JULY 2018

Sara Atwood, associate professor and chair of the Department of Engineering and Physics, reported these achievements:

  • She participated in Olin College’s inaugural Sketch Model Summer Workshop in Boston, Massachusetts, June 18 through 20, 2018. The workshop brought together 12 faculty members who were selected, nationally, from engineering, the arts and the humanities, to design, creatively, integrated arts-humanities-technology learning experiences at the college level. The Mellon Foundation funded the workshop.
  • She presented a paper, titled “Social Enterprise Model for a Multi-Institutional Mentoring Network for Women in STEM,” at the inaugural CoNECD Conference (Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity) in Arlington, Virginia, from April 29 to May 2.
  • She presented a paper, titled Improved “Pedagogy Enabled by Assessment Using Gradescope” and co-authored a second paper, titled “Effects of Research and Internship Experiences on Engineering Task Self-Efficacy on Engineering Students Through an Intersectional Lens” at the 2018 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference on June 24 and 27 in Salt Lake City, Utah. For the latter paper, she was awarded the Best Diversity Paper across all relevant submissions to the conference.

 

Kurt DeGoede, professor of engineering and physics, presented and published a paper, “Competency-Based Assessment in Dynamics,” in the proceedings of the American Society for Engineering Education Conference. This paper received recognition as the Best Paper in the Mechanical Engineering Division for 2018 (more than 1000 members in this division).

 

Brenda Read-Daily, associate professor of engineering; Kurt DeGoede, professor of engineering and physics; and Stacey Zimmerman, associate director of Strengths Coaching and Ethical Leadership Development, presented their paper, “Gallup StrengthsFinder in Engineering” at the American Society for Engineering Education’s annual conference in Salt Lake City, Utah, on June 26, where were awarded Best Presentation in the First-Year Programs Division.

Read-Daily also presented her paper, “Hands-on Activities to Improve Students’ Conceptual Understanding of Water Hardness,” at the conference.

 

Ryan Rippeon ’20, engineering; Debra Wohl, professor of biology; and Brenda Read-Daily, associate professor of engineering, presented a poster, titled “Nitrate Removal Performance in a Sulfur-Limestone Amended Agricultural Drainage System,” on June 5 at the Pennsylvania Water Environment Association’s Annual Technical Exhibition and Conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

 

JUNE 2018

Sara Atwood, associate professor and chair in the Department of Engineering and Physics, gave a presentation, titled “A Design-Thinking Model for Developing Socially Responsible Engineers,” at the 11th-Annual Engineering and Liberal Education Symposium held at Union College on June 1 and 2, 2018. She described an activity held in the engineering department to use the engineering design process to approach the topic of school shootings and gun violence in honor of the National Walkout Day on March 14, 2018.

 

MAY 2018

Mark Stuckey, professor of physics; Timothy McDevitt, professor of mathematics; Michael Silberstein, professor of philosophy, and Alex Sten ’17 wrote a paper that received honorable mention in the prestigious Gravity Research Foundation 2018 Awards for Essays on Gravitation. The paper, “Could GR Contextuality Resolve the Missing Mass Problem?,” will now be considered for publication in the International Journal of Modern Physics D.

 

JANUARY 2018

Sara Atwood, associate professor and chair in the Department of Engineering and Physics, was a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley during a fall sabbatical, where she gave an invited talk on Medical Polymers at UC Berkeley. She also gave invited talks on Creativity in Engineering Education for the Stanford chapter of the American Society for Engineering Education and on Engineering Identity Formation for First-Generation Students for the Stanford Designing Education Lab.

AUGUST 2017

Margo Donlin, an engineering and physics major, attended the Landmark Conference Summer Research Symposium on July 27, 2017, and presented a poster about her SCARP project, “Reaction Time of Young Adult and Middle-Aged Men and Women During A Forward Fall.”

 

Brenda Read-Daily, assistant professor of engineering, presented the poster, “Introducing Water Treatment Concepts Using Backpacking and Point-of-Use Technologies,” at the conference of the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

 

July 2017

Margo Donlin, an engineering and physics major, attended the Landmark Conference Summer Research Symposium on July 27, 2017, and presented a poster about her SCARP project, “Reaction Time of Young Adult and Middle-Aged Men and Women During A Forward Fall.”

March 2017

Peter Licona, assistant professor of PK-12 STEM education, presented “Translanguaging to Foster an Inclusive Learning Environment” at the Pennsylvania National Association of Multicultural Education conference at Dickinson College.

Licona and Alexandria K. Poole, assistant professor of philosophy, presented on Scientific and Ethical Literacy at the 2017 Lancaster Learns Conference.

November 2016

Kurt DeGoede, professor of engineering, and Kelly Seymour ’12 had significant media attention for research conducted on “Cellular Telephone Dialing Influences Kinematic and Spatiotemporal Gait Parameters in Healthy Adults.” The research was published in the Journal of Motor Behavior earlier this year. Canada’s Global News and the UK’s Telegraph, Daily Mail and IFL Science ran articles on the research.

October 2016

Michael Silberstein, professor of philosophy; Mark Stuckey, professor of physics; and Timothy McDevitt, professor of mathematics and department chair, received a contract with Oxford University Press for their book, “End of the Mechanical Universe.” This book will argue for a revolution in fundamental physics, moving from dynamical explanation in the mechanical universe to adynamical explanation in the block universe.

Gabrielle Genvario, electrical engineering; Tommy James, mechanical engineering; Parke Martin, mechanical engineering; Ryan Shirk, mechanical engineering; Adam Snyder, mechanical engineering, all Class of 2016, collaborated with Lancaster Science Factory to construct a musical water fountain at the children’s interactive technology and science center. They built the exhibit as a class project to demonstrate how solenoid valves work and because they wanted to combine mechanical and electrical engineering concepts. The exhibit debuted in October 2016 in the Science Factory’s Mueller Hall.

Brenda Read-Daily, assistant professor of engineering department had her research, “Kinetics of nitrous oxide (N2O) formation and reduction by Paracoccus pantotrophus,” published in AMB Express 6:85

Kurt DeGoede, professor of engineering and physics, published a paper with Kelly Seymour ’12. “Cellular Telephone Dialing Influences Kinematic and Spatiotemporal Gait Parameters in Healthy Adults” was published in the Journal of Motor Behavior 2016. He served on Seymour’s Master’s Thesis Committee at the University of Delaware.

Michael Twist ’17 presented a paper “Pose Method of Running: Fact or Fiction” at the American Society of Biomechanics Annual Meeting, in Raleigh. Two other research students Margo Donlin ’19 and Otis Statham ’18 attended the four-day conference, as well.

Summer 2016

Sara Atwood, associate professor of engineering, published a paper in the proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education, held in New Orleans in June 2016. The paper was titled “Best Practices for Using Standards-based Grading in Engineering Courses.” The study was funded by NSF DUE: IUSE grant for “Making Grades Meaningful: Standards-based Grading for Engineering Project Courses,” on which Atwood is a co-principal investigator.

Brenda Read-Daily, assistant professor of engineering, presented her paper, “Using Backpacking Water Purification Systems as a Means of Introducing Water Treatment Concepts to an Introduction to Environmental Engineering Course,” at the 2016 annual conference of the American Society for Engineering Education held in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Kurt DeGoede, professor of engineering and physics, and Jennifer Bush ’15, Taylor Falin ’15 and Lindsay Hetherington ’15 contributed to the poster “Clinical Perspectives on the Utility of the Electronic-Hand Assessment Tool II (E-HAT II)” presented by Dan Panchik, associate professor of occupational therapy, at the Neuro-Developmental Therapy Association conference.

Kurt DeGoede, professor of engineering and physics, Christina Hoban ’15, Natalie Hrynkiewicz ’15 and Jillian Miller ’15 contributed to the poster, “Developing the Electronic-Movement Analysis Tool (E-MAT): Detecting Changes in Tremor,” presented by Dan Panchik, associate professor of occupational therapy, at the Neuro-Developmental Therapy Association conference.

Mark Stuckey, professor of physics; Michael Silberstein, professor of philosophy; and Timothy McDevitt, professor of mathematics and department chair, won honorable mention in the prestigious Gravity Research Foundation Awards for Essays on Gravitation for their essay “End of a Dark Age?” The essay contains and explains their fits of the Union2 Compilation supernova data, THINGS galactic rotation data, and ROSAT/ASCA data on the mass profiles of X-ray clusters without need of dark energy or dark matter. These results contradict the concordance model of cosmology wherein dark energy and dark matter are believed to comprise 96 percent of the mass-energy in the observable universe. The fits are achieved by modifying Regge calculus, the graphical form of Einstein’s general relativity, based on their proposed new approach to fundamental physics called the Relational Blockworld.

May 2016

Mark Stuckey, professor of physics; Michael Silberstein, professor of philosophy; Timothy McDevitt, professor of mathematics and department chair; and A.K. Sten ’17 co-authored “End of a Dark Age?,” which was accepted for publication in the International Journal of Modern Physics.