News and Notes by Date
August 2012
08-06-2012
08-01-2012
The Simons Foundation has awarded Greg D. Landweber, associate professor of mathematics at Bard, a Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians. This grant offers Professor Landwber $35,000 over a five-year period to be used in support of collaboration, travel and research expenses for his project, Supersymmetry and K-Theory. The grant also includes funds to enhance the research atmosphere of the Mathematics Program at Bard.
08-01-2012
This summer we have 38 eighth-graders on campus at Bard participating in an intensive math program. These New York City students are spending three weeks doing seven hours of math per day! Bard math professor Japheth Wood says, "I'm amazed to see the students" educational trajectories after SPMPS. Some have gone on to some very selective NYC public high schools, and all of them are going to breathe life into their high school's math program."
08-01-2012
Bard math professor Lauren Rose has received an award from the American Institute of Mathematics to attend a week-long program in Washington, D.C. entitled, "How to Run a Math Teachers' Circle Workshop." Professor Rose's team comprises middle school and college educators who will use the D.C. workshop to work to improve mathematics education in U.S. middle schools. They plan to host bimonthly Math Teachers' Circles in the Hudson Valley that bring together middle school math teachers and professional mathematicians.
July 2012
07-12-2012
07-09-2012
You can also listen to an interview with Michael Specter on this topic on the Takeaway at NPR.
07-06-2012
Michael Tibbetts is a professor of biology at Bard, as well as a faculty member in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program.
He is a molecular biologist who uses zebrafish as a model to investigate questions related to hearing. Dr. Tibbetts earned his B.S. from Southeastern Massachusetts University and his Ph.D. from Wesleyan University. He is a recipient of the Peterson Fellowship from Wesleyan and a National Science Foundation grant (2008, to study transmission of anaplasmosis from ticks to people). Tibbetts is a member of Sigma Xi, the Genetics Society of America, and the American Society of Microbiology. His professional interests include the neuroscience of hearing, cancer chemotherapeutics, bioethics, genetics, and human origins. He has been on the Bard faculty since 1992.June 2012
06-13-2012
Professor Jain will receive $35,000 supporting his research on new ways to fight bacterial infections. Bard students Coral Liu, Sheneil Black, and Weiqing Wang work with Jain on this project.
May 2012
05-30-2012
What would it take to make faster computers and more efficient solar panels? Jesse Kohl '07 is looking for answers at the crossroads of nanotechnology and clean energy.
05-23-2012
The college has been awarded $800,000 from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute for science education, building on the success of the Citizen Science Program.
05-14-2012
Bard Math Circle's last event of the year took place last weekend, and found Bard math students and local schoolchildren drawing tessellations with sidewalk chalk at the Kingston Library.
April 2012
04-06-2012
04-02-2012
On Tuesday, April 10, the Bard College Citizen Science Lecture Series will present the lecture “Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Investments in Reducing Enteric and Diarrheal Diseases Burden.” While diarrhea-related deaths have decreased globally, diarrheal diseases remain the second-leading cause of childhood deaths. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s investments are aimed toward saving and improving millions of lives thorough the development and delivery of low-cost interventions that prevent and treat diarrheal and enteric diseases.
February 2012
02-21-2012
January 2012
01-26-2012
Think of it as a sort of CSI: Human Rights. The Human Rights Project at Bard has addressed the role of forensic evidence in war crimes cases through a series of workshops and conferences. In this essay, HRP director Thomas Keenan examines the investigative process in the case of Nazi Josef Mengele. Slate.com called the piece one of the five "best stories ever written about war criminals on the lam."
01-11-2012
Bard first-years in the Citizen Science program are developing their scientific literacy by studying infectious disease in a monthlong intensive. If you're in the area, join us for the Citizen Science lecture series, which is free and open to the public!
December 2011
12-16-2011
12-10-2011
Bard's Citizen Science educational programs for area schoolchildren taught by Bard's first-year students and Citizen Science faculty will expand to include five school districts, with more than 1,500 local children participating.
November 2011
11-17-2011
Bard CEP first-year graduate students attended NYSERDA‘s Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation, and Protection in New York: “Linking Science and Policy” conference in Albany yesterday. The conference provided students with an opportunity to make connections with professionals in the environmental field and pursue internship opportunities for next year.
11-16-2011
President Botstein cautions that our "Our democratic culture has ceded to a populist fear of that which is difficult to understand," and writes that the scientific and educational communities have an obligation to take a stand for the validity of science and combat growing science illiteracy in the United States.
11-04-2011
Congratulations to Bard chemistry prof. Craig Anderson, who has received the prestigious Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award for 2011, providing a research grant of $60,000!
September 2011
09-27-2011
"We yearn to control and master the future, and one corollary of that is our deep wish to cede control over our lives to the hyper-rationality, objectivity, and reliability of machines," writes Arendt Center director Roger Berkowitz.
09-15-2011
Ethan Bloch is a professor of mathematics at Bard. Dr. Bloch was born in Norwalk, Conn., in 1956, and spent part of his childhood in Connecticut and part in Savyon, Israel. After graduating from high school in Tel Aviv he returned to the U.S., going to Reed College, where he majored in mathematics and developed a firm belief in the value of a liberal arts education.
After graduating from Reed in 1978, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1983, focusing on geometric topology, and in particular on simplexwise linear maps. After Cornell he spent three years at the University of Utah as an instructor of mathematics, subsequently coming to Bard College in 1986, where he has been ever since. Dr. Bloch writes, "I have found Bard to be a wonderfully appropriate environment for my interest in teaching mathematics in a liberal arts setting that encourages spirited inquiry, and maintains a nice balance between individuality and flexibility on the one hand, and a traditional curriculum on the other." His publications include A First Course in Geometric Topology and Differential Geometry (1996), Proofs and Fundamentals: A First Course in Abstract Mathematics (2000, 2010), The Real Numbers and Real Analysis (2011), and numerous scholarly articles. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation grant (1985–87) and is a member of the American Mathematical Society. Dr. Bloch is married and has two children, who, he says "quite easily fill all my non-Bard time."July 2011
07-01-2011
The article "Implicit Science Stereotypes Mediate the Relationship between Gender and Academic Participation," coauthored by Bard psychology professor Kristin Lane with Bard undergraduates Jin Goh and Erin Driver-Linn has been published by Sex Roles as an "Online First" and can be read on the journal's website in the July 2011 issue.
April 2011
04-14-2011
Most parents assume they would need high-yield explosives to get their kid out the door and into a library to do math for two hours on a Saturday afternoon, but Bard math professor Japheth Wood has been offering an alternative to dangerous household pyrotechnics right at the Kingston Library — the Bard Math Circle.
February 2011
02-04-2011
January 2011
01-23-2011
Bard's Citizen Science Program strives for greater science literacy for students.
01-17-2011
“Activities are focused on middle school children, but everyone is welcome,” said Japheth Wood, professor of mathematics at Bard College, noting that math teachers at all levels have come by on the second Saturday of the month to participate in the two hours of fun.
01-17-2011
Bard's innovative January Citizen Science intensive gives first-year students science fundamentals, regardless of major.
December 2010
12-01-2010
Felicia Keesing is the lead author of a new study on biodiversity and human disease, which was published in Nature in December 2010. This important study has received international attention and press at over 70 venues and blogs.
October 2010
10-05-2010
President Leon Botstein appears on the Colbert Report to show how Bard's Citizen Science program addresses science illiteracy in the United States.
January 2009
01-09-2009
Bard High School Early College II (BHSEC II), a public school partnership between Bard College and the New York City Department of Education, has received a Science and Math Improvement Grant from the Toshiba America Foundation. The $13,440 grant was awarded for an innovative research project, "Urban Effects on Lightning Activity in Queens, New York."
February 2007
02-01-2007
Perhaps no city rivals New York, but lately Shanghai is making its bid. As the booming Chinese financial center races to emulate its Western counterpart, these two culturally disparate cities share increasing similarities. Now, thanks to an innovative grant to the Bard High School Early College (BHSEC), students from BHSEC and Shanghai’s pre- mier high schools, Affiliated High School of Fudan University and No. 2 High School of East Normal University, are examining their respective megacities through collaborative comparative environmental studies of New York’s Hudson River and Shanghai’s Huangpu River.