FACULTY NEWS
Faculty News
Holly Beers (religious studies) published a Spanish translation of her book, “A Week in the Life of a Greco-Roman Woman.” She presented four papers, “Mapping the Gentile Global Movement in Acts with the Isaian Servant Motif,” “Imagination in Scholarship and Teaching,” “Preaching Challenging Texts: Colossians, Masters and the Enslaved, and the Church Today” and “The ‘Teachings of Demons’ as ‘Magical’ Practices in 1 Timothy 4:1,” at the annual meetings of the Evangelical Theological Society, the Institute for Biblical Research and the Society of Biblical Literature.
John Blondell (theater arts) directed “The Tempest” for Vojdan Chernodrinski Theatre in Prilep, Macedonia, which appeared at the Bitola Shakespeare Festival in Bitola, North Macedonia; directed “King Lear,” at the Ohrid Summer Festival in North Macedonia; programmed and selected productions for the Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival in Italy; and toured his Lit Moon Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” to the Directions East Festival in Bialystok, Poland.
Katherine Bryant (political science) and colleagues received a $5,000 Council of Christian Colleges and Universities planning grant for Christian- Informed International Relations: Thinking, Teaching and Practicing, a project that culminates in a conference in March 2025 at Lee University. She and her student Kate Robinson ’27 received the Hatfield Prize from the Center for Public Justice for their research about how local groups address homelessness in Santa Barbara.
Kristi Lazar Cantrell (chemistry) and collaborators, including MaKenna Jacob ’25 and Joshua Jang ’25, published an article, “Investigating a Novel Neurodegenerative Disease Toxic Mechanism Involving Lipid Binding Specificity of Amyloid Oligomers,” in ACS Chemical Neuroscience. Cantrell also published an article, “Deciphering the Molecular Dance: Exploring the Dynamic Interplay Between Mouse Insulin B9-23 Peptides and Their Variants,” in the journal Biochemistry with collaborators, including Ethan Walker ’22, Riellie DeSoto ’24 and Jang.
As part of his work with the ATLAS collaboration, Ben Carlson (physics) co-authored a paper published in Nature Communications about a new way to detect unknown physical processes such as rare exotic decays of the Higgs boson that offers a new strategy in the search for dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider. He published several other papers in the area of high-speed electronics, machine learning and particle physics phenomenology and supervised two students who contributed to the operation of the ATLAS experiment at CERN.
Jesse Covington (political science) has coauthored a book, “Hopeful Realism: Evangelical Natural Law and Democratic Politics” with two others. IVP Academic published it January 7, 2025. He spoke about the book at a Westmont Downtown lecture in the fall.
Kim Denu (provost) has written a chapter, “Inclusive Excellence: Diversity as a Hopeful Educational Practice,” for a book, “Habits of Hope: Educational Practices for a Weary World.” Last summer, she met Cynthia Toms (kinesiology) and officials at the Uganda Christian University for Westmont in Uganda and visited David Shiang ’25 in Washington, D.C. (see pages 11 and 38).
Mary Docter (modern languages) presented a paper, “The Significance of Pre-Departure Orientation in the Development of Intercultural Competence in Study Abroad,” at the Best Practices in Christian Higher Education Conference at Abilene Christian University.
A composition by Daniel Gee (music) for choir and piano, “Cuán Bueno,” a setting of Psalm 133 in Spanish, was published by Walton Music as part of the Jo-Michael Scheibe Choral Series.
Andrea Gurney (psychology), voted Best Licensed Therapist in The Independent’s Best of Santa Barbara® 2024 Readers’ Poll, spoke about God with Us in Our Suffering and Healing at Trinity United Presbyterian Church. She led a Marriage Bootcamp workshop based on her online course at River of the Valley Church in Canoga Park. She discussed “He Said, She Said, We Said: The Art and Science of Communication” at a gathering of MomCo, an organization that brings moms together.
Jonathan Hicks (theater arts) celebrates 10 years of membership with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 442. He has held a department head position at the Arlington Theatre since 2016, been an assistant department head at the Santa Barbara Bowl and continues to lead the local as a member of its executive board and as a member of its negotiations committee.
Dan Jensen (engineering) and his students presented a paper, “A Design Tool to Support Decisions on the use of Digital vs. Physical Prototyping,” at the American Society for Engineering Education annual conference in Portland, Oregon.
Sarah Jirek (sociology and anthropology) completed the data collection for her research project examining formerly incarcerated individuals’ experiences with the criminal justice system and their perspectives on criminal justice reform. She conducted 83 in-depth, qualitative interviews with research participants, including 75 formerly incarcerated individuals and eight reentry professionals.
Steve Julio (biology) and collaborators at the University of North Carolina, including Alexa Spandrio ’20, published an article in the journal PLoS Pathogens about how the bacteria that causes whooping cough utilize oxygen to survive in the mammalian respiratory tract.
Blake Victor Kent (sociology and anthropology) received $40,000 from the Harvard Center on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations and Health Disparities to examine links between religion and health in the immigrant U.S. Bangladeshi and Pakistani populations. Scholar GPS ranks him No. 2 among scholars worldwide on metrics of research productivity and impact over the previous five years for the “God” research specialty. He appeared on the BBC discussing worship, brain and prayer.
Yi-Fan Lu (biology) received a grant from the Otis M. Williams and Evelynn Freeman Williams Fund from the Santa Barbara Foundation to support his research about SARS-CoV-2 proteins and mutations and their impact on neurological and cardiovascular conditions.
Rebecca McNamara (English) spoke about Teaching with (Un)certainty as part of a thread on The Ethics of Reading Chaucer, Then and Now at the New Chaucer Society Biennial Congress in Pasadena.
Mark Nelson (philosophy) published a paper, “Paley before Hume: How Not to Teach the Design Argument,” in APA Studies on Teaching Philosophy.
Allan Nishimura (chemistry) has received a three-year grant from the American Chemical Society Committee on the Petroleum Research Fund for his research proposal “Application of Dihedral Angle Correlated Fluorescence Spectra to the Study of Biphenyl Aggregation on Al2O3.”
Edd Noell (economics and business) presented a paper, “Exploring Adam Smith’s Case Against Systems of Preference or Restraint: The Role of Malevolence in Economic Development,” at the History of Economics Society Conference at the Universidad del Desarrollo Santiago in Santiago, Chile.
Christine Ramsey (music) sang the title role in Bizet’s “Carmen” with Opera San Luis Obispo.
Helen Rhee (religious studies) spoke about the influence of Paul’s letters on early Christian thought on wealth and poverty in a podcast with IVP Press.
Marianne Robins (history) preached on Hebrews 13:1-3 at Trinity Covenant Church.
Artwork by Chris Rupp (art) will appear at the 32nd Strictly Functional Ceramic National, a prestigious ceramic competition held each year in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Jeff Schloss (biology) was elected to the executive committee of the International Society for Science and Religion, and the BioLogos Foundation reappointed him as a senior scholar in its work integrating science and Christian faith. He gave invited talks at Denver Seminary’s Conference on Christianity and Human Origins, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary’s project on Science and Southern Baptists, Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics & Culture Conference, an international workshop in Boston on the Social Consequences of Religion for Cooperation, and a Stanford conference on Technology & Human Nature. Ironically (given his past), a recent paper, “Hawaiian Surfers, Faith and Altruism,” cited his co-edited Oxford Press volume on altruism.
Laura Drake Schultheis (biology) presented Finding Healing through Fire Mitigation: Returning a Eucalyptus Fuel Corridor to Native Oak Woodland at the Society for Ecological Restoration of California conference in Redlands. She spoke about Purposeful Planting: Characterizing Plant Flammability Using Functional Traits for Defensible Space at the Ecological Society of America Conference in Long Beach.
Integratio Press has republished a book by Professor Emeritus Greg Spencer (communication studies), "Awakening the Quieter Virtues," in a new and expanded form with testimonial essays by alums, application connections and original poems.
Mitchell Thomas (theater arts) played Poor Tom/Edgar in “King Lear” at the Ohrid Summer Festival in North Macedonia for sold-out performances in front of the church of Saint Sophia, a UNESCO World Heritage site dating to the fifth century. He reprised his role as Astrov in Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” at Eastward Directions Theatre Festival in Bialystok, Poland, in October.
Ronald See (psychology) spoke as the featured international lecturer for the 2024 Brain Awareness Week at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. He lectured to faculty, staff, students and the general public on topics that included sex differences in drug addiction, neuroscience perspectives on cannabis, novel rapid acting antidepressants and animal models in neuropsychiatry.
Alistair Su (history) presented a portion of his book manuscript at the Political Economy Workshop at UC Santa Barbara.
Meredith Whitnah (sociology and anthropology) has written a new book, "Faith and the Fragility of Justice: Responses to Gender-Based Violence in South Africa” through Rutgers University Press.
Professor Emeritus Paul Willis (English) held a reading and book signing at Chaucer’s Books for his new book of poetry, “Losing Streak.” Fellow former Santa Barbara Poet Laureate David Starkey interviewed him for a story about the volume in the Santa Barbara Independent. Willis has six poems included in “Taking Root in the Heart: A Collection of Thirty-Four Poets from The Christian Century.”