The Center for Asian Pacific American Studies, housed in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, has published Education, Youth, Leadership, Labor: Asian Pacific American and Latino Perspectives, a 200-page anthology of articles about the Asian Pacific American and Latino communities. It was co-edited by CSULB Professors John N. Tsuchida, Juan M. Benitez and Dean Toji.
Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies students Andrea Esposito, Brandy Bandaruk, Heather Barlow, La Tianna Williams, Marina Rabinovich, Heather Maluso, Christopher Ponce, Heather Stephenson, and Josheph Mathieu received scholarships worth a total of $18,000 from the California Foundation of Parks and Recreation. The foundation awarded a total of 16 scholarships at the annual California Park and Recreation Society Conference held in Long Beach in February.
Ken Dial, 1978 CSULB Masters’ graduate in biology, was featured in the February 26, 2008 episode of NOVA: The Four Winged Dinosaur. The episode discussed the discovery of the Microrapter, one of the smallest dinosaurs found, and the evolution of flight in birds. Dial, an experimental biologist at the University of Montana, was featured for his work with chukars and the developmental process of infant birds. Dial has also developed and hosted 28 30-minute television programs for Discovery Communication's Animal Planet focusing on avian biology and evolution. Visit NOVA for more information on the program.
Dr. Betty McMicken, assistant professor in the Department of Communicative Disorders, will be inducted as a Fellow of the California Speech-Language-Hearing Association (CSHA) at the organization’s convention in Monterey this April. CSHA is a professional organization of speech-language pathologists and audiologists advancing services to children and adults with communication and related disorders. This honor, reserved for only a few members of the association, is being granted to McMicken for her dedication to the profession over the past 42 years. She has served thousands of patients and is a recognized authority on the following specialty areas: disorders of the voice, dysphagia (swallowing), dysfluency (stuttering) and aphasia.
Dr. Linda España Maram, associate professor of Asian American studies, has received the 2007 Book Award in History from the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) for her book, Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s (Columbia University Press, 2006). She will receive the award at the AAAS conference next month.
Teri Yamada's Nou Hach Literary Project is receiving the prestigious Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award from the Association of American Publishers. Yamada, a professor of comparative literature, started the Nou Hach Literary Project in 2002. As publisher of the Nou Hach Literary Journal, it is the only literary organization in Cambodia to publish a journal of modern literature. It also promotes literacy and writing in Cambodia. Yamada shares the award with Kho Tararith, director of the Nou Hach Literary Project.
Criminal justice master's student Sofia Peralta is gaining recognition as a promising young scholar, having been awarded four competitive scholarships and presenting her first empirical paper at a regional academic conference during her first year at the university. In February, Peralta received the 2008 Mabel Wilson Award, a scholarship for female graduates of the L. A. county area who demonstrate scholastic achievement and future academic promise despite financial need. She was awarded the Kay Holloway Scholarship, which provides tuition reimbursement for a female graduate student in criminal justice and the George Montoya Travel Scholarship in Criminal Justice, a competitive award which provides funding and a travel stipend for a conference. Peralta was also selected by the Western Society of Criminology (WSC) as one of five recipients of the June Morrison Scholarship Award, which provides a travel stipend to graduate students to attend the annual WSC conference so that they can present an empirical paper. As a result of this award, Peralta presented her award-winning pedagogical paper at the WSC conference in February and plans to present at the upcoming national meeting of the American Society of Criminology. In addition, she was recently hired as a research assistant under a multi-million dollar grant to examine the effectiveness of residential substance abuse aftercare for parolees in California, which is the basis of her ongoing research endeavors and thesis topic.
In a recent edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), California State University, Long Beach entomologist Dessie Underwood and five colleagues from other institutions examined the genetics of how and when certain butterfly caterpillars co-evolved as a result of plant toxicity. The article by Underwood, along with Christopher W. Wheat, Heiko Vogel, Ute Wittstock, Michael F. Braby and Thomas Mitchell-Olds, is titled The genetic basis of a plant-insect coevolutionary key innovation. It can be found in the December 18, 2007 edition of PNAS. PNAS is one of the world's most-cited multidisciplinary scientific serials.
Anthropology Professor Hector Neff took a group of nine students to Santa Lucia Cotzumalguapa, Guatemala to conduct on-site research of an ancient city preserved beneath more than 1.5 feet of volcanic ash. Students gained valuable field experience using ground-penetrating radar to conduct a geophysical survey of the pre-Hispanic community. Jessica Jaynes, an undergraduate student, and Yoshi Maezumi, Maureen Lynch, Andrea Bardsley, Adrian Abella, Jimmy Daniels, Gen Granger, Tony Quach, and Kristin Safi - all graduate students - made the trip in January.