8 Receive McGregor-Oresman Research and Teaching Assistantship Grants By Sue Kropp
	Earlier stories about McGregor-Oresman researchers and teaching assistants: "Murder in the Chemistry Lab" (August 24, 1998) "The Verdict Has Been Decided in the Chemistry Lab Murder Trial" (December 17, 1998) "6 Receive McGregor-Oresman Research and Teaching Assistantship Grants" (March 31, 1999) "10 Faculty Members to Conduct Research with Students under McGregor-Oresman Grants This Summer and Fall" (May 18, 1999)		FEBRUARY 24, 2000--Eight members of the College faculty received grants from the College's McGregor-Oresman Fund in December. The grants enable faculty to hire students to help on research projects or undertake teaching assistantships this semester. Joanne Erwin, associate professor of music education, and two students will research and produce a manual to help College students tutor children in the local schools. Jami Silver, a senior from Farmington, Connecticut, and Paul Pitcher, a senior from Chicago, are gathering information for the publication. Erwin, Silver, and Pitcher plan to publish the manual--which will include each school's policies, administrative structure, and general advice for tutors--this spring. Carter McAdams, associate professor of theater and dance, will continue working with Nusha Martynuk, associate professor of dance, and Oberlin poet Lynn Powell to produce a guidebook for local teachers interested in incorporating the visual arts and music into classroom education. McAdams also will work with a student research assistant, who will help produce a CD-ROM to accompany the guidebook, and a web-page that chronicles the project's progress. Mark McQuade, a senior from North Vernon, Indiana, will assist Richard Miller, professor of singing, in the classroom during the semester. As a teaching assistant, McQuade will share decision-making duties with Miller, and be responsible for presenting acoustic data to the students in Miller's class. "Mark is also an assistant in the vocal-arts laboratory," says Miller. "His experiences there will allow him to bring his personal interests in the physiology and acoustics of the singing voice to the class." William Norris, professor of sociology, and a student research assistant will investigate the impact, support, and/or opposition of other people and groups to members of the lesbian, gay men, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) communities in Cleveland. They also will organize a general committee to share information and oversee conferences for LGBT communities at colleges belonging to the Great Lakes Colleges Association. Anne Trubek, assistant professor of expository writing and English, and Peter Soppelsa, a senior from Lawrence, Kansas, will produce a textbook, Technologies of Writing: From Plato to the Digital Age. The book will examine connections between the development of new technologies and the history of writing. The textbook is intended for use in composition and interdisciplinary first-year courses. Veljko Vujacic, assistant professor of sociology, is working on a manuscript, "From Class to Nation: Communism and Nationalism in Russia and Serbia." Ada Menaker, a junior from Mount Kisco, New York, will help Vujacic by working with primary sources from Russia's perestroika period. Maja Gosovic, a sophomore from La Pierre, France, will help Vujacic with the Yugoslav Serbian portion of his research. Robert Warner, Longman Professor of Natural Sciences, and Jonathan Needleman, a first-year student from Olney, Maryland, will continue Warner's research in the measurement and theoretical modeling of nuclear-reaction cross sections. The two will analyze previously gathered information and compare data from past experiments. Elizabeth Wilmer, assistant professor of mathematics, and Sam Greenberg, a junior from Durham, North Carolina, will investigate simple models of small world graphs through computational experimentation and mathematical analysis. Wilmer and Greenberg are exploring this new field of research because small world graphs model many types of networks and combine features of two well-understood types of graphs in new ways.
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