fish and Wildlife Service, ODA, and the City of Klamath Falls, OR.