A Colgate research team has been awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation for the project “CNH-­‐S: RUI: Understanding the effective processes by which communities manage tropical forests.”

The research team is studying the extent, status and conservation of Ethiopian sacred forests. Numbering in the thousands, these sites protect some of the last remaining native forest in the country’s northern region. In each case, a ring of forest surrounds a Christian Orthodox church. The forests stand out dramatically in a landscape otherwise dominated by agriculture and rangeland. The project’s main goals are to explain the mechanisms of sacred forest protection, and determine why some sacred forest communities are responding well to social change while others are witnessing severe forest degradation. The research team uses mixed methods, including ecological sampling, geographic information science, ethnography, interviews, and archival analysis.

Tropical deforestation is an important threat to livelihoods, biodiversity, and is a large contributor to anthropogenic global warming. Explaining how sacred forests function is both a celebration of what is likely centuries-­long protection as well as an opportunity to evaluate the system for lessons about sustainable land management – knowledge that is critically needed in a time of unprecedented land-­use change in the tropics.

Principle investigator, Catherine Cardelús (biology), first traveled to Ethiopia in 2009 with funding from Colgate University’s Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute. Subsequently, two years of additional funding from the Picker was awarded to Cardelús, Peter Scull (geography), Peter Klepeis (geography), Eliza Kent (religion), Carrie Woods (biology), Alemayehu Wassie (forestry), and Izabela Orlowska (history). This funding supported extensive fieldwork by Wassie and Orlowska as well as three research trips to Ethiopia to collect field data, which proved critical in the NSF proposal writing process.

Six Colgate students participated in the Ethiopia field work, and seven students have conducted class projects, independent research, or senior theses related to the project.

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Participants examined the temporal (geology), spatial (ecology), and ethical (philosophy) cross-scale processes that are currently eroding ecosystem resiliency.

During a three-day-long workshop generously supported in part by the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute, seven natural scientists and five philosophers discussed at length how the accelerated extinction that is currently underway would likely unfold as ecosystems systematically lose resiliency and destabilize into degraded social-ecological states. Read more

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Faculty members engaged in interdisciplinary science research through the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute will host Dr. Paul Williams on campus this April. Dr. Williams is the former medical superintendent of Bwindi Community Hospital in rural Uganda. Read more

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The Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute recently celebrated its 5^th anniversary during Family Weekend, with a panel discussion. Invited faculty members whose collaborative work has been supported by the Institute discussed the challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinary research.

Learn more about the history of the institute and its founder.

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Scientists from Australia, Canada and the USA gathered for an interdisciplinary symposium that focused on how the remarkable diversity of marine invertebrate larvae has evolved.

Funded by the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute and hosted by Damhnait McHugh (Colgate University), Bruno Pernet (California State University, Long Beach), and Andreas Heyland (University of Guelph, Canada), the participants worked to identify key questions in the field, discuss the application of novel approaches and techniques to addressing these questions, and generate new collaborative interactions among scientists who have different areas of expertise but common interests in the evolution of marine invertebrate larvae.

The group of 18  developmental biologists, morphologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, geneticists and a philosopher of biology met in the Ho Science Center for three days to work on these issues, and ultimately will publish a manuscript that summarizes the current state of our understanding of larval transitions, the common principles that emerge from across their different fields, and proposals for future research. READ MORE

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A two-day collaborative workshop and public presentation will center around a body of work developed by DeWitt Godfrey, associate professor of art and art history and director of the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts.

Godfrey intuitively developed loose grid structures that can be folded to produce continuous surfaces. These structures demonstrate certain symmetry properties which will be explored with the mathematical, computational, design and engineering expertise of Tomasz Pisanki and Alen Orbanic (University of Ljubljiana, Slovenia) and Daniel Bosia (ARUP Associates, U.K.).

The investigations of these surfaces and their mathematical properties will allow the team to imagine new lines of artistic and structural research, leading to practical applications in new sculptural objects.

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Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute-supported research by faculty members Dan Schult (Mathematics), Ken Segall (Physics and Astronomy), and Patrick Crotty (Physics and Astronomy), was recently the subject of an article in Physics World.

The researchers believe that it is possible superconductors could simulate the brain. Read the article online.

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