Honoring faculty mentors
The Graduate Student Assembly has named three faculty members as outstanding mentors who guide, encourage, and inspire their students. This year’s Graduate Mentor Award winners are Julia Adams, professor and chair of the Department of Sociology and codirector of the Center for Comparative Research; Langdon Hammer '80, '89PhD, professor of English and American Studies; and Jordan Peccia, associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering. Established in 2000, the award was created to honor advisers whose dedication and generosity of spirit promote the professional, scholarly, and personal development of their students. The award winners will be honored at the Graduate School’s Commencement Convocation in May.
Alumnus heads Colgate University
Jeffrey Herbst '87PhD (political science) became the 16th president of Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, after serving for five years as provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at Miami University in Ohio. He has served on the faculties of Princeton University (his undergraduate alma mater) and several African universities, including the University of Zimbabwe, the University of Ghana, and the University of Cape Town.
Herbst’s research and teaching focus on the politics of sub-Saharan Africa, with special interest in peacekeeping, democratic liberalization in Africa, and how the international community can further economic growth in less developed regions of the world. He is author of States and Power in Africa (Princeton University Press, 2000), which was co-winner of the Gregory Luebbert Best Book Award from the comparative politics section of the American Political Science Association. His other publications include New Order in Sight? The African Union, NEPAD, and the Future of a Continent (with Greg Mills, International Institute of Strategic Studies), and articles in Comparative Politics, Foreign Affairs, ForeignPolicy.com, International Organization,and International Security.
Watching mountains shrink
The Patagonian Andes have been getting smaller. They began to shrink about eight million years ago, when a cooling climate allowed ice to form at lower elevations, enlarging the mountain’s glaciers. Larger glaciers can effectively saw off mountaintops. Keith Ma, a graduate student in geology & geophysics, wondered if glacial erosion was causing the Andean mountain belt to shrink. To test the idea, he derived an equation for the height and width of a mountain belt with known plate velocities and erosion rates and then built a computer-controlled analog model to verify it. Using sand, moving plastic sheeting, and a vacuum in place of crustal rock, tectonic plates, and eroding glaciers, he recorded the evolution of the model mountain belt through glass walls and verified his equation. "We applied the equation to the Andes and found that a high but plausible erosion rate is needed to drive the observed decrease in size of approximately three millimeters per year." Now Keith will take his lab-based research into the field to measure the actual erosion rate of the Andes in Argentina.
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