Celebrating Scholarship

April M. Beisaw, Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology, is the author of “Taking Our Water for the City: The Archaeology of New York City’s Watershed Communities,” recently published by Berghahn Press.  Over 100 Vassar students contributed to the fieldwork for this book.

Mallory Whiteduck, Assistant Professor of Political Science, was awarded the 2022 Ralph Henry Gabriel prize for “The Rez: Aesthetics of the Everyday in Native American Literature and Visual Culture” (University of Michigan).

Allison Puglisi, Assistant Professor of History, received an honorable mention from the American Studies Association for her dissertation, “Redefining Residency: Black Environmental Thought in New Orleans, 1929-1998” (Harvard University).

David Esteban, Associate Professor of Biology, received one of nine research grants made by the Patient-Led Research Collaborative to fund high-impact projects that seek to understand the causes, diagnostics, and treatments of Long COVID. His funded project, entitled “Microbial metabolites as disease-modifying factors in Long-COVID,” will investigate the production of, and response to, microbially derived AhR ligands in the microbiomes of people with Long COVID.

Paul Kane, Professor of English, was awarded the Order of Australia by the Australian government for “significant service to literature, particularly through the promotion of Australian arts, poetry, and emerging talent.” He also recently published his eighth collection of poems, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, a series of “verse essays.”

Lynn Christenson, Associate Professor of Biology, received a National Science Foundation award with her collaborators from George Mason University and USDA Forest Service, to support a workshop related to “Forest biodiversity responses to changing climate across the Americas: Synthesis of long-term ecological data.”

Jingchen (Monika) Hu, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, received support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to advance research, application, and outreach in the area of statistical data privacy.

Ed Buie II, Assistant Professor of Astronomy, secured an ACCESS research grant for supercomputing time on the Anvil Supercomputer at Purdue University for his project in “Exploring the Impact of Varying Star-Forming Backgrounds and Turbulent Conditions on Non-Equilibrium Chemistry in Simulated Galactic Halos.”

Jan Cameron, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, is an assignee of the Intergovernmental Personnel Act Assignment (IPA) program and will serve in the coming year as a Program Director for the Analysis Program within the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS), Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the National Science Foundation (NSF).