Faculty honorees to present lectures this fall, Hagan award recipient to be recognized

As the recipient of the 2012 SUNY Fredonia President’s Award for Excellence in teaching, Dr. Cheryl Drout will present her awards lecture on Tuesday, Sept. 11, at 2 p.m. in Rosch Recital Hall, with the title, “What is the Sound of One Voice Teaching?”

Described as mediation on student engagement, Dr. Drout will share experiences teaching and learning with SUNY Fredonia students and those in the university’s Japanese partner institutions, as well as colleagues and mentors. She noted, “Informed by the backdrop of the dual tragedies of 9/11/01 and 3/11/2011 (the Japanese earthquake and tsunami), I will highlight the spirit of ‘joyful effort’ that imbues the Fredonia community.”

Geosciences Professor Gary Lash has been named the Kasling Lecturer for the 2012-2013 academic year, and Associate Professor David Kinkela of the Department of History will receive the annual William T. Hagan Young Scholar/Artist Award. Dr. Lash will offer the Kasling Lecture on Tuesday, Oct. 16, at 4 p.m. in Rosch Recital Hall, and the Hagan award will be presented to Dr. Kinkela at the same event. Dr. Lash’s lecture is entitled, “...boring old shale - how simple questions can take one on a submicroscopic to global tectonic journey...”

Dr. Lash has been a professor in the Department of Geosciences since 1981. He was the recipient of the Hagan award in 1989 for his research. In the mid-’90s, Lash’s interests turned to the local stratigraphy, specifically the Devonian shale sequence so well exposed along the Lake Erie shoreline and in creek bottoms in western New York.

Dr. Lash and Professor Terry Engelder of Penn State initiated a collaboration that continues to this day. Early in 2008, Drs. Lash and Engelder released calculations on the amount of natural gas that the Devonian Marcellus Shale might hold, which attracted the interest of the natural gas industry and helped to make the Marcellus Shale the household word it has become.

Their work also led to the pair being included in Foreign Policy magazine’s list of Top Global Thinkers for 2011. Dr. Lash continues to study the Devonian shale succession, most recently addressing the use of inorganic chemistry as a means of understanding the environment of deposition of these deposits.

Dr. Kinkela, also director of SUNY Fredonia’s Honors Program, received his Ph.D. in 2005 from New York University. He is author of, “DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide that Changed the World” (UNC Press, 2011), and co-editor of the forthcoming book, “Nation-States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History” (Oxford University Press). In 2008-09, he was a research fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 2010, he was a fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.