Panhia Lee

Mulcahy: Chemistry department, students to prosper from 1st NSF grant

Dr. Seann Mulcahy, associate professor of chemistry, takes an outside view when analyzing the value of his initial National Science Foundation (NSF) grant. 

The first faculty member in the Providence College Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry to earn an individual NSF grant, Mulcahy is thrilled by what the honor means to his department and the research students he mentors.

The $191,371 award from the NSF’s Chemical Synthesis Program will fund collaborative research on Mulcahy’s project, “RUI: Synthesis of Isomeric Carbolines by Tandem Palladium Catalysis.” The three-year grant, which runs through August 2019, is the most significant research award Mulcahy has received to date. It builds on previous awards from the National Institutes of Health’s Rhode Island IDeA Network for Excellence in Biomedical Research program, the American Chemical Society, and the Rhode Island Foundation.

“We are collaborative scientists in chemistry,” he said. “We necessarily involve undergraduates in our scholarship. It is important to provide funding for them to conduct research in our labs.” He emphasized that colleagues in his department “are passionate about what we do” and that awards like the NSF grant are integral to faculty research and undergraduate opportunities.

Mulcahy explained that the NSF’s focus is on “high-impact science” that carries broad applicability for other researchers, students, and for society. NSF grants provide “a training mechanism for students. Research fits into a larger set of goals. Liberal arts institutions like Providence College are positioned for that.”

Mulcahy’s project currently involves five students, who receive credit during the academic year. Funding also will cover research by two students each summer.

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The Big Picture

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Senior Suzanne Alward 17 CR uses a model to consider how best to present her work in a gallery setting.

As every RISD student knows, there’s a lot more to earning a degree in the arts than mastering technical skills and developing a strong aesthetic point of view. Ceramics majors and MFAs enrolled in a fall seminar co-taught by thriving Brooklyn-based sculptor Nicole Cherubini 93 CR and historian/curator/studio potter Sequoia Miller are developing strategies for cultivating ideas in the studio and presenting their work to the wider world.

The seminar has two principal goals, says Miller. The first is to teach students research methods and provide other tools for advancing their studio practice. The second is to build a greater awareness of the context in which artists operate – to consider ways of shaping the public’s experience of their work by writing a meaningful artist’s statement, for example, or thoughtfully presenting their work in a gallery setting.

“It’s challenging to translate abstract ideas into a known language without narrowing them down too much,” Cherubini explains. She organized field trips to NYC and Boston, where students toured clay-based exhibitions, garnered ideas and discussed real-world practices with gallerists and museum curators at the Museum of Art + Design in NYC and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Brown musician, composer finds inspiration in unexpected spaces

For Assistant Professor of Music Eric Nathan, November brought the premiere of a new composition by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a Copland House residency award announcement.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] —For three weeks in January 2017, Eric Nathan will live and work in the home that legendary composer Aaron Copland called “my hideaway, my solitude” in Cortlandt Manor, N.Y. One of nine composers to win a 2016 Copland House residency award, the assistant professor of music at Brown University said he is looking forward to the opportunity to focus on writing without distraction in the former home of “the dean of American music.”

Other composers have described Copland House as a place where one can “sense the spirit of someone who has created so much and has been so influential to American music,” Nathan said. That makes the residency particularly promising for Nathan, for whom specific places have served as a creative spur and compositional tool.

This month, the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered Nathan’s commissioned work, “the space of a door,” a composition inspired by his emotional experience upon first visiting the Providence Athenaeum, an independent library and cultural center dating to the 1830s, last December. A recent review of the performance described “the space of a door” as music that is “clean and shot through with rhythmic vitality” that “conjures images of a physical space” and “is filled with resonant harmonies that are left to hang in space.”

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First-year students pitch business ideas that solve global social problems

Malnutrition. Water-borne illness. Cardiovascular disease. These issues and more were top of mind this semester for a group of first-year International Business majors challenged by their professors – Associate Professor of Management Diya Das, Ph.D., and Assistant Professor of Management Elzotbek Rustambekov, Ph.D. – to develop a business that would address a global social problem.

The assignment was part of Global Foundations of Organizations and Business, a three-credit component of Bryant’s nationally recognized First-Year Gateway.

On Nov. 2 – not even eight weeks into their collegiate careers – 10 student teams pitched their proposals to a panel of judges that included the director of strategic initiatives from software company Dassault Systemes and the director of operations for Swarovski.

The teams and their innovative solutions reflected extensive research and critical thinking about the scope of the problems they had identified, and the cultural mores and practices that would affect their business. In learning how to nurture their ideas into international businesses, they developed skills in design thinking, rapid prototyping, leadership, communication, negotiation and time management. They also grew in their understanding of the triple bottom line – the social, economic, and environmental dimensions their proposed businesses would have.

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