ORGSP Newsletter
Office of Research, Grants
and Sponsored Programs
March 2012
Dr. Rollins Invited Speaker at the VII Latin American Mycological Congress
Dr. Adam W. Rollins (Department of Biology) was invited to participate in the VII
Latin American Mycological Congress held in San Jose Costa Rica from July 18 21, 2011. He was asked to do two things (a) design and present a pre-congress
workshop and (b) organize, chair, and present at a meeting session. Dr. Rollins
was happy to accept these requests, and supplement his trip with a small research-based excursion.
The three-day pre-congress workshop was entitled, "Ecological Techniques to
Study Fungi and Myxomycetes" and was presented by Dr. Rollins at the Santa
Rosa National Park research field station in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. The workshop consisted of an admixture of lecture-based, field-based, and laboratorybased sessions. The participants represented an international Latin American
group with participants coming from areas such as Costa Rica, El Salvador, and
Mexico.
The congress was held on the campus of the University of Costa Rica in San Jose. During the Congress Dr. Rollins chaired a session entitled, "The Systematics
and Ecology of Microorganisms Historically Regarded as Fungi (myxomycetes,
oomycetes, and dictyostelids)". The session consisted of six paper presentations, one which was presented by Dr. Rollins (and co-authored by Dr. Caldwell)
entitled, "Preliminary report of dictyostelid cellular slime molds from southern
Belize".
Following the congress Dr. Rollins spent some time in the field collecting data
and samples for various research projects. Interestingly, one of these series of
samples is serving as the basis of LMU undergraduate Jessica Mayberry's Jr./Sr.
seminar research project.
Images from the 2011 VII Latin American Mycological Congress held in Costa Rica (A) loading
the bus for the pre-congress workshops, (B & C) organisms encountered by workshop participants, (D) field-based workshop activities, (E) an active volcano study site, (F) lab-based workshop session, (G) the main venue for the Congress, (H) Dr. Rollins presenting a lecture at the
University of Costa Rica.
Information provided by Dr. Adam Rollins
ORGSP Newsletter
Office of Research, Grants
and Sponsored Programs
March 2012
School of Education News
Photo provided by Stephanie Maiden
On October 26, 2011 Sandy
Birchfield presented two concurrent sessions at the 2011 Southwest Virginia Leadership Conference. The topic was Engineering
a Safe & Effective School Community/School Community Partnerships Giving Feedback that
Builds Trust. When stakeholders
feel comfortable in the community/school relationship many
positive things take place. Discussion centered on the differences in school climate/culture,
case studies dealing with diversity, and group assessments of
what defines their specific culture.
Dr. Michael Burger is working
with four K-12 school districts on
standards-driven assessment
models.
Dr. Pat Murphree conducted five professional development sessions on helping struggling students for Ewing Elementary School faculty in Lee County, VA.
Dr. Susan Gratz presented at the Tennessee Education Technology Conference on December 1, 2010. The topic was “Using Project-Based Learning to Meet Curriculum
Standards.” She demonstrated how to use both low tech and high tech resources in
project-based learning. Websites for resources were provided and attendees participated in a discussion on projects they had used.
Dr. Pat Clark and Dr. Debby Hayes conducted a roundtable discussion entitled “Facing
the Saber-toothed Tiger” at the annual Association of Teacher Educators annual conference in San Antonio, Texas on February 14, 2012.
Dr. Helen Cole and Dr. Peggy Quarles conducted a roundtable discussion entitled
“Familiarity Breeds Content: How to Use Multicultural Education in the Classroom” at
the annual Association of Teacher Educators annual conference in San Antonio, Texas
on February 14, 2012.
Dr. Peggy Quarles published the article "Multicultural Education Should Be the Number One Goal in Every Classroom" in the U.S. China Education Review, November 2011.
Dr. Dan Wilder and Dr. Pat Murphree co-published an article, "Is There a New Crisis for
Girls?" in the Fall 2011 Tennessee Leadership Journal.
Information provided by Dr. Deborah Hayes
ORGSP Newsletter
Office of Research, Grants
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March 2012
News from the School of Arts and Sciences
Professor Liz Lamont
Liz Lamont was awarded the 2011 Plattner Award for
Creative Non-Fiction for the article “The Elephant and
the Chicks: How Rural Appalachia’s First Writer-inResidence Came and Went” published in Appalachian
Heritage, Summer 2011 edition.
The article can be found at:
http://community.berea.edu/appalachianheritage/issues/
summer2011/contents.html
The article is also available online through Project Muse.
Professor Rebecca Brackman
Rebecca Brackman was elected Vice President of the
Kentucky Philological Association at the organization’s
annual conference
Dr. Brackman also read a paper entitled “The Irish Underground: St. Patrick’s Purgatory and the Caves of Error
and Despair in The Faerie Queene,” for the conference’s
plenary session.
Dr. Anna Teekell Awarded Prize for Distinguished Dissertation
Dr. Anna Teekell, Assistant Professor
of English has just been awarded the
Adele Dalsimer Prize for Distinguished
Dissertation from the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) for her
doctoral dissertation, "Irish Literature
of the Second World War: The Stylistics of Neutrality". Dr. Teekell received
her award at the ACIS
2012 International Meeting
in New Orleans, Louisiana
March 14 -17.The ACIS is a multidisciplinary scholarly organization with approximately 800 members in the United States, Ireland, Canada, and other
countries around the world.
The ACIS was founded in 1960 as the
American Committee for Irish Studies; it is incorporated in the Commonwealth
of Virginia as a non-profit organization.
ORGSP Newsletter
Office of Research, Grants
and Sponsored Programs
March 2012
News from the School of Arts and Sciences Continued
Dr. Wilcox to Present in Lisbon, Portugal
Dr. Roy Wilcox, Assistant Professor, Chemistry,
has had an abstract accepted on “Modeling of
Pulsatile NonNewtonian Flow of Blood as a Bingham Fluid” for the Society of Rheology Meeting in
Lisbon, Portugal. He will be giving an oral presentation on his research in August 2012. Dr. Wilcox’s research incorporates blood viscosity measurements into a constitutive equation that models the velocity
and stress distribution of blood in the arteries as a function of
blood pressure and pulse rate.
Pictured is a microscopic image of blood showing how the
red blood cells form rouleux which appears as stacked coins
when the blood is at rest. As blood flows during the heart
cycle the stacks disperse decreasing bloods resistance to
flow.
The Myxobiota of Peru
Dr. Adam W. Rollins (Department of Biology) is a member of an international collaborative team that will study the slime molds (myxomycetes) associated with
cacti and succulent plants from the arid regions of Peru. Many of the plants are
endemics that have adapted to obtain their moisture from the fogs that "roll" off
the ocean and some host very rare and often previously undiscovered species of
slime molds. The three year project (supported by Spain's equivalent to the National Science Foundation) is led by Dr. Carlos Lado (3rd from the left) who is a
research scientist with the Scientific Research Council of Spain (CSIC). The other
members of the team come from the University of Arkansas (USA), the Lima Museum of Natural History (Peru), the University of Tlaxcala (Mexico), the Polish
Academy of Science (Poland), the Kenyan Museum of Natural History (Kenya),
and the Royal Botanic Garden (Spain). The first expedition is expected to take
place this upcoming October.
1. The Peruvian study area to be covered during the three-year investigation is indicated by the
ellipse labeled "A". 2. Dr. Rollins [on the left] with select members of the international research
team that held the first project planning meeting in conjunction with the ICSEM meeting this past
September [2011] in Reclife, Brazil. 3. The typical arid landscape of the study areas. 4. Badhamia
melanospora, a myxomycete that is adapted to arid environments.
ORGSP Newsletter
Office of Research, Grants
and Sponsored Programs
March 2012
News from the School of Arts and Sciences Continued
LMU BFREE Hosts Workshop
LMU’s Rainforest Science Cooperative Laboratory at Belize Foundation for Research and Environmental Education, Belize, Central America was host to a
workshop “Land Snails as Indicators of Forest Health” , February 24-26. The
workshop was funded by Ya’axche’ Conservation Trust (YCT) an organization
charged with managing the Bladen Nature Reserve of Belize, their “crown jewel”
of protected Reserves. YCT received funding to set out plots and gather baseline
information to use land snails (some as small as 1.2 mm) as biomonitors for the
rainforest of the Bladen. Participants included Martin Hofman, Research
Officer; Marcus Tut, Ranger Ya’axché Conservation Trust, Dr. Ronald S. Caldwell,
Lincoln Memorial University, Dan Dourson, Resident Biologist and Dr. Steven
Brewer, Resident Plant Ecologist, Belize Foundation for Research and Environmental Education Dr. Ron Caldwell presented at the workshop. Dr. Caldwell will
traveled back to Belize over spring break to discuss the placement of plots (over
30) in the BNR with BNR.
ORGSP Newsletter
Office of Research, Grants
and Sponsored Programs
March 2012
Dr. Paul Wood Submits NIH Proposal
Dr. Paul Wood, Professor of Pharmacology,
has submitted a grant proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to establish a Regional Comprehensive Metabolomics Resource Core (RCMRC) at Lincoln Memorial
University. This new RCMRC facility would
develop a number of high throughput targeted metabolomics assay platforms to assess
the human metabolome in different disease
states. These assay platforms will be accessible by investigators across the USA to interrogate metabolic changes in defined diseases
and ultimately define potential diagnostic
tests and potential new therapeutic avenues.
University Archivist has Case Study Published
Michelle Ganz, University Archivist, recently had a case study published in a the
book “The Lone Arranger: succeeding in a small repository” by Christina Zamon
The case study was entitled “Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum”
Photos provided by Melissa Miracle
ORGSP Newsletter
Office of Research, Grants
and Sponsored Programs
March 2012
Foundation Corner
By Martha Scheidler, Director of Foundations
What’s an LOI? You’d think that those
of us in academia would be familiar
with alphabet soup. But just to be
clear, the LOI is known as a Letter of
Intent, a Letter of Inquiry or a Letter of
Interest. Each one is not so different
from the other, in that you are communicating with a foundation to explain what you do and determine if
your project fits with their funding
guidelines.
Photos provided by Melissa Miracle
Many times a foundation will ask a potential grantee to submit an LOI before submitting a full proposal. This saves time and effort for both the funder and the recipient. The foundation might tell you exactly what to put in the LOI, but if not, there are
some basic items.
You will want to include the project title and a short description of the project or program. Here is where you have to be succinct yet passionate. You will need to explain
in a very short narrative why this is so important and what you hope to achieve, what
evaluation tools you will use and how you will know if you are successful. Include a
time line, who will be involved in administering the project, how much money you
need and why you need it. And it’s very helpful to explain if you are collaborating
with other departments or have community partners.
All this in two pages or less!! Basically, you are giving the foundation program director a snapshot of your project or program. And while it’s difficult to distill a large project into two pages, it will help you organize and think systematically about what you
are planning and how to achieve your goal.
Recent Submissions and Awards
March Submissions:

The Community Garden applied to the Garden Tool Company for child appropriate
gardening tools.

Darnell Arnoult submitted requests to the Max and Victoria Dreyfus Foundation
and the RSF Seed Fund for the Cumberland Gap Young Writers Workshop.

Dr. Mary Anne Modrcin submitted a request to the Jane L. Pettway Foundation for
an ASN scholarship.
ORGSP Newsletter
Office of Research, Grants
and Sponsored Programs
March 2012
A Note From the LMU Institutional Review Board
Please remember that all research proposals and projects involving human subjects,
must have IRB approval prior to the presentation of any information gathered during
the course of the research.
Under federal policy, the IRB cannot grant retroactive IRB approval.
For more information regarding the LMU IRB, please visit
http://www.lmunet.edu/curstudents/ORGSP/IRB.shtml.
ORGSP Contact Information
pauline.lipscomb@lmunet.edu
or call (423) 869-6214
carolyn.gulley@lmunet.edu
or call (423) 869-6291
melissa.miracle02@lmunet.edu
or call (423) 869-6834
If your grant award, application, presentation,
or publication has not been mentioned in this
edition, please forward your information to us
using the contact information listed.
The ORGSP is located in Duke Hall, Suite 304
As a reminder, all applications for external funding must first begin by contacting the
ORGSP.
The ORGSP staff would like to thank everyone for
their submissions to the newsletter!
Photos provided by Laura Gambrel