By Kaila Snyder, Staff Writer
Three Susquehanna faculty members met on April 2 in Blough-Weis Library to attend a session titled “Short Talks on Faculty Scholarship.”
The event highlighted individual faculty members who wished to share expansions on their personal research with their faculty community as well as the university community.
The event was attended by faculty members across all academic fields and focused on highlighting specific examples of faculty research and achievements.
The first speaker was Massooma Pirbhai, assistant professor of physics at Susquehanna. Pirbhai gave her presentation, titled “Carbon Nanotubes affecting Neural Stem Cells,” explaining the complexity of carbon nanotubes as well as her own personal data collection and experiments.
Pirbhai has been working with this topic since she was in graduate school; she initially started by looking into cancer treatment and using nanomaterials to deliver drugs or kill cancer cells while sparing healthy ones.
Eventually this led Pirbhai to study the effects of carbon nanotubes administration over a long period of time.
During her presentation Pirbhai stated: “The goal of my research is to look at cell manipulation from the outside.”
Pirbhai told the Quill that she usually spends the summers working on her research.
“Balancing the teaching and research is often extremely hard because both take a lot of time and energy. But one sometimes can feed the other,” Pirbhai said.
Pirbhai gave the example of how in her Introduction to Physics class this semester a lot of the discussion has been based on the study of neurons.
The second speaker was Associate Professor of Music Marcos Krieger, who specializes in organ & harpsichord, music history, and ear training.
Krieger opened with an operatic piece, which was a composed by C. Foschi, and a product of Krieger’s own archival research. Krieger focused on the idea of how people understand and explain music.
“We should reconsider where styles of music start and end.” Krieger stated.
To conclude the faculty presentations, Drew Hubbell, associate professor of English, presented his research on “The Transition Town Movement in Western Australia.”
Hubbell expanded on the continuation of the British Romantic ideas from the 19th and 20th centuries.
“I wanted to emphasize the big question of why literature matters,” he said.
Hubbell also expanded on where geography matters in transition Western Australia, how local communities are pioneering sustainable society, and defined the average Western Australia transition member.
As a final send-off to his faculty audience, Hubbell stated “Transition towns are scalable microcosms of hope.”