June 2026
Nicholas Ball, professor of chemistry, published a paper titled “Rapid Access to Sulfinyl Fluorides for the Preparation of Sulfonimidoyl Fluorides” with Glenn Sammis’ group at the University of British Columbia. This work demonstrated a facile way to access synthetically useful sulfur compounds with promise in medicinal and chemical biology.
Malachai Komanoff Bandy, assistant professor of music, presented the seminar paper “Vulnerasti cor meum: Scoring Jesus’s Heart in Dieterich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri (1680)” as invited colloquium speaker June 10 at the Centre for Copenhagen Luther Research (CCLR), organized by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Copenhagen (Copenhagen, Denmark).
Graydon Beeks, professor emeritus of music, presented the paper “The Use of Cannons Material in Handel’s Op. 2 Trio Sonatas” on June 9 at the conference held in conjunction with the annual Handel Festival in Halle, Germany. While there, he also participated in the meetings of the editorial board of the Hallische-Haendel-Ausgabe, of which he is a member, and the Vorstand of the Georg-Friedrich-Haendel Gesellschaft, of which he serves as a vice president. His article “‘Some Overtures to be plaied before the first lesson’: New candidates” was published in the 2026 Haendel-Jahrbuch.
Robin Brooks, visiting fellow in global policy and governance, was interviewed for a PBS Newshour segment about mass public protests in Albania against a proposal by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to develop a luxury resort in an environmentally protected area.
Paul Cahill, associate professor of Spanish, presented two papers. The first, “¿‘Sin filosofía se pasea’?: poesía y pensamiento en Desdén de Concha García,” was presented at the XII Congreso de Investigación Literaria «Pensamiento y Literatura: Itinerarios cruzados en las culturas hispánicas», held at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid from June 11-12. The second, “‘Nunca un latido constante’: interrogando los orígenes de la poesía de Concha García,” was presented at the XII Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Humanidades Hispánicas: Orígenes y (r)evoluciones, held at the Universidad de Burgos from June 17-19.
Ramisa Maliha Chowdhury, graduate assistant, presented her research, “Bangladeshi Americans in Higher Education: Understanding Their College Decision Making,” at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting, the largest educational research conference in the world. Her presentation showcased findings from her dissertation, which examines how cultural expectations, family influences, gender, and social context shape the college major and career decision-making processes of Bangladeshi American college graduates.
Kevin Dettmar, W. M. Keck Professor of English, is the 2026 recipient of the Frances Andrew March Award given by the Association of Departments of English (ADE), a network within the Modern Language Association (MLA), “to recognize and honor distinguished service to the profession of English.” He will be presented with the award at the association’s annual meeting in January 2027 in Los Angeles.
Virginie A. Duzer, professor and chair of Romance languages and literatures, participated in the Journée d’étude du séminaire Balzac du GIRB (Groupe International de Recherches Balzaciennes) at the Université Paris Cité (Grands Moulins) on June 19. The day was dedicated to asocialites in Balzac, and her talk was titled “Qui désigne l’asocial ? Cartographie énonciative des assignations d’asocialité dans les Études philosophiques: Louis Lambert en terrain d’enquête.”
Robert Gaines, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology, together with colleagues from Northwest University in Xi’an, China, published the paper “Algal δ13C reveals climate changes during the Cambrian Explosion” in the journal Nature Communications.
Dean Gerstein, director of sponsored research, gave two presentations at the 30th Annual Technical Assistance Conference of the National Sponsored Programs Administrators Alliance of HBCUs, Inc. in New Orleans on June 4: “Looking Through the SUNDRI Data Visualizer” and “Introducing the Grants Development Ecosystem Inventory (GDEI).” These talks provided key research results and demonstrated the capabilities of two online data analysis portals to be opened this summer for research administrators and others with support from NSF grants SUNDRI and BANNERS-PUI.
Gerstein and two of his SUNDRI project colleagues, Jennifer Glass and Kara Luckey, published a brief report, “Research Development and Pre-Award Administration in Context,” in the June-July issue of NCURA Magazine, the house organ of the 9,000-member National Council of University Research Administrators.
Edray Herber Goins, professor of mathematics and statistics, gave a keynote address at the Geometry Labs United (GLU) Conference at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on June 2. Goins's multimedia talk titled “An Introduction to Dessins d’Enfants: The Intersection of Graph Theory, Group Theory, and Differential Geometry” featured animations and 3D-printed renderings of the Archimedean solids.
Jill Grigsby, professor emerita of sociology, was interviewed for the Brown University Class of 1976 Oral History Project by a group of Brown undergraduate students and faculty scholars. She also participated in the Commencement Forum Panel, “1976 in 2026: A Brown 2026 Oral History.”
Esther Hernández-Medina, assistant professor of Latin American studies and gender and women’s studies, led and co-organized the 10th anniversary of Tertulia Feminista Magaly Pineda, a feminist group she co-founded in May 2016 along with Yildalina Tatem Brache. The anniversary event took place in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and included a documentary screening about the work done in La Tertulia during that period, a presentation of the group’s new graphic design, and a panel with members who spoke about the impact La Tertulia has had on Dominican feminism and women’s rights in the Dominican Republic.
Hernández-Medina presented the paper “CIPAF and Tertulia Feminista Magaly Pineda: References of Dominican Feminism” at a roundtable on the history and contemporary development of the Dominican feminist movement organized by Ginetta Candelario (Smith College), along with Warren Day Professor of History April Mayes, and Elizabeth Manley (Xavier University of Louisiana). The roundtable was part of the 2026 Latin American Studies Association (LASA) annual congress in Paris. Hernández-Medina also organized and chaired the Haiti-DR LASA section panel “Revolution and Resistance: Popular Economy, Afro Diasporic Religiosity, and Revolutions Reimagined.” She facilitated the section’s business meeting along with co-chair Sharina Maíllo-Pozo and co-organized and moderated the second part of the meeting on Zoom on June 12.
Gizem Karaali, professor of mathematics and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, published an extended book review of Around the World in Eighty Games by Marcus du Sautoy in The Mathematical Intelligencer.
Karaali was one of the three co-organizers of the event Convening to Investigate the Impact of AI-Powered Pedagogies in Postsecondary Mathematics Education in Washington D.C. from June 15-16, hosted by the Mathematical Association of America and supported by the National Science Foundation.
Olivia Anne Lafferty, assistant professor of English, participated in the 2026 First Book Institute hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies at Pennsylvania State University from May 31-June 6. She was one of eight scholars selected to workshop their book projects. The First Book Institute workshops are designed to help participants publish works that make significant contributions to their fields and help them land a contract with a top university press.
Tom Le, associate professor of politics, was awarded a Japan Global Network Collaborative Grant by the Social Science Research Council.
Genevieve Lee, Everett S. Olive Professor of Music, was an invited performer for a meeting of the Foothill Philharmonic Committee. She and Jennie Jung, lecturer in music, presented a program of 4-hand and 2-piano music by Bernstein, Piazzolla, Rachmaninoff and Ravel. On the Tuesdays @ Monk Space series in Los Angeles, Lee performed a vocal-piano work of Chinary Ung as part of a June Brightwork Ensemble concert. Lee performed a cello and piano recital with National Cello Institute faculty member Amy Barston. They played music of Arutuinian, Beach and Shostakovich in Lyman Hall. Pomona College has been the host for the summer institute for 50 years.
Lee was a guest a on the “Music and the Liberal Arts” episode of the Prof Talk podcast with hosts Tom Le and Nicholas Ball.
Jingyi Li, assistant professor of computer science, published two works presented at ACM DIS (Designing Interactive Systems) in Singapore: “The Future of Creative Education: What We Can Learn About Technology from Art Teachers and Their Classrooms” and “Artistic Practice Opportunities in CST Evaluations: A Longitudinal Group Deployment of ArtKrit.” The second paper, led by Catherine Liu CMC ’26 with Asya Vaisberg ’26 and Chau Vu ’26, received an honorable mention award. Li also gave talks about their research at National Taiwan University, National University Singapore and KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology).
Scott Lisbin, Return to Pomona Scholar, released the updated second edition of his award-winning book Applying Lean Six Sigma in the Healthcare Setting, which introduces innovative new content, including a new framework for evaluating care quality called the 8 Rights of Quality Care, a novel application of 5S to patient placement and flow, updated insights into how AI and robotics are reshaping healthcare operations, and enhanced tools for improving performance across diverse healthcare settings.
Sara Masland, associate professor of psychological science, contributed to a piece in TIME Magazine, “8 Common Myths about Borderline Personality Disorder.” Masland also contributed to a scientific publication, “‘I feel like so much more of myself’: The experience of modifying appearance in borderline personality disorder" in the journal Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment. The first author, Kate Jones ’24, initiated this work as her senior thesis.
Richard Mawhorter, professor of physics and astronomy, gave talks at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and Emory University. He also gave talks at Groningen University and the University of Göttingen, through a Re-Invitation Grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Mawhorter published a substantive article in Physical Review A with three Pomona student co-authors titled “Global isotopic analysis of hyperfine-resolved rotational spectroscopic data for barium monofluoride, BaF.” Alex Preston ’21 (now at UConn) is lead author.
Pomona and NSF support enabled SURP students Charles Brainin ’27 and Carter Topley ’28 to join Mawhorter at the American Physical Society DAMOP meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, where Brainin presented a contributed talk titled “Deperturbation Analysis of Low-Lying Electronic States in YbO.” They also collaborated on a DAMOP poster concerning last summer’s LiKF2 research in Bilbao, Spain. After subsequent visits to UCLA and Caltech, they’re at Emory for a 3-week stint working to characterize YbAg using laser spectroscopy.
Wallace “Marty” Meyer, director of the Bernard Field Station and associate professor of biology, was an author on two conference presentations. At the Western Society of Malacologists Meeting, his student Lily Waldman SCR ’26 won the best student presentation award with her presentation titled “Assessing endangered Hawaiian land snail food resources: Distributions of epiphytic microbial assemblages across elevations, plant species, and mountain ranges on Oʻahu.” At the American Malacological Conference, Aihnoa Bezerra-Gastesi ’25 presented a poster titled “Assessing microbial changes on plants harvested for threatened and endangered Hawaiian snail captive rearing efforts.”
Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy, is co-investigator on an approved proposal titled “The Cosmic Origins of Globular Clusters: Linking Reionization-era Star Clusters to the Near Field,” awarded under Cycle 1 of the Roman Space Telescope and led by principal investigator Jenna Sammuel. Moreno also served as chair of the allocation committee of a different telescope for a prominent space telescope managed by a major space agency.
Sarah E. Noll, assistant professor of chemistry, was invited to speak on a panel during the Art, Museums and Archaeology Workshop at the American Society for Mass Spectrometry Annual Conference in San Diego. Alongside scientists from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Getty, she spoke about mass spectrometry and careers in conservation science.
Dan O’Leary, Carnegie Professor of Chemistry, Hiwot Endeshaw ’25 and Jaylyn Gonzalez ’25 published “3D-Printed Molecular Orbital Models for a Second-Semester Organic Chemistry Course” in the Journal of Chemical Education.
O’Leary attended the 40th Reaction Mechanisms Conference at Hope College and presented a poster titled “PyQuiverHS: A Web Tool for Calculating Isotope Effects.” A collaboration with researchers at San Jose State University, the project created a free online resource for predicting isotope effects using widely available computational chemistry methods.
Benjamin Rosenberg, visiting assistant professor of neuroscience, authored a paper with colleagues from UCLA titled “Positive and negative affect influence learning during exposure therapy: secondary analysis from a randomized controlled trial” in Journal of Anxiety Disorders. This study identified unique impacts of positive versus negative affect on expectancy change, a core mechanism of exposure therapy. Results suggest unique benefits of targeting positive or negative affect during exposure therapy to enhance outcomes.
Larissa Rudova, Yale B. and Lucille D. Griffith Professor in Modern Languages, professor of Russian, presented a paper, “Strange Belongings: Childhood, Otherness, and Internal Exile in Eugene Yelchin's Fiction,” at the conference “Diaspora(s), Exile, Nomads, and Children’s Literature,” held at the University of Crete in Rethymnon, Greece, from May 29-June 1.
Gibb Schreffler, associate professor of music, presented the paper “Early-Nineteenth-Century Chanty Style and the Fabulous Journey of ‘Grog Time o’ Day’” at the Connecticut Sea Music Festival’s Symposium on the Music of the Sea on June 12.
Anthony Shay, professor emeritus of dance, had an article, “What is Popular Music? What is Persian Popular Music?” included in a major anthology on Persian music, Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music and Society, edited by Nahid Siamdoust and H. E. Chehabi and published by Ilex Project. The anthology originated from the papers originally presented at Yale University in January 2018 and includes every genre of Iranian music from classical to rock and folk music to religious cantillation.
Patricia A. Smiley, professor emerita of psychological science, with Matthew Marvin ’17, published an article in Infant Mental Health Journal. The paper presents a thematic analysis of mothers’ savoring narratives in relation to recollections of their own attachment histories.
Smiley was recently granted her license by the California Board of Psychology to practice clinical psychology in the state. She is a psychotherapist with Compass Therapy in Newport Beach and Claremont.
Ania Vu, assistant professor of music, had the scene Strange Birds from her chamber opera performed by Brightwork NewMusic (a new music ensemble that includes Pomona lecturers Aron Kallay and Maggie Parkins) at Monk Space in Los Angeles. She also had an East Coast premiere of Water Realms for chamber orchestra at the Chelsea Music Festival on June 26, conducted by Ken-David Masur.
Margaret Waller, emerita professor of humanities and Romance languages and literatures, posted a blog for Pride Month on the Columbia University press website.
Andrew Wilson, director of research computing, coauthored a paper in World Archaeology titled “Climate-responsive earthen architecture: multi-scale environmental analysis of passive house design in Classical Olynthos.” The paper uses multi-scale environmental simulation to examine how the mudbrick construction and passive design of Olynthian houses moderated indoor conditions across daily and seasonal cycles.
Kevin Wynter, associate professor and chair of media studies, with Jonathan Lethem, Roy Edward Disney '51 Professor of Creative Writing and professor of English, contributed to The Complete Kubrick box set marking the most significant collection of Stanley Kubrick’s remastered films and archival materials. Wynter and Lethem contributed a conversation on Kubrick and authorship based on a course they co-taught last year.
Feng Xiao, associate professor of Chinese, delivered an invited talk titled “AI Beyond the Hype: What Really Matters” as part of the Tsinghua Political Science Centennial Distinguished Lecture Series at Tsinghua University in Beijing on June 5.
From June 12-29, Xiao served as an external reviewer for AI grant proposals submitted under the Joint Research Scheme of the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.
Samuel Yamashita, Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History, contributed a 50-page entry on the “Varieties of Culinary Hyperlocalism Along the Pacific Rim” to the new Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. He was the first scholar to identify this important 21st-century culinary phenomenon, which is also the subject of the book he is currently finishing—The Gnarled Root: Culinary Hyperlocalism Along the Pacific Rim—which examines chefs serving hyperlocal cuisines in Seattle, Los Angeles, Lima, Hawai’i, Sydney, Bangkok and Kyoto.