The College community mourns the deaths of four students during the fall and winter.

Maria Melucci, 59, a philosophy major, died November 19 at Princeton Medical Center following an illness. She had enrolled first in 1996 as a non-matriculating student and as an official student in the fall of 1997. In 1998, she spent a semester at Aristotle University in Greece. She is survived by her husband, Thomas Bainbridge, five sons, two daughters, and three grandchildren.
Scott LaBrie died December 10 at Pennsylvania Hospital of a cerebral aneurysm that he suffered December 2, 2001. LaBrie, of Washington, NJ, was a 19-year-old sophomore physics major who played the guitar and was minoring in music. A memorial service was held at The College in February.
Caleb Bohman, 19, of Sussex, NJ, passed away January 2, following his collapse while at swimming practice at The College pool. Bohman competed for the Lions in backstroke events and was a freshman majoring in computer graphic design. He had been an honor student and standout athlete at Vernon Township High School in both swimming and track and field.
Erika Pluta-Diamond, 34, a graduate student in counselor education, died suddenly on January 10. She was a counseling intern at the women’s trauma unit at Princeton House and a valued graduate assistant in the TCNJ Office of Student Life. She had previously attended Rutgers University and is survived by her husband, Kent Diamond.

Karla Adesso, a senior biology major, has been awarded an $800 academic fellowship by Beta Beta Beta, an honor society, to support research she will do on the Colorado Potato Beetle with Janice Bossart, assistant professor of biology.
Derek Fong ’02, a business information systems management major, has won the first annual $1,000 Help Desk Scholarship essay contest sponsored by Course Technology, a division of Thomson Learning, a computer education publishing firm. The essay was based on his experience as an intern on TCNJ’s help desk.
Scholarships totaling $6,000 were awarded to four students last summer by the New Jersey Press Association in recognition of their achievements as beginning reporters. The students were nominated for their awards by the newspapers for which they had worked, or were planning to work, as interns. A $3,000 scholarship and paid internship went to Conor Fortune, a senior philosophy major and then-editor of The Signal, TCNJ’s student newspaper. Fortune worked last summer at The New Jersey Herald, a daily published near his home in Sussex. Three others, all of whom interned at The Times of Trenton, received $1,000 scholarships. They are Kimberly Krupa ’01 and Stephen Tuckerson ’01, both professional writing/journalism majors, and Nick Manetto ’01, a history major.
Two seniors last summer were among 34 students from across the country who won fellowships from the International Radio and Television Society Foundation to support nine weeks of work and study in New York City. Charles Restrepo, a communication studies major, and Derek Wan, journalism, were selected from among over 600 applicants who made it through the competitive selection process and enjoyed an all-expenses-paid experience. Restrepo spent his two months working for BMI, monitoring Internet music delivery sites for the nonprofit firm, which seeks to protect the financial interests of artists whose music is distributed on the Web. Wan was a production assistant in documentary films for Newsweek Productions and Docere Digital Studios, working on programs such as a National Geographic piece on West Point cadets and an MSNBC special on former President Bill Clinton. Wan also was selected for the Stephen K. Nenno Award, given to the fellowship student who best exemplified the characteristics of selfless service, integrity, loyalty, and inspirational leadership that were the hallmarks of one of the founders of the fellowship program.
Those who visit Walt Disney World in Florida before June 21 may find Elliott Hirshorn ’03 on duty as an assistant curator of education in the Disney Animal Kingdom. The biology/secondary education major took the spring semester off to accept a six-month advanced internship in which he is developing programs and teaching guests about wildlife conservation.
Two of the four high school graduates who won $1,000 scholarships from the Association of Mathematics Teachers of New Jersey have enrolled at The College. Nancy Jarger ’05 of Wayne and Julie Jeral ’05 of Marlton both are majoring in mathematics and plan to teach in secondary school.
Craig Kaufmann, a senior history major, was awarded a $1,000 prize by the scholarship committee of the Descendants of the Founders of New Jersey. The organization sponsors an annual contest for the best essay written by a college student on the history of New Jersey, especially the colonial period. Kaufmann’s winning essay was on the Sandy Hook Lighthouse.
Joseph Vella and Michael Calvert, juniors majoring in biology and chemistry, respectively, attended last fall’s Fourth Undergraduate Symposium in the Chemical and Biological Sciences at the University of Maryland. They presented a poster titled “Amplification of Microsatellite Loci from Museum Specimens of Cervid Skeletal Remains.”
Victoria Nusse, goalie on the women’s varsity soccer team and a senior biology major, became The College’s all-time career shutout leader last fall. In her four-year career, she held opponents scoreless in 70 games.
Albert Lobbato, a senior health education major and forward on the men’s soccer team, earned a place as TCNJ’s third all-time leading scorer with 51 goals during the season.

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Engineering students score well with two Baja vehicle teams
The scene is one of the judging tents at the annual Mini-Baja East all-terrain vehicle competition held at the U.S. Army base at Fort Jackson, SC, in May, 2001. A judge from the sponsoring Society of Automotive Engineers, at left with back to camera, examines one of two entrees from students in TCNJ’s School of Engineering. This vehicle was designed from the ground up by a team of four as their senior independent project and eventually took ninth place in a field of 47. The team members are, from left, Trevor Christman, David Van Camp, Kevin Valik, and Susan Alimenti. The vehicles, all powered by identical engines that may not be altered, are judged in 13 categories, from maneuverability on land and water to speed and endurance over a four-hour course. The College’s other vehicle, built by a team of underclassmen engineering students, did even better, taking sixth place overall. Shou Rei Chang, professor of engineering, worked with both teams, as he has for many years. A TCNJ entry won the contest in 1991 and our teams regularly finish in the Top 10. Much of the $5,000 to $15,000 needed to build an entry and take part in the contest is raised by the student engineers.

In Focus
Faculty
The campus community has been saddened by the death on October 27 of June Walker, longtime softball coach and associate director of athletics at The College, following a short illness. Walker, who was 67 and had retired in 1995, died at her home in Cuthbert, GA. A memorial service was held on campus in December. A graduate of the University of Georgia, she earned her doctorate at the University of Texas in 1969 and joined the faculty here in 1974. In 22 seasons of coaching, her teams compiled an amazing record of 721 wins and 154 losses. During that period she was named NCAA Division III Coach of the Year five times, and gained a national reputation for her advocacy of women’s rights in all aspects of college athletics.

The College administration has announced the appointment of four new deans. Gail M. Simmons was named dean of the School of Science, a new position created by the division of the former School of Arts and Sciences into three schools. A biologist with extensive background in genetics and molecular research, Simmons did her undergraduate work at the University of Pittsburgh and earned her PhD at the University of California. She comes to TCNJ from the post of associate dean of science at City College of the City University of New York. The new School of Science includes the departments of biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics and statistics, and computer science.

Susan Albertine, a longtime professor of English and former vice provost for undergraduate studies at Temple University, will become dean of the School of Culture and Society, effective this summer. A 1972 graduate of Cornell, Albertine earned a master’s in English at SUNY-Cortland, and a doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1985. After teaching secondary school English in New York State, she taught English literature over a period of 14 years at Chicago State University, University of North Florida, St. Olaf College, Susquehanna University, and the University of Pennsylvania. The new School of Culture and Society includes 13 academic departments and programs from the former School of Arts and Sciences. They are: communication studies, English, history, philosophy and religion, political science, psychology, sociology/anthropology, modern languages, and law and justice. The school also oversees interdisciplinary programs in African-American studies, classical studies, international studies, and women’s and gender studies.
Taras Pavlovsky, a member of the Roscoe L. West Library faculty since 1995, was named dean of the library. Pavlovsky graduated from Rutgers with a BS in chemical engineering, earned a master’s in musicology from Rutgers and a master’s in library science at Columbia University. He has been music and media librarian here, and in recent years has chaired the library faculty steering committee.
Lisa Angeloni, who has been director of the 17-member Office of Admissions since 1997, will be known henceforth as dean of admissions. A graduate of Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY, she earned a master’s in education administration from SUNY, and was associate director of admissions and marketing at SUNY-New Paltz for nine years before coming to TCNJ. As part of an administrative reorganization, she will report to Vice President for Academic Affairs Stephen R. Briggs.
Robert Bartoletti, former principal and superintendent of schools in Cranbury, in November became the new director of the Professional Development School Network of the School of Education. He will coordinate the network, which consists of 22 public schools within a 20-mile radius of TCNJ, and provides a way for its members to share new ideas and research as well as help teachers improve their own professional development.
Juda Bennett, assistant professor of English, participated in the Langston Hughes Centennial Celebration held in February at the University of Kansas. The symposium is a stage for scholars from the U.S. and abroad to present fresh perspective on Hughes and his work.
Brian Bishop, TCNJ swimming coach and aquatics director, was honored in December by the New Jersey Inter-Scholastic Athletic Association for many years of service to the organization, including enabling the association to hold its state championships at The College for over 10 years.
Robert Cunningham, associate professor of mathematics, is serving this year as president of the Association of Mathematics Teachers of New Jersey, a 3,000-member professional organization devoted to improving math education from elementary grades to the early college years.
Henry Fradella, associate professor of law and justice, has had his article, “Sexual Orientation, Justice and Higher Education: Student Attitudes Toward Gay Civil Rights and Hate Crimes,” accepted for publication in the Journal of Law and Sexuality. Three students, Michael Carroll ’00, a law and justice major; Ryan Melendez ’01, mathematics; and Ed Chamberlain ’03, English, co-authored the manuscript, which they also presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology.
Thomas Hagedorn, assistant professor of mathematics, has completed a two-year leave on a Sloan Foundation Fellowship at the University of Montreal, where he was a postdoctoral fellow in computational molecular biology. His position was part of a joint program with the U.S. Department of Energy to encourage more physical scientists and mathematicians to work on computational problems in biology. While in Canada, he worked at the Center for Research in Mathematics under David Sankoff, a leader in the use of mathematics and statistics to unravel information stored in DNA/RNA. Hagedorn attended a number of professional conferences during his leave, and helped organize RECOMB 2001, the world’s leading conference on computational molecular biology.
David Holmes, associate professor of mathematics and statistics, presented a paper at the Joint International Conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing held at NYU last summer. He reported on research into the authorship of letters purportedly from Confederate General George Pickett to his wife. Holmes attributed many of the letters not to Pickett but to his wife, who apparently wrote them after his death. The research has been accepted for publication in Literary and Linguistic Computing.
Deborah Knox, associate professor of computer science, has received a grant of $97,000 from the National Science Foundation for a digital library project initiated by her several years ago and now being developed by TCNJ and people from Virginia Tech, Villanova, Hofstra, and Penn State. Known as the Computing and Information Technology Interactive Digital Education Library (CITADEL) project, it provides opportunities for computer science students to help in the work.
Bozena Levin, associate professor of economics, is the author of an article in the December 2001 issue of Post-Communist Economics entitled “One Polish Bank’s Experience of Promoting Enterprise Restructuring.” It examines Poland’s experience with bank privatization. Another article, “Women Entrepreneurs During Poland’s Transition,” will appear in the 2001 anthology of The Global Business & Economic Review to be published this spring.
Xinru Liu, part-time professor of history, is the author of the lead article in the fall 2001 issue of the Journal of World History. Its title is “Migration and Settlement of the Yuezhi-Kushan: Interaction and Interdependence of Nomadic and Sedentary Societies.”
Lorraine Martin-Plank, assistant professor of nursing, gave a presentation on “Nurse Practitioner—Community Partnerships for Health” at the inaugural conference of the International Network of Nurse Practitioners and Advanced Practice Nurses held last summer in Ireland.
Gerry Miller, associate professor of accountancy, is the lead author of the article “Reporting and Auditing Non-Financial Performance Information by State Governments” published in the November 2001 issue of The Australian Accounting Review.
Florence Moonan, a secretary in the Office of College Relations, had two exhibits of her abstract paintings in recent months: one at the Atelier Fine Art Gallery in Frenchtown and another at the Arthur J. Holland Gallery of the Trenton City Museum.
Emmanuel Osagie, vice provost for academic grants and sponsored research, is one of 33 college and university administrators participating this year in a leadership development program of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. As member of the AASCU’s third annual Millennium Leadership Institute, Osagie attended a workshop last August in Washington that preceded a yearlong mentoring experience. The program is designed to strengthen the preparation and eligibility of persons who are traditionally underrepresented in higher education leadership.
Rajib Sanyal, professor of management, and Subarna Samanta, associate professor of economics, will have their research paper, “Corruption Across Countries: The Cultural and Economic Factors” published in Business and Professional Ethics Journal. The research covered 47 countries and found that countries with low per capita income are more likely to have more corruption.
David Smits, professor of history, has had an essay he first published in 1998 included in a widely used series of texts known as “Major Problems in American History,” and published last year by Houghton Mifflin. The essay deals with the use of Indian scouts and allies in the campaigns of the frontier army during the period 1860–1890.
Donald Vandegrift, associate professor of economics, has been awarded a three-year, $100,000 National Science Foundation grant to study behavior, performance, and risk taking under labor contracts that pay workers on relative performance and under team production. Under the former system, workers are paid on the basis of individual performance, while on the latter, all members of a team are paid equally, based on the team’s performance. The research will be conducted at Penn State University, using students there as subjects in the experiment.
Alan Waterman, professor of psychology, is serving the second year of a two-year term as president of the Society for Research on Identity Formation, an academic group that assists members in research on concepts of identity development.
Morton Winston, professor of philosophy, has been appointed to the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on International Cooperation. He also has been awarded a Fulbright Alumni Initiative Award grant from the Council on International Education to develop new courses on human rights and international relations for The College of New Jersey and Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand, where he was a Fulbright senior scholar in 1999–2000.
Jean Wong, assistant professor of language and communication sciences, presented a paper on “delay as an interactional resource” at the annual convention of the National Communication Association in Atlanta in November. Using transcriptions of real native/non-native speaker English conversation as empirical data, she explored an interface among grammar, delay (or silence), and the native/non-native speaker context. During the winter, her article on “Applying Conversation Analysis in Applied Linguistics: Evaluating English as a Second Language Textbook Language” appeared in the International Review of Applied Linguistics, published in Berlin, Germany.

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