News

Holland Michel, Bard alumnus and codirector of Bard's Drone Center, unfolds the little-known history of the rise of unmanned aircraft in the American military.

Professor Khakhálin and colleagues confirm that neurons in this new model not only grow more specialized over time but can become less specialized when subjected to strong visual stimulation.

Research Professor Gideon Eshel argues against the construction of high-voltage power towers across the Hudson Valley, citing environmental and economic concerns, as well as unproven need.

Pakistan native Asad Hashmi '16 followed his sister to Bard on the promise that he'd get to work closely with faculty. The Bard experience has been everything he'd hoped. Led by Professor Craig Anderson, Hashmi was one of nine Bard student and alumni/ae coauthors of a paper on creating artificial photosynthesis as an affordable, renewable energy source, published this fall in the journal Tetrahedron Letters. Hashmi keeps busy on campus, in and out of the lab. He's been on the soccer team, the track and field team, and the squash team. He's a lab assistant on campus, he's a chemistry tutor, and he works helping new international students transition to life in the United States.

BHSEC Manhattan math professor Joseph Danquah was among the New York City public high school teachers honored with a 2015 Sloan Award for Excellence in Teaching Science and Mathematics.

With the holiday season approaching, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates that up to one million new drones will be entering U.S. airspace, creating potentially dangerous situations for unmanned and manned aircraft. A new study released today by The Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College offers a comprehensive examination of incidents involving drones and manned aircraft in the national airspace over the past two years. Using data from the FAA and Department of Interior, the report, “Drone Sightings and Close Encounters: An Analysis,” explores 921 incidents in the national airspace from December 2013 to September 2015. Coauthors Dan Gettinger and Arthur Holland Michel identified 327 close encounters in which drones presented some level of hazard to manned aircraft, 90 of which involved commercial multiengine jets, and 594 sightings, in which drones were spotted near or within manned aircraft flight paths but did not pose immediate danger of collision.

A study by two researchers at the Center for the Study of the Drone, at Bard College, provides a comprehensive overview of the risks posed to manned aircraft by unmanned aircraft.

Seventeen year olds Sierra Block Gorman and Natalia Jucha learned to code at Bard High School Early College Manhattan. They talk about why it’s important for girls to explore the STEM fields.

A study authored by Bard professor Gidon Eshel shows that grass-fed cattle may be worse for the environment than cattle from industrial feedlots.

Bard and other colleges host low-income middle school students for summer math camps that provide support and mentoring through high school and into college. 

Professor Khakhálin and colleagues studied developing frog tadpoles, confirming that neurons in this new vertebrate model not only grow more specialized over time but can become less specialized when subjected to strong visual stimulation. (eLIFE)

Last week Gettinger and Holland Michel participated in a two-day war game designed to explore the different ways that drones could be used for tactical and strategic effect in a conflict.

Build a robot, do laboratory research for publication, get your hands dirty with some field work ... watch our students and faculty talk about their work in math, science, and computing at Bard.

J. p. Lawrence '14 interviews Bard biologist Felicia Keesing and other experts about the potential increase in the number of rodents and ticks brought about by a local abundance of acorns.

On Monday, September 28, Bard alumna Allie Cashel ’13 will read from a memoir of her experience with chronic Lyme disease, Suffering the Silence: Chronic Lyme Disease in an Age of Denial. The reading is presented by the Written Arts and Biology Programs. A living portrait of chronic Lyme disease and its patients’ struggles for recognition and treatment, Suffering the Silence, originally Allie Cashel’s Senior Project, is now a full-length memoir that details Cashel’s own experience with chronic Lyme and shares the stories of a number of other patients from around the world. Introduced by Mary Caponegro ’78, Bard literature professor, and followed by a Q&A, this event takes place at 7:30 p.m. in Weis Cinema in the Bertelsmann Campus Center.

Is our current voting system the most fair? Bard mathematician John Cullinan researches the arithmetic behind the way we vote.

Senior biology major Andrea Szegedy-Maszak came to Bard from Middletown, Connecticut, where both her parents are professors at Wesleyan. Bard was the first school she visited on her tour of colleges, and it immediately felt like “The One.” Although she applied to other schools, it was clear that Bard was the right place for her. The Language and Thinking program, held every August for incoming first-years, confirmed her feelings. “Everyone was talking in a way that I hadn’t seen young people talk before, even though we had all only known each other for six hours,” she recalls. “I was surrounded by people talking about interesting things and it felt really good.”

Intrigued by brain imaging techniques and neural anatomy, Andrea came to Bard intending to be a psychology major. It was in Citizen Science, the three-week science intensive for first-years during winter intersession, that she realized she wanted to study biology as a first step on the road to studying neuroscience. The following spring, she took Professor Brooke Jude’s microbiology course for majors and nonmajors and never looked back. Bard’s Biology Program is small and intimate; students are given a lot of individualized attention from professors and have top-notch facilities at their disposal. “That’s something that sets us apart,” she observes. “If you go to a big research university, you just don’t get that kind of attention or even facility access as an undergraduate.”

Citizen Science made a huge impression on Andrea. The civic outreach activities, such as going to a local middle school to run science experiments for the sixth grade class, encouraged her interest in education. Last year, Andrea became a teaching fellow. These students opt to stay on campus during Citizen Science, assisting first-years and visiting faculty in the lab. In some cases, her job is to make sure that all materials for the day’s assignment are prepped; in others, professors have their fellows lead the lab instruction, an opportunity a student at a larger research institution might not have until graduate school. Andrea loves to work with students who have never been in a lab before and to make science fun and accessible so that they might enjoy it the way she does. Working as a teaching fellow, she says, “is going to be my most potent, tangible Bard memory forever.”

Andrea also works with the Center for Civic Engagement (CCE), mentoring for the Rhinebeck Science Fair. Thanks to funding through CCE, Andrea and a friend were able to run a full-time science summer camp last summer at four different public libraries in the area: Red Hook, Germantown, Poughkeepsie, and High Plains. The weeklong camps ran from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and were free to attend.

Andrea is inspired by the multilayered intellectual, creative, and academic interests of Bard students. Distribution requirements ensure students try their hand at many different disciplines. This leads to a campus full of people with highly varied interests who have explored many areas of academic life. For instance, Andrea is currently taking a music class in psychoacoustics. A few of her classmates want to be music and art therapists and, encouraged by the Bard administration, are currently constructing their own majors using psychology, science, music, and dance.

After taking a high-level neuroscience course last semester, Andrea began thinking about the relationship between autism and pre- and postnatal serotonin exposure. She is now hoping to work independently with new neuroscience professor Arseny Khakhalin on a project that examines the neuroscience behind developmental effects of early serotonin exposure.

Andrea is looking forward to her Senior Project this year, which involves researching the mechanisms behind bacteria-powered fuel cells with Brooke Jude as her adviser. She has also been accepted into the Bard Master of Arts in Teaching 3+2 Program, which means she’ll be incorporating an educational element into the Senior Project, such as how to use the fuel cells as a teaching tool or how to best incorporate them into different curricula. As an MAT graduate student, she’ll spend a fifth year at Bard and graduate with a master’s degree and a New York State certification in teaching biology.

Bard has changed Andrea’s life. As a school, it sets high standards that students are encouraged—even expected—to go above and beyond. “I’ve learned to work really hard here,” she explains. “I’ve learned that I can meet the high standards that are set for me academically, but I can also make my own standards for what I am and what I need. It’s been unbelievable.”

Bard senior Andrea Szegedy-Maszak came to Bard intending to be a psychology major. It was in Citizen Science, the three-week science intensive for first-years during winter intersession, that she realized she wanted to study biology. Now Andrea is taking the next step to being a biology teacher: she's enrolled in Bard's Master of Arts in Teaching program.

Bard ecologist Erik Kiviat and Simon's Rock colleague Robert Schmidt were the first scientists to discover clam shrimp in New Jersey. Now Kiviat is on the hunt again for the rare crustacean.

Bard College associate professor of psychology Kristin Lane, as well as Jin Goh '12 and Douglas Gazarian '13, were among 270 researchers who participated in the most comprehensive investigation ever conducted about the rate and predictors of reproducibility in a field of science. The four-year study, published in Science, found that among replications of 100 published findings in three prominent psychology journals, fewer than half produced the same findings as the original study.

The Center for the Study of the Drone analyzed data from the Federal Aviation Administration and found 295 near misses between drones and manned aircraft in the U.S. since November 2014.

After Bard, Wayne joined the master's program in computer science at Stanford University. Later he decided to pursue his passion in the intersection between the humanities and sciences, a passion kindled a few years ago during his time at Bard. Currently Wayne is PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction group of the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His main research interests include crowdsourcing, creativity support tools, and social computing.

The Summer Program for Mathematical Problem Solving (SPMPS, pronounced "spumps") is back for a fifth summer at Bard. The 40 participants of this three-week residential math enrichment program, all rising 8th graders from underserved New York City middle schools, arrived on campus yesterday to start their first week of mathematical study. Their classes this summer include: Methods of Proof, Number Theory with Proof, Formal Systems, Logic, Integer Sequences, Cryptanalysis, Graph Theory, Math and Justice, Geometry of Numbers, Strategies and Games, Programming, and Infinity.

The Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College has partnered with The Verge to create a database of the first 500 exemptions to the FAA's commercial drone restrictions.

Professor Haggard explores the overlap of quantum mechanics and gravity, searching for new understandings of space and time.

Morrison takes a fresh approach to the study of microscopic killers: she combines new computational tools with traditional scientific methods.

A study led by Lydia Meyer ’14 and Bard biology professor Bruce Robertson finds that nesting in non-native shrubs does not negatively impact the nesting success of veery thrushes. When birds or other animals make choices that are harmful for themselves—by reducing their lifespan or reproductive success, for example—this is known as an “evolutionary trap.” While there is concern that birds that prefer to build their nests in non-native plant species will have less successful nests and risk falling into such a trap, the new study—published in The Condor: Ornithological Advances—found that not to be the case for veery thrushes (Catharus fuscescens) who preferred to nest in invasive shrubs in the forests of New York. Their nesting success was not adversely affected at all.

In partnership with Bard College’s Center for Civic Engagement, the Red Hook Public Library will host several hands-on science camps for children and teens this July. For students entering grades 9-12, the library will host a three-week research program. 

Organisms living close to each other compete for a limited set of resources: this extends from plant communities to human communities. Densely packed cities, like New York, can house many more people, but the space available for each person is limited. Competition for space is intense. Past research has shown that the same is true of plants—densely packed communities of plants usually compete with each other for resources such as space, water, and nutrients. However, a new study led by Bard College biology professor Alexandra Wright and published today in the Journal of Ecology suggests that these competitive disadvantages may be outweighed by benefits gained during severe weather conditions such as droughts and heat waves.

The weekly collection of civilian and military drone news featured on the website of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard is now a collaboration with Forbes.

Vaccines are a powerful public health tool, so why do some doctors allow their patients to delay or forgo vaccination?

Using a tadpole model to investigate, a new study suggests in-utero exposure to the epilepsy drug VPA appears to elevate the risk to babies of developing an autism spectrum disorder.

Robyn Smyth has been named the first recipient of the Robert Estabrook Moeller Memorial Fund Research Fellow Award for limnology (lake science).

Alexandra Wright was surprised to find that an area in Germany with high biodiversity recovered rapidly and with great success after a recent major flood.

The impact of catastrophic flooding can be mitigated by protecting biodiversity, suggests a new study led by Bard College biology professor Alexandra Wright and published this week in Nature Communications.

Stuart Levine, Bard professor of psychology and emeritus dean of the college, delivered a lecture last month to the Obedience to Authority Conference in Kolomna, Russia. Professor Levine presented a paper on the continuing development of his Bard College seminar, Milgram—Obedience to Authority, and insights that have emerged in the course over the years. The Bard seminar focuses on Milgram's famous and controversial Yale University experiment on obedience to authority and the subsequent 50 years of further study and critical response it generated. Professor Levine presented at the invitation of Professor Alexander Voronov, of the State Academic University for the Humanities in Moscow, who has visited the Bard seminar in the past. This year Bard celebrates professor Levine's 50th anniversary as a member of the college's faculty. Read More

As part of Bard College's Citizen Science Program, all first-year students return to campus in January to take part in a rigorous three-week course that introduces them to natural science and the ideas underlying the scientific method. This year’s theme, “Reducing the Global Burden of Infectious Disease,” explores the biology of infectious disease and the myriad of impacts that outbreaks and subsequent management can have on our global society. As a health emergency with global implications, one topic that will be central in this January’s course is the Ebola epidemic and crisis in West Africa.

The Bard College Citizen Science Program presents two lectures this month. Both lectures take place at 6:30 p.m. in the Richard B. Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater. They are free and open to the public; no reservations are necessary. On Wednesday, January 14, Gautam Dantas, assistant professor at the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, will present “Networks of Exchanging Antibiotic Resistomes in Human and Environmental Microbiota.” On Thursday, January 15, Michael Specter, staff writer at the New Yorker and visiting professor in the Environmental and Urban Studies Program at Bard, presents “Relying on Reality: Separating Fact from Fiction in Daily Life.”

Santa Fe painter Jivan Lee "is a talented, emerging artist with a blossoming career and bright future ahead of him," writes Bonnie Gangelhoff.

Hudsonia executive director and Bard alumnus Erik Kiviat is part of a team of scientists that has established the existence of a new species of frog in New Jersey.

Patty Dooley writes about the power of the "wow factor" in teaching science, and how to move students from those first reactions to asking "Why?" and then "What if?"