Faculty Accomplishments

A new study by Gail Carlson, assistant professor of environmental studies and director of the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment, and Skylar Tupper '20 has been published in the journal Chemosphere. The paper, titled "Ski wax use contributes to environmental contamination by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances," looks at these hazardous environmental contaminants at a central Maine recreation center. "We examined the environmental impact of ski wax use at an outdoor recreation area with significant cross-country ski activity by measuring PFAS levels in melted snow, soil, and water following a collegiate ski race. We found extremely high levels of long- and short-chain PFAS (C4–C14) contamination in snow at the race start line (∑[PFAS] 7600–10,700 ng/L), with the longer-chain analytes (C10–C14) predominating," the authors wrote in the paper's abstract. "Our results suggest that ski wax use, from which fluorocarbons abrade at very high levels onto snow during a ski race, are the main source of PFAS contamination at our site. Regulation of ski wax use is warranted to reduce PFAS pollution."

Professor of Education Adam Howard and three students have coauthored a paper recently published in the journal Globalisation, Societies and Education. The students, Jamie Pine '19, Weston Muench '18, and Sarah Peck '17, worked on this research over the course of their senior year at Colby (Pine and Peck as an honors project and Muench as independent studies all year).  The paper, "Securing eliteness class strategies of an elite school in Chile," looks at "The ways in which elite schools in Chile reproduce power and privilege within the nation’s highly inequitable schooling system are largely ignored by researchers and the general public. In this article, the authors address this gap by identifying and exploring the primary class strategies that an elite school employs to secure their elite status. Through these strategies, the school keeps their community closed to the outside world, promotes shared values within their community, and remains faithful to founding principles in their educational project. These strategies allow the school to uphold strong social isolation, to shield them from public scrutiny, to cultivate elite subjectivities, and to forge a framework through which hierarchies are established. The authors argue that these class strategies not only secure the school’s elite status and reputation but also are central in maintaining and advancing their students’ class positioning in Chile.

Christopher Soto, associate professor of psychology, has become a fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). This fellowship honors SPSP members who have made longstanding and extraordinary contributions to the field of personality and social psychology.

Damon Mayrl, associate professor of sociology, coauthored a new paper "The Archive as a Social World" in the journal Qualitative Sociology. "Historical scholars often adopt a solitary ethic, conceiving of their work as the product of a lonely and isolated individual toiling away in a dusty archive," according to the study. "In this article, we focus on the practice of archival research to demonstrate that this solitary ethic is just that—an idealized representation that differentiates and unifies a group of scholars—rather than a description of the actual research practice of those engaging with historical materials." Mayrl and his coauthor Nicholas Hoover Wilson, assistant professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, argue that the archive’s social character should be understood as a methodological opportunity for historical sociologists, allowing them to maximize and extend their research by inspiring creative research strategies.

Ira Sadoff, the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature, Emeritus, has published Country, Living, a new book of poems published by Alice James Books in Farmington, Maine. "I go to Sadoff's poems for their rich honesty, their deep humanness, their complexity of vision, and their energy," writes Jane Mead in advance praise for the book. "He is original, wholly relevant." 

Assistant Professors of Environment Studies Stacy-ann Robinson and Gail Carlson, along with Hania Lincoln Lenderking '20, have coauthored a review of recent academic studies on the impacts of climate change on food security in the Caribbean. It finds that climate change will impact agriculture and fisheries mainly through changing patterns of weather, air and sea surface temperatures, and water availability. It concludes that successful adaptation to these impacts should involve region-specific solutions and local communities. The review is published in the International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology. 

Liam O'Brien, professor of mathematics and statistics, coauthored a paper recently published in the British Journal of Radiology titled "Linear Mixed-effects models for estimation of pulmonary metastasis growth rate: implications for CT surveillance in patients with sarcoma." Their work advances the field by showing that "CT surveillance intervals for pulmonary metastases can be estimated based on metastasis growth rate. There was significant variation in the pulmonary metastasis growth rate between metastases within patient and between patients. Pulmonary nodule volume growth followed an exponential model, linear in time," according to their paper.

Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Liam O'Brien and Alane O'Connor '96 have coauthored a paper published in the Journal of Maternal-Fetal & Neonatal Medicine. Titled "Implications of perinatal buprenorphine exposure on infant head circumference at birth," their research shows that "head circumference in infants exposed to buprenorphine during pregnancy was not significantly different from national norms for either male infants or female infants."

Robert Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, has coedited a new textbook Nature Through Time (Springer, 2020). Starting from the initial colonization of land about 430 million years ago to today, the book traces the changes primarily in terrestrial ecosystems from the world around us. The book, with 14 chapters and 96 different contributors from across the world, includes all levels of the biosphere—plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates. In addition to being a coeditor, Gastaldo is the lead author on two chapters and a contributor to a third. "Previous textbooks at the university level have taken a 'forward-in-time' march from early plants and animals, with coverage of groups of organisms," said Gastaldo. "Here, we have used 'postcards' and case studies from around the globe, covering specific points in geologic time to demonstrate how what we know about our planet today is rooted deeply in its past. And how past diversification, extinction, and Earth Systems events have played their roles in the planet’s biodiversity."

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Benjamin Neal is the lead author on a new paper published in the journal Oecologia. In the paper, "Possible control of acute outbreaks of a marine fungal pathogen by nominally herbivorous tropical reef fish," the authors identify a new trophic link: the consumption of fungus by herbivorous fish, which may help to reduce disease in coral reef ecosystems. "Thus, in addition to their well-known role as determinants of macroalgal overgrowth of reefs, herbivorous fish could thus also be important in control of diseases affecting crustose coralline algae that stabilize the foundation of coral reef substrate," according to the paper's abstract.