Faculty present research, publish during fall semester

Faculty spent the fall semester not only teaching, but also publishing and presenting research. 

Dr. Yong-Zhuo Chen, professor of mathematics, attended the workshop on Fractal Geometry and Related Topics last month at Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, China. Fractal geometry is an active mathematical field that studies irregular geometry figures that are not dealt with in classical geometry. 

Dr. Mihaela-Christina Drignei, assistant professor of mathematics, presented a paper titled “A Numerical Method for Solving a Goursat-Cauchy Boundary Value Problem” at the American Mathematical Society Eastern Sectional Meeting in Philadelphia. 

Also, Colin Poirer, an applied mathematics major from Turtlepoint, presented during the fall a research project he had worked on last summer with Drignei. The project was “Some Elementary Inverse Problems Involving the Timing of Signals,” and he presented it at the Penn-York Undergraduate Research Conference, which was hosted by Pitt-Bradford. 

Sean Gess, an adjunct instructor of biology,was the lead author of an article, “Rest-site Selection by Fishers (Martes pennant) in the Eastern Deciduous Forest,” that appeared in Wildlife Society Bulletin last month. Gess and his fellow researchers studied resting fishers in a recolonized area and found 79 structures used for rest by 15 of the medium-sized members of the weasel family. The fishers’ favorite resting spots were in live trees with broken tops, primarily black cherry, American beech and sugar maple. 

Dr. Nancy McCabe, associate professor of writing and director of the writing program, published two pieces during the fall. Her flash fiction piece “After the Coma” appears in the current issue of Citron Review, and her craft essay “Crossing the Nonfiction Line: Autobiographical Fiction and Fictionalized Memoir” was a cover story in the fall issue of Voices de la Luna. 

Her essay “Can This Troubled Marriage be Saved: A Quiz” was cited in an article in Brevity magazine as “a remarkable example of how an essay can be crafted by simple subversions of an expected form.” 

Dr. Jean Truman, assistant professor of nursing, presented a poster, “Enhancing Assessment Skills and Assessing Clinical Judgment Utilizing Standardized Patients During an Emergency/Disaster Situation,” at the Sigma Theta Tau International, Honor Society of Nursing’s 42nd Biennial Convention in Indianapolis. 

The poster illustrated how nurse educators can use standardized patients to assess the competency of student nurses responding to disaster victims. Students were required to accurately assess victims using principles of mass casualty triage. Their clinical judgment and performance were evaluated during their interactions with the standardized patients. 

Dr. Donald Ulin, associate professor of English, published an article, “From ‘Huckleberry Finn’ to ‘The Shawshank Redemption’: Race and the American Imagination in the Biracial Escape Film,” in the European Journal of American Studies. Ulin studied several American movies about biracial friendships between a young white man and an older black man in the light of Mark Twain’s iconic novel, including several film versions of “Huckleberry Finn.” 
 
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