2010 Distinguished Alumni Award: Virginia DeJohn Anderson

April 28, 2010

Virginia DeJohn Anderson is a professor of early American history at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she has taught since 1985. Her area of specialization is the history of Colonial and Revolutionary America. Her latest book, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, received the Phi Alpha Theta Best Subsequent Book Award in 2005. Creatures of Empire combines ethnohistorical and environmental history approaches to examine the impact of imported livestock on Anglo-Indian relations in the North American colonies. (more…)

2010 Distinguished Alumni Award Recipient: Roger Ballentine

Roger Ballentine is the President of Green Strategies Inc., where he assists clients in the energy and environmental arena with domestic and international public policy matters, investment guidance in the “clean tech” marketplace, marketing and business development strategies, sustainability, and capital formation. He is also a Venture Partner with Arborview Capital LLC, a private equity firm focused on the clean technology marketplace, as well as Lecturer on Law at the Harvard Law School teaching in the area of energy and climate policy and a Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington D.C. (more…)

2009-10 Faculty Member of the Year Award Recipient: Lawrence Gramling

April 27, 2010

Dr. Lawrence Gramling, Ph.D, C.P.A. is the assistant head of the accounting department in the School of Business. He has actively participated as a faculty member in the Honors Program for many years. He served on the Board of Associate Honors Directors since 1988. In 1995, he spent eight months as the interim director of the Honors Program.

Dr. Gramling has been the accounting department’s Honors advisor for more than 20 years and recently developed a pre-thesis seminar series of workshops for Accounting majors. He also has taught an Honors section of the Principles of Managerial Accounting course and has directed numerous honors theses for Accounting Honors graduates over the years. (more…)

2009-10 Faculty Member of the Year Award: Robert Thorson

April 26, 2010

Dr. Robert Thorson earned his B.S. from Bemidji State College, his M.S. from the University of Alaska, and his Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He is a professor of geology in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Anthropology, specializing in integrated geoscience, kettle lakes, and stone walls. He has been heavily involved with the Honors Program since the Spring of 2001, when he was a candidate for the Directorship of the Honors Program. That fall, he created an elective science course for Honors students, Current Issues in Environmental Science, one that is still being taught today. In 2004, he became fully invested with developing and teaching a new breed of interdisciplinary honors courses, creating Geoscience Through American Studies, the first course for what would later become the Honors Core curriculum. (more…)

Rowe Researcher: On-Line Certified Professional Food Manager Course

August 9, 2009

Summer 2009: The Evaluation of an On-line Certified Professional Food Manager Course to Reduce/Eliminate Food Born Illnesses in the Food Service Industry

By Wenhui Sun, Ellen Shanley M.B.A., R.D. and Colleen Thompson M.S., R.D., The University of Connecticut, Storrs, Conn.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 76 million people suffer from foodborne illnesses each year in the United States. Food service is the second largest employer in the United States with a large number of immigrants and individuals having limited skills. The food service industry has an extremely high turnover. (more…)

Rowe Researcher: Soldier Systems Center

Summer 2009: Biological Science Aid, Military Performance Division, U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, Natick Soldier Systems Center

By James Alvarez, POC: Edward J. Zambraski, Ph.D., Jeffery S. Staab, M.S.

My summer was spent as an Intern with the United States Army in Natick, MA, at the Soldier Systems Center. My division’s mission is stated as “conducting biomedical research to improve and sustain Warfighter health and performance under all conditions”. My role in this mission was acting as a general lab technician, processing human blood and tissue samples collected from numerous ongoing studies. I also had the opportunity to observe, and in some cases implement, a number of experimental protocols. (more…)

2009 Distinguished Alumni Award: Mark Weidenbaum

April 26, 2009

Dr. Mark Weidenbaum came to the Honors Program at the University of Connecticut from Waterford, Connecticut. Under the guidance of Drs. John Tanaka (chemistry), Hans Laufer (biology), and Frederick Steigert (physics), he graduated summa cum laude in chemistry as a University Scholar in 1977. He went on to receive his M.D. at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1981 and trained for two years in General Surgery at Roosevelt Hospital (New York). (more…)

2009 Distinguished Alumni Award: Daniel LeVine

Daniel LeVine entered the Honors Program at UConn in fall of 1974. Dan majored in mathematics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year. Subsequently, he graduated summa cum laude from UConn in 1978.

After leaving UConn, Dan continued his studies at the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University where he earned his Ph.D. His doctoral dissertation, “Multidimensional Scaling with Dissimilarity as a Nonmonotone Function of Distance,” explored how an algorithm commonly used in mathematical psychology could be modified in order to broaden its application. (more…)

2008-09 Faculty Member of the Year Award: Robert Gross

Dr. Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History at the University of Connecticut. A native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, he received his B.A. in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 (Phi Beta Kappa 1965) and Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1976. He taught at Amherst College, the University of Sussex, and the College of William and Mary (where he served as director of American Studies) before coming to the University of Connecticut in 2003. He is the recipient of various national awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim, Howard, and Rockefeller Foundations, the Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. (more…)

Rowe Researcher: Mesenchymal Progenitors

August 9, 2008

Spring 2008: Characterization of Mesenchymal Progenitors from Bone Marrow and Adipose Tissue

By Shawnet K. Jones, Katie Lamothe, Ivo Kalajzic and H.Leonardo Aguila

In the lab of Dr. H. Leonardo Aguila we aimed to find markers that would allow for the characterization and isolation of mesenchymal progenitors from different sources. This project focused mostly on progenitors isolated from bone marrow and adipose tissue, two sites containing cells with recognized ability to form bone. In addition this project aimed to determine if there was a differential distribution of progenitor cells amongst males and females. (more…)