Teaching Science at Public High Schools
Helping Patients Cope with Complexities
Geological Approaches to Diverse Questions
Bryn Mawr to Co-Host Microsoft Robotics Institute
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©2006
Undergraduate Scholarships
The Clare Boothe Luce Program, administered by The Henry Luce Foundation, awarded Bryn Mawr College a grant of $288,512 to support three undergraduate scholarships in mathematics over three years.
The CBLP was established under the terms of the will of Clare Boothe Luce "to encourage women to enter, study, graduate and teach" in science and engineering. It is the largest private source of funding for women in science and engineering, and to date has awarded more than $100 million to 132 colleges and universities, and one high school. More than 1,400 women have benefited from CBLP grants for scholarships, graduate fellowships and professorships.
Clare Boothe Luce achieved distinction in diverse careers in journalism, politics, theater, diplomacy and national intelligence. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, in 1983.
Dynamic Duo
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Frank Mallory |
W. Alton Jones Professor of Chemistry Frank Mallory and his wife and research partner Sally Mallory, a senior lecturer in the University of Pennsylvania 's chemistry department who holds A.B., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Bryn Mawr, were invested as fellows of the Inter-American Photochemical Society at the organization's annual meeting in Salvador, Brazil, in June. The fellowship recognizes "outstanding lifetime scientific achievements in the photochemical sciences." It has been awarded to only 12 other scientists since it was instituted in 1994. The Mallorys are the first team to win the honor. Their scientific partnership predates their marriage: they began publishing together in 1962.
The couple has pursued several varied avenues of research, but they are most celebrated for their investigations of the so-called "Mallory reaction," which Frank discovered serendipitously as a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology in 1955. The Mallory reaction became a staple of organic chemistry, used by thousands of chemists to synthesize new compounds.
Hypothesis Confirmed
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Donald Barber |
In a 1999 paper published in Nature by Assistant Professor of Geology Donald C. Barber and colleagues at the University of Colorado, where he was a doctoral student at the time, hypothesized that a flood of fresh water released into the Atlantic Ocean by the melting of an ice dam played a major role in an abrupt climate change that depressed temperatures in Europe for a period of about three centuries some 8,200 years ago. Two recent papers published in The Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences and Quaternary Science Reviews, provide additional data to confirm the hypothesis.
Geologists have long been aware of evidence of the cold spell and of evidence that two enormous freshwater lakes in North America formed by retreating glaciers burst through an ice sheet that had been restraining them. Barber worked out the connection between these two events by precise radiocarbon dating of the lakes' sudden drainage. He went on to hypothesize that the influx of fresh water into the Atlantic changed salinity levels enough to interrupt thermohaline circulation, the process that normally causes water from the tropics to flow northward. Disruption of these currents effectively shut off the heat supply to Europe and the Arctic , he says.
Barber's paper created a major stir in the world of paleoclimatology and in the popular press. "The idea that changes in salinity could affect thermohaline circulation had been suggested before," Barber says, "but only in theory. People thought perhaps this had happened during an ice age. But our paper showed a concrete case of it in a context that is much more relevant to current and possible future climate change."
STAR Graduate
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Amanda Spivak '01 |
Amanda C. Spivak '01 received a Science to Achieve Results (STAR) graduate fellowship from the National Center for Environmental Research of the Environmental Protection Agency. The fellowship, which provides up to $37,000 per year, encourages "promising students to obtain advanced degrees in and pursue careers in an environmental field."
Spivak is working on her Ph.D. at the College of William & Mary's graduate school of marine science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. "My research experimentally tests how top-down (i.e., predator) and bottom-up perturbations (i.e., light, nutrients) interact with benthic biodiversity and food-chain length to alter sediment carbon pools, pathways and transformation rates in an experimental eelgrass (Zostera marina) system," she explains. "Conclusions from this work will be useful in predicting how estuaries will respond to anthropogenic food-web alterations and nutrient loading. In addition, these results will provide insights regarding the effects on estuarine carbon and nitrogen cycling."