|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|
|
||
6 Receive McGregor-Oresman Research and Teaching Assistantship Grants
MARCH 31, 1999--Six members of the college faculty recently 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.
Taylor Allen, assistant professor of
biology, is working with Katy Roberts, a senior from
Salisbury, Connecticut. Roberts is guiding a research team
of 
three
other students seeking to isolate and sequence the genes
coding for the switch that regulates contraction in three
specialized muscles of the toadfish. For studies on the
design of muscle, the toadfish is interesting, Allen says,
because one of its muscles has the fastest known contraction
speed. The project is one of three semester-long
investigations that students are pursuing in Biology 314, a
course that introduces students to methods of
cell-physiological research.
As part of his ongoing project on workers' politics in China, Marc Blecher, professor of politics and East Asian studies, is working with Yinghao Huang, a junior from Baltimore, Maryland. Huang is surveying the Tianjin Evening News and the Workers' Daily for the last five years, looking for and summarizing articles on worker unrest and workers' views of industrial reforms. She is also surveying several books on workers' politics that Blecher obtained during his 1997-research trip to China. Huang summarizes key sections and alerts Blecher to those he should study in detail. She also codes and helps analyze data from questionnaires filled out by Blecher's research assistants in Tianjin.
Patricia Mathews, associate professor of art, is working with Robin Cowie, a senior from Pittsburgh, to research material for an analysis of New York artist May Stevens.
Melissa
Berke, a junior geology major from Gahanna, Ohio, is helping
Bruce Simonson, professor of geology, with his continuing
studies of samples from the 2.6 billion-year-old impact
layers that he and his students discovered in Australia and
South Africa. (See story, "Day by Day, Centimeter by
Centimeter: My Search for South African Spherules," on page
4 in the 325K PDF (Acrobat) file of the Observer
of November 8, 1996.) Berke
will finish some of the counts started by Simonson's former
students, do some new ones on her own, and help Simonson
compile information on spherules in younger impact layers,
like the one at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary, for
comparison.
First-year student Sarah Hall, from Honaunau, Hawaii, is working with Dan Stinebring, associate professor of physics, to improve the Introductory Astronomy course, which about 130 students take every fall. Sarah's work focuses on two areas: improving the collaborative-learning part of the course (group assignments and activities) and improving the web site for the course and integrating it more closely into weekly activities.
James Zinser, professor of economics, and Alyse Schrecongost, a senior from Salem, West Virginia, are analyzing competition (antitrust) policy in Latin America. Following three kinds of concerns, they are collecting information about new legislation, the conduct of competition-policy agencies, and the results of administrative and judicial decisions in several countries. They are reading decisions posted on Internet sites in Latin America and local newspaper accounts of administrative decisions, as well as the extensive professional literature.
Please send comments, questions, and suggestions about Oberlin Online news and feature articles to Linda.Grashoff@oberlin.edu.
