Month: April 2013

Research Excellence Funds for Social Sciences

The vice president for research is pleased to announce this year’s recipients of the Research Excellence Fund Awards, and would like to thank all of the review committee members for participating in this important internal award process.

Emma Norman and Steven Walton received Scholarship and Creativity Grants.

Adam Wellstead received a Research Seed Grant.

Read more at Tech Today.

Mayer Introduces a Travel Resource for Locals

OHare AirportAudrey Mayer (SS) has started a new resource for the Tech community called “Stuck Huskies.” It is an open-to-the-public page where people who are on cancelled flights to/from Chicago can post on the wall to find ride shares back up to Houghton (or down to Chicago), buses, etc.

“I decided to establish it after a conversation with Shari Stockero (CLS),” Mayer said, “as we were both taking the bus up from Chicago after our flights were cancelled to Hancock.”

Visit the Facebook open group “Stuck Huskies.”

From Tech Today.

Richelle Winkler’s Creative Canvas Course

Winkler CanvasCreative Canvas Course Contest (C-4) Results

The Center for Teaching and Learning’s first Creative Canvas Course Contest (C-4) saw students nominate more than 100 different courses from almost every department. Richelle Winkler is one of the winners of the C-4 contest.

Winkler’s course focuses on the use of modules, peer review, and discussions. Watch a video course tour to learn about these design features.

From Tech Today.

Erik Nordberg is Executive Director of Michigan Humanities Council

Erik NordbergErik Nordberg, University Archivist and PhD Candidate, Industrial Heritage and Archaeology, has taken a new position as Executive Director of the Michigan Humanities Council.

He is a former MHC board member, having served on numerous committees before his eight-year term ended in 2011. He will begin serving as the MHC Executive Director on May 1.

Read more at the Michigan Humanities Council.

UP History Conference for June 2013

UP History ConferenceU.P. History Conference set

The Historical Society of Michigan’s 64th Annual Upper Peninsula History Conference will be held June 28-30, 2013 in Houghton. The conference is hosted and sponsored by the Michigan Technological University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections.

These are some of the events presented by people now or recently from the Department of Social Sciences:

One of the keynote speakers will be Professor Emeritus Larry Lankton, who will explore the duality of the Keweenaw in “A Special Sense of Place: Water, Woods and Winter.”

Social Sciences graduate student Valoree Gagnon will present “Keweenaw Bay Indian Community’s Tribal Fish Harvest: Change and Continuity.”

Social Sciences graduate student Erik Nordberg will present “Life Underground: Working in Michigan’s Copper Mines.”

Anthropology major Sawyer Newman will present “Chinese in the Copper Country and the U.P.”

Social Sciences graduate student Sean Gohman will present “The Cliff Mines and Archeology.”

Read more at the Mining Gazette.

Upper Peninsula History Conference Headed to Houghton County in June

Registration for the full event (including three meals, Sunday morning walking tour, and all regular sessions) is $119 for members of the Historical Society of Michigan and $149* for non-members. Admission for Saturday-only (which does not include the Saturday evening awards banquet) is $79 for HSM members and $109* for non-members. A discount on conference registration is available to Houghton County residents in honor of our host institution. For overnight accommodations, contact the Magnuson Franklin Square Inn at (888) 487-1700 and ask for the “Upper Peninsula History Conference Bock” to get the HSM rate of $60/night.

*All non-member rates include a one-year membership to the Historical Society of Michigan.

Read more at the Historical Society of Michigan.

Cookstove Project in Sustainable Design Expo

Cookstove ProjectMichigan Tech students found a low-cost, highly effective way to reduce the impact of cooking over biomass fires without designing and installing high-tech, costly stoves. They have been invited by the Environmental Protection Agency to take their work to Washington, DC, to participate in the EPA’s annual Sustainable Design Expo. Known as P3 (People, Prosperity and the Planet), the competition challenges college and university teams to design and develop sustainable technologies to help protect the world’s health and the environment.

The cookstove project team includes Mark DeYoung and Jonathan May, mechanical engineering; Travis Wakeham, anthropology and biological sciences; and Jarod Maggio, Abram Peterson, Mollie Ruth, Kelli Whelan and Alex Wohlgemuth, environmental engineering. Their faculty advisor is Kurt Paterson, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Read more at Michigan Tech News, by Jennifer Donovan.

CBS Detroit and its Technology Report published an article about Michigan Tech’s two student teams chosen to exhibit in the EPA Sustainable Design Expo in Washington, DC, this week. See EPA Sustainable Design Expo.

From Tech Today.

Norman Presents on Transborder Water Governance

AAG 2013Emma S. Norman (SS) presented her paper, “The Citizen, the State, and Environmental Governance: How indigenous actors, citizen scientists and regional constructions are reshaping transborder water governance” and served on a panel related to indigenous water rights at the Association of American Geographers Conference in Los Angeles (April 9 – 12).

From Tech Today.

Richelle Winkler’s website gets national attention

Richelle WinklerRichelle Winkler, MTU asst. prof. of sociology and demography, and her colleague Ken Johnson at the University of New Hampshire and other colleagues at Univ. of Wisconsin – Madison recently released a new interactive website that graphically displays net migration patterns for counties in the US from the 1950s-2010.  Her work and the website were recently profiled in USA Today (12 Apr.) in an article “Age, kids and jobs affect where Americans live“.  The website is available to everyone to explore at www.netmigration.wisc.edu.

Assistant Professor Louise Dyble Awarded NEH Fellowship

NEHAssistant Professor of History Louise Dyble (SS), has been awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment of Humanities (NEH). From the NEH website:

“The NEH Summer Stipends program provides awards for individuals to pursue scholarly work in the humanities during the summer. Projects may contribute to scholarly knowledge in a particular discipline or to the general public’s understanding of the humanities, and they may address broad topics or focused research in a single field. Recipients typically produce scholarly articles, books, archeological site reports, translations, editions, or other scholarly tools in either traditional print or electronic formats.”

From Tech Today.