Latest Achievements

Chris Aberson and Amber Gaffney served as co-chairs of the Western Psychological Association’s (WPA) 2022 Conference. The conference theme was Diversity, Equity, and Sustainability. At WPA, seven faculty and 37 students authored presentations. Chris Aberson gave the WPA Outstanding Teaching Award Address and Academic Research M.A. student Joseph Pang won the American Psychological Association Division for International Psychology’s student poster contest.

PreMed and PreVet Society students organized an event called Intro To Suturing Workshop on April 25. They invited Dr. Bret Gorham from Providence St. Joseph Hospital and Dr. Ellie Carrier from North Coast Veterinary Hospital. The workshop lasted 2 hours long (much longer than the scheduled one hour) and provided hands-on training to ~25 students on suturing skills. The workshop encourages interest in pursuing healthcare careers.

Mike Fisher (Associate Vice President, Facilities Management) received a grant from the Second Nature Foundation to support The Sustainability Office’s Climate Resilient Landscaping Demonstration Project. The project will replace a landscaped area on campus with climate-resilient native plants, and will be a model for landscape planning, a source of pollen and nectar for native pollinators, and serve as a living lab that provides students with experience in environmental resilience research and development. The Sustainability Office’s Morgan King (Climate Action Analyst) will provide leadership and expertise throughout the project’s implementation.

Humboldt Professor of History Rob Cliver was recently interviewed for the New Books Network Economic and Business History podcast about his 2020 publication, Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China's Yangzi Delta Silk Industry (Harvard University Asia Center). Listen to the interview here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/red-silk. 

Three Cal Poly Humboldt students presented research at the 2022 April Meeting of the American Physical Society that was held April 9-12 in New York City. Physics and Astronomy majors Claire Rogers ('23) and Jesse Mendez ('22) presented work related to research being done in the Gravitational Research Laboratory, while Ana Sammel ('22 Applied Mathematics major, Physics minor) presented work done in conjunction with Vanderbilt University. 

Chris Aberson, along with Psychology Academic Research M.A. alums Josue Rodriguez (′19) and Danielle Siegel (′21) recently published an article titled Power Analysis for Regression Coefficients: The Role of Multiple Predictors and Power to Detect all Coefficients Simultaneously in The Quantitative Methods for Psychology. The work provides researchers tools to improve sample size planning for complex research designs. Both Mr. Rodriquez and Ms. Siegel are currently enrolled in U. C. Davis’ Quantitative Psychology Ph.D. program.

Students in the Model United Nations program won several team awards at the Model United Nations of the Far West conference. Sawyer Chrisman, Levi Huser, Cruz Lopez, Johnny Mendoza, Ana Zamarano (representing France), Malluli Cuellar, Philip Mochel, Alida Nicklaus and Kim Willard-Mack (representing Malaysia), and Michael Coyne, Amber Rae Dennis, and Edwin Rosales (representing Ukraine) all won recognition for outstanding team performance at conference. In addition, Amber Rae Dennis was selected as one of four plenary speakers. Humboldt was one of the top performing schools at the conference, which draws hundreds of students from across the Pacific Rim. 

Prof Alison Holmes will be going to Europe—at last!—on a faculty award from the International Team in the Chancellor's Office. The trip—originally scheduled two years ago but canceled due to COVID—will take a group from across the CSU system to five different German universities. If all goes according to plan this time, they will spend a week visiting our partners and learning about their programs. 

Brandon Browne and colleagues from the U.S. Geological Survey published a professional report with the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys detailing their comprehensive study on the ~400 yr BP eruption of Half Cone, a post-caldera composite cone in Aniakchak National Park and Preserve in Alaska. As one of the largest eruptions from a volcano on the Alaska peninsula over the past 3,000 years, it blanketed hundreds of miles with thick ash and produced an important stratigraphic marker used by geologists and archeologists working to understand the geological and human history of the region.          

Dr. Matthew Johnson received a grant from the CSU Agricultural Research Institute to support a study on whether the criteria for Wildlife Conscious Certification (WCC), a new eco-label being developed for cannabis farms, truly benefit wildlife. Dr. Johnson’s project will implement WCC-recommended habitat enhancements on cannabis farms, and examine their impact via wildlife surveys. Project collaborators include Jackee Riccio (Executive Director, Cannabis for Conservation) and Wildlife Associate Professor, Dr. Barbara Clucas.

Chris Aberson recently published two papers as part of a multinational team including over 400 researchers. The first article, titled A multi-country test of brief reappraisal interventions on emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic appeared in Nature Human Behaviour (NHB). A second article, In COVID-19 health messaging, loss framing increases anxiety with little-to-no concomitant benefits: Experimental evidence from 84 countries, is in press at Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). PNAS and NHB are highly influential outlets, boasting huge impact factors over 12.0. The team presently has an additional manuscript under review and another in preparation.

  Julie Slater-North,  Lecturer/PPSC-SSW Program Coordinator along with colleague Michelle Rainer, Lecturer/Pathway/SERVE Project Coordinator and both from the Department of Social Work, recently published a chapter in the book, School Social Work: Engaging Social Justice and Racial Equity from Practitioners’ Perspectives The chapter, titled Rural Indigenous School Social Work as Best Practice School Social Work. This text is a collection of writings regarding serving diverse youth in California schools, written by both school-based practitioners and university-level educators.

Meenal Rana will be representing the department of Child Development on April 19th, 2022, as a keynote speaker for the 2022 Higher Colleges of Technology Education Student Research Virtual Conference in Abu Dhabi, UAE (Conference theme: "Educating the Whole Child in a Post-Pandemic World"). Rana presents her keynote on "Importance of Trauma-Informed Teaching in Post-Pandemic Classrooms".

On March 5, Cultural Resources Facility Co-Directors Nick Angeloff and Mark Castro hosted a symposium at the Society for California Archaeology meeting in Visalia, California. Staff members Cydney Lanthier, Daniel Busch, Saige Heuer, Jason Laugesen, and Curtis Rogers presented their efforts and findings from archaeological reconnaissance of understudied areas within Humboldt and Trinity Counties in 2020 and 2021. The August Complex of Fires of 2020 revealed areas that were previously covered by heavy vegetation. Cannabis legalization in California also allowed cultural resource studies on private properties. The team's survey and research in these areas provided further insights into California's prehistory.  

Dr. Kathy Thornhill and the Center for Community Based Learning have been awarded a two-year grant from the California Volunteers, Office of the Governor to implement a fellowship program that will support one-hundred Cal Poly Humboldt undergraduate students, including AB540 Dreamers. The Fellows’ time and talent will help revitalize and energize local community-based organizations and advance campus strategic priorities. Fellows will serve 450 hours in one of three focus areas: Climate Change, K-12 Education, and Food Insecurity.  

Chris Aberson, Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department, recently joined the editorial advisory board of Meta-Psychology. Meta-Psychology is an open access outlet focused on meta science and quantitative methodology. Dr. Aberson is presently the editor-in-chief of Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy as well as an associate editor at Collabra Psychology. He also serves on the editorial boards of Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, and Basic and Applied Social Psychology.

Dr. Matthew Hurst received a $37,000 grant from the CSU Agricultural Research Institute to study the effectiveness of vegetative barriers on reducing agricultural runoff from lily bulb fields in the Smith River Plain. Research findings will be used to determine the best land management practices for lily bulb cultivation. The project will be carried out in direct collaboration with the California Water Board and Hastings Bulb Growers, Inc, and with the assistance of undergraduate student researchers. An additional $46,000 in matching funds will be provided by the Water Board for water quality monitoring in the stream tributaries.

Sam Kelly and Cessair McKinney (Environmental Science and Management undergraduates), and ESM faculty Kerry Byrne published a restoration note on the efficacy of a Photography App to enumerate native seeds in the journal Ecological Restoration. Their work was supported in part by GI 2025 funding, and their article was published Open Access thanks to the Sponsored Program Foundation. Access the article here: http://er.uwpress.org/content/40/1/29.refs

Dr. Amber Gaffney, Associate Professor of Psychology, along with colleague Michael Hogg from The Claremont Graduate University, recently published a chapter in the book The Psychology of Sociability (2022, Routledge). The chapter, titled A Social Identity Analysis of Sociability, focuses on how needs for affiliation with groups and examines both positive (e.g., better mental and physical health) and negative aspects (e.g., polarization, authoritarianism) of group identification and sociability.

Nicolette Amann has been awarded a $50,000 grant from the National Writing Project to support the design and implementation of a year-long professional development program that will be offered through the Redwood Writing Project. The program will bring up to 15 public school teachers together from across the region to create curriculum that will enrich history education, enabling educators to better teach the “complicated stories” from local and US history, and promote more robust and explicit instruction in the four domains of civics education--knowledge, skills, dispositions, and behaviors.

Carisse Geronimo, graduate of the Energy Technology and Policy program in the Environmental Resources Engineering department (2020) and current research engineer at the Schatz Energy Research Center, has published an article in the journal "Fuel" with Drs. Sintana Vergara, Charles Chamberlin, and Kevin Fingerman. The article is titled "Overlooked emissions: influence of environmental variables on greenhouse gas generation from woody biomass storage" and is available here: (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fuel.2022.123839)

Dr. Ho Yi Wan and his lab were featured on The Wildlife Professional, the flagship magazine of The Wildlife Society. The article spotlights Dr. Wan's career path and his advocacy in advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion. View article here: https://bit.ly/WAN_TWP2022

Former Natural Resources graduate student Allison Nunes and advisor Kerry Byrne (ESM) published a paper in the Journal of Arid Environments. The paper describes the effects of experimental drought and shrub microsite on the seed bank of two sagebrush steppe plant communities in southern Oregon. It is available Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaridenv.2022.104752

Dr. Panta presented a paper entitled "Political Favoritism and Value of Corporate Cash Holdings " at the Southwestern Finance Association Annual conference held in New Orleans on March 3rd, 2022. This paper examines the impact of political favoritism on the value of corporate cash holdings and finds cash holding, on average, is less valuable for politically favored firms than their counterparts. In other words, this study shows that political favoritism is associated with a decrease of $0.44 in value for a $1.00 in cash holding. The authors define the stock ownership by the member of the US Congress as a measure of political favoritism to a firm.