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Psychologist Simine Vazire will deliver the 2019 Andrew J. Bernstein ’68 Memorial Lecture at Bard Hall on Thursday, April 25, at 6:00 p.m. Vazire, professor of psychology and director of the Personality and Self-Knowledge Lab at UC Davis, will give a talk on “The Credibility Revolution in Psychology.” 

Bard alumna, literature major, and technology reporter Natalia Drozdiak cowrote the story for Bloomerg on the first image of a black hole, a “huge breakthrough for humanity.”

The Ecological Society of America (ESA) has named Felicia Keesing, Bard College’s David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, as one of its 2019 Fellows. The Society's fellowship program recognizes the many ways in which its members contribute to ecological research and discovery, communication, education and pedagogy, and management and policy. Fellows are members who have made outstanding contributions to a wide range of fields served by ESA, including, but not restricted to, those that advance or apply ecological knowledge in academics, government, non-profit organizations, and the broader society. The Society cited Keesing for “pioneering research in the ecology of infectious diseases and community ecology of African savannas, and pedagogical research that she has integrated into a vision and practice of college science teaching for enhancing scientific literacy.”

Felicia Keesing, David and Rosalie Rose Distinguished Professor of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, has been on the Bard faculty since 2000. She has a B.S. from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1995, she has studied how African savannas function when the large, charismatic animals like elephants, buffaloes, zebras, and giraffes disappear. She also studies how interactions among species influence the probability that humans will be exposed to infectious diseases. Keesing also studies Lyme disease, another tick-borne disease. She is particularly interested in how species diversity affects disease transmission. More recently, she has focused on science literacy for college students, and she led the re-design of Bard College’s Citizen Science program. Keesing has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, National Geographic Society, National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among others. She has been awarded the United States Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2000). She is the coeditor of Infectious Disease Ecology: Effects of Ecosystems on Disease and of Disease on Ecosystems (2008) and has contributed to such publications as Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ecology Letters, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Ecology, BioScience, Conservation Biology, and Trends in Ecology & Evolution, among others.

The Ecological Society of America, founded in 1915, is the world's largest community of professional ecologists and a trusted source of ecological knowledge, committed to advancing the understanding of life on Earth. The 9,000 member Society publishes five journals and a membership bulletin and broadly shares ecological information through policy, media outreach, and education initiatives. The Society's annual meeting attracts 4,000 attendees and features the most recent advances in ecological science. For more information, visit esa.org.

 

Simon’s Rock students Eric Yi and Samantha Statter joined professors Eric Kramer and Donald McClelland, and Joseph Carlson of the Joint Genome Institute, as coauthors of an academic research paper published in Plant Direct that provides new insights into one of the big mysteries in forest ecology.