News

The risk of such a policy, says Gettinger, “is that countries may be more willing to use military force when they can do so without risking their own people.”

Seniors Elena LeFevre, Nicola Koepnick, Adelina Colaku, Page Benoit, and Madeleine Breshears, and Bethany Zulick ’16 are among the Fulbright winners for 2018–19.

Professor Keesing is codirector of “The Tick Project,” a first-of-its-kind study to see if tick reduction can be effectively accomplished on a large scale in entire neighborhoods.

The Purple Comet Math Meet is a free, online, international team mathematics competition designed for middle and high school students.

The $9.4 billion budget request represents a significant expansion in drone spending over 2018.

Extending the definition of food loss to include inefficient dietary choices, a new study quantifies the benefits of plant-based diets versus animal-based diets for food security. The study, published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), is coauthored by Bard College Research Professor Gidon Eshel. Animal based foods require more resources per unit product (gram, calorie, or gram protein) than plant-based foods. Since resources allocated to feed production for livestock yield less human food compared with what they could have yielded if they were instead used for plant-based food production, allocating resources to animal-based food production constitutes an effective food loss. Alon Shepon and colleagues quantify this “opportunity cost” by estimating the amount of food that could be produced if animal-based items were replaced by nutritionally at least comparable plant-based items in the U.S. diet.

The authors found that plant-based replacements could produce 2- to 20-fold more protein per acre than beef, pork, poultry, dairy, or eggs. The authors further estimate that replacing all animal-based products in the mean American diet with plant-based alternatives would allow increased food production sufficient to feed approximately 350 million additional people, or 110 percent of the current U.S. population. This putative added food availability handily exceeds potential food availability gains by elimination of conventional food losses, mostly spoilage, leaky supply chains, or post-retail waste.

Gidon Eshel is research professor in environmental science and physics at Bard College. He earned a BA from Haifa University and MA, MPhil, and PhD degrees from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.

More coverage at Phys.org: “Food waste: The biggest loss could be what you choose to put in your mouth”
 

Extending the definition of food loss to include inefficient dietary choices, a new study quantifies the benefits of plant-based diets versus animal-based diets for food security.

See how New Annandale House was built in this short video. Four repurposed shipping containers make a new media lab, home of Bard's Center for Experimental Humanities.

Bard College’s Center for the Study of the Drone released a 23-page report that breaks down available counterdrone products and identifies the ways each solution approaches drone mitigation.

With its double-height space and glass end walls, Bard College’s new media lab is not your standard prefab container building.

Arthur Holland Michel '13 is a finalist for the Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, given to support the completion of significant works of nonfiction on topics of political and social concern.

Bard College student Lily Zacharias ’19, who is majoring in Political Studies with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality Studies, has won the prestigious Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs’ 2017 International Student/Teacher Essay Contest on the World’s Greatest Ethical Challenge. Zacharias received first prize in the undergraduate category for her essay “Artificial Intelligence’s Ethical Challenges.”

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 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.

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.

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. 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 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 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.