Hi all!

Hope your summers are off to a good start! Below, you will find information about the New England Future Faculty Workshop. Applications close on June 12th, 2023. If you are interested in applying, please visit the link here.

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The New England Future Faculty Workshop (NEFFW) is a two-day event dedicated to preparing PhD students and postdoctoral researchers for faculty careers in academia. This event will be hosted virtually by Northeastern University (Boston, MA) on August 2nd and 3rd, 2023, and we invite graduate students and postdoctoral researchers as participants from across the country. A flier with more information is attached.  

The goals of the NEFFW are to:  

(1) increase representation of scholars from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds 

(2) provide professional development opportunities for cultivating future faculty applicants  

(3) offer personalized feedback on application materials 

(4) develop support networks for future mentorship 

Underrepresented populations in Faculty positions in Academia include women, racial and ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, first-generation students, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Last year, we hosted 182 participants from over 74 institutions across the globe. 

This year we aim at cultivating the relationships we created in the past years while expanding our reach to students and researchers  with diverse identities coming from institutions not only in the New England area but also in the whole country and the world..  

As a part of the NEFFW event, participants will have access to focused panel sessions, review of their application materials (CV, cover letter, research, teaching, and diversity statements), personalized feedback, affinity group discussions, and the opportunity to meet fellow graduate students and postdoctorates across a variety of institutions from different disciplines. Topics discussed will include institutional fit, developing research, teaching, and diversity statements, interviewing skills, negotiation, mentoring, time management, and planning for their first year as faculty. 

You can apply to register for the event here. Information about the workshop can also be found in the attached flier. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out directly to northeasternadvance@northeastern.edu.  

Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash

For eight weeks this summer, undergraduate students, all college rising seniors, will be part of the inaugural Student Airborne Research Program (SARP) - East. SARP-East was created on the heels of the successful SARP-West. The students will be conducting research, developing a hypothesis, presenting their findings, and working on a practice research proposal. 

Susanne Craig (616/UMBC) recently was appointed as scientific lead for the 'Surf' or aquatic aspect of the program. We asked Dr. Craig for more details about the upcoming workshop and her role.

"I am collaborating with other faculty mentors to design the observation campaign that will investigate the aquatic aspect of SARP. These include colleagues from Virginia Commonwealth University, US EPA, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, and our wonderful graduate mentor from the University of Alabama. We will be conducting studies of the James River all the way down to the Chesapeake Bay using various approaches that include optical measurements, biogeochemical laboratory analyses of water samples, physical measurements of the water column, studies of tagged fish, and good old-fashioned examination of water samples under a microscope."

We were curious about any specific research goals with the selected site being the Chesapeake Bay.

"This [area] is a complex system where anthropogenic factors strongly influence the land, waterways, and atmosphere. We want to have a strong focus on the coupled human natural system of the Surf, Turf, Above the Earth and how they fit together. We have designed the program to have a strong interdisciplinary slant that involves surface to space, nose height to satellite, ground to geostationary."

We inquired about the goals for the students.

"The overall goal is to perform integrated observing strategies to address complex, process oriented Earth System Science goals. This involves studying processes in aquatic, terrestrial, and atmospheric systems. We want the students to have a "small bite" of a larger problem with an intrinsic focus on how we might scale our observations, i.e., whether that's from a point measurement to a satellite pixel, or to planet scale or the reverse. To achieve this, we'll be utilizing airborne NASA observing assets, such as NASA Langley's B200, SR-22, and Gulfstream III aircraft, and Dynamic Aviation's B200, uncrewed aerial vehicles (drones), ship-based observations, and in situ observations of various terrestrial systems."

We wondered what Dr. Craig is most looking forward to in working with the students.

"What I most look forward to is getting students excited about Earth system science - understanding that our water, land, and atmosphere is a connected system. If that piques their interest in pursuing studies in science, policy, environmental justice, or anything related, then I'd take that as a huge win! An even bigger win would be to engage folks who otherwise might not have considered such a career. I'm also hoping that we are beginning to dismantle some of the barriers to participation in such studies by ensuring that our recruitment process reaches out to communities of people who have been historically underrepresented in all of these fields. Justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in our field is of huge importance to me. I am chairperson of The Oceanography Society's JEDI committee and I strongly believe that this aspect of being a scientist in my community is as important as the scientific studies."

Participating students come from all around the country, and Dr. Craig provided an image of this year's geographic distribution. Note, applications for SARP are now closed for this year. The next application period will run from around November 2023 - January 2024.

Family stories, told honestly, reach people in ways that reams of advice and pages in history books cannot. When personal narratives reach the classroom, students respond by opening up, say two professors who have published memoirs of their family tragedies as a way to process their grief and share their stories.

“I believe that writing personal narratives and sharing my own family’s stories helps build trust and rapport in the classroom,” said Aharona (Roni) Rosenthal, director of Judaic Studies at UMBC. “Writing personal narratives can serve as a model for students and encourage them to listen to their grandparents’ stories, embrace their own family’s traditions, and find their own voice in writing.”

Write about the darkness and the light

Rosenthal, who self-published her family’s history last spring as Where the Lilacs Bloom Once Again,remembers her great-aunt Friddie arriving for a visit to the family in Israel. With her huge laugh, her bright red nail polish, and her scarred hands and face, Friddie would wear thick makeup, pull white gloves over her hands, and paint the undersides of her nails to hide the permanently blackened nails. 

Rosenthal recorded her father telling family stories about Friddie, kept for 13 years in secret prisons and labor camps in Romania during World War II and then under the Communist rule, where she was tortured and forced to dig the canal from the Danube River to the Black Sea. When her father, Yossi Rosenthal, died a few months after telling her that history, Rosenthal returned to Israel and found on her father’s desk a photo album, a partially finished family tree, and a note from her father, asking her to tell more widely the story of their family.

Rosenthal spent 12 years researching and writing her family memoir. Along the way, Rosenthal found long-lost family members, learned the fate of others, and gathered material that she now shares in her classes at UMBC, especially in her unit on the Holocaust in her Hebrew literature class. 

One of the Rosenthal family stories tells of Friddie’s detainment in the labor camp, where she met a man through a chink in the stone wall dividing the men’s side from the women’s side of the camp. Friddie was looking for a cat who was slinking around the wall, and so was Mircea, the man she fell in love with, sight unseen.

“It was a miracle in the darkest place in the world, the scariest place in the world,” Rosenthal said, and after Mircea was released, he helped free Friddie and the couple married.

Narratives that stick with you

Rosenthal’s family tales are intertwined with atrocities in World War II, when Romania allied with the Nazis. Thousands of Romania’s Jews were slaughtered and sent to concentration camps. Rosenthal remembers her grandparents who, on every anniversary of a 1941 pogrom in Iași, would light candles under pictures of lost loved ones, but never speak about the massacre. 

One of Rosenthal’s students, Moriah Thompson ’24, biological sciences, said she had known the history of atrocities in World War II, but that Rosenthal’s stories and primary sources brought that history to life. 

“Seeing her pictures and listening to the letter her ancestors wrote, it was actually so absolutely incredible to see the history as it related to her family,” Thompson said. “The narrative that stuck with me the most was the letter her great-grandfather wrote about the pogrom he and his family endured. Being Jewish, we know the history and we’ve heard the stories. But hearing from a man who experienced it was so much different. I can’t imagine the fear he felt trying to keep his family safe, or his wife worrying about the children.”

Writing your story so others can find it

Nancy Shelton,a recently retired education professor at UMBC, knows the power of writing a personal story.  

“I don’t believe you can teach kids to write without writing with them,” said Shelton, who researched literacy and taught potential teachers how to teach writing. So as a classroom teacher, then as a professor in the education department, she always wrote with her students during classroom writing sessions. 

One winter day at their Florida vacation home, when she and her husband were both a few years from retirement, he was joking with her as he headed out to wash their new car. A while later, Shelton, who has hearing loss, heard her dogs barking frantically and found her husband prone on the kitchen floor, having a seizure.

“It literally came out of the blue,” Shelton remembered. At the hospital soon after his seizure, John was diagnosed with stage four cancer. 

“A death sentence,” Shelton said. She called her sister who advised her to take notes during the medical consultations. As John slept in the evenings, Nancy sat by his hospital bedside and filled in her notes “as if they were data,” the kind she had collected for years researching schoolchildren’s literacy. Her notes, she said, were a way of handling her husband’s swift slide into illness, and finally death.

“I am a writer,” Shelton said. “I thought, well, I will write my way through this.”

As a reader, she looked for books with characters whose family members were dying of cancer, but she couldn’t find any she identified with. So she wrote one, 5-13: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Survival, published in 2016. 

Writing can make you strong

“Being able to be a published author as a teacher of writing gives you credibility,” Shelton said. 

In her education classes, Shelton read literature to her students, such as the first kiss scene from Rita Mae Brown’s autobiographical novel, Rubyfruit Jungle, or the definition of heaven by the narrator of Lovely Bones. Then she would ask the students to write in response. Often, the students’ writing was quite personal, exploring identity, family and memory. 

The classroom, she said, turned into a safe space for writing, and for sharing. “I believe writing is something that exposes a part of us that would otherwise be hidden, and that exposing makes you very vulnerable, but also makes you very strong,” she said.

By Susan Thornton Hobby