“Religion and spirituality are often understudied and overlooked dimensions of culture,” Hope said. “College can often be the setting in which emerging adults are re-evaluating previously held beliefs, continuing in a faith tradition, or exploring new ways to believe or make meaning.”

This is the second paper from the Black@SLAC Study, which was funded through grants from the Society of the Scientific Study of Religion, Division 36 of the American Psychological Association, and the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood. The ethnically and religiously diverse sample consisted of 21 women of African descent attending 16 liberal arts institutions in the U.S. during the 2021-2022 academic year. Alyssa Clark, Walter D. Foss distinguished 69ֱ��ing Professor of Psychology at the College co-authored with Hope on this project, alongside Alesha Archil, an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, and Gordon Palmer, assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

After analyzing data from semi-structured interviews, Hope and her colleagues’ research suggests that existing affinity groups and organizations may prioritize faith traditions associated with majority faith groups and/or majority cultural groups, which may discourage Black undergraduates from being involved.

Hope’s analyses yielded five themes: religious campus climate, institutional resources, increasing religious inclusivity, commitment to religious awareness, and supportive relationships. “The central theme in our article is that SLACs should engage in sustainable, long-term intersectional approaches to support Black undergraduates,” she said.

“Black women exhorted institutions to facilitate religious and spiritual inclusivity, campus-wide awareness and tolerance, and culturally affirming religious counter-spaces,” Hope added. She said each narrative “elucidated actionable changes for institutions to support Black women’s religious and spiritual lives and underscored recommendations for developing collectively sustainable and beneficial religious and spiritual climates.”

Hope said her team’s findings will extend the campus climate literature in higher education by emphasizing the intersections of racial, gender, and religious identity. “Given the heightened national focus on undergraduate retention, this study can offer evidence-based considerations and solutions to faculty, student affairs professionals, and other decision-makers in higher education,” she said.

At Wooster, Hope aims  to work alongside her colleagues to “create and sustain academic spaces where students can envision, build, and maintain connections between their academics and their lived experiences.”

The post Psychology professor Meredith Hope documents Black undergraduate women’s perceptions of institutional religious and spiritual support appeared first on 69ֱ��.

Wooster’s Meagen Pollock, geologist and Lewis M. and Marian Senter Nixon Professor in the Natural Sciences, and Assistant Professor of Physics Laura DeGroot, at the College, answer these questions and more below.

How often do meteors enter the Earth’s atmosphere in this way?

Pollock: Several tons of meteoritic material enter Earth’s atmosphere each day. (!). Most of it burns up in the atmosphere and never reaches the ground.

How do scientists track or detect events like this?

Pollock: Scientists use multiple methods, including weather radar, satellite sensors, and eyewitness reports. According to , this event was seen from three regional weather radars and picked up by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper instrument on a weather satellite, which detects light emitted by electrical discharges. So far, there are 222 eyewitness reports about this event on the .

What determines whether something burns up completely verses reaching the ground?

DeGroot: According to NASA, anything smaller than a football field will break apart in the Earth’s atmosphere, but the initial size, composition, and speed are factors that determine whether it makes it to the surface. They are traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, and when they hit, the air in front of them compresses very quickly causing the temperature to rise. This causes the meteor to heat up and burn until there is nothing left. This also causes intense pressure of the atmospheric gas, which can exceed the structural strength of the object holding itself together causing it to explode midair. As this happens, we then see a bright flare and less than 5% of the original object reaches the ground.

Are meteorites dangerous or should we be concerned that it could happen again?

DeGroot: Documented cases of meteorites causing injuries or deaths are rare! While Earth’s atmosphere is bombarded by space debris daily, larger meteors only strike every few years or decades. We know of very large impacts due to craters from millions and tens of thousands of years ago. Other documented cases of large impacts include in 1908, 1954, and many may remember the 2013 fireball that streaked across the sky in Chelyabinsk, Russia. This one blew apart 14 miles above the ground, creating a shockwave that damaged buildings that caused injuries. Overall, they are rare, and we don’t need to be concerned. Most material burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

What is the difference between a meteor, asteroid, and meteorite?

Pollock: An asteroid is a small, rocky or metallic body that orbits the Sun. When a piece of an asteroid, or some other object, enters Earth’s atmosphere, it heats up and glows, and we see a bright streak of light called a meteor. A meteorite is what we call the object if it makes it to Earth’s surface.

What was it made of?

Pollock: Most meteorites are stony meteorites, made primarily of minerals like we find on Earth with small amounts of metallic iron. NASA has confirmed from a sample that it was a type of stony meteorite called an achondrite, which has experienced geologic processes like the ones on Earth. It’s less dense than the stony meteorites that have the small amounts of metallic iron.

Is it possible to find a meteorite? How would we recognize one?

Pollock: Yes, it’s possible, but it’s harder than you might expect, even if you have an idea of where they might be based on a color-coded strewn field map like the one at the link above. Look for rocks that feel heavier than expected for their size and appear to be different from surrounding rocks. It might also have a dark, glassy fusion crust on the outer edges.

Is there scientific value in collecting fragments/meteorites?

Pollock: Absolutely! Meteorites are direct samples of other bodies in our solar system, many of which formed over 4.5 billion years ago. By studying them, we learn about solar system formation, planetary processes, and even the chemical ingredients that may have contributed to the origin of life on Earth. If they’re recovered carefully from known falls, they’re even more scientifically valuable because their history and exposure are well constrained.

What should people do if they think they’ve found a meteorite?

Pollock: Try not to touch it with your hands! Snap a photo where it lies, note its location, and use clean foil or gloves to collect it. Keep it clean, dry, and wrapped or in a bag, and take it to an institution that can examine it for you. You can bring it to 69ֱ�� Earth Sciences Department. Please be warned, though! Most suspected meteorites turn out to be regular rocks.

Featured image: Assistant Professor of Physics Laura DeGroot (left) and Meagen Pollock, geologist and Lewis M. and Marian Senter Nixon Professor in the Natural Sciences (right)

The post Wooster Earth sciences and physics professors answer common questions about meteor passing through Northeast Ohio appeared first on 69ֱ��.

The research team also included Wooster graduates Srushti Chaudhari ’22 (geology); Wenshuo (Fred) Zhao ’23 (environmental geoscience), and Mazvita Chikomo ’22 (environmental geoscience); Meagan Pollock, Lewis M. and Marian Senter Nixon Professor in the Natural Sciences; geology technician Nick Wiesenberg; and geo-ecologist Benjamin Gaglioti, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Wiles, a glacial geologist and founder of the Wooster Tree Ring Lab, has spent much of his career studying how climate shapes landscapes. “Most of the work we do with the lab is actually in Alaska,” he explained. There, advancing glaciers toppled entire forests and buried the wood in ice and sediment, where it remained preserved for scientists to sample and analyze hundreds to thousands of years later. More locally, just a 10-minute drive from the College, The Secrest Arboretum, a living archive of global tree species planted more than a century ago as part of a statewide reforestation effort, located on the Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences Wooster Campus, has become a scientific resource as well in partnership with curator Jason Veil.

The new article is the fourth the Tree Ring Lab has published on the arboretum’s collection. This paper focuses on how specific deciduous conifers — cone-bearing trees that, unlike evergreens, seasonally shed their needle-like leaves — are adapting to climate change. The Wooster team chose to study these distinctive species, Wiles said, because they are underrepresented in research, with only “four or five studies around the world that have been done this way.”

Among the species examined are Siberian larch, European larch, dawn redwood, and bald cypress. Their histories tell of both resilience and vulnerability. Since being transplanted from the sub-Arctic tundra and the Alps in the first half of the twentieth century, the Siberian and European larches, Wiles explained, “are shifting their climate response” to northeast Ohio’s increasing temperatures and precipitation. Meanwhile, the dawn redwoods, once thought extinct until rediscovered in China in the 1940s, and the bald cypress, native to the swamps of the southeastern United States, have shown remarkable stability in Ohio’s increasingly wet climate, even withstanding tornadoes.

Dawn redwood trees dropping their needles in the fall at Secrest Arboretum in northeast Ohio.

The project has been a rich years-long training ground for students through various AMRE projects, Wooster’s Applied Methods and Research Experience program in which students apply classroom learning as business and organizational consultants. Chaudari and Zhao both conducted field work, extracting core samples from living trees at Secrest. During the pandemic, all three student coauthors analyzed decades of tree-ring and weather-station data while following social-distancing guidelines on campus. In addition to presenting their findings at professional conferences, the students learned field methods, programming, and statistical analysis, which prepared them for postgraduate work.

Chikomo, now a doctoral candidate studying how global wetlands respond to environmental change, appreciates how her research at Wooster gave her not just the scientific tools she still uses today at Rutgers but also a “formative experience” in problem-solving, collaboration, scientific exploration, and the ability to communicate the team’s findings to various audiences. “This project ignited my appreciation for experiential learning and for research as an active, applied process,” she said, “one that takes theory from the classroom and turns it into knowledge that meaningfully enhances our understanding of the world.”

Zhao recalls that when he first embarked on dendrochronology research with Wiles, he was unfamiliar with tree-ring science. “The only thing I had,” he said, “was the passion for science and an unharnessed willingness to learn new things.” But his years of AMRE projects at Wooster became an “invaluable experience,” he added, because it “opened my eyes to the broader world of paleoclimatology,” the field to which he’s devoted his graduate studies at the University of Oklahoma.

For Wiles, the arboretum is both a scientific resource for natural experiments and a window into the future. As Ohio becomes warmer and wetter, understanding which species can withstand changing climate conditions will be essential for long-term planning. “A tree is an investment of maybe 100 years. Which species are best adapted going forward?” he asks, noting that ongoing research by Wooster’s Tree Ring Lab will help to reveal the answer.

The post Wooster researchers publish new study on how local arboretum trees adapt to a changing climate appeared first on 69ֱ��.

In the article, Holt explained that her previous conversations with students about AI mostly focused on academic integrity and the importance of doing original work. Her new assignment, developed in collaboration with Wooster’s director of educational and emerging technologies, Jon Breitenbucher, encourages students to think more critically about AI as an information source and to compare and contrast AI research with other informational sources, including traditional encyclopedias and Wikipedia.

As a result of the assignment, she finds students came away with a much better understanding of the pros and cons of each medium. The project also succeeded in giving them a “newfound sense of the importance of improving freely accessible information about historical topics available for the general public,” she added.

In addition to comparing information sources, Holt’s students examined the accuracy of the information and whether there were biases in the way events were explained. “Our class discussions and student reflection push them to consider how and why some topics get more coverage than others, identify crucial content gaps, and do the research and writing to make Wikipedia more representative,” Holt said. Students practiced their own communication strategies through oral presentations, TikTok videos, Instagram posters, and Wikipedia entries.

Since Holt started using Wikipedia in the classroom, her students have made well-researched contributions to address gaps in the resource’s coverage, especially in the areas of Latin American and Latinx topics. As a result of this work, they have added more than 400,000 words, more than 4,000 references and had their work viewed more than 42.5 million times. In 2025, Holt was appointed to the Humanities and Social Justice Advisory Committee for Wiki Education, a spinoff of the Wikimedia Foundation, which builds connections between universities and Wikipedia.

Holt hopes the lessons her students learned via this assignment will be carried forward into their future careers, especially if they are asked to use AI in the workplace. “It’s important that they understand potential pitfalls and the need to not take output at face value,” she said.

The post Professor Katie Holt incorporates new techniques to improve student understanding of AI tools appeared first on 69ֱ��.

“The office of academic affairs is excited by the selection of Professor Sene for this fellowship and the holistic support it provides him to build in his capacity as a leader in global work at Wooster,” said Sarah Sobeck, dean for faculty development.

All fellows advance an initiative on their home campuses and hold a titled administrative position throughout the length of the fellowship. Sene’s fellowship administrative position will be associate dean for global initiatives.

“Many Wooster faculty work (teaching, research, scholarship, and academic service) is globally oriented,” Sene said. “A primary focus of this fellowship is to help leverage existing (and potential) partnerships, especially in the Global South, to unlock the many opportunities that they could offer to our faculty and students. This is a serious undertaking, but I am ready and excited to take on the challenge.”

In his new position, Sene plans to accomplish the following: create a model for building partnerships with outside institutions for student and faculty-led initiatives, increase connections to institutions in the Global South, and help advance Wooster’s campus-wide internationalization efforts. He will also participate in professional and leadership development and meet regularly with his cohort to share the successes and challenges of their chosen projects.

Sene has established partnerships with colleagues at Université Cheikh Anta Diop (Senegal), University of the Gambia, Université des Sciences Humaines de Bamako (Mali), Ashesi University (Ghana), Al Akhawayn University (Morocco), Forman Christian College (Pakistan), and American University in Cairo (Egypt). He is in his second year of service on the GLCA BIPOC Faculty Leadership Council.

At Wooster, Sene has worked on various global engagement initiatives, including working with the Framing Our Future working group on Global Partnerships, the Global Engagement Office Advisory Committee and serving as a member of the GLIS Curriculum Committee.

The post Professor Ibra Sene awarded GLCA Academic Leadership Fellowship appeared first on 69ֱ��.

The idea that perpetrators of political violence would share their reason for such violence is nothing new. After all, Krain noted in his CBC interview, John Wilkes Booth shouted “Sic semper tyrannis” (thus always to tyrants) as he jumped from the balcony to the stage after assassinating Abraham Lincoln. Engraved bullet casings are a fairly recent development and one that can have disturbing implications.

“People don’t do this by accident,” Krain said to the CBC. “There’s always a motivation behind it.” He explained that the media has gotten better at not sharing killers’ manifestos. Consequently, that has caused some shooters to find other ways to get their messages out into the public. “[Engraving a bullet casing] guarantees their message gets out there, and they are controlling the narrative,” Krain said to The Washington Post. That narrative can spread quickly online. What’s more, photos of engraved bullet casings are easily shareable on social media and likely to go viral, especially worrisome to Krain. “It amplifies the person’s voice,” he said to the CBC. “The more publicity this particular approach gets, the more likely it’s going to be copied.”

Krain also worries about the tendency of some groups to jump to conclusions about a killer’s motives and political leanings before a full investigation is completed. An unfortunate byproduct of this quick reaction is to lump together those committing political violence with those who practice nonviolent forms of protest into one homogenous group.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that some messages in recent cases have been related to gaming or memes. Krain explains that, not only does this make the messages even more difficult to understand, but it can lessen the impact of a horrific act.

“The language involved is important,” he said to the CBC. “When that sort of offhand language is used, it makes it seem less impactful and less frightening than it really is and maybe creates a permission structure for others to engage in that behavior.”

The post Professor Matthew Krain shares expertise in political violence on disturbing new trend in multiple media outlets appeared first on 69ֱ��.

Roche’s book uncovers answers around how the people of a vast, single-state region could develop such a political culture, and one that went national. “At its heart, the book is a century-long history of how a place develops its political identity,” said Roche. He explains that at the core of that identity is a political philosophy that’s founded on individual freedom. Now found from Texas to Alberta, Canada, this conservativism gained cultural power from the history and mythology of the Old West.

“In practice, particularly in the mid-twentieth century, these conservatives voiced their opposition to civil rights, aid programs, labor unions, and any challenges to the cultural or social status quo, especially when it came to race, sexuality, or gender,” said Roche. “This book explains how this philosophy eventually took over the Republican Party as right-wing conservatives took over the party at the local level in Texas and elsewhere.”

By reconstructing the West Texas region’s history starting in 1876, Roche helps readers understand the rise of the modern right and the relationships between history, place, and politics. However, the book follows more than political power players. Roche digs into football coaches, newspaper editors, and even a breakfast cereal tycoon who each promoted the ideology.

“I got to create a fresh narrative for the best ways to understand the past of this huge place, which is bigger than New England, and reimagine how to tell well-known stories and events like the cattle business, the Dust Bowl, fights over textbooks, and even the rise of Reagan.”

The idea for the book grew out of an old dissertation Roche wrote more than twenty years ago. “I was part of a generation of political historians who were seriously interested in the rise of right-wing Republicanism, post Rise of Reagan,” he said. “My goal was to put place at the center of that movement. And since the 1960s, West Texas has been known as the most right-wing conservative place in America.”

Roche appreciates the true partnership he experienced working with the University of Texas Press, saying they’ve been amazing to work with from the initial proposal to designing the cover. “It’s Wooster’s leave program and other ways of supporting its teachers/scholars that make scholarship like this possible,” he said.

The post Professor Jeff Roche’s new book about West Texas’ role in the rise of US conservatism earns national attention appeared first on 69ֱ��.

After studying material science and chemical engineering as an undergraduate, with the goal of doing polymer research, Sparks developed an interest in geology in her early work career, as she saw how one field connected to another. Over geologic time spans, “the lithosphere flows in the same way a polymer might,” she said, using the professional term for the rigid outer part of the Earth.

From her engineering background, she realized that existing geologic calculations could be made more precise. “To me, a number without an uncertainty attached is incomplete,” she said. However, Sparks says that geology research is often published without those calculations of uncertainty or with such a wide range that the number might not be useful at all. “You’re not making interpretations based on reality or on the conditions of the model you set up,” she said. “It’s not very telling.”

That realization led her to apply the Taguchi method, a statistical analysis tool common in engineering but relatively new to geology. “I know I can make this more efficient,” she said. “I learned this in engineering; let’s see if we can apply it to geoscience.”

Assigning a number to the uncertainty of a particular data set “is not out of reach for us,” she said. “Lots of people don’t do sensitivity analysis or put it in a publication. The motivation is to get more people to implement this more widely.”

Sparks completes field research in Nepal.

Approaching data with an understanding of its limits is a method she teaches Wooster students. “It’s a passion of mine to have transparency about what we know,” she said. “Maybe I don’t know everything about a particular subject, but I can tell you what I do know and where to find more information.” Her students learn about the strengths and limitations of given data sets and about the repercussions of making assumptions.

“Sparks’ research demonstrates the cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach our earth sciences program takes,” said Meagen Pollock, Lewis M. and Marian Senter Nixon Professorship in the Natural Sciences. “Students here learn not just traditional geology, but also advanced computational methods borrowed from engineering. Her cross-disciplinary skill set helps our graduates succeed in careers in environmental consulting, natural resource exploration, climate research, and more, as well as graduate studies.”

“Science builds on itself,” Sparks said. “The more we do, the more we learn.” Geology, she said, is often viewed as less precise, “because the rock record is incomplete, and we’re working on time scales of billions of years, and no one was around to see it.”

In geology, and other fields of science, controversies exist between competing theories “where people are very passionate, strong proponents of one or the other, and very often it comes down to something in between,” Sparks said. She published software to go along with her recent paper, and she hopes that other scientists will use it for sensitivity analysis on their own research.

Sparks, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of Arizona, is starting a one-year appointment at Wooster. “I like the focus on student learning at a place like Wooster,” she said, “My long-term goal is to stay at a teaching institution that doesn’t preclude you from performing research as well.”

The post Geology professor uses her undergraduate training as an engineer to bring new insights to field appeared first on 69ֱ��.

Most have heard of Einstein’s theory of relativity, Newton’s law of gravity, Parkinson’s disease, and many more, but hundreds of more obscure phenomena are also named after their discoverers, and one of the first things Manz found is that in recent decades, the names have been getting longer.

“Different fields have different thresholds,” he said, and in recent decades, the thresholds have been getting lower in every field, so that discoveries may now carry the names of five or six researchers. Because scientists want their information condensed, he notes, the eponym often gets abbreviated, so the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction becomes the BZ reaction or the Fisher–Kolmogorov–Petrovsky–Piskunov equation becomes FKPP equation.

Manz eventually split his research into two papers. , traces the history of the BZ reaction’s eponym. , published in Scientometrics, looks at the broader question of how scientific discoveries get their names and what the threshold is to be included.

Much of the early research on the BZ reaction was published in Russian journals, and transliteration into the Western alphabet introduced many variations on names. Manz worked with Zach Rewinski, formerly assistant professor of Russian studies at the College as a co-author on the Chaos publication. For the Scientometrics article, he collaborated with the College’s science librarian.

“Working outside our own departments is sometimes really necessary,” Manz said, “and it’s great that it’s possible.” At a big university the two might never meet, he said, but at Wooster, “I just went to his office and asked if he was interested in joining the project.”

Belousov–Zhabotinsky Reaction illustration by Tara Brunner ’24

Wooster’s other cross-disciplinary contribution to Manz’s Chaos paper was the illustration, created by Tara Brunner ’24. “I’m creative in the lab, but not visually creative,” Manz said, so he contacted the art department and was connected with Brunner to create a visual spiral of all the names that have been associated with the BZ reaction.

As a physicist, Manz studies reaction-diffusion waves. The BZ reaction is a chemical system, but its wave properties are useful to a physicist and present yet another opportunity to reach across disciplines. “I have Petri dishes and pipettes in my lab,” Manz said, “but I try to tell physics majors that chemists use a lot of physics, and I’m using chemistry to investigate physical properties.”

Manz’s sabbatical leave in 2024 made it possible for him to do the deep dive into scientific literature that was required for the two papers. “It was a completely different part of my brain,” he said, comparing the work to his usual research focus. In whatever field, he appreciates the opportunities that he gets at Wooster to stretch himself. “I like research, but I also like teaching,” he said, “and that’s not possible at a big university in the same way.”

The post Wooster physicist Niklas Manz goes beyond his discipline to study how phenomena get their names appeared first on 69ֱ��.

The passive sampler, designed and tested in collaboration with Arcadis, is a cost-effective method for field sampling per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), commonly known as forever chemicals. The environmentally persistent, anthropogenic chemicals are non-biodegradable and have been found in many water sources around the world. In 2023, the device was patented–Edmiston’s 13^th patent—and then commercialized by as the Sentinel^TM.

“The device acts like flypaper to latch onto PFAS from river or lake as water passes,” Edmiston explained. “After a time in the water, the sampler is then removed, analyzed in the laboratory, and then you can tell how much PFAS contaminant flowed past while it was in the water.” The device helps to monitor pulses of chemicals that flow past intermittently that otherwise would be missed in a single sample of water.

The development of specialized adsorbents—materials that attract and hold other substances onto its surface—has been part of Edmiston’s research for 20 years. In 2021, he and environmental engineers from Arcadis collaborated to apply for and receive funding from the to develop a passive sampler for PFAS. He provided the adsorbent development and lab-scale testing, and Arcadis did the field evaluation and field design work. The adsorbent in the Sentinel^TM is a variation of Osorb, that he previously developed.

Edmiston included several Wooster students in his research for the project, including Riley Hershberger ’24, a biochemistry and molecular biology major and environmental studies minor, and Noah Hill ’24, a chemistry major and physics minor. Both were co-authors on the 2023 journal article in Groundwater Monitoring & Remediation. “We conducted a parallel laboratory study that demonstrated the passive sampler has an integrative response to measure PFAS for greater than 90 days,” Edmiston said. “One of the unique features of Riley’s work is she deployed the samplers in Ghana to expand the knowledge about where PFAS is being found globally.”

“I’m excited that the environmental monitoring industry recognizes the utility of the device we invented,” he said. “I hope many environmental scientists use the sampler to understand how PFAS is affect rivers and lakes.” The award will be presented at the San Diego National Conference Environmental Industry Summit XXIII, April 2-4.

The post Paul Edmiston lab develops national award-winning environmental monitoring tool appeared first on 69ֱ��.