Faculty/Staff News of Note
August 2006
The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board has funded the $11,500 proposal “Penn State Behrend Program to Reduce Underage and High-Risk Drinking” submitted by Amanda Knerr, associate director of student affairs.
Fordham University Press will publish the book France During World War II: From Defeat to Liberation, written by Michael Christofferson, associate professor of history, and Thomas R. Christofferson.
Clare Porac, professor of psychology, has returned from Washington, D.C., where she spent the 2005-06 academic year as the visiting senior scientist in the Science Directorate of the American Psychological Association (APA). (Read a summary of her activities while in residence at APA using the Web address www.apa.org/science/psa/july06year.html.) Clare will continue to work on special projects for the APA Science Directorate during the upcoming months. Also, “Pseudoneglect: Evidence for Both Perceptual and Attentional Factors,” a paper co-written by Clare, Alan Searleman, professor of psychology at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, and Katina Karagiannakis, a graduate student in psychology at Marymount University in Arlington, Virginia, appears in the August 2006 issue of the international neuroscience journal Brain and Cognition.
Dave Skellie, Pennsylvania Sea Grant’s coastal land use and economic specialist and chair of the Seaway Trail Pennsylvania steering committee, helped unveil four new interpretive signs at a news conference held last week. Seaway Trail Pennsylvania is a 64-mile stretch of Route 5 and 5A running parallel to the lake that has been designated a National Scenic Byway; the new signs to be installed along the trail are titled “Erie’s Land Lighthouse, On Top Again,” “ Why Do Grapes Grow Here? The Concord Grape Belt,” “ Freshwater Fishing Capital, Industry and Innovation,” and “Dobbins Landing, Erie's Hub for Travel and Trade.”
Wen-Li Wang, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and Thomas L. Hemminger, professor of electrical and computer engineering, have had a second paper accepted for publication this summer. “A User-Oriented Reliability Modeling Approach for Web Systems” will be published in the International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology.
Two biology faculty have submitted new three-year proposals to the National Science Foundation. Michael Campbell, associate professor, has requested $299,139 to fund “RUI: Characterization of the Interaction between NDP1/OHP2 in Plants.” Yi-Hong Wang, assistant professor, submitted a $380,908 proposal titled “Characterization of Leafy Sepal and Sterile Flower Mutants in Tomatoes.”
John Fizel, director of the Penn State iMBA and professor of economics, discussed “The Winner’s Curse in Major League Baseball” at the annual meeting of the Western Economics Association International in San Diego. Also, John recently was interviewed and quoted in the July 27 issue of the USA Today article “Batter Up! Sports Economics hits field” and in the July 7 issue of the Erie Times-News article “Hosts aren’t getting rich from World Cup: 20 questions with Penn State Behrend economics professor John Fizel.”
Kenneth J. Fisher, professor of engineering, Michael Lobaugh and Robert M. Michael, lecturers in engineering, Shannon K. Sweeney, assistant professor of engineering, and Peter J. Kuvshinikov of Erie-based Tool & Die Productions had the article “Development of a Cost Model for Manual Tool Polishing” published in the spring/summer 2006 issue of International Journal of Modern Engineering, a peer-reviewed online publication found at www.ijme.us.
A paper co-written by Clare Porac, professor of psychology, appears in the latest issue of the international neuropsychology journal Laterality. “The Relationship Between Hand Preference Consistency, Health, and Accidents in a Sample of Adults Over the Age of 65 Years” was written with Alan Searleman, professor of psychology at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.
Archie Loss, professor of English and American studies, has published the article “‘I Found It on the Web’: Research in English Studies in the Digital Future” in the most recent issue of The Grove: Working Papers on English Studies (University of Jaen, Spain). The article is an outgrowth of a lecture Archie gave at University of Jaen in March 2005 when he was a visiting scholar in the Department of English and Philology.
“Analysis of Two-Dimensional Gage Repeatability and Reproducibility,” an article by Shannon Sweeney, assistant professor of engineering, has been accepted for publication in the online journal Quality Engineering (Taylor & Francis).
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