Gallery Opening

On Friday night, Drs. Baceski, Martin, Miller, and Kovich and I attended a gallery opening for Rockhurst's own Anne Austin Pearce.  The opening was at the Sherry Leedy Gallery in the Crossroads Arts District, a district that hosts an evening event on the First Friday of each month in which local artists are celebrated and their art displayed.  Anne's work is stunning and the chance to discuss the pieces with her introduced a personal element that made them even more extraordinary.  The piece pictured here is entitled "The Ride;" and though I loved all of the paintings on exhibit, I was most moved by this work.

Lucy talk

Tuesday night, some colleagues and I attended a fascinating talk at the Linda Hall Library by Dr. Donald Johanson (presentation pictured above), the Founding Director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.  Dr. Johanson discovered the most famous fossil in the world, "Lucy," and thereby gained worldwide recognition as a paleoanthropologist (he made certain that we understood that paleoanthropology is in fact NOT the study of old anthropologists).  The event space was packed and we all listened intently as he described the day on which he uncovered Lucy's remains in the Tanzanian desert (November 24th, 1974, incidentally 115 years to the day after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection), and the implications of that finding.  The species to which Lucy belongs, Australopithecus afarensis, is a member of the lineage that split from the other Great Apes (like the orangutan, pictured above with my niece) and gave rise to modern humans.

Evolution blogs

Please be sure to check out the blogs from my Evolution class at the bottom of the page!

Easter break

I hope everyone had a great Easter!  I spent the break at a beach cabin in Texas with my family.  Sun, sand, 85 degrees, and my little niece playing on the beach. Sounds terrible, right? I grew up very near this area so it was nice to go back home and see some of the features of southeast Texas that I have missed.  We spent a lot of time on this beach as kids, so it's exciting to see my niece continuing this tradition. I'm glad to be back in KC, but it was a fun diversion.  Pictured is a beach cabin very similar to the one in which we stayed, back lit by an amazing sunset.

Induction Pictures

Posted are pictures of our student and faculty speakers (see previous blog entry), respectively, as well as their audience on Sunday.

Honors Freshmen Induction

The formal induction ceremony for our first-year honors students was held this past Sunday in Massman Hall on campus.  We invited the students and their families to a nice brunch to celebrate the official recognition of their status as honors students.  Our student speaker was Ms. Kayla Frey, and our faculty address was graciously given by Dr. Risa Stein (Department of Psychology). Several honors faculty members, as well as our President, Fr. Curran, were in attendance, as were most of the members of our Honors Student Association Executive Board.  I have to thank Renee McGautha, our student Eboard, and Sodexo catering service for making this a very smooth and successful event.  I will post pictures as soon as I have a chance to download them.

Honors and KCWildlands

We are now back from spring break and I realized that I never blogged about our KCWildlands work day from  the week prior!  For this work day, several community volunteers, including many of our honors students, worked to clear the fence line at Jerry Smith Park.  This park contains a remnant prairie (one of the few left in Missouri), and it's right in our backyard (just off of 135th and Holmes in south KC, MO)!  It's a very biologically diverse and beautiful area, especially in spring and summer.  Our workday, despite the fact that it was the last weekend of February, was great - sunny but just cool enough to be perfect for manual labor.  The pictures include action shots of our honors students at work, as well as a map from the KCWildlands website in case you'd like to visit this spectacular place.