Salve Regina University

NEWPORT, R.I. (Sept. 14, 2016) – A newly constructed 23,000-square-foot academic wing on Salve Regina’s seaside campus will be named in honor of Cumberland Farms Chairman of the Board Lily Haseotes Bentas for her longtime friendship and service to the university.

The Lily Haseotes Bentas Center will be officially dedicated during a ceremony on Saturday, Sept. 17 at 4 p.m. United States senators from Rhode Island, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, will offer remarks, along with members of the Haseotes family and representatives from the Salve Regina community.

The Bentas Center is connected to the 67,000-square-foot reconstructed O’Hare Academic Building, Ochre Point Avenue, sharing a large university commons area overlooking Newport’s Cliff Walk and the Atlantic Ocean. The Center will house the Department of Business Studies and Economics, along with its business outreach program, the Rodgers Family Department of Nursing, student common areas, classrooms, conference areas and faculty offices.

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NEWPORT, R.I. (Aug. 23, 2016) – Dr. Sami Nassim, director of multicultural programs and retention at Salve Regina University, has published an article, “A Holistic Approach to Helping Minority Students Succeed in College.” His work appears on Rhode Island’s College & University Research Collaborative website at http://www.collaborativeri.org/research/.

“One of the most important challenges in higher education is to close the achievement gap between racial majority and minority students,” Nassim writes. “At non-profit private four-year institutions, the share of white students who graduate within either four or six years is at least 10 percentage points higher than the share of minority students. In Rhode Island, the disparity in graduation rates between white and minority students is even larger.”

Nassim focused his study on research and programs developed at Salve Regina with the hope that the information garnered may hold lessons for other institutions interested in increasing minority student retention and for policy makers seeking to improve the educational attainment and economic status of minorities in the state.

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NEWPORT, R.I. (Aug. 3, 2016) – Members of Olympic sailing, triathlon and rowing teams competing in polluted waters at the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro may be interested in peer-reviewed research just published by a Salve Regina University chemistry professor and co-authored by one of her undergraduate students.

Dr. Susan Meschwitz, assistant professor of chemistry, and Salve Regina senior chemistry major Emily Poulin have discovered that a class of organic molecules are proving effective in the fight against drug-resistant bacteria, a finding with the potential to impact modern medicine as the misuse and overuse of antibiotics have led to the development of widespread resistance. See the article published July 25 in the journal “Molecules” by MDPI (Basel, Switzerland):http://www.mdpi.com/1420-3049/21/8/971.

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A national jazz dance conference created by Lindsay Guarino, assistant professor in the Department of Music, Theatre and Dance, will be held on campus July 31-Aug. 3. “Jazz Dance: Roots and Branches in Practice,” is being co-hosted by the National Dance Education Organization, the largest dance organization in the country.

The conference will look at jazz dance broadly through movement workshops and conversations, inviting dialogue that connects the past, present and future of jazz.

“The conference is unique in that it is the first national jazz dance conference of its type, and it is exciting for me personally because it was inspired by my textbook that was published in early 2014,” Guarino said. “The conference is possibly one of the most important things I’ve done for the Salve Regina dance program. It’s helping me to give the program a unique identity in jazz dance – something very different from other dance programs across the country.”

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