Dean's Undergraduate Fellowship

Please join me in congratulating my outstanding research student, Mr. Ahmad Maaz (pictured below with his collaborators, Jake Grimes and Kurt Piening, at the Missouri Natural Resources Conference in January), for receiving the Dean's Undergraduate Fellowship for Summer Research!  Ahmad will receive funding through this award to compose and publish a manuscript describing the research we have been conducting on the phylogeny and taxonomy of the Smooth Earth Snake (Virginia valeriae).  He will also be presenting this research Monday at the Rockurst Outstanding Research Seminar and next weekend at the Missouri Academy of Science annual meeting; and all three students will be presenting their poster at the Festival of Student Achievement on campus next week.  This is truly an exciting time for our research team!  Great job, guys.

Honors Induction Ceremony

Yesterday morning, families, faculty and the Honors Student Executive Board formally welcomed the honors freshmen class into the Honors Program.  We gathered for a nice brunch and were honored to have two distinguished speakers, Mr. Shail Mehta (freshmen honors student) and Dr. Joanna Carraway-Vitiello (Honors Advisory Committee member and professor in the honors program, pictured talking with me below).  We were so proud to celebrate the

largest freshmen honors class in Rockhurst history!  Congrats to all of these outstanding students (and a special thanks to Dr. Bill Sturgill for taking pictures)!

Belize

Over spring break, I had the singular opportunity to travel to Belize with two phenomenal companions and 16 incredible students for a service immersion trip.  After the (treacherous!) drive from Belize City to Punta Gorda, we settled into the St. Peter Claver Parish guest house and prepared ourselves for the week's work.  Our charge would be to drive (two more treacherous hours each way - see picture above) to a small Mayan village on the Guatemalan border each day, where we would help the local people lay the foundation of a home for school teachers.  Teachers in this district are assigned to a village school and sometimes have to ride the bus or walk for hours to get to work if there is nowhere for them to stay in the village.  In fact, some of our students served as substitute teachers each day because teachers were unable to make it to work.  This home will eventually house 5 teachers, and we had the honor of literally breaking the ground at the site, which overlooked the village.  We had an amazing and reflective week, and we are now working to continue our service from the Rockhurst campus.

AJCU Honors Conference

This weekend, three honors students (pictured with their requisite cheesesteaks and a Rockhurst alum with whom we had dinner) and Dr. Mary Haskins and I went to Philadelphia for the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities Honors conference.  We came away with lots of great ideas to incorporate into our program, and we got to go to the Mutter Museum on our last day.  As four out of five of us were biologists/science majors, we were very interested in seeing the specimens at this museum of medical history and anatomical anomalies.  It was really fascinating and is a don't-miss destination in Philadelphia.

Evolution blogs!

Please scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the service-learning blogs put together by my creative Evolution students!  And remember to check back with them periodically throughout the semester to check their progress! (picture from www.evolution.berkeley.edu)

Expanding Your Horizons

Friday night, my ball python, Monty, and I packed up and went to Science City to introduce 50 middle-school girls to herpetology (the study of reptiles and amphibians).  We were one of several sessions in a great program called "Expanding Your Horizons" that introduces young girls to Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields.  The girls all fell in love with Monty, including those who "hated" snakes initially, and enjoyed learning about him and the other herps at the Nature Center in Science City.  They also had a chance to pick up stuffed or rubber snakes with snake tongs to practice their skills.  Some of the girls are pictured here (with permission).

Service Trip Meeting

In March I will have the singular honor of serving as a Companion on our Rockhurst service immersion trip to Belize.  This will be my fourth service trip with the university, and my third to Belize.  I look very forward to seeing the people of Belize again, and to exposing 12 of our best students to this amazing country.  Yesterday, we had our all-group service trip meeting, at which the Counseling Center talked us through the results of our Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test (experientially, as you can see from the picture, where we are all lining up in accordance with our MBTI results).  If you have ever found Waldo, you should be able to pick me out in this picture...