Faculty Notes

by John McLain

Dharshi Bopegedera’s coauthored paper, “Laboratory Experiment Investigating the Impact of Ocean Acidification on Calcareous Organisms,” appeared in the July issue of the Journal of Chemical Education.

Prison Obscura, a traveling exhibition that opened at The New School in March, features selected photographic works from incarcerated juveniles who worked with Steve Davis from 1997 to 2002. Selections from his portrait series, Captured Youth, are featured in Try Youth as Youth at the David Weinberg Gallery in Chicago, which runs through May 9. Selections from Davis’ Evergreen-inspired Back to the Garden series recently appeared in the Austrian publication Woman: “10 Hippies von heute im Portrait.”

The Climate CoLab at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology honored MES faculty member Kathleen Saul and her colleagues for their proposal, Democratic Finance: Energy of the People, By the People, For the People. The Climate CoLab uses online contests to find innovative ways to address global climate change. Saul’s team was one of only four to be honored in a field of 34 entrants. Their proposal calls for private investment through crowdsourcing to install and operate photovoltaic electrical systems on the largely unused rooftops of federal buildings.

In April, Longhouse Director Tina Kuckkahn-Miller received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Museum at Warm Springs in Oregon. The award recognizes her two decades of leadership in promoting Native American interests and cultural activities.

Paul Przybylowicz spent the last two weeks of February in Guatemala as an invited consultant with the Partners of the Americas’ Farmer-to-Farmer Program. Przybylowicz worked outside Guatemala City with local mushroom farmers seeking to improve their shiitake production methods.

Faculty emeritus Michael Beug’s book, Fungi of North America: A Mushroom Reference Guide (written with Alan E. Bessette and Arleen R. Bessette) was nominated for a 2014 PROSE Award. The book is the first ascomycete guide to be published in color, with highly detailed photographs that one reviewer described as “glorious.”

Faculty emerita Nalini Nadkarni’s longstanding quest to use nature imagery to improve the mental health and well-being of prisoners was recognized by Time magazine, which named her “blue room” concept among the 25 Best Inventions of 2014. Since 2013, Oregon’s Snake River Correctional Institution successfully used a blue room to reduce stress among inmates in solitary confinement. It is an exercise space where a projector plays video of outdoor scenes.

Faculty emeritus Bill Ransom’s The Jesus Incident and The Lazarus Effect, the first two novels in The Pandora Sequence that he co-authored with Frank Herbert in the 1980s, are now audiobooks (in CD and MP3) from Blackstone Audio. Audiobooks of the final novel in this series, The Ascension Factor, will follow in the next few months. The Pandora Sequence, which was long out of print, enjoyed a resurgence following the success of a three-novel omnibus print release of the works.

Ken Tabbutt exhibited photographs from his recent sabbatical in Europe at Evergreen’s Galerie Fotoland. His collection, “Through the Eye of a Geologist,” links landscapes with the geologic processes that created them. The focus of his work is volcanism in the eastern Mediterranean and Canary Islands and glacial geomorphology in the Alps and Norway. “The natural processes associated with volcanism and glaciation,” Tabbutt writes, “produce some of the most spectacular landscapes on Earth.” A number of the images are also online at Inside Evergreen.

Michael Vavrus’s new book, Diversity and Education: A Critical Multicultural Approach, was published by Columbia University’s Teachers College Press in December. (The book’s foreword is by Wayne Au ’94, ’96 MiT, a UW-Bothell professor who was featured in the Fall/Winter 2014 Evergreen Magazine.)

Shangrila Joshi Wynn’s invited book chapter, “Postcoloniality and the North-South Binary Revisited: The Case of India’s Climate Politics,” will appear later this year in The International Handbook of Political Ecology (Edward Elgar Publishing).