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March 2012 @Pomona Newsletter

Table of Contents

News and Notes

  • The next Staff Forum is Tuesday, March 20, at 9 a.m. in Rose Hills. Send questions to staffcouncil@pomona.edu, via campus mail to Matthew Walker in ITS, or via the suggestion boxes near the time clocks in Frary and Frank dining halls.
  • The Cesar Chavez Day staff holiday is on Friday, March 30.
  • Do you manage student employees? On Wednesday, March 28, at 10:30 a.m., attend the Student Employment Supervisors Meeting in Rose Hills to learn about changes to the paperwork process of hiring students and for a Q&A with Student Employment, Human Resources, Payroll, and the Career Development Office. 
  • Have you signed up for AED/CPR training yet? It's not too late. AEDs are the new Automated External Defibrillators that can be found in various locations on campus. Future training sessions include March 27, 9 a.m. - 12 p.m.; April 6, 1 - 4 p.m.; and April 20, 1 - 4 p.m. Email wayne.phan@pomona.edu or call x71668. Registration is a must as each class can only accommodate a maximum of 12 people. More information on AEDs on campus [pdf]

Distinguished Staff Award and Service Awards

The 2012 staff awards were announced on Monday at the annual staff luncheon. Let's all extend a hearty congratulations to this year's Peter W. Stanely Distinguished Staff Award winner: Art Rodriguez, senior associate dean of admissions. Art came to Pomona in 2000 as an assistant dean of admissions responsible for Latino student recruitment. During his time at the College, he has worked in various capacities within the Office of Admissions and now serves as senior associate dean and director of admissions. Art received his bachelors degree from Carleton College and his masters from Harvard University. Before coming to Pomona, Art served as director of multicultural affairs at his Carleton for several years before attending graduate school. During his recent year as acting dean of admissions, Art enjoyed working the admissions staff in selecting and enrolling the class of 2015. He most appreciated seeing the admissions office's work come to life when new students arrived this past August.

Below are the many valued staff members who were recognized for their years of service at the celebration:

30 Years
Donna Harshman Admissions
Donna Lane Trusts and Estates
25 Years
Rhoda Borcherding Study Abroad
Glenn Flohr Physics & Astronomy
Yvonne Roybal Housekeeping
20 Years
Frank Bedoya Campus Life
Manny Cervantes Grounds
Maria Corona Housekeeping
Irineo De Leon Housekeeping
Dani Otnes Office of the Dean of the College
Susan Thalmann Art and Art History
15 Years
Deb Dearinure Information Technology
Rebecca McGrew Museum of Art
Ronald Nemo Grounds
Julie Roberts Office of the Treasurer
Sheri Sardinas Office of the Dean of Students
Matthew Walker Information Technology
10 Years
Susan Alcaraz Grounds
Lamar Arenas Housekeeping
Craig Arteaga-Johnson Annual Giving
Connie Boon Chemistry
Blanca Flores Housekeeping
David Haley Physics and Astronomy
Leda Hermez Dining Services
Karen Lamb Business Office
Kerry Martin Career Development Office
Kristen McCoy Housekeeping
Anthony Nguyen Information Technology
Kenneth Pflueger Information Technology
5 Years
Jose Acevedo Maintenance Operations
Juan Araya Environmental Analysis/The Farm
Mireya Bastida Housekeeping
David Brunk Admissions
Christopher Crane Information Technology
Martina Ebert Foundations and Corporate Relations
Nilda Feliciano Information Technology
Orlando Gonzalez Maintenance Operations
Alicia Guzman-DeWitt Human Resources
Nita Kansara Campus Life
Ming-Li (Christina) Liao Admissions
Maria Alvarez Martinez Facilities and Campus Services
Mary Marvin Communications
Margie McKenna Facilities and Campus Services
Hilda Medina Housekeeping
Dennis Mermilliod Maintenance Operations
Catherine Okereke Major Gifts
Ileana Palencia Coop Fountain
Candie Putnam Real Property
Angelina Monreal Quevedo Information Technology
Brandon Ramsey Dining Services
Jonathan Smaby Information Technology
Ron Watling Maintenance Operations
Deborah Wilson Museum of Art
Annie Yu Chemistry

New Facilities Service Request System

The Facilities and Campus Services Department has a new online system, WebTMA, for placing service requests anytime. The system will provide members of the Pomona College community the opportunity to receive automated confirmation of the receipt of service requests and periodic updates on the status and completion of that request.

In order to fully realize the benefits of the system, please discontinue the practice of sending email and leaving telephone messages at the Facilities and Campus Services Office for non-emergency service. Also, bookmark the link to the Service Request Form as a favorite: http://app1.webtma.net/PomonaCollege/GenerateRequest.aspx?key=8fMN5Hy6FyyeZUY3VyFhaGx1tYrZ4ojR39b3%2bswzyjZsBFIcTU6RQQ%3d%3d.

Within the form, it is important that you give as much detail as possible in your description of the “Action Requested." What is the problem? What needs to be done? Exactly where is this happening? Answers to these questions will help Facilities and Campus Services address the problem in the most efficient manner.

Improved KnowledgeBase From ITS

The office of Information Technology Services (ITS) recently announced the rollout of the new version of the ITS KnowledgeBase. The new KnowledgeBase provides better search optimization, enabling a more flexible search experience with improved results. Accessible by going to http://helpdesk.pomona.edu , the ITS KnowledgeBase allows for immediate 24/7 access to FAQs, answers to information technology related questions, problem resolutions, and general articles about information technology at Pomona College. If you have questions or comments, please send them to helpdesk@pomona.edu. ITS encourages feedback about the KnowledgeBase so they can ensure that it is effective for your use.

Sustainability Tip

The City of Claremont has co-mingled, single-stream recycling. That means that everything recyclable goes into the same bin, including:

  • Plastics #1-7 including cups, plastic bags and film, plastic packaging, and six-pack rings. Look for the triangle symbol on the bottom - if it has #1-7 in it (which almost all plastic items do), throw it in! This includes some Styrofoam items, so keep an eye out!
  • Aluminum, steel, and tin including cans, foil, and trays.
  • Glass (all colors)
  • Paper and cardboard including newspaper, corrugated cardboard, cereal boxes, magazines, telephone books, mailing envelopes with bubble lining, and paper bags (staples and envelopes with plastic windows are okay!)
  • Packaging including milk cartons, wine boxes, and egg cartons.

New Employees

  • Victoria Baltodano, cook 1, Dining Services
  • Salvador Chavez, cook 1, Dining Services
  • Laura Condino, administrative assistant, Facilities and Campus Services
  • Jose Delgado, utility worker, Dining Services
  • Annie Khoshkbariie, dining lead, Dining Services
  • Christina Parenteau, document management specialist, ITS
  • Kely Polanco, building attendant, Housekeeping
  • Nathan Stazewski, web designer and developer, Communications
  • Gary Stewart, utility, Dining Services
  • Matthew Wilson, assistant athletic trainer, Physical Education

Recent News

Faculty and Staff Accomplishments

Scholarly Talks and Lectures

On 23 February, Ralph Bolton '61 (Anthropology) delivered a paper, "Anthropology Without Borders: An Idea Whose Time has Come," at the annual meeting of the Society for Cross-Cultural Anthropology in Las Vegas in a session he chaired ("Anthropology Beyond Borders: Transnational Research"). He gave a lecture, "Achachis y Bordados: Storytelling Embroideries from Chijnaya, Peru" on 18 February for Family Weekend in the Smith Campus Center Gallery. The talk was an exposition about the Chijnaya folk art exhibit that he co-curated for the Gallery and that was on display during February.

Michael Diercks (Linguistics and Cognitive Science) and Anna Bax '13 presented their co-authored paper, "Out with the New and In the with the Old: Topic-based object marking in Manyika," at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Portland in January. He also gave a talk at the Linguistics Department at Cornell University in February on "What Kinds of Agreement Are Possible? Examining Lubukusu Complementizer Agreement."

Terri Geis (Museum of Art) presented a paper, "Lola Cueto and the Teatro Nahual," as part of the panel "Agents of Social Change: Women Artists and Women Patrons in Postrevolutionary Mexico," at the College Art Association Annual Conference in Los Angeles on 25 February.

Katherine Hagedorn (Music) presented "Revolution 2011: Blessings and long life at the feet of Oyá" at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference in Philadelphia on 18 November, and gave the invited presentation, "The Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba: Touring the Sacred with the Revolution, and Tourism Made Sacred 'Post-Socialism," at the Conference on Global Postsocialism at the University of California, Riverside on 21 October.

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) gave a special lecture titled "Can Zombies do Math?" on 17 February for Family Weekend at Pomona College.

Nina Karnovsky (Biology) and four biology students attended the 39th annual meeting of the Pacific Seabird Group from 7-10 February in Turtle Bay, Hawaii. Karnovsky presented the talk, "Deep Diving Dovekies in a Warming Greenland Sea." Kristina McOmber '12 presented a poster on her senior thesis research, "The Diel Cycles of Breeding Cassin's Auklets' Diving Behavior During Foraging Trips." Molly Shallman '12 presented results from research in Karnovsky's lab in her poster titled "Is it Still a Bird Eat Bird World? How Penguin Declines May Impact Brown Skuas Breeding on King George Island." Jamie Canepa '14 and Neha Savant '14 presented results from their summer research in their poster, "Drama in nest site #5: Up Close and Personal with the Xantus's Murrelet."

Zayn Kassam (Religious Studies) gave a talk titled "Muslim Women's Activism as Spiritual Practice" at the Huntington Library for a women's studies seminar panel titled "Seeking Transcendence: Women's Spirituality as Liberatory Practice" on 18 February. Also, Kassam offered remarks at a panel discussion celebrating the release of The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology (Oxford University Press, 2012), which includes an essay by Kassam, on 7 February at Claremont Graduate University.

Ann Lebedeff (Physical Education) gave the talk, "What Makes a Great Coach?,” at the USPTA California Division State Conference at the Home Depot Center in Carson on 28 January.

Kevin Wang '13, Phillip M. Uribe (Pomona staff), Chien-Wei Chen '11, Qi Wang, Peter S. Steyger and Jonathan I. Matsui (Neuroscience) presented a poster titled, "Adult zebrafish utricle sensory hair cells respond to gentamicin," at the annual Mid-Winter Meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology in San Diego from 25-29 February.

Thomas Moore (Physics and Chemistry) gave an invited presentation, "'Six Ideas That Shaped Physics': Past, Present, and Future," at the Winter Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers in Ontario, California, on 8 February.

On 24 February, Mary Paster (Linguistics and Cognitive Science) presented an invited lecture titled "Phonologically Conditioned Morphology" at UC Santa Cruz as part of the Distinguished Visitors series hosted by the Stanford/UC Santa Cruz Crosslinguistic Investigations in Syntax-Phonology research group.

Jennifer Perry (Anthropology) gave an invited lecture on 7 February on "Landscapes and Seascapes of the California Channel Islands" in the 2012 Archaeology Lecture Series at the School of Forensic and Investigative Sciences at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England.

Sheila Pinkel gave a lecture about a course she developed titled "Light Explorations: An Intersection of Art and Science" at the College Art Association Annual Convention held in Los Angeles in February 2012. She spoke about her artwork on an art/science panel at the Arena 1 Gallery in January 2012 in a lecture program titled "Uncategorically Not." She also gave a talk about her work and participated in a panel discussion in January 2012 at Photo L.A., an annual expo held at the Santa Monica Convention Center.

Virginie Pouzet-Duzer (Romance Languages and Literatures) was invited by colleagues from the département des littératures de langue française to give two talks at the Université de Montréal in Canada. The 27 February lecture, "Briser les miroirs du labyrinthe: Ivsic/Toyen/Le Brun," was on surrealist books and the 28 February lecture, "Dans l'entre-deux des textes et des images," was on text/image interactions and theorization.

Monique Saigal-Escudero (Romance Languages and Literatures) gave a presentation, “Activities of Women in the French Resistance,” at a book club in Claremont on 23 February.

Anthony Shay (Theatre and Dance) delivered a paper, "Courtesans and Performers in Safavid Iran and Mughal India," on 3 February at the Connected Histories Conference at Pomona College. He also delivered a paper, "Dirty Dancing: Public Entertainers, Sex, and Effeminacy," at the CORD Conference "Queer Dancing" at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from 16-18 February.

Hung Cam Thai (Sociology and Asian American Studies) delivered a lecture at a symposium on "Immigration and the Homeland" at the Lebanese American University in Beirut on 1 February.

Samuel H. Yamashita (History) was invited to give the annual Japan Series Lecture at Lyon College, delivering "The Beginnings of Japanese Food" on 23 February.

Pete Zani (Biology) gave an invited seminar at Cal Poly Pomona in February on "Climate-linked physiology and demography related to overwintering in side-blotched lizards.” In January, he presented a poster (along with an undergraduate co-author from Whitman College) on "Effects of nighttime warming on reproduction in side-blotched lizards" at the annual meetings of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Charleston, South Carolina.

Publications

Michael Diercks' (Linguistics and Cognitive Science) paper, "Incorporating Location in Argument Structure: The Lubukusu Locative Clitic," was published in December 2011 in Selected Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference on African Linguistics: African Languages and Linguistics Today.

Robert Gaines (Geology) and colleagues published a paper in the March issue of Geology: "Burgess Shale-type biotas were not entirely burrowed away," Geology 40, pp. 283-286. 

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) published, “Spatial isomorphisms of algebras of Truncated Toeplitz operators” (with William Ross and Warren Wogen) in the Indiana University Mathematics Journal 59:6, pp. 1971-2000. He also published "Three questions about complex symmetric operators" in Integral Equations and Operator Theory 72, pp. 3-4.

After two years of experiments and one year of analysis, Fred Grieman (Chemistry) and several collaborators have published a paper on the chemistry of the hydroperoxyl radical and acetone and its importance in the troposphere has been published: "Determination of Equilibrium Constants for the Reaction between Acetone and HO2 Using Infrared Kinetic Spectroscopy" in the Journal of Phsyical Chemistry 115:38, pp. 10527-10538. This work, funded by NASA, was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Lab in collaboration with Stan Sander at the JPL and Mitchio Okumura at Caltech with Casey Davis-Van Atta '10.

Zayn Kassam’s (Religious Studies) essay, "The Challenges of Globalization for Muslim Women," was published in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology (Oxford University Press, 2012), eds. Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Sheila Briggs.

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon (English) published a new book, Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2012). He also had an article, "Memories of Memories: Historicity, Nostalgia, and Archive in the Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder," published in the most recent edition of Cinema Journal 51:1.

Pardis Mahdavi (Anthropology) published two articles recently: "'But We Can Always Get More!': Deportability, the State and Gendered Migration in the United Arab Emirates" in the Asia and Pacific Migration Journal 20: 3-4  and "Questioning the Global Gays(ze): constructions of sexual identities in post-revolutionary Iran" in Social Identities 18:2.

Dan O'Leary (Chemistry) has published an essay titled "The Deeds to Deuterium" in the March 2012 issue of Nature Chemistry 4:2, p. 236, and a companion blog entry, "Urey, deuterium, and the Rosenberg" for the journal's Skeptical Chymist website.

Laura Perini (Philosophy) published an article, “Sequence Matters: Genomics and the Gene Concept," in Philosophy of Science 78:5, pp. 752-762, and a book chapter, “Form and Function: A Semiotic Analysis of Figures in Biology Textbooks," in The Educated Eye: Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences, eds. Nancy Anderson and Michael R. Dietrich (Dartmouth College Press, 2012).

Jennifer Perry (Anthropology), with Kristin M. Hoppa PI '06, published a paper, "Subtidal Shellfish Exploitation on the California Channel Islands: Wavy Top (Lithopoma undosum) in the Middle Holocene," in Exploring Methods of Faunal Analysis: Perspectives from California Archaeology (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, 2012), eds. Michael A. Glassow and Terry L. Joslin, pp. 65-86.

The third revised edition of Framing America: A Social History of American Art (Thames and Hudson. 2012), a textbook by Frances Pohl (Art and Art History), has just been published.

Hung Cam Thai (Sociology and Asian American Studies) recently published a chapter, "Homeland Return Visits among Vietnamese Immigrant Men," in Men and Masculinities in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2012), ed. Lenore Lyons.

An excerpt from Samuel H. Yamashita's (History) book Master Sorai's Responsals was included in Japanese Philosophy: A Sourcebook (University of Hawaii Press, 2011).

Exhibitions and Performances

Elizabeth Champion (Music) performed as as singer in the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Mahler Symphony 8 performance held at the Shrine Auditorium on 4 February.

Katherine Hagedorn(Music) performed a combined concert with Gamelan Burat Wangi and Gamelan Sekar Jaya in the World Festival of Sacred Music at the Luckman Theatre at California State University, Los Angeles, on 8 October.

Genevieve Lee (Music) performed two electro-acoustic works for the PIE (People in Electronics) series in Los Angeles on 11 February. Her piano trio, Mojave Trio, gave a lecture-recital at Occidental College on 21 February.

Sandeep Mukherjee (Art) exhibited work in two shows: "Artists’ Tower of Protest,” organized by LA><ART and the Getty Research Institute as part of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, located on the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Hilldale in West Hollywood, California, from 19-29 January; and "Drawn" at the Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles, 3 January – 10 March.

Sheila Pinkel (Art and Art History) organized the exhibition "Refocus: Multicultural Focus," a Pacific Standard Time show, at the Arena 1 Gallery in Santa Monica in January 2012. This exhibition was a reprise of the exhibition "Multicultural Focus," the first cross-cultural exhibition of photography in Los Angeles, which was mounted at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in 1981. She also produced a catalogue for this exhibition. She also had her work included in the exhibition about the history of the Los Angeles Center For Photographic Studies, a Pacific Standard Time exhibition, at USC's Fisher Gallery, from January – April, and at Photo L.A., an annual expo held in January.

Honors and Awards

Mary Paster (Linguistics and Cognitive Science) won an Arnold L. and Lois S. Graves Award in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences, which recognizes "outstanding accomplishments in actual teaching in the humanities by younger faculty members" and "unusual skill and enthusiasm" in teaching. The award will fund summer research on the Maay language for the writing of a manuscript and design of a related course in the fall. 

Other

Martin Crawford (Outdoor Education Center) reports that the OEC, along with the Public Events Committee and the Office of Campus Life, hosted a screening of the documentary White Wash, and a panel discussion on 18 February. The discussion included Rick Blocker, founder of Blacksurfing.com, Alison Rose Jefferson '80, and director Ted Woods.

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) was appointed editor of the journal Involve, published by Mathematical Sciences Publishers (UC Berkeley). He also obtained funding from the Fletcher Jones Foundation to run a summer research program on "Supercharacter theory and exponential sums." The grant will be administered through the Claremont Center for the Mathematical Sciences (CCMS) and will fund three undergraduate students and one graduate student.

Adam Plukett '09 reviewed Hillary Gravendyk's (English) first book of poetry, Harm, in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

David Haley (Physics and Astronomy) co-led the Lecture Demonstration Workshop (W01) for the Winter Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, on 4 February. We presented more than 100 physics demonstrations were presented to more than 20 attendees during the eight-hour workshop.

With David Tanenbaum (Physics and Astronomy), Haley co-hosted the 8th annual Center for Nanoscale Systems Institute for Physics Teachers (CIPT) workshop on 18 February. Twenty-one high school teachers from Southern California attended, and the day included presentations from Tanenbaum and Marty Alderman (Cornell University) and hands-on activities in thin films and electrical circuits.

Joyce Lu (Theatre and Dance) completed certification as a practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method(R) of Somatic Education.

@Pomona Newsletter