BYU nursing students (from left) Julie A. Allen, ’01, Jana R. Sandberg, ’99, Rachel Contreras-Spencer, ’04, (sitting), and Amy L. Jacobs, ’02, bring expertise and compassion to the maternity ward of a hospital in Tucuman Argentina.
biology and agriculture
Lars P. Nielsen, ’02, an organic chemistry major, received a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for the 2001–02 academic year. One of 302 recipients nationwide, Nielsen hopes to apply the $7,500 scholarship toward graduate studies at Harvard.
education
Professor Russell T. Osguthorpe, ’71, has been named department chair of Instructional Psychology and Technology.
engineering and technology
Associate professor Larry L. Howell, ’87, has been named department chair of Mechanical Engineering.
Fourteen BYU construction management students designed a 25,000-square-foot steel and concrete building for Kids on the Move, an early intervention program for young children.
Associate professor Norman L. Jones, ’86, was awarded a Walter L. Huber Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers for his research in groundwater modeling.
family, home, and social sciences
Associate sociology professor Renata T. Forste, ’84, has completed a study revealing that African-American women are 40 percent as likely to breastfeed their infants as non-black women. Forste found that increasing the amount of infants breastfed could lower the mortality rate of African-American infants, which currently stands at 1.3 times that of whites.
web: newsnet.byu.edu/story/32233
Professor of history Ronald W. Walker, ’61; BYU Mormon Americana curator David J. Whittaker, ’67; and emeritus history professor James B. Allen, ’56, have collected more than 150 years worth of scholarship on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Their Studies in Mormon History is an encyclopedic volume containing more than 6,500 topics and indexing every significant book, article, and dissertation on Church history from 1830 to 1997.
fine arts and communications
Ralph D. Barney, ’57, an emeritus professor of communications, has received a Distinguished Service Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
Part-time music instructors J. Daron Bradford, ’80, and Jay U. Lawrence, ’83, performed in nine European port cities with their group, Enoch Train, as part of the Sea Trek 2001 voyage.
Allen W. Palmer, ’70, associate professor of communications, recently returned from Pristina, Kosovo, where he was working in a program to expose teachers to new teaching styles.
Associate professor Michael Perkins, ’82, has been named chair of the Communications Department. Perkins spent the 2000–01 school year helping set up the journalism program at BYU—Hawaii.
health and human performance
Mark A. Widmer, ’88, associate professor of recreation management and youth leadership, is working with family life assistant professor J. Kelly McCoy to study how family members communicate and solve problems by observing how they meet three challenges: a family camp, a handcart trek, and a survival trek.
humanities
BYU‘s English Department recently received a $200,000 Pew Grant to be used for the redesign of the English 115 course. The Pew Grant Program in Course Redesign emphasizes the redesign of large-enrollment introductory courses using instructional technology to achieve substantial cost savings as well as quality enhancements.
French and Italian associate professor Michael D. Bush, ’72, has received a grant from the National Security Education Program grant to create software to teach strategic and less-commonly taught languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Korean, and Swahili.
Associate linguistics professor Cynthia L. Hallen, ’80, presented a paper titled “The T-unit as a Measure of Syntactic Complexity in Emily Dickinson’s Poems” at the recent Emily Dickinson International Society conference in Trondheim, Norway. Hallen spent the summer working with a team of students to complete the Emily Dickinson Lexicon (EDL), a dictionary of all the words in Dickinson’s poems.
law school
The J. Reuben Clark Law School, in conjunction with the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies, and the School of Family Life, hosted the World Family Policy Forum in July. The forum, which focused on making the world safer for children, attracted more than 60 United Nations delegates, ambassadors, and religious leaders.
Law student Tessa Meyer Santiago, ’89, won the 2001 Roscoe Hogan Environmental Law Essay Contest with a paper identifying unconscious racism made by local decision makers as the primary cause of environmental discrimination.
marriott school
Stephen W. Gibson, ’66, an entrepreneur-in-residence at the School of Management, and his wife Bette Christensen Gibson, ’65, founded the Academy for Creating Enterprise in Cebu City, Philippines, to instruct Filipino returned missionaries how to start, build, and run small businesses.
nursing
Assistant professor Mary E. Tiedeman was one of 47 outstanding nurses honored by NurseWeek Magazine.
Assistant professor Catherine R. Coverston, ’69, accompanied a group of student nurses to Tucuman, Argentina, where they participated in a national nursing conference and worked in clinical practice with Argentine nurses.
In September BYU‘s College of Nursing and the University of Jordan Faculty of Nursing c0hosted a national nursing conference in Amman, Jordan.
physical and mathematical sciences
Mathematics professor Robert D. Speiser and associate professor Charles N. Walter recently returned from sabbatical leaves at Rutgers University, bringing the editorship of the Journal of Mathematical Behavior to BYU.
Mathematics assistant professor Blake E. Peterson is the first president of The Utah Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, organized under his direction in March.
Jamon A. Holzhouser, ’02, was selected as Outstanding Student from the 2001 Brookhaven National Laboratory summer school in nuclear and radiochemistry.
Statistics professor Gale Rex Bryce, ’70, has been named associate dean of the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.
religious education
Ancient scripture associate professors Dana M. Pike, ’78, and Andrew C. Skinner recently published their book Discoveries in the Judean Desert XXXIII, Qumran Cave 4 XXIII, Unidentified Fragments.
The second edition of The Religious Educator, a publication for teachers and students of the restored gospel, is available by subscription at tre.byu.edu.
Church history faculty members Alexander L. Baugh, ’86; Susan Easton Black, ’66; Richard N. Holzapfel, ’80; and Paul H. Peterson, ’66; and history faculty member William G. Hartley, ’66, served as onboard instructors for the Sea Trek 2001 voyage.