People in the news

Publication Date

Bunkong Tuon, assistant professor of English, published “A Prayer for Orphans” in The Truth About the Fact: International Journal of Literary Nonfiction. In this autobiographical piece, Tuon reflects on his return trip to Cambodia where, after 25 years of living in the United States, he met his half brothers for the first time. It is a story about three children orphaned by the forces of history, attempting to repair rifts that were opened by the Cambodian genocide.

Daniel Kason ’11, an English major, published his short story “Dark Creation,” in Indigo Rising Magazine, a literary publication. Kason will attend the University of Maryland joint masters and doctorate program in English in the fall. This summer, he will look for a literary agent for his science fiction novel “The Leech World.”

Robert Sharlet, the Chauncey Winters Research Professor of Political Science, recently completed several online projects connection with the memoir he is writing on his brother Jeff Sharlet, a Vietnam GI who became a leader in the GI anti-war movement during the Vietnam era. The online sources on the project now include a Wikipedia entry and a blog titled “Searching for Jeff.” Updated weekly, the blog tells the story of Jeff Sharlet and has attracted readership around the world. The website was created with the hope of finding people who have been hard to locate. The Wikipedia entry has reached 10,000 hits since it went live.

Rebecca Koopmann ‘89, associate professor of physics, was recently included in an article in Cornell University’s online publication, Chronicle. Koopmann attended a symposium at Cornell and talked about ALFALFA, an Arecibo Observatory-based extragalactic search for faint cosmic radio signals.

Union professors David Gillikin and Margot Paulick were each awarded $35,000 grants from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement’s coveted Single Investigator Cottrell College Science Award program. The grants will support their research while involving students.

Gillikin, assistant professor of geology, is researching “Developing Archives of Aquatic Chemistry From Freshwater Mussel Shell Geochemistry: Stable Isotopes, Trace Elements and Biomineralization.” Paulick, assistant professor of chemistry, will continue her research on “Synthesis and Evaluation of Cell-Permeable Variants of Trehalose to Improve the Viability of Preserved Mammalian Cells.”