VCU College of Humanities and Sciences

Dr. Alenka Luzar, VCU Professor of Physical Chemistry, was elected an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in December.

Dr. Luzar is being honored by the AAAS for her distinguished contributions to the field of computational and theoretical chemistry, particularly for theoretical modeling and new applications of modern condensed matter science to confined liquids.

Each year the Council elects members whose “efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications are scientifically or socially distinguished.” The honor of being elected a Fellow of AAAS began in 1874 and is acknowledged with a certificate and rosette. 

Dr. Luzar will be presented her certificate and rosette on Saturday, February 19, during the AAAS Fellows Forum at the Association’s Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Award-winning poets Jean Valentine and Kathleen Graber will give a reading at VCU on Thursday, January 27, at 8 pm in the Harris Hall Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, just out from Copper Canyon Press.  Her previous collection, Little Boat, was published by Wesleyan in 2007.  Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 – 2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. 

Valentine was the recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, and Columbia University. 

VCU Professor Kathleen Graber is the author of two volumes of poetry.  The Eternal City was published by Princeton University Press in 2010 and is a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry. 

Her first book, Correspondence, was published by Saturnalia Books in 2006. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, and AGNI.

Graber is the recipient of fellowships from The New Jersey State Council on the Arts (2003, 2009) and The Rona Jaffe Foundation.  She was a Hodder Fellow in poetry at Princeton University in 2007 and an Amy Lowell Travelling Scholar in 2008.  Graber teaches in the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The deadline for most College of Humanities and Sciences scholarships and fellowships is February 1.  Don’t delay.  Many scholarships require an application and letters of recommendation.   Go to the College’s Scholarship Page for application information and links to application forms.

VCU’s Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) provides faculty with resources that foster their professional growth as teachers, that encourage the use of strategies to engage students in active learning, and that stimulate innovation and creativity in VCU classrooms.

On Friday, the CTE begins their spring semester schedule with two seminars: Teaching Large Classes and Making Student Thinking Visible: Teaching with Classroom Response Systems.  More are on for next week – in anticipation of the start of classes on January 18.

The Center for Teaching Excellence homepage:
http://www.vcu.edu/cte

For What’s New articles & resources:
http://blog.vcu.edu/cte/