Faculty/Staff News of Note
September 2006
The Housing Authority of the City of Erie has awarded Center for Organizational Research and Evaluation assistant director Chivon Fitch $5,365 to conduct a resident safety and services survey.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has funded a zebra mussel monitoring program proposal submitted by Robert Light, senior associate dean for research and Sea Grant director, and Ann Faulds, Sea Grant associate director for the Delaware Estuary. The ten-month grant provides $20,000.
Frank DeWolf, lecturer in management and e-business and director of the RFID Research Center, has submitted the proposal “Creating RFID Expertise via Community-Based Job Training in Northwest Pennsylvania” to the U.S. Department of Labor. The grant requests slightly more than $1.9 million over three years.
New Black School faculty member Todd Nesbit, assistant professor of economics, has had the paper “Automobile Safety Regulation and the Incentive to Drive Recklessly: Evidence from NASCAR” accepted by Southern Economic Journal. The paper, co-written with Russell Sobel of West Virginia University, asserts that as automakers add devices to cars to make them safer in the event of an accident, drivers compensate by driving more recklessly, making accidents more likely to occur.
Research by Mary Beth Pinto, associate professor of marketing, and Phylis Mansfield, assistant professor of marketing, concludes that the combined burden of student loan and credit card debt has become a ubiquitous part of the American college student experience. “Financially At-Risk College Students: An Investigation of Credit Card Usage, Student Loan Debt, and Prioritization of Debt Repayment” is featured in the current issue of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators’ Journal of Student Financial Aid.
James Kurre, associate professor of economics and Economic Research Institute of Erie director, spoke to the Erie Rotary Club earlier this month on “ERIE and the Erie Economy.” He was invited to speak by Behrend alumnus Mark Louis ’90.
Sea Grant staffers received funding for the following programs:
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has funded two proposals from Robert Light, Sea Grant director: One for $200,000, to fund Sea Grant Year 9, and one for $100,588 to support the six-month proposal “Building Coastal Resources in Pennsylvania.”
The United States Environmental Protection Agency funded a proposal by Associate Director Eric Obert, “Standardizing the Process for Evaluating and Monitoring the Fish Tumor and Other Deformities—Beneficial Use Impairment.” The three-month proposal requested $7,371.
David Skellie, coastal land use and economic specialist, will receive $75,000 from the Great Lakes Commission for the one-year “Penn State Behrend Erosion and Sediment Control Project.”
Michael Rutter, assistant professor of statistics, gave the presentation “Successes and Obstacles from a Research Experience for Undergraduates in Mathematical Biology” at the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Mathematical and Statistical Techniques held last week in Tomar, Portugal. His presentation was based on the REU program at Behrend.
Using and Interpreting Statistics, an introductory textbook written by Eric Corty, associate professor of psychology, has been published by Mosby. The first full-color statistics text, it is targeted at students in the health, social, and behavioral sciences.
Michael Brown, assistant professor of management, had the article “Socialized Charismatic Leadership, Values Congruence, and Deviance in Work Groups” published in the July issue of Journal of Applied Psychology. The study, co-written with Linda Travino, professor of management in the Smeal College of Business, found that a socialized charismatic style of leadership was associated with reduced deviant behavior in the workplace.
Mike also attended the Academy of Management meeting held last month in Atlanta; he organized a symposium on ethics, leadership, and integrity that included a paper presentation on role modeling and ethical leadership, and he facilitated a behavioral ethics research incubator that is studying international ethical leadership.
Syed Saad Andaleeb, professor of marketing, has been invited to join the editorial board of the International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance. The journal is produced by the Leeds University (U.K.) Institute of Health Sciences and Public Health Research and published by Emerald Group Publishing, Ltd.
Michael Rutter, assistant professor of statistics, received a $4,500 supplemental National Science Foundation grant to give the presentation “Successes and Obstacles from a Research Experience for Undergraduates in Mathematical Biology” at the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Mathematical and Statistical Techniques held earlier this month in Tomar, Portugal. His presentation was based on the REU program at Behrend.
Martin Kociolek, associate professor of chemistry, and Tracy Halmi, lecturer in chemistry, attended the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting in San Francisco earlier this month. Martin and three student authors presented the paper “Isoxazoles as Precursors to Functionalized Carbocycles and Oxacycles”; Tracy represented the local section of ACS and created a poster presentation promoting the Chemistry Day 2006 theme of “Your Home—It’s All Built on Chemistry.”
“Reforming Inner City Bus Transportation in a Developing Country: A Passenger-Driven Model,” an article co-written by Syed Saad Andaleeb, professor of marketing, and two students from a research methods workshop he conducted in Bangladesh, has been accepted by the Journal of Public Transportation. JPT is published by the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida.
Also, Saad has joined the editorial board for the Journal of International Consumer Marketing, edited by Erdener Kaynak, professor of marketing in the School of Business Administration at Penn State Harrisburg, and published by Haworth Press, Binghamton, N.Y.
Scott Stevens, assistant professor of mathematics, and Amir Khalilollahi and James Sonnenmeier, assistant professors of mechanical engineering, submitted the proposal “Modeling Idiopathic Intercranial Hypertension and ICP Disorders” to the National Institute of Health. It requests $217, 249 for three years.
A National Science Foundation proposal in the amount of $380,908 has been submitted by Yi-Hong Wang, assistant professor of biology. If funded, “Characterization of Leafy Sepal and Sterile Flower Mutants in the Tomato” will be a three-year project.
Anthology of Colonial and Post-Colonial Short Fiction, a new book by Dean Baldwin, associate director of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Patrick J. Quinn of the University of Mississippi, has been published by Houghton-Mifflin. The collection includes works by both British subjects in colonial settings and colonized indigenous people.
“ERP Correlates of Individual Differences in the Comprehension of Nonliteral Language,” co-authored by Dawn G. Blasko and Victoria A. Kazmerski, associate professors of psychology, was published in the most recent issue of Metaphor and Symbol.
“The Temperature of a Vibrated Granular Gas,” an article by G. William Baxter, associate professor of physics, has been published in the journal Granular Matter. Bill’s co-author is Jeffrey S. Olafsen of the University of Kansas.
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