Physics Symposium: Members of the physics department gathered on October 2 to hear excellent presentations given by their research students.

Dear College Faculty and Staff,

This weekend we are welcoming alumni back to campus for the first time since 2019 to celebrate Grand Reunion! I am excited to be hosting our annual Dean’s Reception—jointly with the School of Engineering—tomorrow evening at 6 p.m. in the new Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation. Please feel free to join us to reconnect with former students and enjoy food, drink, and our lovely new space on campus! 

We will be continuing the festivities throughout next week as well, as we lead up to the official dedication of SCDI. We’ve planned events throughout the week for faculty, staff, and students that culminate in a Campus Celebration and Dedication on Friday. I hope you will take part in celebrating this exciting time for Santa Clara University.

If you do attend any of these events, please do stop and say hello; I am so enjoying meeting people in person!

Daniel

Highlights

Rohit Chopra (Communication) participated in several events in September 2021. On September 2, he was an invited discussant for the lecture, "Panoptical Views on Politics: Minimal Secularism" by Professor Cécile Laborde, Professor of political theory at the University of Oxford. The event was organized by the Asia Society India Centre. On September 12, he moderated a panel on "Hindutva Propaganda and the Digital Ecosystem" as part of the Dismantling Global Hindutva: Multidisciplinary Perspectives conference, held from September 10-12. He was also one of the organizers of the conference, which was co-sponsored by 70 programs, centers, and departments from over 50 universities. On September 22, he delivered a talk "From Google to Gita: Policy Challenges and Solutions for a Global Age," as part of the annual lecture series of the Centre for Policy Research, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Multi-level analytical framework for investigating individual differences in behavioral, cognitive and neural profiles of differentiation between distinct numerical operations.

Lang Chen (Psychology & Neuroscience) has published a peer-reviewed article in Neuropsychologia as a first author. This work employed a multi-level analytical framework for investigating individual differences in behavioral, cognitive and neural profiles of differentiation between distinct numerical operations in young children. The study revealed that children with lower math abilities showed undifferentiated performance on addition and subtraction tasks, and more interestingly, their neural activity patterns for these two operations were quite similar across a distributed brain network supporting quantity, phonological, attentional, semantic and control processes. These findings identify the lack of distinct neural representations as a novel neurobiological feature of individual differences in children's numerical problem-solving abilities and an early developmental biomarker of low math skills. This work is supported by the WAVE Visualization Grant from Santa Clara University that was awarded to Lang.

In September, Ignatius Press published "Providence Blue: A Fantasy Quest," the latest novel by David Pinault (Professor Emeritus, Religious Studies).

The National Communication Association (NCA) is pleased to announce the selection of Laura L. Ellingson (Communication), Patrick A. Donohoe, S.J. Professor, as a recipient of the 2021 Distinguished Scholar Award.

Given annually, the NCA Distinguished Scholar Award is the association’s highest accolade. It honors a lifetime of scholarly achievement in the study of human communication. Recipients are selected by their peers to showcase the best of the Communication discipline. Ellingson’s research focuses on gender in extended families, feminist and qualitative methodologies, and interdisciplinary collaborations and teamwork in health care organizations.

Recipients will be honored during the upcoming NCA 107th Annual Convention. The Presidential Address and Awards Presentation will begin at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, November 20, at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, WA, and also will be live-streamed for those unable to attend.

NCA is the largest Communication association in the United States. They serve the scholars, teachers, and practitioners who are their members by enabling and supporting their professional interests in research and teaching.

Abel Cruz (Modern Languages & Literatures) published an article in Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics entitled “A syntactic approach to gender assignment in Spanish–English bilingual speech,” which explores how Spanish–English bilingual speakers assign grammatical gender to English nouns occurring in codeswitched speech (e.g., 'el key' versus 'la key'). In Spanish, every noun is assigned a grammatical gender. A concrete example is the incorporation of the word ‘covid’ in the Spanish language. Spanish speakers have to decide whether the word ‘covid’ is masculine (e.g., 'el covid') or feminine ('la covid’). If you listen to the Spanish-speaking news, you will hear both! It turns out that Spanish–English bilingual speakers are constantly assigning grammatical gender to English nouns occurring in Spanish–English bilingual speech (e.g., el army ‘the army’). This is an intriguing linguistic behavior because English words like ‘army’ or ‘key’ lack grammatical gender altogether. The goal of the paper is to understand the nature of this assignment mechanism and its implications for models of bilingual architecture. The paper presents linguistic data from a bilingual community in southern Arizona, U.S., and develops a syntactic analysis that aims to capture gender assignment in bilingual speech within the realm of linguistic theory.

Tripp Strawbridge (Modern Languages & Literatures) published an article titled “Modern Language: Interaction in conversational NS-NNS video SCMC eTandem exchanges,” in the journal Language Learning & Technology. The article analyzes the way in which university language students interact in virtual peer-to-peer conversation exchanges. Strawbridge highlights the ways in which language students, in conversation with native-speaker partner peers, move between roles as “language expert” and “language learner” in order to address target language gaps and navigate informal virtual conversations.

Katy Bruchmann (Psychology) along with Sarah Chue '21 (Psychology), Keelin Dillon '22 (Psychology and Spanish Studies), Kayla Neumann '22 (Psychology), and Charlotte Parque '22 (Psychology and Music) recently published an article titled "Social Comparison Information Influences Intentions to Reduce Single-Use Plastic Water Bottle Consumption" in a special issue of Frontiers in Psychology about promoting sustainable behaviors. Their research—which began as a class project for a psychology research methods course—suggests that whether college students learn that they are more sustainable or less sustainable than their peers in terms of single-use plastic water bottle consumption, they feel more motivated to reduce their consumption in the future than a baseline control. This project has implications for the sustainability missions on SCU's campus and beyond.

Francisco Jiménez (Professor Emeritus, Modern Languages & Literatures) had his peer reviewed article, “Los Episodios Nacionales de Victoriano Salado Álvarez: Una visión Histórica progresista en contenido y forma,” published in Tiempo Viejo (1867)—Tiempo Nuevo (2017): Presencia(s) de Victoriano Salado Álvarez en el siglo XXI. Edited by Dr. Alejandro Sacbé Shuttera. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021.

He was interviewed by Rafael Vazquez’s Santa Rosa Radio Station KKBF “Lideres del Futuro” Program. He made a virtual school visit to Sacred Heart Nativity School on May 26; gave a virtual presentation on the process for writing The Circuit for all eighth-grade students at St. Clare School on April 22; gave a lecture on “The Immigrant Experience in Everyday Life” at Stanford University on July 8; and on September 9, he made a presentation on “The Context for Breaking Through” for all first-year students at Los Gatos High School who were required to read his memoir, Breaking Through. He was also appointed as an advisor to the Steinbeck Center's Steinbeck in the Schools program at San Jose State University.

College of Arts and Sciences Calendar