Colby’s annual spring day of service, Colby Cares Day, was covered in the Morning Sentinel April 20. The article, “Colby students lend a hand at Waterville area organizations for Colby Cares Day,” focused on just two of the numerous sites where Colby students lent a hand: the L.C. Bates Museum and the Waterville Public Library....
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Gail Carlson was in Augusta, Maine, April 17 testifying at the State House and urging “legislators to ban certain food-packaging that contain synthetic chemicals known as PFAS and phthalates,” Maine Public reported. Carlson and some of her students testified in favor of a new bill that would ban these chemicals...
Professor of Government Anthony Corrado, a campaign-finance expert, was quoted in an April 16 CNN article titled “2020 fundraising: Top takeaways from the first quarter.” The fact that only half of the 16 Democratic candidates running for president in 2020 have raised $3 million or less is “a sign that Democratic donors haven’t yet coalesced...
In the spring of 2015, Eric Roy ’04 said he got a tip from an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) retiree about high lead levels in the water in Flint, Mich. This was before the people of Flint fully understood what was in their water. And way before Flint became a public health crisis. A chemist...
Natasha Zelensky, associate professor of music, gave a multi-media presentation titled “Franco Memory Through Song” at the University of Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn Campus on April 11. Zelensky, an ethnomusicologist who studies the role of music in immigrant communities, discussed her project, undertaken with her students, “to collect and preserve some of Lewiston’s most unique—and treasured—Franco-American chanson,” the Lewiston...
Christopher Soto, associate professor of psychology, has published a paper in the journal Psychological Science addressing the replicability crisis in psychology. His paper, “How Replicable Are Links Between Personality Traits and Consequential Life Outcomes? The Life Outcomes of Personality Replication Project,” presents the findings of his project, which “provide grounds for cautious optimism about the personality–outcome...
Catherine Besteman, the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology, conducted a Q&A for Books and Ideas, a project of the Collège de France. Yasmine Bouagga interviewed Besteman about her book Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine. Among the questions asked were “How can social service practices be reconciled with the customs and habits...
Assistant of Professor of Economics Yang Fan was an “expert” in a WalletHub piece on Mastercard credit cards. Fan provided answers to four questions, including “Should every person have at least one Mastercard credit card?” to which he responded, “Yes, it limits the risk that the vendor you are purchasing from does not accept your...
“The historical development of complex global trafficking networks for marine wildlife” is the title of the latest published paper by Loren McClenachan, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies. The article, which McClenachan coauthored, appeared in the journal Science Advances and chronicles how the team “curated 150 years of tortoiseshell transactions and derived biologically...
Carrie LeVan, the Montgoris Family Assistant Professor of Government, wrote an op-ed titled “What Mainers really think of ranked-choice voting” in the March 12 Bangor Daily News in which she discusses the complexity of whether Mainers support the expansion of ranked-choice voting. “Because ranked-choice voting has become a partisan issue, simply asking Maine’s voters whether they want to expand it seems...
The Colby College Museum of Art is profiled in a March 12 New York Times piece titled “Raising the Cultural Bar on Campuses.” The profile mentions a new exhibit by Theaster Gates, Colby’s distinguished artist and director of artist initiatives. “While not typically top of mind as a go-to destination, college and university art museums have a common...
Fulbright Scholar Clare Murray ’18 interviewed Jordia Benjamin, the Colby Museum of Art Mirken Senior Coordinator of Programs and Audience Engagement, for the blog Superstars of Culture that Murray created to highlight cultural change-makers. The interview was picked up by Smith & Benjamin’s e-magazine Bahamian Art & Culture and appeared in its March 8 issue. Benjamin, a native of the Bahamas, has traveled...
Blair Braverman ’11 started her first Iditarod March 3, but she’s not new to mushing. Her social media posts about her dogs and their races have a large following—dubbed “Ugly dogs”—and the media has been interested in her story. National Public Radio’s All Things Considered aired an interview with Braverman March 1 and posted a...
Greta Wells ’11, a geology and French studies double major, has been awarded a Fulbright-NSF Arctic Research grant to study in Iceland this year. Wells is pursuing a Ph.D. in geography at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation project investigates a series of glacial lake outburst floods (jökulhlaups) that drained from the Kjölur region in Iceland at...
Herb Wilson, the Leslie Brainerd Arey Professor of Biosciences, is in the news this week. Two reports of his January birding trip to Mexico were published: in the Portland Press Herald and in Yucatán Ex-Pat Life. Both articles recount a particularly successful day birding at Rio Lagartos, a “well-known birding hot-spot” on the Yucatán Peninsula. “Altogether we saw 83 species...
Is it climate change or global warming? James Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, was quoted in a March 3 Angle News article that dissects how the two terms came to be. Fleming talked of Svante Arrhenius, “the first scientist to calculate the impact that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had on temperature,” he told Angle News. “The...
The journal Nature has published an article by Robert Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, in its News and Views section. The March 1 article, “Ancient plants escaped the end-Permian mass extinction,” details what two papers (one by Fielding et al., the other by Nowak et al.) “reveal about what happened to terrestrial plants during the end-Permian crisis,” Gastaldo writes. Written for a general...
An article by Professor of Education Lyn Mikel Brown and Jenny Flaumenhaft ’19 was published in Phi Delta Kappan Feb. 25. Titled “Student-empowered curricular change,” the article details their work using an initiative called TREE—Transforming Rural Experience in Education—at Maine’s Seabrook Elementary School. TREE uses a bottom-up approach and recognizes that empowerment is key to student success. At...
Decor Maine published the essay “Our Maine Ruinlust” by Adrian Blevins, associate professor of English, that chronicles two homes Blevins refurbished in her 15 years in Maine. The essay mainly focuses on her second home in East Winthrop, a house with beauty that eases her, a “huge house that the original owners unironically named ‘Olympus’ [that] also...
A Physics Today artcle titled “When condensed-matter physics became king” includes two Colby connections. Its author, Joseph Martin, was a faculty fellow in Science, Technology, and Society 2013-14. While at Colby, he became familiar with the Bern Porter Collection in the Special Collections Department. Porter, a 1932 Colby graduate, drew a Map of Physics in 1939, which...
