News

Professor Eshel’s latest study shows that a single change in food habit could dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Corals associate the smell of plastic with food, a new study finds—an example of what Bard biologist Bruce Robertson calls an evolutionary trap, which he defines as occurring “when the cues animals use to make decisions are no longer reliable.”

Professor Christopher LaFratta publishes his research with Bard undergraduates in Optics Express journal, in an article titled "Augmenting mask-based lithography with direct laser writing to increase resolution and speed."
 

Professor Keesing, who is codirecting a study aimed at reducing Lyme and other tick-borne diseases, says that ticks are remarkably well adapted to surviving extreme temperatures.

The study, which established a relationship between onshore wind speed and total microbial aerosols at an urban waterfront, has implications for public health management and urban microbial ecology.

The Citizen Science Program at Bard College will hold a conference titled 'Why Science Matters" on Monday, January 15. The event is a new addition to the annual science literacy intensive for first-year students that takes place this month. The conference includes a number of talks and panels engaging novel perspectives on the connections between science and other areas of human thought. Bard College faculty and staff as well as outside speakers will present, including Francesca Gamber, principal and history faculty member at Bard High School Early College Baltimore. Professor Gamber will give a talk titled "Bending toward Justice: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Localism of the Moral Universe" and moderate the subsequent panel discussion. Visit the Citizen Science website to view all of the conference abstracts.

Professor Felicia Keesing's research on tick-borne illnesses with fellow ecologist Rick Ostfeld appeared in two of the 10 most popular global health and development stories of the year.

Dan Gettinger, Bard alumnus and codirector of Bard's Drone Center, talks about how Isis uses recreational drones for propaganda purposes.

Bard Professor Gideon Eshel is the lead author on a new study published in Nature that provides a model for sustainable U.S. beef production.

The Hudson River Watershed Alliance (HRWA) has honored Bard College with its 2017 Watershed WaveMaker award for an organization working to protect, conserve, and restore Hudson River water resources. The alliance cited Bard for its commitment to launching and organizing the Saw Kill Watershed Community to draw attention and awareness to protection of the Saw Kill, use of the Bard Water Lab to improve the understanding of regional water quality issues, leadership in implementing the Hudson River Subwatershed and Tributary Research Network (THuRST), and academic excellence demonstrated in the College’s Environmental and Urban Studies Program and Center for Environmental Policy. Bard will be presented with the award at HRWA’s Toast to the Tribs Awards Benefit on Tuesday, December 5, at The Falcon in Marlboro, New York, from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. For tickets and more information, visit hudsonwatershed.org.

Working to study, protect, and teach others about the Saw Kill Creek and its watershed, the Saw Kill Watershed Community (SKWC)is made up of Bard faculty, staff, and students; members of the conservation advisory councils of the towns of Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Milan; local, county, and state officials; representatives of the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve, the Hudson River Estuary Program, and Cornell Cooperative Extension (Dutchess County); and several nonprofits, including Riverkeeper, Scenic Hudson, and the Hudson River Watershed Alliance. For more information, visit sawkillwatershed.wordpress.com. Another water quality initiative at Bard is the Bard Regional Green Infrastructure Demonstration Project, which transformed a compacted gravel parking lot using a low impact development approach to manage more than 10 acres of storm-water runoff. The project, which received funding support from the New York State Environmental Facilities Corporation and design inspiration from a graduate student in the Bard Center for Environmental Policy, serves as a living lab for Bard students. In addition, Bard is currently working with the private sector and environmental organizations as part of a NYSERDA grant to evaluate the feasibility of very small hydropower systems on dams located on campus. Over the next year, this work will be available on a public website that starts to answer the intractable question of how various stakeholders can sustainably approach the more than 7,000 dams across the state. Bard students are contributing to this work. For more information on sustainability initiatives at Bard, please visit bard.edu/sustainability.

The Saw Kill Watershed Community brings together Bard College students and area residents to protect the watershed through science, education, and advocacy.

Eli Pariser, Upworthy president and cofounder, author, and Bard College at Simon’s Rock alumnus, visited an Internet and Society class at Bard High School Early College Queens.

Drone Center codirector and cofounder Dan Gettinger '13 discusses how U.S. military spending on drones in 2018 is set to outpace 2017 spending.

The study, "Trojan Females and Judas Goats: Evolutionary Traps as Tools in Wildlife Management," brings together the science from the pest-control, eco-evolutionary, and conservation communities to create a conceptual framework by which evolutionary traps can be repurposed as tools of deception to eliminate or control target pest species.

A new study from the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College finds that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) plans to spend $6.97 billion on drone technology in 2018, a 21 percent jump over this year’s budget and far more than the military previously predicted it would spend. The study finds that the 2018 budget boosts spending on research and modernization efforts, including significant increases to key unmanned sea and ground vehicles.

Bard College has created a new digital media studio made possible by a $40,000 gift from the Cornelia and Michael Bessie Foundation. The gift allowed Bard to renovate and equip a classroom in the Henderson Computer Resources Center, converting it into a new media studio.

Bard College has created a new digital media studio made possible by a $40,000 gift from the Cornelia and Michael Bessie Foundation. The gift allowed Bard to renovate and equip a classroom in the Henderson Computer Resources Center, converting it into a new media studio. The driving design questions for this innovative space asked: How do we create responsive spaces that can be quickly and easily reconfigured to accommodate different uses, learning tasks, and audiences; easily accommodate changes in technology and pedagogy; anticipate greatly expanded use of video conferencing technologies for creating a truly connected classroom; and anticipate the expanded use of tablets and other mobile devices?
 
“Our goal has been to create an environment in which trial and error is encouraged, but that doesn’t require mastery of any sort, rather experiment and instructional problem solving,” says Dean of Information Services and Director of Libraries Jeff Katz. “Rather than undertaking the complicated installation of permanent smart classrooms, we have identified equipment that can be easily deployed to create a particular instructional space in any available classroom.”
 
In this new digital media studio, instructors and students can see and use reconfigurable furniture. They can experiment with new products like room­darkening shades or hand­held projectors, cameras and other technology that can be made available and adopted in their classrooms. The studio has already been used for video conferencing meetings, connecting to Bard College Berlin, Al-Quds Bard College for Arts and Science, Bard-Smolny Program in St. Petersburg, and Cairo. Other courses have conducted interviews with remote subjects, had three-way debates with Berlin and St. Petersburg, set up pop-up workshops with a dozen laptops in a portable cart, held demonstrations of new software such as presentation software Omeka, or GIS, or podcast, or field recording production, and had guest speakers joining classes in Annandale from Vilnius, Lithuania.

Bard College students Telo Hoy and Meagan Kenney have been awarded Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships to study abroad for the fall 2017 semester. Hoy, a music composition major from Santa Fe, New Mexico, was awarded $3,000 to study at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavik. Kenney, a mathematics major from Richmond, Virginia, was awarded $4,500 to pursue studies in Hungary at the Budapest Semester in Mathematics. Hoy and Kenney are among nearly 1,000 American undergraduates from 386 colleges and universities across the United States selected to receive the prestigious award.

As seniors, Arthur Holland Michel ’13 and Dan Gettinger ’13 created the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard. Now they're industry experts.

In this study, Hulbert examines how people suppress the retrieval of intrusive images, focusing on whether and how this process contributes to regulating affect.

Arthur Holland Michel discusses the work of the Center for the Study of the Drone, an inquiry-driven research and education initiative founded in 2012 at Bard College, and the future of drone technology.

Michael Specter explores why some deny scientific evidence, such as the safety of vaccines and GMOs, or climate change. He says denying can provide a sense of control in an unsure world.

Bard professor Felicia Keesing talks about the role opossums and other wildlife play in controlling the tick population.

Bard professor Gidon Eshel is on a team of researchers from four American universities that says the key to reducing harmful greenhouse gases (GHG) in the short term is more likely to be found on the dinner plate than at the gas pump.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Bard College Chemistry Professor Craig M. Anderson funding up to $245,000 over three years to support a research project that will be conducted with undergraduate students. The project, “RUI: Metal complexes with Benzothiophene and/or NHC ligands: Synthesis and Applications,” looks to improve the understanding of metal-ligand bonding, with potential benefits for the environmental, economic, and health sectors, including the development of more efficient and robust organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and anticancer agents. Anderson says a vital component of this work is that it further integrates laboratory research within Bard’s undergraduate curriculum by training students to be more proficient in the practice of science in a contemporary chemistry laboratory and directly involving them in the dissemination of research results through conference presentations and peer-reviewed journal articles.
 
“The hands-on experience our undergraduate students receive from conducting meaningful, publishable research, and by contributing to the writing and preparing of manuscripts is invaluable for their success in their future studies, regardless of their chosen field, and/or for their advancement as scientists,” says Anderson. He notes that NSF support that he has received since 2012 has resulted in nine published manuscripts with 42 Bard College undergraduate coauthors, with other manuscripts forthcoming. “This federal funding gives our students many more great research opportunities.”
 
Craig M. Anderson is the Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Professor of Chemistry at Bard College, where he has been teaching since 2001. He holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Western Ontario and a Ph.D. from the Université de Montréal. His awards include two previous three-year NSF grants (2014–17: $216,000 and 2011–14: $198,000), and, in 2011, the prestigious Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, which recognized his scholarly research with undergraduates as well as his compelling commitment to teaching. The $60,000 award ran from 2011 to 2016. Anderson’s research centers on the study of transition metal complexes with general applications toward bioinorganic and catalytic systems. His work has been published in numerous scholarly publications devoted to chemical sciences, including Organometallics, Inorganic Chemistry, Journal of Organometallic Chemistry, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and the Canadian Journal of Chemistry. His other awards include the Chemical Institute of Canada’s Award of Excellence, Andrew E. Scott Medal and Prize, and Society of Chemical Industry Award.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Bard College Chemistry Professor Craig M. Anderson funding up to $245,000 over three years to support a research project that will be conducted with undergraduate students. The project, “RUI: Metal complexes with Benzothiophene and/or NHC ligands: Synthesis and Applications,” looks to improve the understanding of metal-ligand bonding, with potential benefits for the environmental, economic, and health sectors, including the development of more efficient and robust organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and anticancer agents.

Arthur Holland Michel '13 comments that drones are becoming commonplace both among criminals and the police.

Last year, more public agencies acquired drones than in all previous years combined, with at least 167 departments fielding the flying robots, according to a study by Bard's Drone Center.

Elisabeth Gambino, visual arts faculty at Bard High School Early College Baltimore, has been selected as a Lindblad Expeditions and National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow.

Bard College senior and biology major Molly McQuillan ’17 and Bard assistant professor of biology Arseny Khakhalin, who is McQuillan’s senior project advisor, coauthored a neuroscience paper published in the prestigious life sciences journal eLife.  “A cellular mechanism for inverse effectiveness in multisensory integration” presents new research that explains how the developing brain learns to integrate and react to subtle but simultaneous sensory cues—sound, touch and visual—that would be ignored individually. The study was led by Dr. Carlos Aizenman of Brown University.

Every moment of our lives we use different senses, such as vision, hearing, or touch, to build a fuller, more useful picture of the world around us. But how does the brain make sense of these flows of information? What happens in our neurons (brain cells) when they try to combine signals coming from, say, our eyes with those coming from our ears? To learn more about this question, a joint team of scientists from Brown University and Bard College chose the simplest possible behavior that would rely on two senses at once: a startle response to a soft sudden sound combined with a weak flash of light. They also chose one of the tiniest and simplest animals that can be startled by a combination of sound and light: the tadpole of the African Clawed frog. They used a flash of light so dim and a sound so quiet that neither of them alone would make the tadpole change the way it swam; yet when combined together, these two stimuli startled the tadpole, making it change its swimming direction in response. These behavioral experiments, independently run in the lab of Aizenman at Brown and by McQuillan at Bard, showed that multisensory stimuli in tadpoles lead to stronger behavioral responses only when the stimuli are weak. Until now, it was not known why and how this response, called the “inverse effectiveness of multisensory integration,” appears in the brain.

The team of scientists suspected that the integration of weak stimuli might be due to the activation of a specific information processing system in the brain: one that relies on signaling proteins called NMDA receptors. The Brown University group, led by study lead author Torrey Truszkowski, connected to individual cells in the tadpole brain and recorded their activity. They found that blocking NMDA receptors with a toxin was the only thing that disrupted the “inverse effectiveness of multisensory integration” in individual cells. At Bard, McQuillan found that adding a small amount of this same toxin to tadpole water made “inverse effectiveness” disappear from tadpole behavior. The tadpoles were no longer able to combine information from soft sounds and dim lights to form a stronger response. This study demonstrates for the first time, in any animal, that NMDA receptors in the brain have been shown to combine information from different senses.

Molly McQuillan is an alumna of Bard High School Early College Manhattan. For her senior project, McQuillan built a state-of-the-art experimental setup to study tadpole behavior, which includes a high-resolution LED projector, modified computer speakers, and a self-made infrared HD camera. It is this unique setup that made her contribution to the cutting edge research in multisensory integration possible. McQuillan is passionate about neuroscience and plans to continue her academic career in this field.

This research was sponsored by grants and scholarships from The National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the American Physiological Society, Brown University, and Bard Summer Research Institute (BSRI).

Professor Cathy Collins has been awarded a $371,652 NSF grant to study "how landscape fragmentation interferes with plant-pathogen interactions that maintain local plant diversity."

Bard College senior and biology major Molly McQuillan ’17 and Bard assistant professor of biology Arseny Khakhalin, who is McQuillan’s senior project advisor, coauthored on a neuroscience paper published in the prestigious life sciences journal eLife.  “A cellular mechanism for inverse effectiveness in multisensory integration” presents new research that explains how the developing brain learns to integrate and react to subtle but simultaneous sensory cues—sound, touch and visual—that would be ignored individually. The study was led by Dr. Carlos Aizenman of Brown University.

New research by the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College finds that drone pilots could still be subject to state and local penalties even if they're following federal guidelines.

Karen Phuong and Benjamin Myers tied for the silver medal in this year's Dana Foundation competition to create an original science experiment to test theories about the brain.

Professor Keesing talks about her research into preventing tick-borne diseases, and the appearance of new and sometimes deadly infections in recent years.

Bard biologist Felicia Keesing and her husband and research partner Rick Ostfeld are forecasting a tough year ahead for infections in the region, based on last year's surge in the mice population.

"When Gidon Eshel sits down for a meal, his plate holds a full agenda ... a cornucopia of environmental, social, and political considerations."

When Abiba Salahou was looking at colleges, she knew she wanted a small school. "I was afraid of disappearing in a big university!" she explains. She visited campus along with another student from her Syracuse, New York, high school. By the end of the day, both women had decided that Bard was their top choice. "The people we met and interactions we had that day made me feel that Bard was the right fit. Every student I met wanted to tell me about the College. I knew I wanted to study biology, and I met a woman in the bookstore who was a bio major. She gave me her email and the contact for her favorite bio professor, and told me to email her any time. I felt like I already knew people. It was so nice to think I would come back and already have friends."
 
Abiba is currently conducting a Senior Project in neurobiology under the supervision of her adviser, Arseny Khakhalin. In her study, she examines how the SSRI antidepressant fluoxetine, commonly known as Prozac, affects behaviors such as feeding and appetite in the Xenopus laevis tadpole model. 

Abiba plans to become a doctor, but she also loves the arts and is an avid reader and writer. "My academic interests are broad," she says, "I wanted a college that would allow me to explore both the arts and sciences." Bard’s writing-intensive focus and distribution requirements appealed to her. In conjunction with her biology major and premedical track course work, she’s been able to take fiction workshops. From the beginning of her first year, taking Language and Thinking and First-Year Seminar (FYSEM), she felt challenged to think deeply and write well about material outside of her major. "My FYSEM professor, Wyatt Mason, was helpful in getting me to push myself further and question my academic goals. He is an inspirational, profound person. The first day he walked in to class and asked us, 'What are you doing here?' He meant at college, in life. I had to really think about that and it often comes back to me. He pushed us to think outside of the text." She adds, "All of our discussions were more than just analyzing a paragraph."
 
Abiba cochairs the Muslim Student Organization with fellow senior Sabrina Sultana, and the club has become more active on campus under their leadership. "One of the most rewarding things about being at Bard has been the sense of belonging and the impact I've been able to have with the Muslim Student Organization. We're doing a lot more events and working with other clubs on campus. Last year we raised over a thousand dollars for the Kingston Food Pantry at our Fast-a-thon." The club organizes students on campus to serve the community, raise awareness of Muslim American cultures, and to combat discrimination in a difficult national climate. Abiba has been instrumental in organizing events that encourage campus conversations about diversity and inclusion. "I like to ask challenging questions," she says, "and push people to rethink their assumptions. Let's not shy away from difficult discussions."
 
Abiba readily admits that Bard has changed her. She has become much more aware and outspoken over the last four years. "Bard has really shown me what kind of person I am. I've learned a lot outside of class. Issues that used to seem abstract have become more real and personal for me; as a result I've become less passive." She has become more deliberate in her choices. "I better understand the impact of my actions now, whether it's making smart decisions about academics and my future plans, or being aware of all the messed up things in the world and not accepting them, taking responsibility to deal with them. That's something Bard has definitely taught me to do."

Read more about Language and Thinking, First-Year Seminar, and other elements of the curriculum at Bard.

Read more about joining or creating a club at the College.
 

A new study of the feeding patterns of African penguins is the first where "climate change has been so clearly shown to create an ecological trap," observes Bruce Robertson.

How the Citizen Science Teaching Fellows Program Challenges and Supports Students and Alumni/ae
  
Every January, the first-year class returns to campus during intersession for Citizen Science, Bard College's scientific literacy intensive. Serving about 500 students every year, Citizen Science is a considerable undertaking run by a dedicated staff and 30 visiting faculty members, with the support of a specially trained group of Bard students: the Citizen Science teaching fellows. This year marks the fifth anniversary of the teaching fellows program. Dr. Amy Savage, Citizen Science director and visiting assistant professor of biology, designed the teaching fellow position when she began as director in 2012, and the first team appeared in the labs for Citizen Science 2013. Fifty Bard students and alumni/ae have since served in the role, and as the program grows, so does its impact on the lives of Bardians on campus and after graduation.
 
Teaching fellows make the Citizen Science classroom experience seamless and fluid, working one-on-one with the underclassmen and assisting the faculty with running the laboratory experiments. Teaching fellows often return in subsequent years, forming a close team invested in creating an exceptional experience for the first-year class. Along the way, they receive a great deal of academic and professional mentoring as students and alumni/ae from Dr. Savage, Laboratory Coordinator Rebeca Patsey, and the visiting faculty.
 
If you drop by a Citizen Science lab, you'll see these sophomores and juniors in action. The teaching fellows come in early every day to set up the labs and stay late to break it all down. More than laboratory assistants, they are trained not only in the location and use of materials, but in the fundamentals of the experiments. They master the practical and theoretical elements of each lesson in the context of current scientific inquiry. Fellows learn to approach the experiment from multiple angles so they can support faculty with different teaching styles and perspectives on the material, as well as younger students with different learning styles and levels of scientific background. "A teaching fellow has to be a bit of chameleon," Dr. Savage explains. 
Over two months of training on campus in the fall, they practice teaching every lab and performing every experiment so they can step in however they are needed in the classroom, whether it's demonstrating to students the basics of pipetting or being ready at a faculty member's elbow at the right moment with the materials that illustrate the next example in the discussion. Dr. Savage observes:

They’re working with a number of talented scientists from a lot of different institutions, learning to navigate these relationships in a professional manner and help the faculty be successful. The teaching fellows are representing the culture of Bard to the faculty, but they’re also representing the culture of Bard to our first-year students. Our first-year students have a peer in the classroom that is role modeling what it means to engage in a conversation around scientific evidence from a liberal arts perspective. What does it mean to ask probing questions and to respond thoughtfully? How should you interrogate something, perhaps outside of your area of expertise? Having a scientific background is not a prerequisite, but a willingness to work hard, to learn the materials that you don’t know at the start, to help those that are struggling to grow, and to work as a team, those are the prerequisites for this job.

Coming from a variety of majors, fellows are well positioned to work with first-year students whose academic backgrounds range widely. Junior teaching fellow and psychology major Eleanor Broughton notes the challenge of imagining the first-year perspective and tailoring her teaching to different students. “I’m trying to think about ways of framing what they’re doing in the lab so that they are engaged and making sense of the work. Some of the students might be a little intimidated by the laboratory environment at first, so making it a safe and comfortable space is always our goal.” She adds, “The best part of the job is after I’ve introduced a lab and I’m walking around talking with students, when I see them having fun and really understanding the material.”
 
Citizen Science aims to give all students the tools to be informed citizens when confronted with scientific information. Being able to apply what they learn in the classroom to life outside academia is crucial. The program focuses on infectious disease, and features a series of expert guest speakers who lecture on such topics as HIV prevention and treatment in youth. The faculty encourages students to relate what they see in the classroom to what they might read in the news. Eleanor’s fellow junior psychology major Clarence Brontë observes, “You’re constantly thinking about the greater societal impacts and the way that science moves outside of the lab and into actual world spaces. It's super rewarding to be a teaching fellow because you get to facilitate those sorts of conversations.” Eleanor and Clarence are now both considering careers teaching at the college level.
 
Fellows who excel and show a vision for Citizen Science may be selected as senior fellows. This small group of students in turn mentors the teaching fellows. Senior fellows assist in training the teaching fellows, giving feedback and notes from their experience. "It was an honor in a huge way to be selected by Dr. Savage, to have our opinions valued at that level, and to be amongst people that you respect so highly," says teaching fellow alumna Andrea (Dre) Szegedy-Maszak '16. Last year, the senior fellows collaborated to write a handbook for the teaching fellows. They hold office hours so the new fellows can meet with them and seek advice on teaching and lab support. "This is another opportunity for the team to get up and practice teaching or to work through scientific ideas that are not quite gelling with a peer that has experience and can give them feedback," says Savage.
  
As part of the program, fellows benefit from a level of career guidance that is unusual for a college setting. Throughout their time at Bard and after graduation, Dr. Savage works with dozens of teaching fellows outside of the Citizen Science Program. She offers support on Senior Projects and course selection, gives feedback on their cover letters and resumes, coaches them as they prepare for interviews, and discusses job opportunities with them at length. Often she acts as a reference for jobs and graduate school, and as a sounding board as they consider grants and research opportunities. Teaching fellows learn to translate the liberal arts experience into the workplace.
 
For Dre, this is the first winter in five years that she hasn't been involved in Citizen Science. She took the course as a first-year, served as a teaching fellow in her sophomore and junior years, and returned as a senior fellow in her last year at Bard. "My strongest Bard memories are of being a teaching fellow," she says. At first intending to major in psychology, the laboratory experience in Citizen Science gave her the courage to take her first biology course, Introduction to Microbiology with Assistant Professor of Biology Brooke Jude. She ended up majoring in biology instead. "I wanted to be a teaching fellow because Citizen Science had such a profound impact on me," Dre explains, "and because I wanted to take some of the spark that it lit in me and help other students have that moment."
 
Today, Dre works as the field outreach coordinator at the Afterschool Alliance in Washington, D.C., in a role she describes as directly following from her work as a senior teaching fellow in Citizen Science. "To have my first job out of college be this relevant to my experience and my goals is remarkable," she notes. Dre supports volunteers around the country who are working in nonprofit organizations that encourage STEM learning opportunities for young people. "I am serving that same kind of advisory role with them as I was, as a senior fellow, with current teaching fellows. Dr. Savage helped me learn how to work with a big group of people, how to schedule, how to keep my own time organized. And how to really—this is something that I learned from her example—how to maintain respect from the people you work with by holding yourself and them to a high standard."
 
Teaching fellows describe a deep sense of camaraderie that stems from "having each other's backs" in the classroom, and those relationships continue after graduation. This winter, senior teaching fellow alumna Leah Silverberg '16 will join Dre at the Afterschool Alliance as a research assistant in their STEM and research divisions. When the position became available, Dre contacted Leah and encouraged her to apply. Soon, the two will be colleagues again. Leah notes, "Without Citizen Science, I wouldn't be going into this job or even this field." The combination of science and education training that she received as a teaching fellow is closely in line with the work of the Afterschool Alliance.
 
A double major in biology and studio art, Leah wasn't sure what to expect from taking a foundational science course as a first-year, but Citizen Science surprised her. "My professor paired the science students with the non–science students. What I got out of the program was how to explain difficult scientific concepts to students who hadn't tackled scientific material before," she explains. When she became a teaching fellow as a junior, she brought what she had learned with her lab partner into her work with the new first-year class. "The whole point of the Citizen Science Teaching Fellows Program is learning how to communicate science in ways that everyone can understand," she observes. "People often feel immediately closed off to scientific ideas. To be able to explain difficult concepts to people who have never had any experience with them is a fundamental life skill that doesn’t just apply to science."
 
Dylan Dahan '15 was a biology major at Bard with a periphery focus in French studies. Now he's in graduate school at the University of Oxford studying microbiology and computational biology in the Department of Zoology. His research focuses on using evolution to design probiotics that prevent staph infections. For Dylan, working as a teaching fellow made him feel more self-assured. For the first time, he acquired a body of valuable knowledge and shared it with students. The close work with faculty made being a scientist seem feasible for the first time. "When you are at Bard, you are taking classes and doing projects, but the idea of being a professor, a researcher, or a Ph.D. student is so far ahead that you could never really imagine yourself in that position. But then to engage day to day with these professors almost as peers and to set up and break down labs with Dr. Savage, and with people like Dr. Brooke Jude—the experience bridged that gap between undergraduate student and researcher for me." Dylan is currently applying to Ph.D. programs in the United States. He looks forward doing a lot of teaching and spending a lot of time in the lab.
 
This time of year, as Citizen Science rolls back around, Dr. Savage receives a lot of emails and cards from former students, particularly former teaching fellows, who closely associate winter with being back in the labs. Students will drop in to chat for a few minutes about their course schedule or a job opportunity, or just to catch up. "My role as their boss, as their mentor, is not to tell them the answers; it’s to help them think through their questions and the problems they face. It is to encourage them to identify their core values and to have confidence in their identity," says Dr. Savage. "It’s incredibly rewarding to help so many people continue to be the best version of themselves. Those relationships will last a lifetime. I feel very fortunate to have worked with students that are as interesting and talented as the students at Bard."
 
Follow Bard Citizen Science on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

How the Citizen Science Teaching Fellows Program Challenges and Supports Students and Alumni/ae
A remarkable group of students and alumni/ae has played an essential role supporting Bard first-years in the labs during Citizen Science. Now celebrating its fifth year, the Citizen Science Teaching Fellows Program is having a big impact on the lives of Bardians on campus and after graduation.

Bard professor, biologist Felicia Keesing on why these little marsupials are the unsung heroes of the fight against Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses.

Drones: Is the Sky the Limit?, the first major U.S. museum exhibition on pilotless aircraft, is set to open at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum on May 10.

Biologist Felicia Keesing talks about the two methods the Tick Project is testing to reduce tick-borne illnesses in Dutchess County residential areas.

Science writer and Bard alumnus Nsikan Akpan examines a surge in fake news stories with real-world impact, beginning in 2010 and leading up to this year's election.

Bard College students Kina Carney ’18 and Jessica Liu ’18 have both won highly competitive Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships to pursue studies abroad during the upcoming spring semester. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Gilman scholars receive up to $5,000 toward study abroad or internship costs.
 
Carney, a literature major, will take part in the Pitzer in Botswana program, which includes extended study trips in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Students live with host families, study local cultures, and work with scholars and experts in each country. Participants experience firsthand the concept and life of Ubuntu, the notion that defines the communal nature of the cultural values of the South African, Batswana, and Zimbabwean peoples. Ubuntu is indicated in the greetings that proclaim, “I am well if you are well,” and “my destiny is intricately intertwined with yours.”
 
Liu, a mathematics major, plans to pursue studies in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics (BSM) program. Through BSM, mathematics and computer science majors study under the tutelage of eminent Hungarian scholar-teachers and receive the benefits of Hungary’s long tradition of excellence in mathematics education that includes combinatorics, number theory, and probability theory. BSM instructors are members of Eötvös University, the Mathematical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and Budapest University of Technology and Economics, the three institutions known for having educated more than half of Hungary’s highly acclaimed mathematicians. In keeping with Hungarian tradition, teachers closely monitor each student’s progress. Considerable time is devoted to problem solving and encouraging student creativity. Emphasis is on depth of understanding rather than on the quantity of material.
 
The Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship Program aims to diversify the students who study abroad and the countries and regions where they go. Rep. Gilman (R–N.Y.), who retired in 2002 after serving in the House of Representatives for 30 years and chairing the House Committee on International Relations, commented, “Study abroad is a special experience for every student who participates. Living and learning in a vastly different environment of another nation not only exposes our students to alternate views, but also adds an enriching social and cultural experience. It also provides our students with the opportunity to return home with a deeper understanding of their place in the world, encouraging them to be contributors rather than spectators in the international community.” During the spring 2017 application cycle, the program reviewed more than 2,700 applications for more than 850 awards.

Bard student Elena Botts ’18 has been named the inaugural Serota fellow at the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College. The Kevin Serota Fellowship at the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College was established in June by Kendall (KC) Serota ’04 and his parents, Kim Blaine Serota and Karen Ann Serota, in tribute to KC’s brother, Kevin Daniel Serota, who died in December 2015. The Kevin Serota Fellowship at the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College honors Kevin’s passion and aptitude in the field of drone technology and creation. The fellowship is a semester-long, intensive research position awarded to a student who has demonstrated exceptional research and writing skills, as well as an academic or professional interest in unmanned systems technology and associated issues. The Serota fellow will support a variety of original research initiatives, including both short-term and long-term research assignments, and is expected to work independently under strict deadlines. In addition to assigned work, the Serota fellow will be invited to submit proposals for original research projects to be considered for publication by the Center for the Study of the Drone.
 
Kevin Daniel Serota was Lead System Engineer at Detroit Aircraft Corporation (DAC), where he engineered, created, and built drones professionally. Kevin’s interest in drones started as a hobbyist working with aerial photography, and his passion led him into his career at DAC. He became an invaluable team member and worked on projects including the creation of drones that went to Africa to aid in antipoaching efforts and a research drone that was shipped to Antarctica. Kevin was most interested in the drone’s capacity for good. Kevin’s brother, Kendall (KC) Serota ’04, has been a member of the Bard College Alumni/ae Association’s Board of Governors since 2011. He currently serves as Vice President and Cochair of the Diversity Committee. KC and his family believe that Bard’s interdisciplinary perspective on drones honors the memory of Kevin’s interests and was instrumental in their decision to create the Kevin Serota Fellowship Fund at the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College.
 
Elena Botts’18 is a Global and International Studies major with a concentration in Mind, Brain, and Behavior at Bard College. Since graduation from high school in 2014, Elena has interned and worked for local nonprofits and political campaigns, including working for local officials in the school board and state legislatures. In 2015, she interned at Lawyers for Human Rights, where she did policy research and directly assisted refugees. As a visual artist and poet, Elena explores how the psyche can influence society. Her work has been published in dozens of literary magazines and two poetry books and exhibited in local galleries.

Cyril is a Solution Architect at UiPath, the global leader in Robotic Process Automation. In their personal life, Cyril is the Alumni Chair of The LASA Foundation, and freelances as a tattoo artist. Prior to their current role, Cyril was an Instructor and Student Coordinator for All Star Code, a non-profit connecting young men of color to the tech industry. Cyril was born in Laredo, TX, raised in Austin, and currently resides in Harlem, NYC. They received their B.A. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Bard College in 2016, after completing a joint senior project in group-based cryptography.

Morgan Evans is a PhD student at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, researching natural language processing on privacy policies. She published and presented a portion of her Senior Project, "An Evaluation of Constituency-based Hyponymy Extraction from Privacy Policies," at IEEE's 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. While a student at Bard, she was a research assistant in the Memory Dynamics Lab and a student fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities.

Brad Whitaker '18, a student in Bard's 3+2 engineering program with Dartmouth College, tells the story of coming out to the Bard Lacrosse Team.