Grad News Forum

Professor Cottingham, President Folt, Professor Hawley, and Dean Kull

This year’s recipients of the Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award are Professor Kathryn Cottingham and Professor Robert Hawley. Each year the Graduate Student Council (GSC) gives out two Graduate Faculty Mentoring Awards to recognize the exceptional mentoring activities of faculty advisors at Dartmouth. Award recipients are honored for their commitment to fostering the academic and professional pursuits of graduate students and receive $500 to support further mentoring activities. This year the selection committee consisted of Julia Bradley-Cook, the president of GSC, Rich Lopez, the academic chair, and Daniel Durcan, the activities coordinator. President Carol Folt announced this year’s recipients on Wednesday, April 10, at the Graduate Poster Session.

Professor Kathryn Cottingham

Professor Kathryn Cottingham is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) program. She joined Dartmouth faculty in 1998 and currently mentors two graduate students. Her research focuses on aquatic ecology, in particular the reasons for and results of cyanobacterial blooms in lakes and factors affecting the accumulation of mercury by fish and invertebrates in streams. Her lab has also been involved in examining dietary exposure to arsenic in pregnant women and infants.

In nominating her for this award, graduate students observed that Cottingham plays an important role as a mentor in her department as a whole. A member of the Cottingham lab observed that when she interviewed at Dartmouth “the most common response I received from other graduate students about the Cottingham Lab, was that Kathy may be the ‘official advisor’ to her own graduate students, but she ‘unofficially’ advises all the graduate students.”

Another aspect of Cottingham’s mentoring style that her graduate students appreciated was her ability to balance letting her students work independently, while also providing enough support and guidance to facilitate success in their research. One of Cottingham’s current students observed that her mentoring style “strikes a nice balance between letting me work independently to the extent that I want to” while always being available “to help troubleshoot, design experiments, and address any problems that arise.” Discussing the importance of building research skills in graduate school, several students expressed their appreciation of Cottingham’s guidance in data analysis and in improving their writing skills. One student explained, “I especially appreciate how her mentoring with me has changed through time as I have developed as a scientist, and has focused on everything from scientific writing, how to work in groups, [and] data analysis.”

Professor Robert Hawley

Professor Robert Hawley is an assistant professor of Earth Sciences. He came to Dartmouth in 2008. Hawley leads the Glaciology Research Group at Dartmouth, mentoring five graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher. The group studies the formation and make-up of polar ice sheets to explore issues related to sea level rise and climate change. Hawley developed a new technique for studying polar firn, called Borehole Optical Stratigraphy, which involves lowering a video camera into a borehole in the ice. The camera records patterns of light and dark in the walls of the borehole, which reflect differences in ice grain size and density and facilitate the studying of annual layers.

In their nominations, Professor Hawley’s students expressed an appreciation for his enthusiasm and patience. They observed that his excitement and creativity in his research were inspiring, and these were balanced with his calm and practical approach to problem solving and project management. One of Hawley’s students explained that Hawley’s “ability to bring both perspective and calm is incredible. I cannot recall a challenging ‘moment’ or issue that I could not bring to [his] attention.”

As well as developing his mentees’ skills in academic and proposal writing and teaching techniques, Hawley also encouraged students to engage in service. A member of the Glaciology Research Group wrote, “With regard to citizen-science, [Hawley’s] work with outreach (e.g., Science Pubs at Salt hill) has been an example that I hope to emulate in my own work.” In addition, Hawley encouraged his students to pursue outside learning opportunities, such as participation in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide Ice Core Project. Finally, Hawley’s students also appreciated his willingness to prioritize their ideas and goals. A student described him as “an undeniable exemplification of a masterful mentor-extraordinaire.”

Reflecting on the process of choosing this year’s recipients, Bradley-Cook observed, “We had an impressive collection of nominees—faculty who go above and beyond to challenge, support, and motivate graduate students. Professors Cottingham and Hawley are inspiring role models with mentoring styles that genuinely support graduate students. We are grateful for the opportunity to acknowledge their extraordinary mentorship.”

The Graduate Studies Office congratulates Professors Cottingham and Hawley on their receipt of this award and thanks them for their dedication to supporting graduate students at Dartmouth.

The latest event in the Graduate Studies “Becoming a Faculty Member” series was held on February 8. A panel of distinguished Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award recipients was on hand to discuss their mentoring styles. Members of the panel included Dean Madden (Department of Biochemistry), Joseph BelBruno (Department of Chemistry), Ross Virginia (Environmental Studies Program), Thalia Wheatley (Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences), and Gregory Holmes (Program in Experimental and Molecular Medicine). Faculty are nominated by graduate students and recent alumni to receive this award based on their outstanding dedication to fostering the professional and personal development of their students.

The panel was asked to discuss why they felt they had been successful mentors. They emphasized the importance of recognizing that each student is different and of adapting one’s approach to each individual. Ideally, a graduate student will leave school with the ability to confidently convey his or her own original ideas, and a mentor needs to foster this ability to think independently. Professor Holmes remarked that knowing where your students want to go in their future careers greatly helps in mentoring them successfully. If you cannot help them, you should direct them to where they can receive help in achieving their goals. The panel agreed that professional meetings are great places for students to develop their skills and meet potential postdoctoral advisors or employers.

Graduate student attendees asked which mentoring styles worked best for the panel and why. Professors Virginia and BelBruno stated that their methods were more “hands-off,” but accessible, in that they placed responsibility on their students to learn on their own, but made themselves available for discussion when needed. Professor Virginia also added that while he takes this approach, he does spend a lot of time with his students when they are out in the field conducting research. Graduate student, Gilbert Rahme, was intrigued to know if mentoring styles change over time (e.g. with promotions or obtaining tenure), and panelists agreed that tactics may become more relaxed with time. Professor Wheatley commented that you must always be “driven as a mentor to ask questions and find the answers.”

Effective mentors also rely on their postdocs to help in the task of counseling and teaching. Professor Holmes remarked that he expects his postdocs to also be great mentors, and he teaches them this skill by showing them how to choose and design projects and how to properly manage a lab. Professor BelBruno views postdocs as colleagues and expects them to educate themselves about lab research with only minor support. He feels that more focused support should be on how to become a successful professor.

Attendees also sought advice on what to do when challenges arise. Professor Madden encouraged students to find a way to communicate the issue directly to their mentor, since mentors cannot always tell when something is not working well for a student. This can be an intimidating prospect, and it can help to reach out to colleagues for advice on how to frame the issue.

Overall, panelists advised graduate students and postdocs to try to be fair and helpful mentors. Professor Virginia reminded everyone that graduate students are people too, who have lives and families, and an advisor should be prepared to appropriately help in all aspects of their lives. To be a well-rounded mentor, one needs to “know when to acknowledge life.”

by Molly Croteau

At its 2012 conference in Portland, Oregon, in October, the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs (AGLSP) awarded its Annual Faculty Award to Senior Lecturer in the Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, Klaus Milich, PhD. The AGLSP’s Faculty Award recognizes “outstanding faculty who exemplify the qualities of interdisciplinary, liberal teaching and who have participated significantly in teaching or advising students and/or have actively participated in other faculty service in a graduate liberal studies program.” Dr. Milich was recognized for his contributions to Dartmouth’s Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program, and for his work as an advisor for graduate students on campus.

“The AGLSP Prize is intended to recognize extraordinary commitment to mentoring and advising,” says MALS Chair Donald E. Pease, Jr. “From the time I recruited him to teach in the MALS Program in 1999, Klaus Milich has proven himself an exemplary scholar and teacher.” Dr. Milich teaches multiple courses for the MALS program— “Research Methods”, a course designed to help students understand and execute theoretical social science; “Diasporas and Migrations,” which focused on concept and theories related to mass-migration and diasporas across the globe; “Religion and Politics,” and “Theories of Postmodernism.” Dr. Milich also teaches courses in the Jewish Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies programs.

During his acceptance address at the AGLSP Conference, Dr. Milich spoke to the place of theory in graduate liberal studies. “It is of great importance to focus on the theorization of our topics,” said Dr. Milich, who’s own research is focused on analyzing and approaching the classic divide between the humanities and the sciences. “Our students come back from jobs to spend time reflecting. They’ve decided to take time to merge theory and their experiences. This is what graduate liberal studies can offer them.”

The AGLSP’s Faculty Award, however, recognizes more than in-class teaching ability. Indeed, it is Dr. Milich’s approach to advising his graduate students that has set him apart.

“In their annual evaluations, Klaus’s MALS students have praised Klaus for the patience he displays in guiding them through every stage of their thesis projects—from initial formulation to culminating revision,” Pease says. “His students have attested in particular to Professor Milich’s willingness to work late into the evening and over long week-ends to help them to meet deadlines and get over writing blocs. No one is more deserving of this national recognition for exemplary dedication to teaching and advising than Klaus Milich.”

“In graduate studies especially,” Dr. Milich tells us, “the student-instructor relationship ceases to be a hierarchical one. Instead, there must be a mutual interdependence between teacher and researcher. I consider my students to be young research scholars, who embark with me on new projects. They chart their course – I help them as I can.”

“Last year, Klaus was the first reader of my masters thesis,” says MALS grad and former Graduate Student Council President Wes Whitaker. “During the fall and winter terms, I met with Klaus and the other two students in colloquium—Ellen Anderson and Thomas Frohlich—on a weekly basis. At these meetings, portions of Ellen, Thomas and my theses were workshopped by Professor Milich. The feedback provided by Klaus and the other members of my colloquium not only strengthened the final draft of my thesis, but also greatly improved my academic writing.”

During his early years as a student, Dr. Milich studied economics, American Literary and Cultural Studies, German and English Literature. In the first stages of his career, Dr. Milich worked as a management consultant, and then went on to work for German public radio, and various international newspapers, for which he wrote and broadcasted essays, documentaries, interviews, and book reviews on literary, cultural, and social issues. Before coming to Dartmouth, Dr. Milich taught at the University of Frankfurt and Humboldt University Berlin. He has held visiting professorships and visiting scholar positions at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Keele University in Great Britain, and at the David Bruce Center for American Studies at University of California Irvine.

Up in Portland, MALS Director Wole Ojurongbe, himself a MALS graduate, read letter after letter from MALS students, who echoed these sentiments. “Before I met and worked with Dr. Milich, I would have described my life as largely content, settled, and unperturbed,” said 2011 graduate Mary Fratini, “but in my good fortune to meet someone who is equally passionate about his own consistently evolving research and committed to mentoring a new generation of thinkers and scholars, my life has become largely unsettled, consistently perturbed and, ultimately, infinitely more satisfying.”

Indeed, it was Dr. Milich’s commitment to his students, and his very real appreciation for academic research that showed through in Ojurongbe’s remarks and in our interview with him. “Our research,” he told us, “always means an exploration of what we have yet to know. It’s a work in progress. An instructor works with a student, so that both can learn the dual process of learning facts on the one hand, and learning how to continue learning on the other.”

Article and photo by Zach Williams 

On Tuesday, April 10^th, Dartmouth’s Graduate Student Council (GSC) announced the recipients of the 2012 Faculty Mentor Awards at the Graduate Poster Session. Established in 2005, the award recognizes and highlights the outstanding graduate mentoring activities that are undertaken by Dartmouth faculty advisors. In addition to publicly recognizing each recipient’s contributions to the school’s graduate community, the GSC also credits $500 dollars to each faculty member’s Dartmouth account to encourage further mentoring. This year, Dean Madden of Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) and Thalia Wheatley of Psychological and Brain Sciences (PBS) were selected for the award.

Each year, students from all of Dartmouth’s Arts and Sciences graduate programs submit letters of recommendation to the Graduate Studies Office for faculty members who they feel exhibit excellent mentoring qualities. All nominated faculty members are then asked to email their curriculum vitae to the award’s selection committee—a panel of student volunteers from the GSC’s Executive Board—who then review all of the letters of recommendation submitted for each nominee before selecting the award’s recipients. 

Professor Thalia Wheatley of Psychological and Brain Sciences (PBS) was selected as one of this year’s award recipients. A Dartmouth faculty member since 2006, Wheatley’s lab is currently comprised of three graduate students and five research assistants. The primary research focus of Wheatley’s lab is how humans understand and react to other individuals, and how the human brain has evolved to handle the computations underlying this social intelligence.

Thalia Wheatley was chosen as a recipient of this year’s Faculty Mentor Award by the Graduate Student Council because of her dedication to graduate mentorship at Dartmouth, and her ability to advise graduate students with varying research interests. As explained by Oliva Kang, a member of Wheatley’s lab who also works with an advisor from Digital Musics, “in addition to the three graduate students in her lab, Dr. Wheatley also mentors two graduates of Dartmouth’s Digital Musics department, and has many collaborators both in and outside of the department.”

Two years ago, the research of Professor Wheatley’s advisees took Thalia and two of her graduate students to rural Cambodia to study how non-Western cultures perceived both emotion and biological movement in music. “We traveled through rough territory in an off-road vehicle for 2 hours in each direction every day to work long hours… and assimilated to the norms of a foreign culture. Because of Thalia’s patience and unwavering dedication, [the trip] was ultimately a scientific success,” said Beau Sievers, a recent graduate from Digital Musics.

In addition, several students spoke of Wheatley’s ability to promote self-guided research that builds upon the academic strengths of her students. “[Thalia] has the uncanny ability to understand and play to people’s strengths while appreciating and educating their weakness,” wrote Christine Looser, a fifth-year PhD candidate in Wheatley’s lab. [She] encourages each of her students to think critically, question assumptions, and do high-quality work…By allowing her students to develop ownership of their research she has made each of us more thoughtful, inspired, and harder-working scientists.”

Congratulations, Professor Wheatley! The Graduate Student Council thanks you for all of your contributions to Dartmouth’s graduate community.

On Tuesday, April 10^th, Dartmouth’s Graduate Student Council (GSC) announced the recipients of the 2012 Faculty Mentor Awards at the Graduate Poster Session. Established in 2005, the award recognizes and highlights the outstanding graduate mentoring activities that are undertaken by Dartmouth faculty advisors. In addition to publicly recognizing each recipient’s contributions to the school’s graduate community, the GSC also credits $500 dollars to each faculty member’s Dartmouth account to encourage further mentoring. This year, Dean Madden of Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) and Thalia Wheatley of Psychological and Brain Sciences (PBS) were selected for the award.

Each year, students from all of Dartmouth’s Arts and Sciences graduate programs submit letters of recommendation to the Graduate Studies Office for faculty members who they feel exhibit excellent mentoring qualities. All nominated faculty members are then asked to email their curriculum vitae to the award’s selection committee—a panel of student volunteers from the GSC’s Executive Board—who then review all of the letters of recommendation submitted for each nominee before selecting the award’s recipients.

Professor Dean Madden of Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) was selected as one of this year’s award recipients. A Dartmouth faculty member since 2001, Madden’s lab is currently comprised of four graduate students and one rotation student. The primary research focus of Madden’s lab is understanding the functional characteristics of ion channels and transporters in terms of their molecular structure.

All of the letters submitted on Prof. Madden’s behalf spoke of his approachability, his positive demeanor, and his dedication to mentorship. “When I have my own lab, I hope I can laugh as much as Dean. He is genuinely happy, and it is contagious… He is always the first to ask a thought-provoking question in a seminar,… [and I admire his] ability to affect the lives of all students, and faculty, he comes in contact with,” wrote Jeanine Amacher, a current member of the Madden Lab.

In addition, many students spoke of Madden’s unique ability to foster self-directed, independent research while providing the professional guidance needed to strengthen both the research and scholarship of his lab’s members. “[Dean] provided me with a great balance of independence and direction, which have helped me progress my research while learning how to be an independent scientist,” said Lemira Sahar Al Ayyuobi, a member of Madden’s lab whose research examines the connection between mutations in the chloride channel CFTR to the genetic disease Cystic Fibrosis.

Finally, this year’s Faculty Mentor Award Selection Committee chose Prof. Madden for the award because of his approachability. Christopher Bahl, a member of Madden’s research group stated, “[Dean’s] open door policy facilitates and fosters a collegial, productive atmosphere in the lab. He is always available and excited to troubleshoot or discuss project ideas when we want help.”

Congratulations, Professor Madden! The Graduate Student Council thanks you for all of your contributions to Dartmouth’s graduate community.

The Graduate Student Council and the Office of Graduate Studies are pleased to announce that Professor Joseph BelBruno is a recipient of the 2011 Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award. The Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award is awarded annually to members of the Dartmouth faculty who exemplify a deep commitment to fostering the professional and personal development of graduate students.

One of this year’s two recipients, Joseph BelBruno is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Director of the Center for Nanomaterials Research at Dartmouth.  His research deals with the study of computational chemistry that is focused on the materials as well as the chemistry of the production process.

BelBruno’s dedication to the scientific and personal development of each student in his lab is unparalleled.  In the numerous letters recommending him for the Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award, a common theme of advisement extending far beyond the lab arose.

According to several of BelBruno’s students, it is his unwavering encouragement and compassion that helps to set him apart. “Joe doesn’t forget that students are humans who can become discouraged and overwhelmed,” notes April Daigle, a graduate student in chemistry.  “He doesn’t focus exclusively on the research problem at hand, but remembers the person with motivating warmth and affirmation.”

Similarly, BelBruno’s reputation as an accessible mentor who encourages students to develop interests outside the lab fosters a positive environment of openness and creativity.  Many of Professor BelBruno’s students spoke of his help in applying to academic conferences, job searching, and cultivating individual research interests.

“From the genesis of my project, he gave me a unique opportunity to choose and shape my research,” says graduate student and BelBruno-advisee Sadik Antwi-Boampong.  “I feel an incredible sense of ownership and pride in the work that I do for him.”

For his students, BelBruno’s mentorship extends beyond their time at Dartmouth. Sara Campbell, a recent alum who completed her doctorate in chemistry in 2009, continues to refer to Professor BelBruno for advice.  Campbell recalls BelBruno’s encouragement of her attendance at seminars and teaching workshops while she was a graduate student, as well as his advocating that she take classes outside of her immediate research area.

“He aided my transition from a dependent to independent researcher, guiding me into becoming a better scientist,” says Campbell.  “He was deeply committed to helping prepare me not only to be a successful graduate student, but for my future as well.”

As evidenced by the letter of recommendation submitted on his behalf, for so many of Joe BelBruno’s students, his guidance goes above and beyond the normal expectations of an advisor.  Yuan Liu, a second-year graduate student in chemistry, stressed BelBruno’s ability to inspire students to meet their potential.

“There is an old Chinese phrase from Confucius: ‘A fine mentor should be a helpful friend, too,’” says Liu.  “Joe is definitely both for me.”

Learn more about past Faculty Mentoring Award Winners.

by Erin O’Flaherty

photo by Wes Whitaker

photo: April Daigle and Dr. BelBruno