People News, August 2024

Smith’s swimming and diving team received the All-America Team award from the College Swimming and Diving Coaches Association in recognition of the achievements of student athletes. Students in the Pioneers’ program earned a GPA of 3.65 during fall semester.

Leah Veress ’25 published an article in the Athol Daily News about a program addressing a mental health crisis among farmers.

The Smith-based journal Meridians received a second grant from Smith’s Project on Women and Social Change to support a summer workshop with colleagues from peer journal Feminist Africa and a workshop on “Decolonizing Transnational Feminist Publishing Collaborations.”

Carrie Baker, Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman Chair of American Studies and Professor of the Study of Women and Gender, was the moderator for a panel in June on “Women at Risk, New Threats to Abortion Access,” at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Baker is the author of the forthcoming book Abortion Pills: US History and Politics.

Michael Barresi, professor of biological sciences, has been awarded a $550,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for “RUI: Hedgehog dependent cranial neural crest cells pattern the zebrafish forebrain.”

Alex Barron, associate professor of environmental science and policy, gave an online lecture in June on “Transforming College Operations for Climate Justice” as part of Vermont Law School’s “Hot Topics in Environmental Law.”

Ben Baumer, professor of statistical and data sciences, has been elected as a section officer of the statistical computing group of the American Statistical Association.

Ginetta Candelario, professor of sociology and of Latin American and Latino/a studies, spoke on the diverse methods and media used in the generation of feminist scholarship on an episode of Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s podcast, Crossing Fronteras.

Luca Capogna, professor of mathematical sciences, has been awarded a $275,939 grant from the National Science Foundation for “RUI: PDE and Geometry in non-smooth spaces.”

Anaiis Cisco, assistant professor of film and media studies, premiered the film Drip Like Coffee in the narrative features category at the 28th annual American Black Film Festival in Miami.

Nancy Cohen, lecturer in writing and public discourse, is the recipient of an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association for her reporting on a state investigation of sexual abuse of children by clergy in Fall River, Springfield, and Worcester. Cohen is a senior reporter for New England Public Media.

Jennifer DeClue, associate professor of the study of women and gender, was profiled in a Pride Month social media series by the American Association of University Women.

Jaime Green, a lecturer in writing and public discourse, is series co-editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2024. Green’s science writing has appeared in publications including Slate, The Atlantic, and The Nation.

Steven Heydemann, Janet Wright Ketcham ’53 Professor in Middle East Studies, is the recipient of a prestigious fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, one of 20 scholars chosen for this year’s fellowship class. Heydemann’s award will support his research project, “Trajectories of Stateness in the Arab World.”

Nicholas Howe, professor of computer science, is the recipient of a $29,941 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for “Developing OCR for Squeezes: Unlocking the Text of Greek Inscriptions Using the Krateros Database.”

Valerie Joseph, AEMES mentoring administrative director of Smith’s Clark Science Center, was interviewed on the Writers’ Block show on WHMP about her new children’s book, This is What Mazie Believes.

Mike Kinsinger, lecturer in engineering, is the recipient of a $38,711 grant from Werfen for “Polymer Injection System.”

Paintings by Elizabeth Meyersohn ’80, lecturer in art, were displayed in “The USA Exhibition” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in June as part of the 23rd international art exchange.

Sara Newland, assistant professor of government, is co-author of “Paradiplomacy in Hard Times: Cooperation and Confrontation in Subnational U.S.–China Relations” published in June in Publius: The Journal of Federalism.

Sharon Owino, assistant professor of neuroscience, has been awarded a $495,341 grant from the National Science Foundation for “BRC-BIO: Adult hippocampal neurogenesis: GPR37 mediated regulation of granule cell maturation.”

Kathleen Pierce, assistant professor of art, and Suzanne Gottschang, director of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute and professor of anthropology and of East Asian studies, have been awarded a $45,590 planning grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support faculty, students, and staff at Smith to “imagine, reflect on, and plan for curricular and co-curricular programming that engages the intersection of science, technology, medicine, health, and culture.” Pierce has also been selected as a American Council of Learned Societies Fellow for her project “Dissecting Vision: Surface, Skin and Pathology in and around Cubism.”

Lindsay Poirier, assistant professor of statistics and data sciences, is part of an interdisciplinary research team that has been awarded a 2024 Digital Justice Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. The project, supported by the Mellon Foundation, is titled “Building the Environmental Injustice Global Record, Connecting Researchers, Teachers and Environmental Justice Advocates.”

Haile Rando, assistant professor of computer science, is co-author of “Genetic patterns of world’s farmed, domesticated foxes revealed via historical deep-dive,” which sheds light on how the world’s foxes were domesticated.

Woodcut portraits and poetry by Julie Lapping Rivera, lecturer in art, are exhibited at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield. “Look Again: Portraits of Daring Women,” will be on display through February 2025.

Susan Sayre, associate professor of economics, published new research in June about carbon taxes, “Spatial Microsimulation of Carbon Tax Incidence: An Application to Washington State,” in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

Cristina Suarez, professor of chemistry, successfully applied for a $555,232 state workforce development grant that will support new nuclear magnetic resonance technology for Smith’s Clark Science Center.

Meg Thacher, senior laboratory instructor in astronomy, is the author of Cool Cosmic Tattoos: Stars and Planets, a “Tattoos that Teach” paperback for children.

Susan Voss, Achilles Professor of Engineering, has been awarded a $421,141 grant from the National Institutes of Health for “Integrating data from a wideband acoustic immittance database to develop machine-learning models that characterize pathology in auditory measurements.”

Chris Vriezen, senior lab instructor in biological sciences, has been awarded a $34,355 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture for “American Elm Breeding and Restoration Partnership: identifying bacterial isolates antagonist to Ophiostoma sp.”

Pun Winichakul, assistant professor of economics, has been awarded an $87,320 grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation for “The Effect of Housing Subsidies on Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence from the Family Options Study.”

Sarah Witkowski, associate professor of exercise and sport studies, and Randi Garcia, associate professor of psychology and of statistical and data sciences, published “Acute increases in physical activity and temperature associated with hot flash experience in midlife women” in the journal Menopause. This is the first study to employ ambulatory and simultaneous objective measures of hot flashes, temperature, humidity, and physical activity and evaluate differences in these predictors for hot flashes that occur during the day and night.

Andrew Zimbalist, Robert A. Woods Professor Emeritus of Economics, was interviewed in June for an episode of The Transaction Report podcast about “Podium to Payoff: Olympics Sponsorship Insights.” Zimbalist also participated in a recent webinar on the public financing of sports sponsored by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Stephen Tracey-Ursprung, MFA ’12, has been appointed interim assistant dean of the new Schools of Performing Arts at Dean College in Franklin, Massachusetts. Tracey-Ursprung chairs the college’s curriculum committee and is a mentor for Dean’s chapter of the National Society for Dance Arts.

Attorney Candace Gibson ’07 has been appointed to the board of the Guttmacher Institute. She earned her Smith degree in government and Spanish and a law degree at the University of Utah.

The Long March Home, a novel co-authored by Tosca Lee ’92, is the recipient of an International Book Award—Lee’s third. Lee’s 2023 book, which is about the Bataan Death March during World War II, was recognized in the Historical Fiction category. Lee majored in English language and literature at Smith.

Kim Noltemy ’90 is the new president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Noltemy is a veteran administrator who previously led the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and held leadership posts at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. She earned her Smith degree in East Asian studies.

Gabrielle Esperdy ’87 has been promoted to dean of the College of Architecture and Design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Esperdy, who earned her Smith degree in art and a Ph.D. in art history at the City University of New York, had served as interim dean at NJIT.

Casting director Juliet Taylor ’67 is the recipient of a 2024 Governor’s Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The honorary Oscar was given to Taylor for her “indelible contribution to our art form,” in the words of Academy President Janet Yang. Taylor, who handled casting for films including Taxi Driver, Sleepless in Seattle, and Schindler’s List, earned her Smith degree in theatre.

Jane Lakes Harman ’66 has been appointed to the U.S. President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. Harman, who majored in government at Smith and earned a law degree at Harvard, is currently chair of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy and on the advisory boards of the Department of Homeland Security and NASA.