Faculty from Pitt-Bradford spent the fall
semester not only teaching, but also conducting and presenting research.
Dr.
Wayne Brinda, assistant professor of education, presented a session titled
“Teasing Your Students to Read: Create Teasers to Engage and Motivate Students
to Read” at the 2012 Annual Convention of the National Council of Teachers of
English in Las Vegas.
The
presentation discussed the use of a “teaser” like those given on the nightly
news to present students with a context for a story and get them interested
before they began reading.
Brinda
also had a paper, “Engaging Students in Inquiry through Field Trips in Your
Classroom,” accepted for publication by the Middle School Journal.
Dr.
Donna Dombek, associate professor of education, participated in a panel
discussion titled “Building Bridges between Theory and Practice: Strategies to
Forge Connections between Foundations Courses and Clinical Experience” at the
Pennsylvania Association of College and Teacher Educators in Grantville.
Dr.
Michaela-Christina Drignei, associate professor of mathematics, made a
presentation titled “Numerical Reconstruction for the Potential of an Inverse
Sturm-Liouville Problem with Mixed Boundary Conditions” at the American
Mathematical Society Eastern Sectional Meeting in Rochester, N.Y.
Dr.
Tony Gaskew, associate professor of criminal justice, presented “Police
Officers, Free Speech and the Social Media: Misconduct in the 21st
Century” at the American Society of Criminology annual conference in Chicago.
Dr.
Tammy Haley, assistant professor of nursing, was co-author of the study “Condom
use Among Sexually Active Rural High-School Adolescents: Personal and
Environmental, and Behavioral Predictors” published in the Journal of School
Nursing.
The
study looked at the predictive value of selected personal, environmental and
behavioral factors for condom use among rural adolescents in grades 9 through
12.
Haley
and her colleagues surveyed more than 1,100 students in three school districts
in northwestern Pennsylvania in 2011 and found that the strongest predictor for
condom use was whether or not teens thought they should use them.
Dr.
Tracee L. Howell, instructor of American literature and composition made two
presentations during the fall semester.
She
was chairperson of a session, “Writers in Hollywood: The Migration to
Screenplay,” at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association 2012
Conference at Seattle University. Howell designed the session, which explored
the work of 20th century American writers such as Raymond Chandler,
William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker who wrote in
Hollywood.
She
also presented “Thicker than Water: Jewish Identity in Vera Caspary’s Early
Fiction” at the 2012 Association for Jewish Studies Conference held in Chicago.
The paper explored the presentation of Jewish identity in the first four novels
of Vera L. Caspary, a 20th century writer known primarily for her
1942 detective novel “Laura,” upon which the 1944 film noir classic “Laura” was
based.
Dr.
Om Singh, assistant professor of biology, performed research on campus titled
“Electromagnetic Field Mediated Bio-Stimulation and Characterization of Indigenous
Extremophiles.” One of Singh’s research specialties is examining organisms that
exist under extreme conditions to determine how their survival tricks could
benefit on biological, chemical or industrial processes.
Dr.
David Soriano, associate professor of chemistry, performed research on campus
titled “Semiochmicicals: A Chemical Ecology Research Project.” Currently, he is developing biodegradable citric
acid polymers that will release bird anti-feedants and the German Cockroach
female sex pheromone. This activity is within the domain of Chemical Ecology.
Soriano is also writing a book manuscript under contract with Nova Science in
Long island, N.Y., on introductory chemical ecology.
Dr. Jean Truman, assistant professor of
nursing, presented a workshop, “Assessing Basics: Standardized Patients,” at
the Mid-Atlantic Regional Human Patient Simulation Network 2012 Conference in
Charlottesville, Va.
Truman
told an audience of physicians, pharmacists, anesthesiologists and nursing
educators how simulations allow nursing faculty the opportunity to assess the
competency of student nurses in a controlled environment.
Finally,
Dr. D. Reece Wilson, assistant professor of education made a poster
presentation on the effects of text genre on students’ ability to understand
scientific content. The presentation was made at the Hawaii international
Conference on Education in Honolulu last month.
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