Honors Room

Thanks to the Honors Student Association Executive Board, the Honors Room (Sedgwick 206) has been recently remodeled!  It looks great, and will be much more accommodating and comfy for our Honors Advisory Committee meeting later today.  Thanks, Eboard!

ACUBE

Last weekend, the majority of the Biology Department, myself included, attended the Association of College and University Biology Educators (ACUBE) annual conference in Indianapolis.  I served on a panel about program assessment with Drs. Laura Salem and Chris Wills, and presented a talk about our Biology Field Trip Abroad to Peru (see earlier posts).  We were exhausted when we returned, but now we get to relax a bit since we are currently on Fall Break!  Pictured below are Dr. Janet Cooper presenting a talk about course assessment and an activity we did using pipe cleaners to reconstruct phylogenetic (evolutionary) trees.

Project Amazonas newsletter

Project Amazonas, Inc., is the non-profit organization with whom we worked during our Biology Field Trip Abroad course to the Peruvian Amazon in May of this year.  Their September newsletter just came out, and our group is featured (see below)!  We worked closely with Dr. Devon Graham (President of Project Amazonas and pictured below) and his amazing staff while at Madre Selva Field Station and in Iquitos.  Reading the newsletter really makes me want to go back to the jungle!

Rube Goldberg competition

Saturday morning I went to watch our Engineering students demonstrate the Rube Goldberg machines they had built under the direction of Dr. Mairead Greene (Math and Physics Department).  If you don't know what one is, think back to the Mousetrap game from when you were a kid; or, better yet, check out the OK Go video for "This Too Shall Pass." These students did a phenomenal job with their machines (pictures of two of them below) and it was a lot of fun to see them in action.