Faculty-Staff Achievements, Feb. 19, 2009

Award

Sue Van Hook, senior teaching associate, biology, in collaboration with Ecovative Design,LLC, is the principal investigator for an EPA SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) grant awarded Jan. 5.  Working as a mycological consultant for this RPI Incubator company, she is experimenting with combinations of agricultural wastes and fungal strains to produce various  regional alternatives to expanded polystyrenes used for structural building insulation.   The new green technology reclaims  agricultural byproducts such as grain hulls as a food source for certain fungi that bind the particles together, creating a natural rigid composite that reduces net carbon dioxide emissions.

Activity

Jay Rogoff, lecturer in English, will read from his work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 19, at the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave., Albany. A reading by a local or regional poet is held each third Thursday at the center.  The suggested donation is $3 at the door, which helps support the Poetry Motel Foundation and the work of the social justice center.

Publication

Paul Arciero, associate professor of exercise science, is co-author (with colleagues from University of Tartu, Estonia, and Texas A&M University-Commerce) of "Plasma Visfatin and Ghrelin Response to Prolonged Sculling in Competitive Male Rowers," published in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2009. 

Writer-in-residence Darryl Pinckney is the author of  “What He Really Said,” an article in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 56, No. 3, Feb. 26, 2009.

In the News 

Roy Ginsberg, Joseph C. Palamountain Jr.  Professor of Government, was interviewed by the newspaper Pravda for a Feb. 9 story on the topic of the Czech Presidency of the European Union. The national daily Pravda is published in the Slovak Republic and has a circulation of 100,000.

Bob Turner, associate professor of government, was interviewed by Capital News 9 for a story titled “20th District Disappearing?” that aired Feb. 16 on the Time Warner statewide cable network.