Old and new – Exec Board ’12-’13 and ’13-’14

On Tuesday May 8^th, the GSC held it’s annual elections for the Executive Board. Eight positions were open for election. They were: President, Vice President, Finance Chair, Student Life Chair, Academic Chair, Secretary and two Social Chairs. The Executive Board is responsible for the leadership of the GSC. Each member has their own portfolio and collectively they run action teams and organize social events. They also represent the GSC and Dartmouth, meeting the president of the College, the trustees, and grad leaders at other Ivy Schools.

While all graduate students are welcome to run in Executive Board elections, votes are cast by Departmental Representatives who have fulfilled both the attendance and volunteer requirements outlined in the GSC constitution: to vote, Departmental Representatives must attend all council meetings (two absences allowed) and volunteer at two GSC events.

The GSC’s role is to nurture and enhance a sense of graduate student community across Dartmouth’s graduate departments, schools, and programs. The GSC consists of elected Departmental Representatives from all Graduate Arts and Sciences programs, including TDI and Thayer, and non-voting representatives from the Tuck School of Business and the Geisel School of Medicine.

The winners of this year’s elections are:

President: Lisa Jackson

Vice President: Anne Xu
Finance Chair: Adrienne Perkins
Student Life Chair: Meg Menon
Academic Chair: Laurie Laker
Secretary: Drew Wong
Social Chairs: Haofeng Li and Erin O’Malley

For more information about the GSC, please visit the home page and don’t be afraid to reach out to your new Exec Board.

Elections for Departmental Representatives are held in the fall term.

The Exec Board in their own words:

Lisa Jackson, TDI, President: I feel so honored to have been elected President of the GSC for the upcoming school year! Building off the work initiated by this year’s GSC executive board and council as a whole, I hope that next year’s GSC will continue to foster communication and collaboration between the other grad student governments, between grad students and undergraduate students, and between grads and the college administration and broader Upper Valley community. By working together, we can continue to enhance the Dartmouth experience for everyone! Congratulations to my fellow executive board members elected on Tuesday as well; I can’t wait to work with you all.

Ani Xu, MALS, Vice President: For a long while, I’ve struggled with the concept of community at Dartmouth, or the lack thereof. Lately and thankfully, I’ve been proven dead wrong. I am absolutely overwhelmed by the strength of character of the students here. This community has given me so much and I sincerely hope that by serving as Vice President of the Graduate Student Council, I will have the opportunity to contribute back to the absolute best of my abilities. I am beyond excited to work with this excellent group of people in the coming year.

Adrienne Perkins, Biology, Finance Chair: I’m happy to have the opportunity to continue serving and working with the GSC as Finance Chair.

Drew Wong, Thayer, Secretary: I am excited to build on the framework established by the former GSC committees and to pave the way for the future councils.

Meg Menon, MALS: I look forward to working with the Graduate Student Council, as we support your interests and strive toward fostering our deep sense of community through tangible and sincere efforts. I promise to do my best in this position and  I encourage you to think of me as an advocate for your well-being and an agent for change that you would like to affect. Thank you.

Laurie Laker, MALS, Academic Chair: I’m honored and excited to have been elected to the GSC Executive Board. We’re all here at Dartmouth to better ourselves academically, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to serve our graduate student community towards that betterment. As a current MALS rep on the GSC, I’m excited to take the reigns of Academic Chair from Rich Lopez – who has done a tremendous job this past year. I can’t wait to get started.

Haofeng Li, Social Chair: Excited about this great opportunity! Hopefully our efforts will make this coming year awesome:)

Erin O’Malley, Social Chair: I am very excited to have been elected as the GSC Social Chair for 2013.  I look forward to being able to bring many diverse groups together and provide the very important social interactions that can all too often get missed in our hectic lives as graduate students.  Also, I look at this as an opportunity to use leadership skills to plan events that everyone can enjoy and to make this another successful year.

Matt Cain

The past year has seen a number of awards and exciting events for the graduate program in the Department of Chemistry. Matt Cain, who worked with Professor David Glueck, shared the Hannah T. Croasdale Award, given annually to acknowledge those who best exemplify the qualities of a scholar. His work was also chosen to grace the cover of the journal, Inorganic Chemistry, Volume 49, Issue 17.

In March, Nick Tito and Xin Su took part in the Germany Exchange Program run by the Northeastern Section of the American Chemical Society (NESACS). They participated in poster sessions, lectures, and research site visits with ten other graduate students in and around Rostock, Germany. In July, Nick co-chaired the inaugural Graduate Research Seminar in Polymer Physics, which preceded the Polymer Physics Gordon Conference, at which he presented a poster. In August, he was one of fifteen graduate students selected nationwide to participate in the American Chemical Society Publications Summer Institute, working to develop new tools for online access. Nick was also recognized for his superb undergraduate teaching assistant work–he was the recipient of the Department of Chemistry’s John H. Wolfenden Teaching Prize.

Xin and Justin Foy were selected to attend the American Chemical Society International-Domestic Student Summit held in November in Raleigh, North Carolina. The main goal of the summit was “to discuss promoting cross-cultural understanding, skill flow, and increasing international collaboration.” They presented a poster and gave a talk.  Xin and Justin are students in Professor Ivan Aprahamian’s lab. Xin is also the Dartmouth representative to the NESACS Younger Chemists Committee (NSYCC), and Justin is the chemistry representative to the Graduate Student Council.

This fall the department welcomed six new graduate students to our program. They are now assigned to research groups and starting their research while also taking courses and serving as teaching assistants. We wish them the best as they progress through our program!

by John Winn

In the summer of 2012, I traveled to Buen Hombre, Dominican Republic—a community of 600 residents on the northwestern coast of the country—to assess the status and functioning of coral reef fisheries accessed by artisanal fishermen. With the help of an undergraduate research assistant, Molly Wilson ’13, I performed fish-community surveys, benthic assessments, catch surveys, and social research on how the fishing system in Buen Hombre operates.

Thanks to the scuba equipment purchased with the Alumni Research Award, I was able to sample deeper reef sites that play an important role in the ecological dynamics of the area. We found that nearshore reefs are heavily exploited to the point that some areas have collapsed into an unhealthy, algae-dominated state.

Herbivorous fish maintain coral health by clearing away macro-algae that can outcompete slow-growing hard corals for space. This presents a major challenge for fisheries management because parrotfish, the Caribbean’s most abundant and effective herbivore, currently comprise at least fifty percent of fishermen’s catch in Buen Hombre.

The Alumni Research Award was an integral part of my experience in Buen Hombre, allowing me to perform more thorough and productive research. My future work will include modeling fish population dynamics to help the community and resource managers establish harvest guidelines and promote ecosystem recovery.

by Tyler Pavlowich, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB)

Photo courtesy of Tyler Pavlowich

Co-authors Vivek Venkataraman and Thomas Kraft collaborated with Dominy on field studies in the Philippines and Africa that inform their PNAS paper. Venkataraman and Kraft are Dartmouth graduate students in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology PhD program in the Department of Biological Sciences, and are supported by National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships.

Did Lucy Walk on the Ground or Stay in the Trees?

Much has been made of our ancestors “coming down out of the trees,” and many researchers view terrestrial bipedalism as the hallmark of “humanness.” After all, most of our living primate relatives—the great apes, specifically—still spend their time in the trees. Humans are the only member of the family devoted to the ground, living terrestrial rather than arboreal lives, but that wasn’t always the case.

To read the full article go to Dartmouth Now.

Maggie Baber-M.S., Earth Sciences

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting is the world’s largest earth sciences meeting and provides many opportunities for academic and professional engagement. This year AGU had 22,167 attendees from 94 countries, 12,000 posters, 6000 oral presentations. While at AGU, I presented, for the first time, the results of my Masters thesis research at Dartmouth at the conference’s cryosphere poster session. I had the opportunity to ask questions and receive feedback from experienced scientists in my field, a unique opportunity as I begin editing my thesis, which is due in February. Additionally, I was able to attend several networking meetings to meet with potential employers of industry, government agencies, and national labs.

Matthew Bigl-M.S., Earth Sciences

I started my AGU experience early Monday morning as I was scheduled to present my research at 8:00.Once I got my poster up and was able to peruse the other offerings within the gigantic poster hall before returning to my poster to field questions and discussion from those who stopped by. Following my presentation I spent the next three and a half days listening to talks ranging from citizen science to climate literacy as well as many great geomorphic and climate change related topics that intertwined with my own research. My project is based around a sedimentary feature known as varves which in my case are located in the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire and formed in a glacial environment recording summer and winter in one couplet. I had the opportunity to listen to another researcher’s varve project that was based out of Ghana and recorded precipitation and therefore could be used to track drought in the local region.

IGERT students and faculty members are seen on their research trip near the west coast of Greenland. (Photo by Alexandra Giese)

“We’re really starting to move rapidly,” says Ross Virginia, the Myers Family Professor of Environmental Science and the director of Dartmouth’s Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program. As IGERT connects research to real world problems, Virginia says, “we’re trying to communicate science in insightful and meaningful ways.”

The program, which studies polar environmental change and supports Arctic research, is funded by a $3 million National Science Foundation grant. Since 2010, the program has facilitated collaboration across departments, conducted research in Greenland, and talked about climate change with diverse audiences—starting a conversation that’s expected to last for years.

IGERT provides two years of funding for PhD students at $30,000 per year. There are a total of 24 fellows—from the fields of engineering, ecology and evolutionary biology, and earth sciences—that connect through IGERT while working toward degrees in their home departments. Fellows take two IGERT core courses, which are taught by professors from different disciplines, and a five-week summer research trip to Greenland that serves as a capstone experience during their first year.

For full article, go to Dartmouth Now

Six Dartmouth faculty members have been selected as 2012 fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and the publisher of the journal Science. Professors Christopher Amos, Michael Dietrich, Carolyn Gordon, Todd Heatherton, Mark Israel, and Ronald Taylor are among the 702 new fellows recognized by AAAS this year for their distinguished efforts to advance science.

“Dartmouth professors conduct outstanding research in the sciences, and it is wonderful to see their accomplishments honored by their selection as AAAS fellows,” says President Carol L. Folt, who was named an AAAS fellow in 2010.  “Our faculty’s discoveries are helping to define their fields and Dartmouth’s growing impact is evidenced by the increase in AAAS fellows for the fourth consecutive year.”

“Dartmouth is honored to have six professors chosen as fellows by the AAAS, one of the most renowned and influential science organizations,” says Interim Provost Martin Wybourne.

Dartmouth now has a total of 33 professors who are current AAAS fellows (see a complete list below). This year, three of the new fellows are from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

“The AAAS recognition of these outstanding faculty members and their important scientific achievements is indicative of the significant research activity taking place at the medical school,” says Wiley “Chip” Souba, dean of the Geisel School of Medicine. “They embody the Dartmouth ideals of improving lives through leadership, intellectual curiosity, and collaboration.”

Continue reading here…

As the term winds to a close, and winter begins to set in, I wanted to take a minute to address the graduate community. I’ve been settling in to my new position here at Graduate Studies, and I’m enjoying all of the opportunities to interact with and on behalf of our students and programs. To see the work that our students are doing, across the wide spectrum that is Graduate Arts and Sciences, is nothing but inspiring.

Here in the Graduate Office, we are working hard to develop new ways to support and strengthen our community. As the Dartmouth faculty expands, and the Geisel School follows suit, we know that there will be more opportunities for graduate students on campus. More faculty will create opportunities for new graduate research, and we will find ways to leverage those opportunities to improve our support networks for research and funding. We are also working to create a graduate student space on campus, to help attach the wonderful sense of community we have built to a physical location we can call our own. I am excited about the future of Graduate Studies, and our students should be as well.

On a personal note, I encourage everyone to get outside and enjoy the winter here in Hanover. As an undergraduate, I was a member of the Dartmouth Outing Club. We used to snowshoe up Gile Mountain, downhill and cross-country ski at the college facilities, and ice skate out on Occom Pond. Dartmouth provides lots of opportunities to take advantage of the endless recreational activities in the Hanover area. And though it might be cold, Hanover tends to be pretty sunny all winter long. So grab a good jacket and enjoy the sun and the snow!

We hope you can join us next week for Cupcake Wars – I’m looking forward to judging the event. For more information, and to stay up to date on all the goings-on at Graduate Studies, please visit the Graduate Studies website and connect with us through our Facebook page.

I hope you all enjoy the remainder of fall term, and have a wonderful holiday season!

Sincerely,

F. Jon Kull, Dean of Graduate Studies

For the full article go to Dartmouth Now.

The Second College Grant was presented to Dartmouth by the State of New Hampshire in 1807 and is used for research, recreation, and sustainable logging. (photo by Eli Burakian ’00)

For full article go to Dartmouth Now.

(Photo by Eli Burakian ’00)