grant – The Transcript

Apiary coming to OWU, bees welcome

Monnett Garden. Image courtesy of owu.edu

Anna L. Davies, Transcript Correspondent

In a partnership with Stratford Ecological Center, Ohio Wesleyan University’s Monnett Garden will get a honey producing and observation apiary on April 22 for students of all majors to use.

The apiary is financed by an approximately $1,000 Theory-to-Practice grant written by junior zoology and nonfiction writing double major Meg Deeter. The grant Deeter received will cover the costs of beekeeping equipment and a stipend for a current lecture series about beekeeping by Stratford apiarist Dave Noble.

Noble’s last two lectures have been about the pollination industry and the honey bee genus Apis, respectively. Stratford will be providing the hives for no charge and will act as the main apiary caretaker and owner. “It’s a growing trend for campuses to have apiaries, and I wanted to bring that here,” Deeter said.

“I’m hoping for a foundation for students like me. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last. I want it to be something that stays when I’m gone.” “My main goal is to have a hands-on experience for parasitology and entomology students,” Deeter said.

Deeter said the apiary would still be open to students of any major. “I emphasized in my grant that this project would be interdisciplinary,” she said. “I don’t like the sciences and the arts being separated.”

Deeter said she was inspired to start the apiary over the summer while interning at a fish and wildlife center and watching her boss breed honeybees. While staying late in parasitology lab last semester, Deeter also overheard OWU professor of zoology Ramon A. Carreno mention wanting an observation hive.

“I also want an outreach for kids. Dave Noble helps with OWjL (Ohio Wesleyan Junior League) and wants to bring kids here to campus to study our apiary,” Deeter said.

Noble’s focus is getting young people interested in bees. “I came to bees when I was in college. My mentors started keeping bees when they were eight,” he said. “10,000 kids on average come to Stratford every year on field trips. I get to interact with all of them,” Noble said.

Like Deeter, Noble said he also wants science, humanities and social science college students to get involved. “I’m a huge proponent of the liberal arts because you have a specific major but get exposed to all these other things to create a wide foundation for life,” Noble said.

Noble’s next lecture is on March 28 and will be about threats to honeybees. The series continues with an April 11 lecture on honey bee genetics and an April 18 lecture on how to not get stung.

All lectures will take place at noon in Schimmel-Conrades Science Center room 163.

Summer internships still available thanks to grant

With the school year winding down, many Ohio Wesleyan students are looking for summer internships.

In August of 2014, OWU career services received The Great Lakes Career Ready Internship Grant for summer internships of $133,333 from the Great Lakes Higher Education Guaranty Corporation. This grant was used to help students with financial needs.

“We’re excited and appreciative for this grant and the potential it creates for our students,” said Director of Career Services Leslie J. Melton in a press release when the grant was announced.

Now that money is available to more students looking to gain experience over the break. This is in large part thanks to the additional donations of two OWU alumni.

“Up until mid-March we were really limited in the number of students who could benefit from the dollars,” said internship coordinator Jill Walters. “We were able to change that a little bit so that the money could be available to more students.”

Walters said that this has recently created a buzz about internships.

“Now we’ve been sending all kinds of emails and trying to get folks interested because the group of eligible students is a lot larger,” Walters said.

The number of quality applications turned in by students seeking internships has grown since then according to Walters.

Even students who have already accepted unpaid internships can seek help from career services to change it to a paid one.

“We were able to reach out to those employers and say ‘hey there would you be interested in partnering, the student is eligible for grant dollars, we would love to pay their salary while their participating in an unpaid internship with you,’” Walters explained.

This was another thing career services were unable to initially do when the grant money was first received.

Internships made available by career services range from locations in Ohio, all the way to Texas, with many others in between. Students can work in fields that include: music, journalism, zoology, psychology, politics and government, business and fitness.

“It’s a really nice mix, something that was really important to our office,” Walters said.

OWU gets $50,000 grant to study waste reduction in eastern Asia

Making interdisciplinary connections and improving waste reduction methods are the goals of the team of faculty recently awarded a $50,000 grant.

The grant is one of five awarded nationwide and comes from the Henry Luce Foundation, a nonprofit with a variety of grant programs.

John Krygier, professor of geology and geography, is one of the grant’s campus coordinators and helped write the proposal.

He said the money will be used for exploratory research in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan that will promote collaboration between professors and students involved with environmental studies and East Asian studies, and possibly other disciplines.

“The idea is to look at some ways that faculty and classes in those two different areas interact,” Krygier said. “It comes down to helping faculty get more Asian content in their environmental courses and get more environmental content in Asian courses.”

He said there is money available for students to get involved, and interested students should contact him.

The exploratory grant encourages faculty to collaborate with colleagues who have different, but complementary perspectives on the world, he said.

“Nobody here is an expert on waste, but you get smart faculty and students together and you just pick a topic, like waste, and say ‘How would that be looked at in your field?’” Krygier said.

Taiwan, South Korea and Japan have been innovators in waste reduction, and some of the methods they have developed could be applied in the United States, he said.

The grant money will also be used to examine the waste reduction practices of nearby companies with Asian roots. One such company is Honda, which aims to reduce its waste to zero.

“That is to a reasonable degree inspired by their Japanese headquarters, though it plays out in the United States very differently,” Krygier said. “So, it’s interesting to look at how ideas about waste management have diffused to the United States.”

Much of the research will occur this summer and fall. Next semester, there will be a symposium and workshop in which faculty and students will present their research.

Krygier said if the project goes well, they have the opportunity to be awarded an additional $400,000 to expand on their work.

Junior Reilly Reynolds, moderator of Tree House, said it is great OWU can connect with other countries on sustainability issues because they should be important to everyone.

“The majority of people at OWU are white, privileged, middle to upper class Americans who will never be affected firsthand by climate change by being forced to live in areas where the environment is unsafe,” Reynolds said. “So, in order to find the purpose of caring, we must look outside of ourselves.”

Modern foreign language department receives grant

The department of Modern Foreign Languages welcomes Douglas Bush, their first-ever Spanish Mellon Postdoctoral fellow.

Ohio Wesleyan, along with the other Ohio Five schools, has received a $2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“It has been a long and exciting process, one in which foreign language faculty members and administrators from the Five Colleges of Ohio, and in collaboration with The Ohio State University, met on several occasions in order to define the post-doc characteristics and potentials,” MFL department chair Juan Rojas said.

This grant is in place to add foreign language faculty through a post-doctorate fellow program and provides Mellon Postdoctoral Fellows at the Ohio Five Colleges. These faculty members are given two years at their appointed college.

“During the process we had meetings and seminars where many faculty members from the five universities shared ideas on how to enhance the teaching-learning process of foreign language, and to build faculty interest and expertise in the uses of blended learning pedagogies,” Rojas said.

Assistant professor of Spanish David Counselman said, “the postdoc will have the opportunity to help create events or other extracurricular opportunities, related to languages and/or their specific area of expertise.”

“Ohio Wesleyan University will benefit significantly from having, in the next four years, two foreign language Mellon Post-Doc fellowships because, besides fostering the academic career of the selected scholar who has recently obtained his Ph.D degree, it will bring new ideas, knowledge, and experience to our students,” said Rojas.

“Dr. Doug Bush, the selected Mellon fellow, will also have the opportunity to engage in an active liberal arts community for a two-year term as he will be teaching three courses per year.”

“A modern foreign languages Mellon Fellow Postdoctoral position is a unique possibility in academia as post-doctoral opportunities in the area of humanities are not very common,” Rojas added.

Junior Macie Maisel, said, “I am a Spanish major and hearing that the modern foreign languages department has received such a great opportunity is very exciting. This will help grow and expand the department and most likely improve the department.”

Jay Martin receives grant to combat hazing

Jay Martin. Photo courtesy of battlingbishops.com.

Many great things come from athletics, but hazing is not one of them. Ohio Wesleyan men’s soccer coach and health and human kinetics professor Jay Martin is looking to address this problem.

“Hazing has always been an interest to me,” Martin said. “When I first got to Ohio Wesleyan I was the soccer and lacrosse coach and both teams were really into hazing.”

Simon Clements of the Chicago-based EXACT Sports research group will be working alongside Martin on his project.

The two sent a grant proposal to the NCAA Innovations in Research and Practice Grant Program stating that “hazing prevalence is as high as 79 percent” and that “a more recent study of 53 colleges involving 11,000 students indicate that over 50 percent have experienced hazing.”

Martin and his research team received a $10,000 grant and will use the money to conduct studies that will attempt to identify teams and players who suffer from hazing tendencies.

Martin and his team will begin their research by identifying 10 coaches throughout all NCAA divisions to send a questionnaire on hazing to.

Then they will do the same thing, but anonymously, with 300 freshman student athletes. This sample will consist of 150 males and 150 females.

“What we are eventually trying to do is to identify teams, players and coaches that have a tendency to haze,” Martin said.

Martin continued by saying they will develop another questionnaire that will be put online so coaches and athletic directors can identify potential hazing situations at their institutions.

All of this will be done by January of 2016.

“We want to be done with part one – that’s identification of the coaches – by April 30, we want to do part two by Aug. 15 and then get the entire study put together to be presented at the NCAA convention next January in San Antonio,” Martin said.

Martin specified that ultimately they are trying to develop an online tool the NCAA can use to pick out hazing teams, coaches, and players.

“We believe that there are certain behaviors exhibited by coaches and players who haze,” Martin said. “So we are trying to identify those behaviors so we can stop hazing and make a more positive environment.”