Tag: Halmos College of Arts and Sciences

Halmos College Hosts Premiere of Changing Seas “Corals in Crisis”- To air June 26 & 30

On June 25, Halmos College Oceanographic Campus hosted the premiere of the documentary series Changing Seas episode entitled, “Corals in Crisis”. The episode discusses Florida’s fragile coral reefs and a new ailment that is severely impacting an already strained ecosystem.

Known as “Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease”, this disease is infecting over half of the reef-building corals in the Florida reef tract at an unprecedented scale, killing most of the corals that get sick. This episode interviews various experts, including Halmos College Research Scientists Brian Walker, Ph.D., and Karen Neely, Ph.D., on how researchers are looking for the cause of the disease while simultaneously developing techniques to treat outbreaks.

This Changing Seas episode will air on Wednesday, June 26 WPBT2 at 8 p.m. and Sunday June, 30 on WXEL at 9PM.

For more information: https://www.changingseas.tv/

NSU Honored as P3 Eco-Challenge Sponsor

On June 11, the Broward County Board of Commissioners held a proclamation ceremony recognizing the support of NSU and other sponsors of the Seventh Annual P3 Eco – Challenge. Representing NSU was Halmos College’s Director of Academic Support and Administration Melissa Dore, Ed.D. Dore also represented NSU at the P3 student awards ceremony in May.

The P3 Eco-Challenge encourages Broward County Public School (BCPS) students to preserve our planet for posterity. This challenge recognizes and rewards traditional and charter BCPS schools, teachers, students, non-instructional and custodial staff for their efforts to learn about and implement environmentally sustainable measures and green initiatives within their schools and communities.  There are two types of P3 challenges:

P3 School Challenge – For schools that demonstrate participation in or implementation of different sustainability metrics based on a rubric composed of 6 comprehensive categories:

  • School Grounds Enhancement
  • School Sustainability
  • Curriculum Integration
  • Community Involvement
  • Administrative Support
  • Innovation/Special Projects

Environmental Stewardship Recognition – For BCPS teachers, students, non-instructional and custodial staff who show evidence of promoting civic responsibility, environmental stewardship, and education of environmental issues. The metrics of this category include:

  • Awareness and Involvement
  • Current Professional Development/Affiliation
  • Instructional Soundness/Creativity
  • Skill Building

Congratulations to all the winners of this 7th Annual Challenge!

For more information:https://www.browardschools.com/p3

Halmos College Aids in Coral Rescue

On Thursday, May 23, The Oceanographic Campus (OC) received a very precious cargo: 341 corals collected of Key West. The goal of this coral “rescue” is to collect healthy corals ahead of the disease boundary. These corals will then be placed in land-based aquaria to prevent them from becoming infected, to preserve genetic diversity, and to serve as propagation source stock for future restoration activities.

This project focuses of 16 high priority species and 6 medium priority species.  The project is the first-ever rescue of this scale and is necessitated by the urgency and devastating impact of the FL Reef Tract Coral Disease Outbreak.

The Coral Rescue team members include Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC) (Lisa Gregg) and NOAA Fisheries (Jennifer Moore) as project co-leads and team members include staff from NSU, FWC, FL Keys National Marine Sanctuary, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, FL Sea Grant, Florida Aquarium (FLAQ), and the National Park Service.

The first batch of corals departed Stock Island early Monday morning. Eighty-two hours later, they docked at the OC’s neighbor: the U.S. Naval Surface Warfare base. From there, the corals were transported to the salt water tanks on the OC’s campus.

“Corals are very delicate,” said Nick Turner, a Halmos Ph.D. candidate who helped transfer the corals to their new home. “It’s hard to keep them alive in tanks. We need to regulate the sunlight to make sure they get enough,” he said. “Too much sunlight is just as bad. That’s why we’re using black shade cloths to let in just enough sunlight.”

FWC has a Coral Rescue Genetic Management Plan to ensure genetic diversity for restoration.

NSU is one of the intermediate holding facilities to hold and care for the ~4,500 corals. Other intermediate holding facilities include: Mote Marine Lab (Sarasota), Univ. of Miami (Miami), and FL Aquarium Center for Conservation (Apollo Beach). Longer-term holding facilities include Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) facilities across the US. The AZA Florida facilities are Disney, Sea World, Mote, and Florida Aquarium.

NSU Graduate Students and Faculty Present at the 2019 Pop Culture Association National Conference

Pictured left to right: Veronica Diaz, Melissa Bianchi, Ph.D., Darius Cureton, M.A., and Nichole Chavannes

Students and faculty from NSU’s Department of Writing and Communication (DWC) at the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS) presented on four panels at the 2019 Pop Culture Association / American Culture Association (PCA/ACA) National Conference, hosted by the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, D.C., Apr. 17-20. This group included:

  • two assistant professors from the DWC
  • two students from the CAHSS DWC M.A. in Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media (CRDM) program, who also serve as graduate assistant coordinators in the Write from the Start Writing and Communication Center (WCC)

About the Panels

Title: “Ocean Ecologies and Dinosaur Zoos: How Games Make Arguments about Nature”

Presenter: Melissa Bianchi, Ph.D., DWC Assistant Professor

Summary: In this presentation, “ecoplay” was proposed as a concept for understanding how video games simulate nature in ways that are distinctly rhetorical, using ABZÛ and Jurassic World Evolution as examples. Video games often attempt to capture the operation of real-world processes and systems, influencing how players engage with these processes, systems, and their governing ideologies through play. These games are well-suited for applying a theory of ecoplay because of their engagement with environmental topics and their apparent connections to other environmentally focused media and rhetorics.

Title: “The Korvac Saga: The Avengers Teach Writing, Defeat the Supervillains, and Save the Universe and the University (A Live Comic Book Performance)!”

Presenter: Darius Cureton, M.A., DWC Visiting Assistant Professor; with colleagues from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and East Stroudsburg University

Summary: In this session, the presenters brought to life a comic book story of superhero teachers struggling valiantly to help their students learn to write by employing the use of comic books and graphic novels in their composition classrooms. In the world of comic books, when a publisher wants to increase sales, they reboot the title by giving the superhero a new costume or changing the members of the super team. The presenters proposed the need to reboot composition, English studies, and the academy.

Title: “The Unforgivable Curse of Consumerism: How ‘Official’ Fan Spaces in J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World Exploit Fandom”

Presenter: Nicole Chavannes, CRDM student and WCC graduate assistant

Summary: Since The Sorcerer’s Stone was released in 1997, the Harry Potter series has spawned seven books, eight film adaptations, a play, and a second film franchise, along with a handful of secondary texts. However, the franchise has expanded beyond offering content for passive consumption; participatory fan spaces exist both online and in-person. This presentation explored how Rowling’s wizarding world exemplifies both transmedia storytelling and transmedia world-building through “official” fan spaces, and how those spaces are inextricably linked with consumerism.

Title: “The Beguiled: Blurring the Line Between ‘Gothic Misogyny’ and Contemporary Female Rage”

Presenter: Veronica Diaz, CRDM student and WCC graduate assistant

Summary: Adaptations offer authors and audiences the ability to reinterpret controversial themes in a different context, contributing to the additive comprehension surrounding a particular text or genre. This presentation explored the affective and effective elements at play in all three iterations of The Beguiled – the original 1966 novel by Thomas P. Cullinan, the 1971 film by Don Siegel, and the 2017 film by Sofia Coppola – that offer audiences transmedia via multiplicity, with drastically different retellings of the same story.

 

Lost Dean’s Son Returns to Oceanographic Campus

In the last week of April, Jim Richardson visited the Oceanographic Campus. This was a bittersweet visit, as his father was with a group of researchers who was lost at sea in 1975.

William Springer Richardson (1928-1975), was a Professor and Director of Nova University Oceanographic Center, he was also active as a scientist, inventor, sailor, flier and author. Richardson was head of a team on board Nova’s research vessel Gulf Stream which was lost at sea off the coast of Maine in 1975.

Mr. Richardson was very happy to see how his father’s legacy has expanded into the Halmos College of Natural Sciences and Oceanography.

NSU’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences Hosts Dean’s List Ceremony

Honggang Yang, Ph.D., dean of NSU’s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (CAHSS), hosted the CAHSS Dean’s List Ceremony on April 3, 2019. CAHSS hosts the Dean’s List Ceremony once a year, so students who earned a spot on the Dean’s List in Winter 2018 or Fall 2019 were eligible, excluding graduates. A term GPA of 3.8 or higher is required to be on the Dean’s List. One hundred nine students were on the Dean’s List, and fifty-nine students attended the ceremony. A luncheon was provided for those in attendance.

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