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| Vol. 19, No. 6 | Oct. 7, 1999 |
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| Vol. 19, No. 6 | Oct. 7, 1999 |
For four senior faculty members, the 1999-2000 academic year is notable for the absence of some of the traditional trappings of college life. As fellows of UD's Center for Advanced Study, Fleda B. Jackson, English; Murray V. Johnston, chemistry and biochemistry; Steven E. Sidebotham, history; and Steven D. Skopik, biological sciences, are freed from all regular assignments, except the supervision of graduate theses and dissertations, to conduct research or focus on instructional improvement.
The annual awards support and extend the University's commitment to fostering the highest levels of teaching and scholarship. At least two of the awards each year support research and at least one is given to further instructional improvement.
A widely published poet and founding director of the University of Delaware Poetry Festival, Jackson received a Center for Advanced Study Instructional Improvement Award that she will use to promote the teaching of poetry both by English graduate students at the University and by secondary school English teachers throughout the state.
Jackson, who received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Arkansas, has devoted 20 years to teaching in UD's English department, where she has led efforts to train UD graduate students and Delaware high school teachers to teach poetry more effectively. One of these initiatives is the Graduate Student Poets in the Schools program, which for the past three years has sent talented English graduate students into Delaware secondary schools to lead poetry workshops in collaboration with classroom teachers. This program reaches over a thousand secondary school students annually while providing UD graduate students with valuable pedagogical training.
The second program is the two-year-old University of Delaware Poetry Festival, attended in its first year by 20 English teachers and 100 secondary school students. The festival features a nationally known poet who reads his or her own work and lectures on techniques for teaching poetry. Part of the program is a teachers' workshop led by English department faculty. English education students assist in the event.
Jackson's work during her fellowship year will focus on deepening and extending the impact of these two successful English department outreach initiatives, with the ultimate goals of leading workshops for secondary teachers in teaching poetry and writing two guides to teaching poetry. The first, to be designed for secondary school English teachers, will include lesson ideas, a list of grade-specific goals for teaching poetry and suggestions as to how these goals might be achieved. Not only will this guide be useful for the teachers' workshop component of the University of Delaware Poetry Festival, but it will also prove helpful for other teachers and UD English education students.
The second publication will be a training manual for UD graduate students who will be conducting workshops in secondary schools through the Graduate Student Poets in the Schools program.
"High school teachers in Delaware are struggling today with many issues having to do with content standards and teacher accountability," Jackson said. "A major goal of all my work and the specific focus of the guides I'll write is coming up with a way to help our graduate students and high school English teachers teach poetry with authority in the face of the standards they're being asked to uphold. Poetry tends to be dismissed as an 'extra,' something that fills up time that could more usefully be spent studying something else. I really look forward to using this fellowship to help other educators justify why they teach poetry and articulate what students gain from it."
Johnston is an internationally recognized leader in aerosols and mass spectrometry research and has received substantial support for his work, including numerous National Science Foundation grants and two current Environmental Protection Agency grants. Johnston's research during the fellowship period will address what effect the size and composition of airborne particulates have on human health, how these particulates form and how methods used to study air pollution can be adapted to study bioaerosoles, particularly virons, or individual virus particles.
His work on airborne particulates is directly relevant to the First State, where the air frequently exceeds the primary regulatory standard for this and other criteria pollutants.
Johnston's group recently was awarded a grant from the EPA to develop and field test a portable device that can analyze particulates in settings where they have been difficult to study, such as homes, office buildings and commercial centers. With this device, which will use laser velocimetry to determine size and laser ablation mobility spectrometry to determine composition, Johnston said they plan to generate data for EPA-sponsored epidemiological studies. The Center for Advanced Study grant comes at a crucial time for Johnston, for the EPA studies, which promise to have far-reaching scientific and regulatory impact, will begin collecting data as early as 2000.
Along with their work on particulate size and composition, Johnston's group is studying nucleation, the process by which aerosol particles are formed. Specifically, they hope to experimentally verify the composition of the "critical nucleus," the cluster/particle size at which both evaporation and condensation are energetically favorable, by using technology they recently developed that produces molecular clusters in a mass spectrometer.
A third focus of Johnston's research during his fellowship year is bioaerosols, particularly virons. While an individual viron can be observed by electron microscopy so as to determine its size and shape, and chemical characterization of virons can be performed in bulk, there exists no way as yet to analyze the chemical make-up of a single viron. If this could be done, it might answer such a fundamental question in molecular virology as, Why are so few virons in a sample infectious? The work of Johnston's group in this area has the potential to be relevant both to molecular virology theory and its medical applications.
"I'm very excited to have been awarded this fellowship, for this is an important time in aerosol research," Johnston said. "We have new research methods available. Both government and private organizations are very interested in learning more about airborne particulates and their environmental impact. This fellowship will allow me to focus on research and, I hope, make significant contributions to the field."
Johnston, who earned a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin and completed a postdoctorate at Northwestern University, came to UD as an associate professor of chemistry in 1990 and was named a full professor in 1996. His research also includes synthetic and biological macromolecule characterization by mass spectrometry.
An archeologist and ancient historian whose work has attracted both significant scholarly recognition and considerable popular attention, Sidebotham has received a Center for Advanced Study research fellowship to support his work on four interrelated projects concerning ancient trade routes.
After earning a Ph.D. in ancient history from the University of Michigan, Sidebotham came to UD in 1981 as an assistant professor of history and has taught a range of courses on the ancient world.
Sidebotham will use the Center for Advanced Study research award to conduct archaeological fieldwork in Egypt and library research and writing in the United States to prepare several manuscripts for publication. He will direct a team of scholars from UD and from Leiden University, the Netherlands, in its seventh season of archaeological excavations at Berenike, Egypt, site of an important Red Sea emporium for approximately 800 years (up to the sixth century A.D.). UD graduate and undergraduate students will be invited to assist the team.
Results of this ongoing work have been published or are being prepared for press. In addition to the fieldwork and manuscript preparation related to it that Sidebotham plans to undertake during his fellowship year, he wants to complete a book-length study on nine years of work conducted jointly by UD and the University of Michigan on two major ancient highways that linked Berenike to trade centers on the Nile and continue a UD archaeological survey of the 800-kilometer-long Via Hadriana, a Roman road traversing the Eastern Desert. Using Global Positioning System technology, the team of three researchers has pinpointed over half of its course and identified, plotted and mapped numerous previously unrecorded sites along the route.
A corresponding project entails a detailed survey of the ancient road linking the Red Sea port of Marsa Nakari to the Nile emporium of Edfu. Sidebotham began work on this previously unrecorded route in the winter of 1997 by locating, photographing and dating many of the stations along the road.
"Now is a critical period in the Red Sea-Eastern Desert region," Sidebotham explained, "as tourism and rapid population growth have accelerated development at such a pace that archaeological sites are threatened. I feel that we must, at the very least, document the existence of these cultural treasures before they are irrevocably lost. The Center for Advanced Study award will allow me the time to continue fieldwork, publication and fundraising in support of this important endeavor."
Skopik, who in 1978 transformed the way first-year biology is taught at UD to biology majors and other science-oriented students, has received a Center for Advanced Study Instructional Improvement Award to integrate computer technology into biology laboratory courses while making most efficient and effective use of available staff. His efforts will complement work already under way thanks to a grant given to UD by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an instrumentation grant that he and his colleagues received from the National Science Foundation.
Skopik, who holds a Ph.D. in biology from Princeton University, has been honored with numerous teaching and advising awards during his 32-year career at UD and he also is a professor in the University Honors Program. From 1978-1984 he was instructor-in-charge of Introductory Biology (BISC 207-208), a year-long course he designed that is taken annually by about 900 students.
He will use the award to introduce computer technology, such as probes and sensors, into the laboratory component of biology courses. Working with his colleague Robert Hodson in biological sciences, he will oversee the writing of new exercises making use of this technology and the creation of training manuals for faculty, teaching assistants and staff. Part of his project will be then to find ways to make best use of the new laboratory format within the context of classroom activities. Other instructional improvements he will investigate include the use of software packages that simulate laboratory exercises.
During his fellowship year Skopik will draw on his extensive teaching and administrative experience to improve staffing of biology labs and mentoring of graduate teaching assistants. A constant in all of his fellowship year activities-and his directive as co-chair of the department's curriculum review committee with Gregory Stephens-will be to take a broad look at the department's direction in teaching.
"What first drew me to UD back in 1967 was the innovative new biology curriculum that had just been put into place," Skopik said. "This fellowship will give me the chance, I hope, to contribute significantly to the shaping of a curriculum appropriate to this age, one that makes full use of the technology available for research, experimentation and analysis."
-Christina Bielaszka DuVernay
