Laurie Kenney – Page 13

sher ’07, students seek to improve material development through understanding electron transport

Meng-ju Sher Group

The research explored here, “Spectroscopic Studies of Hybrid Perovskite Solar Cells,” was undertaken as part of the College of the Environment’s Faculty-Student Research Grant Program, which provides opportunities for faculty and students to work together on research projects.

Meng-ju Renee Sher ’07 is assistant professor of physics, assistant professor of integrative sciences, and assistant professor of environmental studies at Wesleyan University. Sher received her bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan in 2007 and PhD degree from Harvard University in 2013.

franceschi ’19 exhibits senior thesis photos

by Laurie Kenney

Kudos to art & art history and environmental studies double-major Paul Franceschi ’19, who showcased his senior thesis work, “Frontcountry Principles,” as part of an exhibition at Zilkha Gallery here at Wesleyan, earlier this month.

“One of the more expected ways to engage with the environment through images might be to highlight some kind of devastation that humans have wrought upon the natural world,” says Franceschi. “In my work I’m trying to identify a more subtle but possibly just as worrying impulse: a covering-of-tracks, a hidden curation and regulation of space, a totalization of the landscape. Rather than focusing on a conflict between the natural and human worlds, in my photos I’m trying to frame a kind of virtual reality of landscape, where images of the environment are illusory, malleable, and almost uncanny.”

More exhibit photos can be found here.

Franceschi is also one of four environmental studies seniors to be inducted into Wes U’s Gamma Chapater of Phi Beta Kappa this academic year. Read more about the ceremony on News@Wes.

meet our 2019-20 student think tank fellows

by Laurie Kenney

Each year, our COE Think Tank brings together Wes students and faculty from across the university, plus a noted outside scholar, for a yearlong conversation on a topic of vital environmental importance. This year’s focus: how humans relate to and value the non-human part of the world. Read on to discover how our three student fellows have been exploring the topic in their work.

thinking outside the box: meet our 2019-20 think tank faculty

by Laurie Kenney

Each year, our COE Think Tank brings together Wes students and faculty from across the university, plus a noted outside scholar, for a yearlong conversation on a topic of vital environmental importance. This year’s focus: how humans relate to and value the non-human part of the world. Learn more about questions our 2018-19 faculty fellows have been pondering this year.

wisdom in the wilderness: terry tempest williams @ wes

by Laurie Kenney

Award-winning writer-conservationist-activist Terry Tempest Williams cast a quiet spell on members of the Wesleyan and greater Middletown communities during a reading and book-signing reception at Memorial Chapel on March 1, at the invitation of Wesleyan’s College of the Environment.

mcleod ’19 hosts bears ears exhibit and screening

by Laurie Kenney

On February 22, the COE hosted a screening of the 2016 documentary short film Shash Jaa’: Bears Ears, followed by a Q&A with Navajo-Hopi filmmaker/director Angelo Baca. A post-showing reception featured a photo exhibit of the Bears Ears region by Fiona McLeod ’19. Shash Jaa’ details the efforts of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition against the reduction of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent after President Trump’s 2017 executive order. It is a continuation of the film Into America: The Ancestors’ Land, directed by Baca & Nadine Zacharias, which examined natural resource extraction in southeastern Utah.

coe faculty-student grant program supports o’connell’s antarctic research

by Laurie Kenney

This past January, Nethra Pullela ’20, Liz Atalig ’21, and Jackie Duckett ’20 joined E&ES Professor Suzanne O’Connell on a journey to the center of the earth–traveling to the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) at Texas A&M University to collect data and samples for O’Connell’s “Where Was the Antarctic Oligocene Ice?” project, funded by the COE’s Faculty-Student Research Grant Program.