External Posts

For the spring issue of the Maine Arts Journal, Professor of Art Véronique Plesch wrote the introduction to the issue as well as an essay for her "Art Historical Musings" column titled "Dark Dreams." In the essay, she discusses publications that affirm the fundamental role of dreams for the Surrealist ethos and works by visual artists who had “the courage to dream” and thus face the dark recesses of the unconscious mind.

CNN included recommendations from Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Elizabeth McGrath, for a story about how to photograph the upcoming solar eclipse.

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, Stacy-ann Robinson, was quoted in a news article in the Jamaica Observer.  She was an invited speaker at the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association's Climate Resilience Symposium where she spoke about how the local tourism sector can balance economic growth with environmental sustainability. In the article, she highlighted the importance of local solutions in reducing vulnerabilities and increasing resilience.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy Ben Baker was the lead author in the paper "Computational Kinematics of Dance: Distinguishing Hip Hop Genres," published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI. Noting that the field of dance "would benefit from a general, quantitative and human-understandable method of characterizing meaningful differences between aspects of any dance style; a computational kinematics of dance," Baker and his team introduced and applied "a novel system for encoding bodily movement as 17 macroscopic, interpretable features, such as expandedness of the body or the frequency of sharp movements. We use this encoding to analyze Hip Hop Dance genres, in part by building a low-cost machine-learning classifier that distinguishes genre with high accuracy," according to the paper's abstract.

For her new fiction novel 'Bad Animals' Sarah Braunstein, Associate Professor of English/ Creative Writing, received high praise from the New York Times and WBUR.

Associate Professor of Statistics Jim Scott was included in a story about using science to predict NCAA basketball tournament brackets, including how certain strategies and patterns in the numbers can provide an edge in determining outcomes.

Whitney King, the Dr. Frank and Theodora Miselis Professor of Chemistry, was sought by the Portland Press Herald and CBS-13 for stories on how early ice-outs in Maine are affecting everything from algae to moose, after Maine's warmest winter in history.

Amanda Stent, director of Colby's Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, was a lead source for a Government Technology article about how AI tools are impacting security issues at businesses and educational institutions. In the story, she noted that in addition to creating new risks, AI may also bolster and automate IT security.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Greg Drozd published a paper in the journal Environmental Science: Atmospheres about his research on wildfire emissions. The paper, titled "Wavelength-resolved quantum yields for vanillin photochemistry: self-reaction and ionic-strength implications for wildfire brown carbon lifetime," is part of the journal's themed collection on wildfire impacts on atmospheric composition. This is Drozd's first work on wildfire emissions, and the paper will be featured on the cover of the journal's May edition.