Faculty News

Bryn Athyn College Faculty regularly interact with the larger academic community by attending conferences, presenting papers, and contributing to scholarship in their fields. Here is what they have been doing recently:

For the past year the Science Division (Dr. Allen Bedford, Dr. Fredrik Bryntesson, Dr. Sherri Cooper, and Dr. Eugene Potapov) of Bryn Athyn College (BAC), in cooperation with the Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust (PERT), has been working on a biology project tracking the movements of white-tailed deer in suburban Philadelphia. On April 19th, the group (which includes two BAC students, four BAC faculty members, and two members of the PERT team) presented a poster of their research at the meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Chapter of the Ecological Society of America. The tracking project is planned to continue for two more years, serving as a groundbreaking research opportunity for undergraduates and faculty at Bryn Athyn College. (more)

On March 5, 2008, Dr. Sherri Cooper presented a poster at the Ocean Sciences Meeting sponsored by the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU). The meeting was hosted by the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, FL. Dr. Cooper's research on diatom assemblages contributed to the research project, and she helped prepare the final poster presentation. The poster is available for download here (PDF).

Dr. Sherri Cooper recently attended the 18th biennial conference of the Estuarine Research Federation held 4-8 November, 2007 in Providence, Rhode Island. The theme for this meeting was "Science and Management of Coastal Ecosystems." Dr. Cooper gave a presentation to an international audience titled "Puget Sound and Hood Canal: Past 300 Years." Her co-authors of the abstract included Jill M. Brandenberger and Dr. Eric A. Crecelius of Battelle Marine Sciences Laboratory is Sequim, WA and Dr. Patrick Louchouarn at Texas A&M University. The research was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Coastal Hypoxia Research Program.

In mid-September Martha Gyllenhaal, assistant professor of fine arts and art history at Bryn Athyn College, presented a paper at the conference entitled "Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying From Classical Antiquity to the Present," which was hosted by Worcester College, Oxford University, England. Professor Gyllenhaal's talk, "Rembrandt's artful use of plaster casts: New insights into seventeenth-century studio practices and working methods," is also the topic of her doctoral dissertation, which will be completed within the year. (more)