For the Record provides information about recent professional activities and achievements of University of Delaware faculty, staff, alumni and students.

Recent presentations, publications and honors include the following:

Presentations

Kelvin Ramsey, scientist with the Delaware Geological Survey and professor of geological sciences, with C.M. Thompson and R. Lockwood, R., presented “Molluscan Paleoecology and Substrate Affinities on the mid-Atlantic Continental Shelf” at the Geological Society of America meeting, held Oct. 22-25 in Seattle, Washington. With J. Hayden and P.D. Gori, Ramsey also presented “Delaware’s Atlantic Sand Resources: Atlantic Shore and Beach Preservation” at the 2017 National Coastal Conference in Fort Lauderdale Florida.

Flavio Hickel Jr., assistant professor of political science and international relations, presented a paper at the Northeastern Political Science Association (NPSA) conference on Nov. 11  in Philadelphia. The paper was titled “Making American Exceptional Again: Donald Trump’s Civil Religious Political Base.”

Publications

Cathy Matson, Richards Professor of American History, has published three articles recently.  One, "Putting the 'Lydia' to Sea: The Material Economy of Shipping in Colonial Philadelphia," appeared in The William and Mary Quarterly's recent special issue devoted to new scholarship on the intersections of local peoples and global developments in the 18th century. This article explores the enmeshed relationships of Philadelphia merchants who dealt with dense port-city neighborhoods of craftsmen and sailors, as well as their equally dense system of relationships in every corner of global trade. It does so through the lens of how one merchant partnership put a ship at sea. A second article, "Situating Merchant in Late-18th Century British Atlantic Port Cities," was co-written with Emma Hart of St. Andrews University, Scotland, and published in Early American Studies this fall. In it, the authors compare and contrast three merchants' commercial connections, and they find startling distinctions based on the different port city communities of Edinburgh, Charleston and Philadelphia. Matson's third recent article is "Economic History at a Crossroads: Reconsidering Methods, Spaces and Peoples," and it appears in Journal of the Early Republic, Volume 36, as the introductory essay in a special issue that Matson guest edited, stemming from a conference that Matson organized and hosted.

Robert Hampel, professor of education, published “Blurring the boundary between high school and college: The long view” in Phi Delta Kappan, November 2017, pages 8-12.

Honors

Two alumnae of UD's doctorate in economic education program, first-ever graduate Erin Yetter and most recent graduate Amanda Jennings, received awards at the recent 56th annual Financial Literacy and Economic Education Conference in Brooklyn, New York. Yetter, who is senior economic education specialist of the St. Louis Federal Reserve’s Louisville Branch, won the Rising Star Award from the Council of Economic Education and the National Association of Economic Educators (NAEE), an annual award that honors new NAEE members “who have hit the ground running.” At this same conference, most recent program graduate Jennings received the Phil Saunders Best Paper Award. This award recognizes an NAEE member who authored an economic education paper judged the best of the year. UD’s Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship recently hired Jennings to work on multiple projects, a hiring supported by the Fontana Financial Literacy Fund, which was created as a result of a recent gift from finance and economics alumna Donna M. Fontana. Visit UD’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics blog to learn more about Yetter, Jennings and their awards.

Two UD teams took first place prizes at this year’s HackPrinceton. For Best Hardware, the winning team was composed of senior electrical and computer engineering student Kaleb Burd, junior electrical and computer engineering student Jason Reynolds, and senior electrical and computer engineering student Vinay Vazir. Their device, FarSight Safety, is designed to help individuals using walkers prevent falls. UD also had winners in the Ark-IoT: Decentralize Everything - Blockchain Challenge category. The team, which included junior economics student Jonathan Wood, senior electrical and computer engineering student Mark Seda, junior computer science student Liz Strobel, and senior applied mathematics student Pasquale Zingo, used an Ark platform to design a local currency powered by the Internet of Things.

A pair of UD doctoral students in electrical and computer engineering, Patrick Cronin and Fateme Hosseini, took second place in the Embedded Security Challenge at the 14th annual New York University Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) games, which bills itself as “the world’s largest and most comprehensive set of student-led security challenges.” In the Embedded Security Challenge, competitors were asked to use fault detection and recovery techniques to make programmable logic controllers more resilient to hacks. The UD team was advised by Chengmo Yang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

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