For the Record

For the Record provides information about recent professional activities of University of Delaware faculty and staff.

Recent publications, presentations, honors and service include the following:

Publications

Under the supervision of Anne M. Boylan, professor emerita of history, five students enrolled in Carl Suddler’s spring semester African American Women’s History course researched and wrote short biographical sketches of Delaware’s African American suffrage leaders. Three of the sketches were published in September in the online journal Women and Social Movements; the other two will be published in the March issue. The students (and the suffrage leaders about whom they wrote) are Helene Carey (Nellie B. Nicholson Taylor); Stephanie Clampitt (Caroline B. Williams); Alanna Gordon (Emma Belle Gibson Sykes); Alison Lewis (Alice Gertrude Baldwin); and Carol Scott (Blanche Williams Stubbs). The project is part of a larger undertaking to research and publish short biographies of some 2,000 national and state suffrage leaders, in advance of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 2020.

Melissa K. Melby, associate professor of anthropology, is the coauthor with W. Takeda of “Spatial, temporal and health associations of eating alone: A cross-cultural analysis of young adults in Australia and Japan,” published in Appetite, Vol. 118, No. 1, pp. 149-160.

Philip Goldstein, professor emeritus of English at the University of Delaware-Wilmington, is the author of “Philosophical Postmodernism: From Adorno and Derrida to Foucault,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Critical Theory, edited by Stuart Sims, Edinburgh University Press, 2016: 145-161. Theodor Adorno, the social theorist, and Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and other postmodernists critique Enlightenment reason; however, Adorno preserves its middleclass realism, while the others go on to subvert the “bourgeois” subject.

Presentations

Erik Thostenson, associate professor of mechanical engineering, gave a keynote lecture “Nanotube/Fiber Multi-Scale Hybrid Composites using Electrophoretic Deposition” at the sixth International Conference on Electrophoretic Deposition (EPD 2017) held on Oct. 1-6 in Gyeongju, South Korea. The conference, which is held every three years, brings together experts across the world working in the area of electrophoretic deposition (EPD) with focus on its application as a processing technique for the manufacture of new materials and composites. Thostenson, who is also affiliated faculty with the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Center for Composite Materials, received his NSF CAREER award to study the EPD process as an industrially scalable approach to create novel hybrid carbon nanotube/fiber composites. “The EPD approach established by my group has enabled us to explore future applications of these materials, ranging from sensors for structural health monitoring of infrastructure to the development of smart textiles,” Thostenson said.

David R. Wunsch, director of the Delaware Geological Survey at UD, was invited to participate in a National Academy of Science Panel convened for the academy’s Committee Studying the Potential Human Health Effects of Surface Coal Mining Operations in Central Appalachia. The meeting took place in Lexington, Kentucky, on Aug. 22. Before coming to UD, Wunsch spent 15 years at the Kentucky Geological Survey as the coordinator of the Coal Field Hydrology Program, and he has expertise in the geochemistry of groundwater at both mined and unmined areas of the Appalachian Plateau. The title of Wunsch’s presentation was “Pre- and Post-Mining Hydrogeology in the Central Appalachian Plateau: Examples from Eastern Kentucky”.

Honors

Meredith K. Ray, professor of Italian in the Department of Literatures and Cultures, has been awarded a 2017 research fellowship from the Renaissance Society of America for a new book project titled “East of Italy: Early Modern Women Abroad in Italy, Poland, and Dalmatia.”

Fred DeMicco, professor and ARAMARK Chair in the Department of Hospitality Business Management, was recently awarded the Howard B. Meek Award for 2017. This award is the highest individual recognition a member of the International Council of Hotel, Restaurant and Institutional Education (ICHRIE) may receive. It is presented to an ICHRIE member in recognition of the individual’s lifetime contributions and outstanding service both to hospitality education and to ICHRIE.

Maggie Billingsley, a senior in biomedical engineering, and Keely Keller, a graduate student in biomedical engineering, have received 2017 BMES Student Travel Awards to attend the Biomedical Engineering Society’s annual meeting from Oct. 11-14 in Phoenix. Students were selected for this $300 travel stipend based on an application and one-page essay on how the BMES helps to support their work in biomedical engineering. At the conference, Billingsley will present a poster titled Nanoshells Targeting EGFR Enhance the Sensitivity of ELISA-Based Detection Methods, which showcases the work she has been doing in the lab of Emily Day, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering. Keller will present a poster titled Laser-Based Degradation for Engineered Vasculature in Synthetic and Natural Hydrogels, which she has been studying under John Slater, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering. Mary Doolin, a 2015 graduate in biomedical engineering who is now a graduate student at the University of Maryland, also received a travel award.

Service

Trevor Dawes, vice provost for libraries and museums and May Morris University Librarian, was elected to a three-year term on the NorthEast Research Libraries consortium (NERL) executive board. NERL provides a scholarly forum to share and discuss fundamental issues related to collection, management, budgeting and advocacy in academic librarianship.

To submit information for inclusion in For the Record, write to ocm@udel.edu and include “For the Record” in the subject line.