After an extensive review process the College of Arts and Sciences has chosen nine students and seven faculty to receive funds from the newly created Student and Faculty Excellence (SAFE) Fund for the 2016 year.
After a call for greater fundraising efforts to support student and faculty research by Hughlene Frank in an Advancement Council meeting just a year ago, the College of Arts and Sciences was able to create the SAFE Fund from the Dean's Fund.
The SAFE Fund now provides significant support for undergraduate research opportunities, undergraduate and graduate student travel to present at professional conferences, publication support for faculty book contracts, as well as other student and faculty projects.
Projects funded by the SAFE Fund are as diverse and varied as the grantees themselves. Sarah McMillan, Madison Walter, and Brandon Schwartz are members of Verses, Appalachian's poetry slam team, which stems from Lyric, the Spoken Word Poetry Club. They are using their SAFE Fund grant to compete at the national level in the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitation (CUPSI) in Austin, Texas, where they will be presenting their work. This team, last year, won the award for Best Love Poem out of 68 universities from across the country.
Safe_FundHuntley Hughes, a senior in the department of English, traveled to Portland last weekend to present his paper "Voices of Paradox: The Heteroglossia of Crisis in Borges and Dostoyevsky," to the Northwestern Undergraduate Conference on Literature.
Dr. Xioafei Tu of the Department of Language, Literature, and Culture will be using his SAFE Fund grant to travel to China this summer in order to present at an Asian Studies conference on "Moral Responsibility and Humanity" in Shanghai and "Hermeneutic Understanding of Translation of Early Buddhist and Christian Scriptures" in Wuhan.
Dea Kamberaj is a second year graduate student in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Human Resource Management (IOHRM) program was nominated by the IOHRM program to attend the Annual Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Master's Student Consortium in Anaheim, CA. Her SAFE Fund grant will give her the funds to attend. SIOP is the most distinguished and recognized academic and professional organization in the field of Industrial/Organizational Psychology and Human Resource Management. Attending this conference will allow her to learn about current practitioner issues, new research, network with other professionals, and represent Appalachian among other distinguished professionals in the field.
Other student and faculty grantees of the SAFE Fund are:
- Ryan M. Gillespie, a graduate student, Industrial-Organizational Psychology and HRM
- Jamie Kirkpatrick, Senior, Psychology
- Victoria Olender, Senior, Anthropology and GJS/Political Science
- Haley Hansen, Freshmen, Anthropology
- Dr. Gregory Reck, Anthropology
- Dr. Jennifer Burris, Physics and Astronomy
- Dr. Eric Karchmer, Anthropology
- Dr. Andrew Bellemer, Biology
- Dr. Kendra Souza, Language, Literature and Cultures
- Dr. Jon Carter, Anthropology
For more information about how you can be part of the support of the SAFE funds, please contact David at 828-262-6721 or by email at taylordc@appstate.edu. To receive academic support through the SAFE Fund visit the College of Arts and Sciences SAFE Fund online.