Honors Orientation

This year is my first as Director of the Rockhurst University Honors Program and it has thus far been marked by fun and productive activities with some outstanding students. Last week, we welcomed the freshmen Honors students with a pasta dinner, prepared by their Honors mentors and our Honors VP of New Member Development, Ms. Kayla Miller. Dinner was followed by a trip (in the pouring rain!) to the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum and coffee or frozen yogurt. The next day, Honors mentors and mentees worked together on their team-building and leadership skills at the Tucker Leadership Lab (pictured). Through these activities we were all able to grow to know one another and to depend on eachother's skills and knowledge. I can't wait for the next Honors event!

Snake Surgery

Just before classes started my research students (Caitlyn McCall and Ryan Miloshewski) and I, along with a colleague from KU (George Pisani), were consumed by dealing with a problematic study animal. One of the rattlesnakes we track decided to hang out a little too close to a neighbor's home, so we had to rescue her and re-re-locate her to a different site. Before we could do so, we needed to surgically remove the radio-transmitter that allowed us to track her in the first place. The first picture shows George "tubing" her, which entails wrangling her into a tube so we can handle her and anesthetize her prior to surgery. The second picture shows the snake post-op, with me (and Ryan in the background) waiting for her to come out from under the anesthetic, which she soon did. So the surgery was successful and she recovered rapidly enough to be set free a few days later.

Mathfest 2010

A fantastic student (Maureen Whalen, pictured) and I just returned from Mathfest in Pittsburgh, PA, where we each presented a talk concerning our Rockhurst-Hogan Interdisciplinary Summer Institute (a college-experience institute with local high school students). We discussed how the structure of this institute has influenced the Pre-Calculus course at Rockhurst and how it could potentially affect other courses like our Freshmen Seminars. We did this only with the behind-the-scenes help and coaching of a wonderful Math professor, Dr. Guadarrama, who had a baby last week and of course could not attend the conference. As a biologist, I was especially fascinated by the Biomathematics talks; and I also thoroughly enjoyed the discussions on fractals, which are just incredibly cool. To top things off, we got to enjoy a Pirates game and see the lovely Pittsburgh skyline from atop Mt. Washington. And on our way home, we shared a plane with the band Foghat! It was a great experience.