According to Trompetter, social class in America continues to be largely unexamined and little understood. Her discussion will explode common myths such as "America is a meritocracy," "America is a classless society," and "everyone in America is middle-class." Fact will clarify the realities of class in America, and participants will be encouraged to understand their own place in the social topography of America.

Trompetter earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Penn State, a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard University, and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. After completing her doctorate, she completed studies and workshops with the Anti-Defamation League World of Difference Program and the National MultiCultural Institute in Washington, D.C. She has been an active diversity consultant, trainer, and curriculum designer since 1993.

 Tompetter has served as a professor of philosophy and director of women’s studies at Southeast Missouri State University and associate academic dean and director of graduate programs at Misericordia University.

While at Misericordia, she founded the Diversity Institute in 1992 and, in 1998, the Northeastern Pennsylvania Diversity Education Consortium, a 22-member regional educational resource that provides programming, training, and curricular planning to businesses, healthcare systems, school districts, colleges, and universities.

Now retired from Misercordia, she currently serves as director of NEPDEC, and president of Consult 4 Diversity.

For additional information, contact the Office of University Relations at 570-450-3180.

Hazleton resident Richard Hummel recently presented astronomy equipment to the physics and science departments at Penn State Hazleton. Among the items in the gift are a telescope with a wide range of lenses and accessories, astronomer’s binoculars, and related books.

Hummel, a disabled veteran, said, “Astronomy has been a passion of mine for so many years, starting when I was on a Navy ship sailing around the world. I decided to donate the equipment hoping that it would spark an interest and passion in students here at Penn State Hazleton.”

Penn State Hazleton Chancellor Gary Lawler said, “We thank Richard Hummel for thinking of our students and campus when he decided to donate this equipment. We continue to build the resources for our faculty who are top-rate scholars through gifts, grants and university purchases to ultimately enhance the teaching learning experience for students.”

David Starling, assistant professor of physics, added, “Students at Penn State Hazleton are highly interested in astronomy, and those enrolled in the astronomy course and related courses will greatly benefit from this gift.”

Dr. Lawler continued, “The long-term goal for this equipment is to use it in conjunction with the recent 26-acre land gift from the Engle, Bates and Dove families to build an astronomical observatory. This project has already garnered a high degree of interest from community members and local astronomy clubs, and we have already begun raising money for it.”  

Dr. Harold W. Aurand, professor emeritus of history and former campus administrator, passed away November 22 at the age of 72. Dr. Aurand served the campus for thirty-five years, teaching courses in American history, labor studies, and American studies while earning honors for his classroom contributions from students and professional organizations.

Recognized as one of the foremost scholars on anthracite history, he authored four books about and numerous articles which appeared in print and in presentations. He also lectured on the “American Molly Maguires” before audiences in Ireland. 

Dr. Aurand was a founding member and director of the Pennsylvania Labor Society, and was highly involved in Pennsylvania Historical Association and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. He was also active in many local clubs and organizations.

Former Campus Executive Officer Dr. James Staudenmeier said, “No matter what Harold was involved in – teaching, research or community service – he made tremendous contributions. His classes were in demand, his research and knowledge were nationally known, and he was a hands-on member of many community organizations. Plus, he was extremely dedicated to his family.” 

He earned an A.B. degree in history from Franklin and Marshall College and master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Penn State.

Surviving are his wife, Frances; a son, Harold Aurand, Jr. ’86, and his wife, Helen; a daughter, Michele Aurand ’92; and a grandson, Harold Aurand III.

A Penn State Hazleton alumnus won an award that will pay him $5 million to research his proposal to develop a vaccine against HIV that also prevents heroin addiction.

Dr. Gary R. Matyas ’78, captured the 2012 Avant-Garde Award for Medications Development from the National Institute on Drug Abuse with his plan to attack twin scourges. 

“There is a strong correlation between heroin abuse and HIV infection, especially in developing countries,” Matyas said of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus that causes AIDS. “The possibility of creating a combination heroin/HIV vaccine provides an important opportunity to address both a unique treatment for heroin abuse as well as continuing the quest to develop an effective preventive HIV vaccine.” 

Matyas works in Silver Spring, Md., at the U.S. Military HIV Research Program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where work already produced an anti-heroin component of the vaccine. 

In collaboration between the HIV Research Program and the National Institute, the researchers used haptens, a small molecule chemically similar to abused drugs like heroin. Haptens bind with protein carriers to induce an immune response against the addictive drugs. 

Now the anti-heroin hapten is ready for optimization and advanced, pre-clinical tests.

Through the Avant-Garde Award, Matyas will receive $1 million a year for five years to support the next phase of research and development. 

The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for the Advancement of Military Medicine Inc. will administer the grant for the work, which will continue as a collaboration between the HIV Research Program and the National Institute.

Matyas, chief, Adjuvants and Formulation Section, Laboratory of Adjuvants and Antigen

Research at the HIV Research Program, spent his entire career researching diseases and developing vaccines. 

Originally from Mountain Grove, he began undergraduate studies at Penn State Hazleton before completing his bachelor of science degree in biophysics at University Park. 

He earned a doctoral degree in biological sciences while focusing on glycolipids and their changes in cancer in 1985 from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN.

Through 1988, he performed post-doctoral studies through the National Institute of Health’s National Institute of Neurological, Communicative Disorders and Stroke.

Since starting at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, he has worked on liposomes and other vaccine formulations for various biological threats and infectious diseases. 

He is married to Marsha Lakes Matyas, the director of education programs at the American Physiological Society. She holds bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees from Purdue. 

Their son, Joseph, is a senior psychology major at Marshall University, Huntington, WV.

A new physics professor on campus can detect when a laser beam waivers the width of a hair on  a journey to the moon, while a new engineering professor challenged his students to simulate the same trip in a rocket ship.

Their reach toward the moon isn’t the only tie-in between David Starling, assistant professor of physics, and Joseph Ranalli, assistant professor of engineering, who arrived together at Penn State Hazleton for the fall semester.

Starling is creating a laser lab on campus, and Ranalli’s engineering students are building equipment for the lab. Both professors, too, seek ways to interest students in their introductory courses.

“They have a lot of shared research and tremendous energy, a shared love of students and teaching,” Elizabeth Wright, director of Academic Affairs for Penn State Hazleton, said.

Ranalli said his professors influenced him to become a teacher.“I saw their passion. I thought I would share it with the next generation of students,” he said. For an early lesson, he chose a computer game to help students learn the design process.

The game required students to devise a plan for sending a rocket to the moon. They had to choose engines and fuel for stages of the rocket, but also learn about entering and leaving the orbits of Earth and the moon. “Students seemed to like playing the game,” he said. “I almost describe it as a virtual lab exercise,” he said.

Starling, meanwhile, tries to include a demonstration each time he teaches a chapter. In one class, he spun a bicycle wheel, and held it horizontally. Then he flipped the wheel so it turned in the opposite direction, just as a turntable he stood on began rotating like a merry-go-round. “It just shows the conservation of angular momentum,” he said. Doing the math to explain the motions gets complex.

“So when you see it, it’s pretty cool,” Starling said.

Math never rattled him, thanks to his grandmother. As a boy he spent an hour with her before school. “She would run the multiplication tables with me … When we started doing the science, math was never the problem,” he said.

Instead he could concentrate on the principles of physics, which he found to be “simple, beautiful, not complicated.” From a few laws “you derive all the intricate behavior of the universe.” Those laws are true in the classical physics of Kepler and Newton.

But as a graduate student, Starling ventured into quantum physics, which the uninitiated realize isn’t straight forward as soon as they hear the name of a fundamental precept. It’s called the Uncertainty Principle, Werner Heisenberg’s idea that an observer who knows the position of a particle can’t simultaneously know its momentum.

Starling confronted uncertainty through research in quantum optics for his doctorate at the University of Rochester. “If you try to measure, very strange things happen depending on how you measure,” he said.

His lab became adept at making measurements so sensitive that his adviser said they could detect “the deflection of a laser a hair’s breadth even if it traveled all the way to the moon.” Their work helped improve measuring techniques and also has military applications, he said.

Now that he settled in Hazleton with his wife, Sarah, an instructor in psychology at the campus, Starling wants to study another confounding theory: entanglement, a concept so strange that Einstein spent many of his latter years trying to debunk it. Einstein failed. Experiments proved the theory correct, but it remains a source of wonder.

Starling explained by using an example in which two friends each have a marble. If one marble is red, the other will be blue.  “You walk into a room. You find your marble is red, (so) you know mine is blue,” he said.

Some particles share that linkage. If one particle has an “up” spin, for example, the other has a “down” spin. The spins aren’t apparent until one is observed, then the other particle displays the opposite behavior. That happens even if they are too far apart to have exchanged a message at the speed of light. “Things can be both, and only choose when you look at it,” Starling said.

He and his students will get a better look at the particles in the laser lab that he is building with a grant from Penn State.

The lab requires red and blue lasers and a sturdy table to keep the lasers from wobbling. Onto the table, experimenters will screw in tools such as mirrors, wave plates that change polarization, an oscilloscope to measure pulses, and a photon detector – the instrument that Ranalli and a team of engineering students will build with Starling.

“It will save him a lot of money putting his lab together,” and provide experience for students, Ranalli said.

The chance to build a detector for a photon, a single particle of light, piqued students’ curiosity at the undergraduate research fair where professors outlined research projects. “I must have had 10 to 15 students approach,” Ranalli said.

Eight signed up and began meeting with Ranalli and Starling, who taught them basic lab techniques such as how to measure voltages while they waited for the arrival of parts ordered to build the photon detector. After the students help build the equipment, Starling hopes some will stick around the lab to try it out. They can develop science skills to complement their engineering training.

Likewise, Ranalli figures there’s no reason that engineering students cannot take an interest in pure, as well as applied, science.

In his own research, Ranalli started one project that will help students and another that will involve them. With a professor at the University Park campus, he is creating software to use in a solar engineering class for fourth-year students. The software will replace tables that students consult now. “It will help bring the student homework into the computer age,” he said.

Ranalli’s other project might bring information about green energy to smartphones. He wants to develop an app to help homeowners decide the best place on their property to install solar panels or wind turbines. The idea came to him after a neighbor in Mountain Top, where he lives with his wife Melissa, asked for advice on where to put a solar heater for a swimming pool.

Two students offered to help, including one who learned computer programming while in high school. They will make the app on the platform used by Android phones. “All the tools are free. Anybody can download and develop an app,” Ranalli said.

He broadened his research into wind and solar power because next year he will teach third- and fourth-year students in the bachelor’s degree program in General Engineering with an Alternative Energy and Power Generation Track.

Ranalli specialized in power generation while doing the research for his doctorate at Virginia Tech University. He studied the effects of acoustics on combustion, which he said could be as basic as putting a speaker next to a candle and noticing how the flame wavered. His experiments looked at flames in gas turbines to suggest ways to redesign the turbine.

Next he spent three years of post-doctoral research at the National Energy Technology Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy in Morgantown, WV. There, he evaluated the effect of recirculating exhaust gases, as would be done to capture carbon, and of burning alternate fuels such as hydrogen gas or syngas made from coal.

“We don’t know what that would do to turbine design,” Ranalli said.

Read the December 2012 edition of Insight/Outlook (PDF).
 

Complete stories: 

Researching links with grandparents

New engineering and physics professors use new methods to challenge students

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Assistant Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences Daniel Hans Mansson spoke Swedish into his office computer at Penn State Hazleton. From their native country, his mother answered. Maintaining relationships is a specialty of Mansson, not just with his mother, but also in his research.

Mansson often studies traits and relational characteristics that solidify relationships, whether between students and teachers; grandparents and grandchildren; friends on Facebook, or mentors and protégés.

People receive affection in many relationships. In subtle ways relationships also help people do better in school, bolster their mental health and even their physiological wellbeing, as Mansson explained recently – in person and in print. In November he went to Orlando, FL to present a paper about the relationship between doctoral students and their advisers during the conference of the National Communication Association. The association published a summary of a different research study Mansson conducted with his doctoral adviser, Dr. Scott A. Myers, about doctoral students’ relationships with their advisers in the December 2012 issue of Communication Currents.

Relationships with mentors can determine whether or not graduate students earn their doctorate degrees. Students who are dissatisfied with the mentor might quit their programs. But when the relationships work, they add to the satisfaction and professional growth of both the mentors and protégés – even after the students graduate.

Dr. George Grice mentored Mansson while he earned his master’s degree at Radford University, Radford, VA. Now Grice wants Mansson to become Grice’s new coauthor of the next edition of Grice and Skinner’s nationally recognized textbook "Mastering Public Speaking."

Mansson internalized examples from Grice and Dr. Scott Myers, his adviser at West Virginia University. At West Virginia, he wrote his doctoral dissertation about doctoral students’ relationships with their mentors.

Both advisers could be harsh. Mansson remembers when he wanted extra time to finish a paper so he unloaded his troubles on Grice, who listened patiently and then asked whose problems they were. “Mine, sir,” Mansson answered. “Yes, so please don’t make them mine,” replied Grice, who didn’t budge on the deadline. Mansson worked extra hard to finish the assignment on time. After that encounter, both men gained respect for the other.

Myers, too, insisted on high quality performance. “But he always did what was best for me, even though if it was not always easy to understand at the time,” said Mansson. For example, when Mansson’s father died, Myers gave him a hug and offered to let Mansson put aside all academic work so he could mourn with his family in Sweden.

Now Manson has students visiting him. He tries to combine the assertiveness that he learned from own mentors with the emotional culture of Sweden in which he grew up. “If students come to see me, I take time they need to help them, but if they continue to screw up, or if they disregard my suggestions, I have no problem telling them that,” Mansson said.

“My students often ask ‘Why are you so mean?’” he said. He smiles, recalls his mentors and thinks that his students don’t know what mean really is. “A little bit of tough love” will get them farther than just babying them,” he said.  “Looking back on my graduate career, I am so thankful that my advisers were demanding of me and that they expected my work to be good,” Mansson said.

Students speak to professors to argue about grades, to make excuses and to ingratiate themselves, but they also seek to understand their class work better and get to know their instructors. Whatever their motives, good things often happen when they talk with professors, whether by chiming in during class or meeting outside of class.

“Most student-instructor relationships are associated with positive student learning outcomes,” Mansson said. When instructors present a positive attitude, their outlook rubs off on students.

Mansson explained that the more pro-social communicative behaviors students perceive from their instructors, the more the students’ motivation and satisfaction grows. On the other hand, anger and disgust, when displayed by a professor, kill student motivation.

“The way we communicate with students affects how they perceive us,” Mansson said. Likewise, when students express interest in what they learn and appreciation for the teaching, their instructors become more motivated. “When I tell them that,” Mansson said making a “dinging” sound, “you can see a little bulb” light up. A smile from a student, Mansson said, “is the best paycheck I could ever get. When they’re happy, I’ve done my job well.”

Mansson credits the affection that he received from Vivian and Ernie Domoney, his host family when he spent a year as a high school exchange student in Wilmington, N.C., with making him a better student. When he returned to Sweden to finish high school, he cared more about his studies. He came back to the United States for college and remained a resident since.

Students draw similar benefits from their grandparents through relationships that Mansson explored in numerous studies. The grandparent-grandchild relationship has become more important as people live longer. Grandchildren go through college and enter adulthood while remaining in contact with their grandparents.

Mansson became intrigued while thinking about his relationships with his maternal grandfather and his paternal grandmother. As a boy he spent time on his grandfather’s farm and listened to stories that his grandfather told. When they talked, his grandfather encouraged him and praised his college work. Mansson telephoned him every week.

Conversations with his grandmother, who tended to complain about her life, left him flat. He only telephoned her every three weeks.

When grandchildren perceive that their grandparents provide affection and emotional support, they employ behaviors that maintain their grandparent-grandchild relationship. Those include positivity, openness, conflict management, advice, tasks, shared networks, and assurances, Mansson found.

Grandchildren who receive affection from grandparents report low levels of stress, depression, and loneliness; they also are more apt to join in social activities and are more comfortable with closeness toward others, Mansson found. That might nudge them to speak in class, which perhaps improves their studies, or make them more open to relationships with their peers.

The relationship can help grandchildren and grandparents through mental lows. Fifty percent of college students report problems such as depression, stress, and loneliness, according to the findings of other researchers that Mansson cites. He postulates that relationships with grandparents can reduce those problems. Likewise, researchers have identified physical conditions such as low blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol levels when people enter affectionate relationships, a concept that Mansson wants to test with grandparents.

“I’ve got a heart rate and blood pressure monitor in the closet,” he said while motioning across his office. “I will survey grandparents to see if there is a correlation between the amount of affection they express and their physiological conditions.” While medical devices are new tools for Mansson, he more commonly works with questionnaires, which let him dig into relationships.

His questionnaires contain statements such as “My grandparent hugs me” and “My grandparent tells me s/he loves me.” Respondents answer on a scale where 1 is “strongly disagree” and 7 is “strongly agree.”

Questionnaires were sent out by the hundreds in the flurry of research that Mansson conducted for his doctorate and continued since arriving, in 2010, in Hazleton: 184 to students for a qualitative analysis of grandparents’ affection toward young adult grandchildren; 214 to students in a test of Affection Exchange Theory; 636 to doctoral students and 141 to advisers for a study of their mentoring relationships.

Mansson distributed 317 questionnaires to test the validity of the Grandchildren’s Received Affection Scale or GRAS. He created the GRAS because a questionnaire used to measure perceived affection in other relationships didn’t apply to grandparents and grandchildren. It contained statements about kissing on the lips, massage and winking.

The GRAS wasn’t his first study of affection measures. In 2011 he co-authored what remains one of the most frequently read and downloaded article ever for the Southern Communication Journal about the Facebook Affection Scale. While he said the Facebook and social network remains a fruitful area for research, he hasn’t studied it further.

At Penn State Hazleton, as at the other universities where Mansson has been, faculty and students have grown accustomed to his requests to fill out questionnaires. Colleagues on the staff and faculty helped him recruit grandparents for a recent study. Students in all subjects recognize him as the professor who drops into classrooms with a stack of questionnaires for them to complete.

His schedule of classes, where he distributed questionnaires in November and December, covered one page of a legal pad and part of another. About 700 students on campus have filled out questionnaires for Mansson’s new study this semester. He wants to explore how students express concern about their academic work to their instructors.

Mansson noticed that students speak with professors to express their concerns. Unlike other motives that students have for speaking to their professors, such as developing relationships or making excuses, nothing in the research literature describes how students express their academic concern to instructors, he said.

Filling out questionnaires generally exposes students to research. The questionnaires also might start them thinking about relationships that they have with their grandparents or professors. “It’s been well received,” Mansson said.

One Hazleton student earning research credit helps him enter and transcribe data from the questionnaires. She also conducts some secondary research on Mansson’s behalf. The student, Michaeleen Farley, has also discussed the possibility of conducting her own research study during the summer under Mansson’s supervision. Additionally, students in his statistics class help him with some minor aspects of his research, including data entry after reviewing the questionnaires.

Dr. Elizabeth Wright, director of Academic Affairs at Penn State Hazleton, said Mansson’s ability to teach courses in statistics and communications indicates the breadth of his talents. “He’s so strong at teaching, so strong at research and integrating service projects,” Wright said.

Mansson understands new media and online classes, Wright said. He has begun talking to her about what his research findings suggest for mentoring programs on campus. “Mentoring undergraduates is something in which I’m really interested. I’ve done so much research lately that I’d like to take a semester or two and apply it,” Mansson said.

He thinks second-year students with good academic standing could mentor new students who are at risk of failing. The older students could give the younger students tips on preparing for classes and campus life. After a year, Mansson would be curious to know how well the peer-mentoring program worked. He thinks comparing the rate of mentored students who returned for their second year of college with the rate of students who didn’t have a mentor would make an interesting study.

Maintaining relationships, after all, is his research specialty.

In celebration of the upcoming holidays, the Penn State Alumni Chapter of Greater Hazleton will host photos for children with Santa and the Nittany Lion on Wed., Dec. 5, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. in the lobby atrium of the Evelyn Graham Academic Building on the campus mall. This event is free and open to the public. All children under the age of 18 who attend this public event must be accompanied at all times by a parent or legal guardian.

The Alumni Chapter requests those attending the event bring a new and unwrapped toy or game of any size in exchange for a photo. These items will be donated to the Ronald McDonald House at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville.

Parents are also welcomed to bring a camera to take advantage of this great opportunity for holiday keepsakes and greeting card photos.

Following the photo event, the Penn State Hazleton College Choir will offer a holiday music program in 1 Kostos Building at 8 p.m. Under the direction of Marlene Smith, instructor in music, the choir will perform many traditional holiday favorites which are certain to instill the spirit of the season. The choral performance is also free and open to the public.

For additional information, please contact the Penn State Hazleton's Public Information Office at 450-3180.

Penn State Hazleton’s Student Government Association (SGA) and Office of Student Affairs are leading an effort to aid victims of Hurricane Sandy by organizing an on-campus drive to collect much needed items of water, supplies and clothing. Items received will be delivered to Christ Lutheran Church in Conyngham for delivery to a Red Cross distribution center in New York City.

The effort will begin today, with donations accepted between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., and will conclude at 3 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 9. Donations may be dropped off in the lower level of the Charles T. Butler Teaching and Learning Resource Center.

Following is a list of suggested items to donate:

- cases of water

- hygiene products, including toilet paper, toiletries, feminine products and diapers

- paper products, including plates, cups, napkins, paper towels and utensils

- clothing, including coats, hats, hoodies and sweatshirts. These items must be clean and in good condition.

For additional information, contact the Office of Student Affairs at (570) 450-3160.

The Morgan Foundation made a $1 million gift to The Pennsylvania State University Philanthropic Fund, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, which then directed the funds to Penn State Hazleton. It is the largest gift that the Hazleton campus has received during Penn State’s current fundraising effort, For the Future: The Campaign for Penn State Students.

“We are profoundly grateful for this generous gift from the John E. Morgan Foundation given through The Pennsylvania State University Philanthropic Fund,” said Penn State Hazleton Chancellor Gary M. Lawler. “The John E. Morgan Foundation Trustee Scholarship will provide access for generations of students from the four-county region who might not otherwise have an opportunity to pursue a Penn State degree. We truly appreciate the support from the foundation, as well as that of the campus campaign committee, for their important roles in our fundraising efforts.”

Consideration for John E. Morgan Trustee Scholarships will be given to Hazleton campus undergraduates who have financial need, with first preference going to advanced standing/transfer students who are graduates of high schools in Luzerne, Schuylkill, Lehigh and Carbon counties.

Through the Trustee Matching Scholarship program, The Pennsylvania State University Philanthropic Fund has secured funds equal to 5 percent of the endowment’s value each year from University funds to match the scholarship endowment’s own annual spending amount (approximately 4.5 percent). Both payouts will continue in perpetuity. Though the size and number of awards will vary with need, as many as 60 students could benefit during a given year once the endowment is fully funded.

“While 86 percent of our students qualify for financial aid,” Lawler added, “only 17 percent currently receive University scholarships, so the new scholarships will have an enormous impact on our campus.”

“We are deeply committed to helping the communities in eastern Pennsylvania to thrive,” said Jim Zigmant, president of the Morgan Foundation. “Higher education is crucial in making that possible, and Penn State Hazleton offers a wealth of opportunities for the people of our region to better themselves through education. We are thrilled that our philanthropy will ultimately ease the financial burden for students at the Hazleton campus.”

John E. Morgan, who died in 2001 at age 89, earned prominence in the textile industry with his late-1950s invention of the waffle stitch, used in the manufacture of long underwear and blankets. He sold the J.E. Morgan Knitting Mills in 1984 and retired to a second career as a philanthropist, with Penn State Schuylkill, Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and Penn State Intercollegiate Athletics among the beneficiaries.

The Tamaqua-based John E. Morgan Foundation carries on his philanthropic work. In recent years, the foundation has made major gifts to the Penn State Children’s Hospital Building Campaign and established a Trustee Scholarship endowment at Penn State Schuylkill. The recent scholarship endowment is the Morgan Foundation’s first partnership with the Pennsylvania State University Philanthropic Fund, which was created to secure gifts and make grants to benefit Penn State.

“The Morgan Foundation has been extremely generous, not just to Penn State, but to many other organizations and individuals in the region,” said Rodney Kirsch, president of the Philanthropic Fund and senior vice president for development and alumni relations at Penn State. “We are grateful for the opportunity to work with them to achieve our shared goals for the communities we serve.”

The gift will also help Penn State Hazleton to reach the goals of the For the Future campaign, a University-wide effort directed toward a shared vision of Penn State as the most comprehensive, student-centered research university in America. The campaign is engaging alumni and friends as partners in achieving six key objectives: ensuring student access and opportunity, enhancing honors education, enriching the student experience, building faculty strength and capacity, fostering discovery and creativity, and sustaining the University’s tradition of quality. The campaign’s top priority is keeping a Penn State degree affordable for students and families. For the Future is the most ambitious effort of its kind in Penn State’s history, with the goal of securing $2 billion by 2014.

Paul Lesser ’75 and his mother, Anna, recently made an additional contribution to their endowment supporting the Teaching and Learning Resource Center located in the Charles T. Butler Center. In April 2011, they established the Anna Lesser and Paul Lesser Scholarship in Business and, in addition, secured the naming rights of the director’s office in the learning center through an additional gift. The office is named in memory of John Evancho, Paul’s uncle, to honor his commitment to lifelong learning.

Their most recent gift is a continued expression of support to learning and the advancement of students.

The Hazleton Chapter of the Penn State Alumni Association donated an additional $4,000 to the group’s academic award at the campus which will be used to support students. The contribution was made during the annual dinner and meeting held June 5. This is the second endowment at the campus by the group; they also have a scholarship.

Participating in the check presentation were, from left, chapter officers John Skwierz ’76, treasurer; Mike Heon ’99a, first vice-president; and Mary Homanko ’74, president; Chancellor Gary Lawler, Patrick Chambers, men’s basketball coach; and Anthony Lubrano ’82, trustee-elect and University donor.

Associate Professors Sherry Robinson and Wes Grebski fostered foreign exchange between Penn State Hazleton and universities in Norway and France in the past year while exchanging ideas for each other’s classes.

Faculty members Eileen Morgan and Jacqueline Walters led a trip to Belize where nine students did their own research on topics like medical care, use of environmental resources and the history of the Garifuna people, but also spied spider monkeys in the jungle, swam where a collapsed cave revealed a subterranean river and explored traces of the Mayan past.

Penn State Hazleton’s connection to Norway started with Robinson, who studied there on a fellowship and now flies enough to teach business classes in both countries while her students complete international projects together on their computers. 

In the summer, Robinson teaches at a program that brought Norwegians to the Hazleton campus to study business with American students. After enrollment doubled to 30 in this summer, the program’s second year, Robinson wants to reach farther.

“My vision for summer camp is to have students from all over the world and all over Penn State come to Hazleton,” she said.

Grebski welcomed three students who came from France because of their interest in a program about generating power from alternative sources of energy that he helped develop at Penn State Hazleton.

Next he took three of his engineering students to France where he taught a seminar about building solar collectors to students from six nations. After returning to Hazleton he showed the visiting Norwegians how to bake bread with the sun.

“Engineering is a global profession. In order to stay on the cutting edge of the technology, international cooperation is necessary,” he said.

Cooperation between their two specialties also makes sense to them.

Sustainability was one of the themes at the two-week conference that Grebski attended at the Universite d'Artois in Bethune, France, and of the two-week camp on entrepreneurship in Hazleton where Robinson taught students from Hogskolen i Buskerud (the college at Buskerud) in Kongsberg, Norway.

Next year, Robinson would like to have an equal number of engineering students and business students paired in each group.

The budding engineers “can learn basic business, and also inspire the business students,” Robinson said.

Just traveling to a foreign country to study takes courage, and once the Norwegian students arrived in Hazleton Robinson urged them to be brave again because entrepreneurs need to take risks to succeed.

Their opportunity occurred in their final project. They formed small groups assigned to propose a new business.

Robinson saw boldness in all their ideas.

None of the groups proposed old stand-bys such as restaurants or stores. Instead every group pitched ideas that used innovative technology.

The best project, as voted on by the students, was a cell phone case for the beach. Telephones put into the case stayed dry, recharged batteries from the sun and played music for the sunbathers to hear.

During their two-week stay, the students in the entrepreneurship program slept and ate on campus and traveled to Lancaster, where they visited businesses and saw the Amish way of life. They spent two days in Washington, D.C., where their stops included the Capitol and that citadel of innovation, the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.

“It’s an excellent way not only to get introduced to entrepreneurship, but to get to know and interact with people from another country,” Penn State Chancellor Gary Lawler said.

Lawler has sought exchanges between students and professors at the Hazleton campus and their counterparts from the world over.

He visited India to help with a program that brings students who had studied for two years or more at their homeland universities to Hazleton to gain degrees from Penn State.

The first three students, after spending more than a year in Hazleton, have returned to India with bachelor’s degrees in Information Sciences and Technology.

“We’re looking to expand the program to all degree programs,” Lawler said.

Lawler, who might travel again to India in the fall, will seek out partnerships with Indian universities that can send students to Hazleton and other Penn State campuses.

He hopes professors, not just students, will have opportunities to exchange research by visiting one another in Pennsylvania and India.

Because Penn State Hazleton is designated as one of the international campuses in the university’s system, students have arrived on their own from Japan, Thailand and Africa.

They attend a special orientation about American customs, and a counselor checks with them throughout their stay.

“The main thing, they know they have someone to contact, to come to if they have questions,” Lawler said.

While some students study abroad for a semester, a year or more, such long stays abroad are becoming less common, but students are opting for trips of a week or two like the trip that Morgan and Walters led to Belize during spring break.

One student, researching a project before the trip thought Belize had excellent medical care, from what she read. When she talked to women in a waiting room, she got another view, especially when the staff left for the day while patients waited to see them, Walters said.

Surprises were instructive parts of the trip. Students saw that tourism and interest in historical sites like the Actun Tunichil Muknal cave that the students visited elevated the status of the Mayans, who were described as the downtrodden of the country in accounts that students read before the trip.

Living without modern conveniences in a nation of 300,000 where the average annual income is $7,500, some villages lack electricity and most roads are unpaved, has advantages, as the students learned.

“One thing all the students commented on was the lack of technology – people were hanging out together, talking, playing soccer, walking, fishing, swimming, sitting on the porch for a breeze, and you saw a few cell phones, but no hand held games and other types of tech. They noted the much greater sense of community among the Belizians compared to people in the States, the higher levels of physical and social activity and personal contact,” Morgan, the writing center coordinator at Penn State Hazleton, said.

Students spent most of the break living in a “green” lodge where they relied on solar energy and developed a taste for locally grown food, but they slept two nights in a Garifuna village where they watched traditional drumming and dancing.

Walters, coordinator of disability services at Penn State Hazleton, made a video that will point tourists to a cooperative selling products made by Mayan women. She and Morgan hope students will have opportunities to work on public service projects in other countries through similar trips in the coming years.

As with the venture in Belize, the trip that Grebski took to France with engineering students Shane Brophy, Tiffany Veet and Richelle Reeder was brief.

Although in France for just two weeks, Reeder joined a group of students that designed logistics for an imaginary company. They also considered how to reduce the company’s environmental impact through recycling, reusing and reducing materials used and increasing the lifespan of products.

Going overseas to study sustainability made sense to Reeder, a junior from Berwick who entered the engineering program after graduating from Columbia Montour Area Vocational Technical School.

“I have always viewed sustainability as a worldwide problem and movement. The world is connected by products, money and people. It is only natural for me to think that,” she said.

Members of her group came from Germany, Romania, Italy and the United States.

Each college is different, each country is different, even each person is different, if people do not explore the different possibility how is anyone to grow to their full potential. “Hazleton has many diversities but to be able to experience something and hear about it are to different things. You can not put a value to the experience and the people you become friends with,” Reeder said.

The experience of attending Penn State Hazleton and interning with a local company during a three-month stay in the United States fit into the career plans of Yann Le Moing, one of three French students who came to the campus this spring.

Le Moing wants to travel the world while managing the commercial side of construction projects.

“This internship was really rewarding to me because it taught me another way to work and enlarged my capacity to adapt myself to new things,” he said before returning to France where he plans to alternate between studies and working for a company during the next year at the Technology and Sciences Institute of Valenciennes.

His English also improved in Hazleton.

“I am starting to speak fluently enough to have a good and quick conversation,” he said.

A representative of the university’s PennTAP program that provides technical advice to small businesses helped Le Moing and two other students from France find internships at local companies while they studied in Hazleton.

Jack St. Pierre, who helps local businesses get started at the CAN BE incubator in Hazleton, where Lawler is on the board, as was his predecessor, John Madden, speaks at Robinson’s program on entrepreneurship for students from Norway.

“I think it’s great that they’re bringing kids. There’s a good connection. I think she’s going to continue,” he said.

While the foreign students learn about business during their visits to Hazleton, businesses in Hazleton might benefit from the student exchange.

“Interaction with different cultures certainly is good for the community,” St. Pierre said.

“Down the road, they talk to their parents (or) friends who say ‘This little community in Hazleton might be good for a branch office.’ You never know.”

The Hazleton Chapter of the Penn State Alumni Association will host a meet and greet with Penn State men’s basketball coach Patrick Chambers and Penn State trustee-elect Anthony Lubrano in conjunction with its annual meeting scheduled for Tues., June 5 at Mea’s Restaurant in downtown Hazleton.               

Chambers just completed his first season as head coach of the Penn State men’s basketball program. A 1994 graduate of Philadelphia University where he played point guard, Coach Chambers began his coaching career as an assistant coach at Delaware Valley College in 1995, then moved on to serve as assistant coach at his alma mater, Philadelphia University, then to Villanova where he was promoted to associate head coach in 2008. His first head coaching assignment was at Boston University in 2009, where he compiled a record of 42-28 in two years and took his team to the NCAA tournament in his second year there. He joined Penn State as head coach in 2011. He is a native of Newtown Square and is married with three children. 

Lubrano is a 1982 Penn State graduate whose term starts July 1 on the Penn State Board of Trustees. After earning his CPA and subsequently working in commodities arbitrage and foreign trading, he relocated to Tokyo, Japan, to assist his employer to become a member of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Upon returning to the U.S., he started what is now A.P. Lubrano & Company, Inc. and currently serves as president. A varsity baseball player while at Penn State, his lead gift to Penn State Intercollegiate Athletics led to the construction of Medlar Field at Lubrano Park, a 5,400 seat baseball stadium that opened on June 20, 2006. He also served on the athletic committee at Penn State during the Grand Destiny Campaign, a fundraising effort that resulted in over $1.3 billion in gifts. He has three daughters and resides in Glenmoore.

The event is open to the public and begins at 6 p.m. with the meet and greet, followed by dinner and remarks by Chambers, Lubrano, and campus and chapter leaders. The meet and greet will continue after dinner. Reservations are required, with tickets priced at $35 each. For reservations, contact Theresa Brennan at 570-956-6366 or tbrennan@ptd.net, or contact Carole Shearer in the Penn State Hazleton Alumni Office at 570-450-3016 or chs14@psu.edu.  All proceeds from the event will be donated to the Greater Hazleton Chapter Scholarship for the benefit of local students attending Penn State Hazleton. 

Mary Polascik Homanko ’74, president of the Greater Hazleton Chapter of the Penn State Alumni Association, inducted the new graduates into the Penn State Alumni Association.

Degrees, graduates and their hometowns

Associate degrees:
Associate in Arts in Letters, Arts, and Sciences from the University College: Michael D. Cutler, Coaldale; Landen C. Nesbitt, Bellefonte; Nicole M. Paisley, West Hazleton.
Associate in Engineering Technology in Electrical Engineering Technology from the College of Engineering: Patrick L. Kilts, Drums; Adam R. Lee, Drums; Beau R. Quick, Berwick; Adam A. Soares, Stroudsburg.

Baccalaureate degrees:

Bachelor of Science in Rehabilitation and Human Services from the College of Education: Mark A. Scarcella, Milnesville.

Bachelor of Science in Biobehavioral Health from the College of Health and Human Development: Bryana N. Zumbuhl, Hazle Township.

Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology from the College of Health and Human Development: Michael W. Cicerchia, Berwick.

Gregory P. Seiwell, who earned a bachelor of science degree in Information Sciences and Technology during the ceremony, was honored as the graduate earning the highest grade point average in a Penn State Hazleton baccalaureate degree program. Scott J. Fuller, who earned dual Associate in Engineering Technology degrees in Electrical Engineering Technology and Mechanical Engineering Technology, was recognized for the highest grade-point average of a graduate in a Penn State Hazleton associate degree program.
 

Photos are also available on Penn State Hazleton's Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pennstatehazleton

Officials at Penn State Hazleton have announced a major land gift which will increase the campus land footprint by twenty percent and will connect the existing campus with another piece of property which was landlocked.

Approximately 25 acres have been added to northeastern portion of the campus near the existing athletic fields, including a parcel of property in the Conyngham Valley, through a donation from Penn State alumni Blair Bates of Allentown and William and Louise Engle Dove of Columbia, Md., along with Mrs. Dove’s siblings Susan Engle and John T. Engle. Also donating portions of the property are Peter McCorrson of Orcas Island, Wash., and the estate of John Hutton.

According to Chancellor Gary M. Lawler, “We are thankful to Blair Bates and Louise Dove for helping to make this monumental gift to Penn State Hazleton. A land gift of this magnitude allows for expansion of the campus and programs, permitting Penn State Hazleton to continue to serve the needs of the area for many years to come.”

Efforts to secure the gift were led by For the Future: The Campaign for Penn State Students local chair Attorney Pasco L. Schiavo who worked with the donors and provided all legal work on the gift.

Originally owned by the Santee family, the land was sold to ancestors of the beneficiaries in the early 1900s and was passed on to many family members through wills and trusts. It was divided when Interstate 81 was constructed in the 1960s.

Dr. Lawler added that the addition of the property is consistent with the long-range campus master site plan which includes expansion of the facilities and athletic fields, along with other options which are being explored.

The last major land gift to Penn State Hazleton was an 19-acre parcel contiguous to the eastern side of the campus made by Thomas and Earl Slusser and Matthew Bayzick in 1997. This gift provided space for the campus to improve roadway infrastructure around the campus and for a new maintenance building.

Read the January 6, 2012 Standard-Speaker story.