OU COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES RENAMED IN HONOR OF TRANSFORMATIONAL DODGE FAMILY GIFT
The University of Oklahoma announced a historic gift that will transform the future of the OU College of Arts and Sciences. Donated from the family of renowned educator and scientist Homer L. Dodge, a former OU faculty member, department chair and dean, the donation is allocated equally between OU’s College of Arts and Sciences and its Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy – predominantly benefiting student scholarships and research fellowships. In appreciation of this gift, the OU Board of Regents has approved the renaming of the college to the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences.
The largest portion of the funds allotted to the College of Arts and Sciences will go to the Dean’s Undergraduate Scholar Fund to benefit student scholarships. A significant amount is earmarked for the Dodge Family Graduate Fellows Fund to benefit graduate students, as well as for the Faculty Research Fund. Two research chairs will also be funded.
“This extraordinary gift from the Dodge family is momentous, not only for its size, but for the life-changing impact it will have on our students for generations to come,” said OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. “The Dodge family has been a linchpin in our university’s story for over a century, beginning with legendary physics Professor Homer Dodge. This generous gift solidifies their family’s legacy, underscoring their deep commitment to inspiring budding scientists to seize the vanguard of research discoveries. We are profoundly grateful for their unparalleled support and belief in our dynamic vision for a bright future.”
The announcement was made at a ceremony on the front steps of Evans Hall. The Dodge Family was represented by the grandson of Homer L. Dodge, William Wallace; his guest Anna Marie Gomez; Norm Wilson, the trustee of the Alice Dodge Wallace Trust; and his wife, Joan. President Harroz, David Wrobel, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Devin Brown, a senior majoring in planned programs, spoke on behalf of the university.
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SAVE THE DATE - WINTER CONVOCATION
The college will recognize the academic achievements of our students at the upcoming 2021 Winter Convocation. The ceremony will be at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 17, at the Lloyd Noble Center. Please encourage families, friends and community members to join in this momentous celebration and remind students to check their email for information from the college about the event.
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REGENTS' ALUMNI AWARD RECIPIENTS HONORED
The college congratulates the 2021 Regents’ Alumni Award winners who were recognized at a ceremony during Homecoming Weekend. Since 1987, alumni and friends who have made a distinctive impact on OU through their exceptional achievements, service and transformational support have been honored. Award recipients best represent a spirit of community and commitment to excellence demonstrating the university’s highest values. This year's recipients include Jeanne Hoffman Smith, Rod Sanders and Dr. William Paiva who were nominated or co-nominated by the college.
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FACULTY AND DEPARTMENT NEWS |
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A documentary narrated, co-written and co-produced by OU professor Joshua Nelson is set to premiere nationally Nov. 1 on PBS. Searching for Sequoyah is the first documentary feature to chronicle the legendary accomplishments and mysterious death of the famed 19th-century Cherokee visionary, Sequoyah (George Guess). PBS-affiliated stations will begin broadcasting Searching for Sequoyah beginning Nov. 1 as part of their programming for Native American Heritage Month. Viewers should check their local PBS schedule for exact date and time. READ MORE
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Carolina Rueda, filmmaker and associate professor in the Film and Media Studies Department, won the award for Best Cinematography at the Female Filmmakers Festival Berlin with her film Oklahoma Mon Amour (2021). The film was additionally nominated for Best of Festival and Best Screenplay awards at the FFFB. Oklahoma Mon Amour also received the prestigious Special Remi Award at the 2021 WorldFest Houston. The Oklahoma premiere debuted at the Norman Depot as part of the Norman Film Festival. Many OU students and alumni participated in the production of the film, which received support from the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, the College of International Studies and the Film and Media Studies Department.
Pictured: Carolina Rueda (left) with FFFB developing director Jewell Sparks, at the awards ceremony.
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A book written by Lucas Bessire, associate professor of anthropology, was selected as one of five finalists for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction. For this year’s Nonfiction competition, publishers submitted a total of 679 books. A panel of judges selects a Longlist of 10 titles per category, which is then narrowed to five finalists. The winners of this year’s awards will be announced on Nov. 17 during the National Book Awards Ceremony. Bessire’s book, titled Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton University Press, 2021), is an intimate reckoning with extreme aquifer depletion on the High Plains. Running Out chronicles the author’s journey back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers. Bessire’s search for water brings the reader face-to-face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future. The book is billed as an urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change and as a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss and what it means to find your way back home.
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Victor Maqque, a Native Quechua scholar with academic expertise in Latin American history and Andean studies, has been selected as operations manager for the Latin American Sustainability Initiative, coordinated within OU’s Institute for Resilient Environmental and Energy Systems. Maqque will also hold an appointment as a clinical professor of practice in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences. “The College of Arts and Sciences is delighted that Dr. Victor Maqque will be joining us,” said David Wrobel, dean of the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences. “As a clinical professor of practice in the college, Dr. Maqque will work on the expansion and integration of our indigenous-centered programs across multiple departments and connect those programmatic developments with similar initiatives across OU’s colleges to advance the university-wide Native Peoples Initiative.”
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June Abbas, a professor in the School of Library and Information Studies and interim director of the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences Data Scholarship Program, has been selected for the inaugural class of the Association for Information Science & Technology Distinguished Member Program. The designation ASIS&T Distinguished Member is a signature recognition. The achievement comes as a result of hard work, commitment to personal development and a dedication to excellence in the profession. This elite status is attained only by those with a demonstrated commitment to mastering their profession through sustained educational pursuits and a proven track record of service to both their community and the information science and technology field. The ASIS&T Distinguished Member program recognizes up to 10% of ASIS&T global membership based on professional experience as well as significant achievements in the information science and technology field through professional service and leadership, and scholarly or professional contributions. Distinguished Members serve as a mentor and role model, guiding career development and excelling in the field. ASIS&T is considered the preeminent international professional association within the field of information science and is the only professional association that bridges the gap between information science practice and research. ASIS&T members have been leading the search for new and better theories, techniques and technologies to improve access to information. Members share a common interest in improving the ways society stores, retrieves, analyzes, manages, archives and disseminates information.
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Debra Bemben, a professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science has been elected to the 2021 class of Fellows of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research. Bemben is the director of the Bone Density Research Laboratory at OU. Her research interests focus on two main areas: 1. the effects of mechanical loading on bone metabolism in a variety of populations, including postmenopausal women, athletes and amputees; and 2. bone and muscle interactions in geriatric populations. She has published more than 140 research articles in bone and exercise science journals and has received external grant funding to support her research. The Fellow of the ASBMR designation recognizes long-term members who have shown a commitment to ASBMR through service as a volunteer of the society, have made outstanding contributions to the field of bone and mineral science, and have published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research (JBMR®) and/or JBMR® Plus. Fellows are nominated by their peers, followed by an evaluation and selection by a review committee and approved by the ASBMR Council.
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The American Academy of Religion has honored a book by Caroline T. Schroeder, a professor in women's and gender studies. Children and Family in Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism (Cambridge University Press) was selected as a finalist in the category of textual studies. This annual competition recognizes new scholarly publications that make significant contributions to the study of religion. The awards honor books of distinctive originality, intelligence and creativity. The selected titles affect decisively how religion is examined, understood and interpreted.
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Gordon Uno, a professor of botany, has been honored with the William E. Bennett Award for Extraordinary Contributions to Citizen Science. The award is given annually to an individual and a team whose SENCER and other related activities have made exemplary and extraordinary contributions to citizen science and whose work embodies the ideals and aims of SENCER. Uno is being recognized for his long and distinguished career in advancing interdisciplinary STEM education.
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Bonni Goodwin, instructor and researcher with the Anne and Henry Zarrow School of Social Work, has received the 2021 Adoption Excellence Award from the Administration for Children and Families, Children’s Bureau. Goodwin was honored with this prestigious award based on her extraordinary research and professional contributions that advance the importance of permanency and adoption of every child/youth within the child welfare system.
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Samuel Perry, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology has been recognized with two awards for his research. His 2020 book, Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, has been honored with the 2021 Distinguished Book Award by the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Also, the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality presented Perry with the 2021 Hugo G. Beigel Award "to recognize research excellence in sexual science" for his 2020 article in the Journal of Sex Research, the leading journal in sexuality studies.
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Kyle Harper, professor of classics and letters and provost emeritus, has published Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. Harper – a graduate of OU’s Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences with a degree in Letters – is a Roman historian whose work has led him into the history of infectious disease. In 2017, he published a book (The Fate of Rome) that retells the story of Rome’s decline by including factors like climate change and pandemics. This work led him to start writing a new history of humanity and its disease pool. The book combines insights from the natural sciences – especially the genetics of microbial pathogens – to trace the profound influence of infectious disease in the human past, from the beginning to COVID-19. He also tells the story of humanity’s escape from infectious disease—a triumph that makes life as we know it possible yet destabilizes the environment and fosters new diseases. Started more than two years before the arrival of the COVID-19, but finished under its shadow, Plagues upon the Earth helps us understand how we got here by putting the current crisis in deeper perspective.
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Seulki "Rachel" Jang, an assistant professor of psychology, recently had a study published in the Journal of Business and Psychology related to office housework, which gained media attention by the BBC. In The New York Times, Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg made the case that women perform more office housework and experience more burnout yet receive fewer career benefits from performing office housework than do men. However, this claim has not been formally tested. Based on gender role theory, conservation of resources theory and shifting standards, researchers tested the relationships between gender, office housework, burnout and promotion. Results revealed that women performed more office housework overall than did men.
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In October, Thirumalai “Venky” Venkatesan, director of OU's Center for Quantum Research and Technology, organized a joint workshop between the Indian Institute of Technology Madras Quantum Center and the CQRT. This Zoom event was well-received and attended by approximately 80 faculty members and graduate students at both institutions. The success of this workshop continued OU’s effort to develop a joint Ph.D. program with IITM. Venkatesan, an internationally noted leader in advanced technology innovation, is working to collaborate with several institutes in India to enhance the OU CQRT reputation, which will impact the quality of graduate applicants from the country.
"We had a great workshop with faculty from here and OU," said Professor MSR Rao, Director of the Quantum Center at IITM. "There was a great exchange of ideas that went on for nearly six hours. There is a lot of synergy between both groups and many positives came out of the meeting for everyone. We feel we can leverage the capabilities of faculty and students on both sides and take the collaboration forward with a number of topics of interest in the near future.”
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Joan Hamory, an assistant professor in economics, recently participated in a Facebook Live event hosted by Interactive Research & Development, an organization based in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan that is partnered with the government of Pakistan to support improvements in access and quality of health services in the country. A recent study in Pakistan shows that approximately 17 million school-age children are in need of treatment for intestinal worms, an illness that can have substantial negative impacts on health. The Pakistan government recently launched the Pakistan Deworming Initiative, aiming to treat millions of children in 45 districts across the country. The goal of the Facebook Live event was to disseminate information on this initiative and on the economic benefits of providing deworming treatment to youth. Hamory was invited to speak about her research on the benefits of childhood deworming treatment in Kenya, a research project that has been ongoing for almost two decades.
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STAFF SPOTLIGHT: MEET AIMEE HARDESTY
Aimee Hardesty joined the OU family in 2006. Before working for our college, she was with the College of Continuing Education (now PACS), Southwest Convention Center and the Center for Early Childhood Professional Development, where she worked on curriculum and graphic design projects. She started in her current role in 2011 as an instructional designer and course manager for the Online and Academic Technology Services office, where she serves the college today. Hardesty enjoys reading, traveling and kayaking when she’s not working.
This semester, the Online and Academic Technology Services office is busier than ever. As part of her job, she helps to oversee the development of online courses for the college. This includes tracking the course development process, assisting instructors in the building of their online courses, providing help with using Canvas and sharing best practices for how to teach in the online setting. She also provides graphic design support for course layout, training materials and outreach to the college.
During the pandemic, her unit went into “super support mode,” making sure that all faculty and instructors knew that her department was there to answer any questions about transitioning their in-person classes online. They assisted a lot of instructors with moving their courses to the online setting, as well as with Canvas and how to teach remotely. They created several tools to help with this process, including a fully online guide to online course design, an importable template and Zoom guides. Tuesday Teaching Tips continued and were adapted to meet the needs of instructors for navigating online teaching. Some of her proudest career moments since joining the college was the work her department did to help and support this transition to online and the impact that had on the students’ experience and learning.
“Aimee Hardesty, and the entire OATS team under the leadership of Beth McCoy, are invaluable to the success and mission of our college,” said David Wrobel, dean of the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences. “Their commitment to serving our faculty by supporting excellence in the classroom enhances the learning environment to provide our students with the best possible educational experience."
What she loves most about working at OU is her department and those she gets to work with within it. She describes them as “incredibly competent, intelligent, kind, full of integrity and who give selflessly to be the very best in their jobs, their families and in their communities.” She also enjoys working with the faculty, staff and instructors within the college because of how much they care about the students and OU’s mission. Overall, she loves the campus, including the academic atmosphere, the student presence, the beauty of the campus and the academic calendar that provides both constant change and consistency.
The advice she’d give to new OU staff would be to “remember the big picture and the work you are doing, no matter how small, is impacting many lives.”
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OU HUMANITIES RECEIVE RECORD-BREAKING GRANT
Six key humanities programs at the University of Oklahoma will benefit from a $500,000 award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the largest ever total grant from the NEH for OU. The funding originated through the American Rescue Plan, intended to help humanities organizations across the country that have been negatively impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Kimberly J. Marshall, director of the OU Arts and Humanities Forum and an associate professor of anthropology, spearheaded the “New Stories of the West, for the West” grant team. READ MORE
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OU-TULSA FACULTY MEMBER RECEIVES ROBERT WOOD JOHNSON FOUNDATION GRANT TO STUDY NEBRASKA INDIAN CHILD WELFARE ACT
Claudette Grinnell-Davis, Ph.D., M.S., M.S.W., has received a $442,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Policies for Action program to study the implementation and impact of the 2015 Nebraska Indian Child Welfare Act statute. Grinnell-Davis, an assistant professor in the Anne and Henry Zarrow School of Social Work at OU-Tulsa, will serve as the principal investigator for the grant. This research grant is the first step in understanding how best to support Indigenous communities in Nebraska in restoring balance within their communities and generating collaborative strategies to heal the historical trauma that has disrupted tribal communities there for over 150 years. READ MORE
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OU RESEARCHERS CONTRIBUTE TO STUDY ON POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVE TREATMENT FOR LYME DISEASE
As if COVID and RSV weren’t bad enough, incidents of Lyme disease – a potentially serious disease caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi and transmitted following a bite of an infected deer tick – also are on the rise in the United States, including in Oklahoma. Researchers in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, OU Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, contributed to a study published in the journal, Cell, that describes a new antibiotic with the potential to cure Lyme disease. READ MORE
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OU RESEARCHERS LEAD U.S. - CHINA GRASSLAND MICROBIAL BIODIVERSITY STUDY
Grassland soil today experiences increased nutrient inputs, which have dramatic impacts on biodiversity. To help understand this issue, researchers at OU are leading the American contribution to a global study that aims to measure the impact of increased nutrients on soil microbial biodiversity and the ecosystem-level functions for grasslands around the world. Jizhong Zhou, a George Lynn Cross Research Professor and Presidential Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Plant Biology, is the principal investigator of this five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation. The global collaboration between the United States and China is supported by a total combined equivalent of nearly $2.5 million to advance a global understanding of soil nutrients’ impact on microbial diversity to better understand, predict and mitigate the impacts. READ MORE
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OU PHYSICIST UNCOVERS THE HIDDEN POTENTIAL OF HIGH-EFFICIENCY SOLAR CELLS
One of the greatest challenges of solar cells is the Shockley-Queisser limit, the assumption that there is a fundamental limit to the amount of energy a solar cell can absorb and convert into usable energy. OU physicist Ian Sellers is showing that the widely held assumption is false. Sellers, an associate professor in the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences, has received a $310,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to demonstrate the utility of some commonly used semiconductors to significantly increase the efficiency of solar cells. READ MORE.
Pictured: OU graduate student, Hadi Afshari, measuring next-generation solar cells on the solar simulator in the Sellers Lab.
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SCIENTISTS RESEARCH THE HARMS ASSOCIATED WITH ARTIFICIAL LIGHTS AT NIGHT
Research shows that artificial lights at night contribute to health impacts like disrupted sleep, biodiversity loss and altered nocturnal ecosystems, as well as the deaths of up to a billion migratory birds. An interdisciplinary team at OU has been awarded a nearly $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to integrate social and biological science research to seek solutions to this “wicked problem” of artificial lights at night. READ MORE
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GARY MCADAMS - WICHITA AND AFFILIATED TRIBES
$93,686 — U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT
LOCATING AND MAPPING WICHITA ALLOTMENT HOMESTEADS
This project, in collaboration with the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, will document late 19th- and early 20th-century gathering spaces and allotment homesteads through ethnographic interviews, archival research and archaeological surveys. The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes have called what is now Oklahoma home for thousands of years, but were forced to relocate to Anadarko, Oklahoma, after the U.S. Civil War. Then in 1887, U.S. Congress passed the General Allotment Act (or Dawes Act), which sought to break up tribal communities into smaller family units, establishing individual land ownership (known as allotments). Despite these blatant attempts by the U.S. government to destroy their culture, the Wichita people persisted. They continued their practices of camping together, building grass houses and arbors, and using dance grounds as community gathering spaces around Anadarko. This research will aid in countering stereotypes of allotted lands as places of poverty and dependence, replacing them with narratives of how Native American communities were and still are actively responding to the long-term effects of settler colonialism. Grant funds will be used to hire and train Tribal members and OU students in this mixed-methods approach.
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$23,269 — UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON
MOBILE HEALTH TO MONITOR RISK FOR COVID-19 AND IMPROVE MENTAL HEALTH DURING THE PANDEMIC
This four-university collaboration between the University of Houston (MPI Michael Zvolensky), University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (MPI Michael Businelle), University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University addresses disparities in access to behavioral health care during the COVID-19 pandemic among Black, Latinx and American Indians. Project EASE (Easing Anxiety Sensitivity for Everyone) uses a smartphone app to target anxiety and depressive symptoms through symptom monitoring, coping skills and educational information about stress and coping during the COVID health crisis.
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A paper by OU graduate student Kalee Anderson and Nathan Kaib, assistant professor in the Homer L. Dodge Department of Physics and Astronomy, was accepted by The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The results shown in Signatures of a Distant Planet on the Inclination Distribution of the Detached Kuiper Belt provide a potentially useful observational test for the existence of the possible distant ninth planet in the outer solar system. Anderson and Kaib used N-body simulations of the formation of the Kuiper Belt with and without an additional ninth planet. They found that the nine-planet simulations produced a population of low-inclination, distant TNOs that is not present in the eight-planet simulation. The upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory will likely observe many new TNOs in the region of the distant Kuiper Belt they focus on in this paper. This population of TNOs could be used as a test for the existence of the ninth planet in the coming years.
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Nov. 12
Deadline for academic units to submit to the Dean’s office recommendations for reappointment or non-reappointment to a third year for tenure-track and ranked-renewable term faculty.
Nov. 15
Deadline to submit Presidential Dream Course proposals to the Dean’s office.
Nov. 15
Deadline to submit undergraduate program modifications and undergraduate certificates (using State Regents forms) to the Dean’s office.
Nov. 15
Spring 2022 OTIS returned to departments to prepare ePAFs
Nov. 22
Deadline to enter graduate courses and undergraduate courses with G designation not associated with program modifications into Courseleaf.
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If you have information or announcements for News & Updates, please submit to the College communication office.
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