Ghalib and Hornstein, founders of Pocket Factory 22, will be at the Meadville Market House on Saturday, Feb. 11. From 9 to 11 a.m. they will demonstrate an assortment of 3D printers, sell unique creations they have made from those printers and talk about the potential of desktop manufacturing. They will be joined by faculty and students from Allegheny College.

Everyone is welcome to attend this free event, whether they are interested in sustainable manufacturing, want to learn more about how to use 3D printing to create their own designs or are just curious about how the technology works.

“We’re starting a business designing, producing and selling products made on these printers,” Ghalib and Hornstein say on their website, pocketfactory.org. “We’re documenting our successes and failures as we go, with the intention of making it easy for others to replicate our efforts. In our dream world, the only barrier between a desire to make a living off of creative design and doing so is just a click of the print button. We hope this project helps bring that dream closer to a reality.”

Their journey has taken them through Seattle, Salt Lake City, Chicago and Detroit. Their final stop, New York City, will take them to NYC Resistor and Makerbot, the home of the Thing-O-Matic 3D printer.

“Their trip is simultaneously educational and inspirational,” said Matt Jadud, assistant professor of computer science at Allegheny College, who encouraged the pair to make a stop in Meadville. “They are driving across America — in a hybrid, no less — running an entrepreneurial business along the way. They will be demonstrating not only the technologies involved but how anyone can learn to design and make anything they can imagine.”

The event is part of the Year of Sustainable Communities at Allegheny College, a series of activities, workshops and events aimed at inspiring the campus and community to examine what makes a community sustainable in the richest sense of the word—that is, able to provide a good quality of life to those who live and work there and to be resilient in the face of challenges.

For more information on the Year of Sustainable Communities, including a schedule of events, visit www.allegheny.edu/events and click on the “Year of Sustainable Communities” tab.

McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment. “The End of Nature,” which he published in 1989, is regarded as the first book on climate change written for a general audience. It has been published in more than 20 languages.

He is a founder of the climate campaign 350.org, which has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. The first big grassroots effort to involve people from every nation, 350.org has crossed the boundaries of language and faith, and even the great gulf between rich and poor. Time Magazine called McKibben “the planet’s best green journalist,” and the Boston Globe said in 2010 that he was “probably the country’s most important environmentalist.”

McKibben’s talk at Allegheny — titled “350: The Most Important Number in the World” — discusses the discovery in the summer of 2007 that Arctic ice had begun to melt far more rapidly than scientists had expected. Before the season was out, scientists had begun to conclude that the earth was already moving past tipping points — that indicators, from the thawing of glaciers to the spread of droughts, showed global warming was a present crisis, not a future threat. Leading climatologists even gave a number for the red line: 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere, a number that has already been passed.

McKibben will describe not only the science of the situation but also the global movement that he’s led to help change the world’s understanding of its peril and spur the reforms necessary to return the planet to safety.

He is also the author of “The Age of Missing Information,” “Hope, Human and Wild,” “The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation,” “Maybe One,” “Long Distance: A Year of Living Strenuously,” “Enough,” “Wandering Home,” “Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future” and “The Bill McKibben Reader.”

In 2007 he founded stepitup07.org to demand that Congress enact curbs on carbon emissions that would cut global warming pollution 80 percent by 2050. With six college students, he organized 1,400 global warming demonstrations across all 50 states of America on April 14, 2007. Step It Up 2007 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in the nation’s history.

He has been awarded Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships, and he won the Lannan Prize for nonfiction writing in 2000. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College.

The Year of Sustainable Communities at Allegheny College is a series of activities, workshops and events aimed at inspiring the campus and community to examine what makes a community sustainable in the richest sense of the word—that is, able to provide a good quality of life to those who live and work there and to be resilient in the face of challenges.

For more information on the Year of Sustainable Communities, including a schedule of events, visit www.allegheny.edu/events and click on the “Year of Sustainable Communities” tab.

Tempa Lama is founder and spiritual director of Olmo Ling Bon Center in Pittsburgh. An artist and poet, he has also authored two books with Olmo Ling Publications, the first publishing house in the Tibetan Bon tradition.

Trained in Menri Monastery in India from the age of six under the close guidance of the spiritual head of the Bon tradition, Tempa Lama is dedicated to making the ancient teachings of Bon accessible in the West, helping people bring a practice of compassion, healing and happiness into their lives.

In addition to the talk on Feb. 24, a Bon Buddhist residential retreat called “Open Presence” with Tempa Lama will be held from 10 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 25 to 2 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 26, at McKeever Environmental Learning Center in Sandy Lake.

“Open Presence” means facing each moment as it is without fear or judgment. In this retreat, participants will cultivate Open Presence to recognize that the experience of each moment is not separate from the nature of the mind, allowing us to touch our innate capacity to free ourselves and others from suffering.

The cost for the retreat is $115, which includes one night’s accommodations and meals. Registration closes Feb. 11. For more information or to register, contact Sharon Wesoky at swesoky@allegheny.edu.

Joe Brennan ’13 was awarded the prize for best internship report at Boston University’s Paris Internship Program. Brennan’s report, “La Chasse du Bushmeat,” summarizes the research project he was involved in at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. Using molecular typing, he was charged with identifying endangered hunted species from parts of Africa.

Sam Ginsburg ’12 was joint author of the poster “Exploring Theta_k-embeddings,” presented at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston held this past January. His poster was based on research conducted in summer 2011 at an NSF REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Also presenting at the Joint Meetings was Julie Woods ’11, who was part of a team of students presenting the talk “The rainbow domination number of a graph,” a report on research the students conducted at Smith College’s post-baccalaureate program for women in mathematics.

Elyse Schmitt ’12 presented at a conference at Westminster College designed to showcase projects being conducted in the environmental science departments at local colleges and universities. Schmitt’s poster on urban commercial aquaponic system case studies was awarded first place in the nonscience poster judging.

Professors of Environmental Science Terry Bensel and Richard Bowden, Stacia-Fe Gillen ’14, Lauren Deem ’13, Kelsey Ream ’13, Alessandra Trunzo ’11, and Taylor Weiss ’11 co-presented “The Penn’s Woods Project: Forest Science Education for High School Students” at the Pennsylvania Forest Festival, held at Pennsylvania State University, and also at the 2011 Annual Convention of the Society of American Foresters. The hands-on demonstration illustrated modules and activities included as part of the recently launched Penn’s Woods Project, which provides forest science teaching resources for high school teachers across Pennsylvania.

Assistant Professor of Biology Lisa Whitenack and Anthony Hessel ’12 presented posters at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology annual meeting in Charleston, S.C., along with their collaborator at the University of Connecticut. Whitenack’s poster was titled “Jumping kinematics in the Plethodontidae I: performance, morphology, and scaling.” Hessel’s was titled “Jumping kinematics in the Plethodontidae II: the effects of tail loss.” Both presentations stemmed from Anthony’s research this past summer.

Annie Ginty ’09 and Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Sarah Conklin have a paper published in the current issue of Biological Psychology. The paper, “Preliminary evidence that acute, low-dose supplementation of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids reduce cardiovascular reactivity to mental stress: A placebo controlled trial,” reports data collected at Allegheny a few years ago.

Head Tennis Coach Jared Luteran has been named the 2011 USTA Allegheny Mountain District Collegiate Coach of the Year. Luteran, who has been at the helm of the Allegheny tennis program since the 2002-2003 season, was selected as NCAC Co-Coach of the Year in 2007. The USTA Allegheny Mountain District Collegiate Coach of the Year honor is given to one college coach in the Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania, and Wheeling, West Virginia area who exemplifies the spirit of tennis both on and off the court.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Rachel Weir gave two talks at the 2012 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston. She was invited to give the talk “Weighted Reproducing Kernels and the Bergman Space” in the special session Operator Theory on Analytic Function Spaces. The second talk, “Applications of Wavelets: A Sophomore-level Seminar Course,” was a contributed talk in the session Wavelets in Undergraduate Education.

Professor of Biology and Environmental Science Scott Wissinger and Howard Whiteman ’88, professor of biology and director of the Watershed Studies Institute at Murray State University, and co-authors recently published the article “Larval growth in polyphenic salamanders: making the best of a bad lot” in the journal Oecologia. The paper reports on 22 years of collaborative research by the lead authors on how environmental factors during larval development affect whether salamanders metamorphose into terrestrial adults or remain in ponds for life as sexually mature larvae.

Assistant Professor of History Guo Wu published a Chinese essay, “Fushan dui Zhongguo zhengzhi shi de sikao” [Francis Fukuyama’s Thoughts on Chinese Political History], in the December issue of the Dushu [Readings] monthly, China’s most influential journal of academic and intellectual inquiry. The essay reviews the political theorist Fukuyama’s 2011 book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution, focusing on his study of China’s state-building in history. Wu also presented his paper “Discovering an Ethnic Culture in Qing China: Local Officials’ Representation of the Miao and Their Accommodating Policies in the Yongzheng Period, 1722–35” to the 126th annual conference of AHA in Chicago on January 5.

Each module contains forest-related scientific equipment, background information, field guides, descriptions of forest research methods and suggested activities and experiments. Modules are located at strategic places across Pennsylvania, including the Crawford County Conservation District in Meadville, Titusville High School, Asbury Woods Nature Center in Erie, Juniata College in Huntingdon and the John James Audubon Center in Audubon.

Modules are constructed so that students can engage in hands-on self-directed research activities. “By providing research tools and instruments that are used by modern forest professionals, we enable students to work as forest scientists and managers do when conducting research and measuring forests,” said Terry Bensel, professor of environmental science at Allegheny College and a co-director of the Penn’s Woods Project. “The equipment we include will enable accurate measurement of tree diameters, age and growth, as well as forest soil biology and chemistry.”

The modules are designed to introduce students to topics of critical importance to Pennsylvania’s forests, including forest-wildlife interactions, invasive species, forest management, air pollution, forest soils and climate change. Each module allows students to develop their own research projects.

“We’re not trying to simply convey facts and figures,” said project co-director Richard Bowden, also a professor of environmental science at Allegheny. “Rather, we want students to experience the way in which professionals use modern methods to address issues related to forest research and management.”

The modules’ exercises follow guidelines established by the National Science Education Standards for science content and scientific inquiry and relate directly to the Pennsylvania Department of Education Academic Standards for Environment and Ecology.

About a half million private landowners own approximately 80 percent of Pennsylvania’s forests. Private landowners seldom utilize professional or service foresters in making harvest decisions, and even fewer have written forest management plans. The Penn’s Woods Project focuses on high school students, the next generation of Pennsylvania forest landowners, to give them the knowledge and tools they need to manage and harvest forests for long-term sustainability.

The project has been funded by the Pennsylvania Wild Resource Conservation Program, the John Nesbit Rees and Sarah Henne Rees Charitable Foundation and Allegheny College. For additional information, contact Richard Bowden or Terry Bensel at 814-332-4844 or visit http://pennswoodsproject.allegheny.edu/.

Now in its seventh year, Creek Camp is hosted by Creek Connections, a watershed education outreach program of Allegheny College.

Most activities take place in and around the waterways of French Creek, the most biodiverse stream in Pennsylvania. Campers in the camp for rising 10th and 11th graders perform water chemistry tests, collect aquatic macroinvertebrates, canoe French Creek, snorkel for freshwater mussels and search for reptiles and amphibians in and around the water.

“A typical day at Creek Camp is far from typical,” said Laura Branby, Creek Connections field educator. “And with such a small group, there are rarely more than one or two students from any one high school. Teens from Costa Rica often attend one of the camps and last year’s campers came from Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, Ohio and New Jersey.”

Each session is limited to 12 campers, who arrive on Sunday afternoon. Throughout the week, they participate in on- and off-campus activities, including a student-designed research project and visits to numerous locations in the French Creek watershed.

By the end of camp, students are very familiar with the flora and fauna of French Creek. “They’ve been wet, they’ve been dirty, and they wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Branby.

Creek Camp for 10th and 11th graders concludes with a luncheon for campers and their parents, including the campers’ presentation of their research project and other aspects of the week’s activities.

In addition to the traditional camp, Creek Connections is introducing a Family Creek Camp, July 15-19, to its schedule this year. Families will live in dorms on campus while exploring the biodiversity of northwestern Pennsylvania streams. Individual adults are invited to attend in addition to families, which could be parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren and even groups of friends.

All activities in Creek Camp and Family Creek Camp are hands-on and led by Allegheny College faculty, students and staff as well as environmental professionals.

Online registration for Creek Camp and Family Creek Camp is available. The site also includes blogs written by past campers, photos and the counselors’ end-of-camp presentation.

For more information, contact Laura Branby at 724-822-3290.

About Creek Connections
A watershed education outreach program of Allegheny College, Creek Connections works with K-12 students throughout the school year to help them understand the importance of healthy waterways in their community—local, nationwide and global. Their community’s “backyard” waterways are the laboratories where the students perform chemical tests of the creek, search for aquatic macroinvertebrates and understand the many connections between their actions and the waterway’s health, between their waterway and the many rivers and lakes in the area, and between the health of the waterway and their own health. Creek Camp started as a natural extension of Creek Connections’ school year program. It is an in-depth, up-close, hands-on experience for high school students to study an exceptional waterway and to meet representatives of a variety of environmental-related career fields.

“In Sisterhood” is an oral history and multimedia project designed to promote a deeper understanding and appreciation of this inspiring aspect of the region’s history and to highlight how progress was achieved through the hard work and determination of a diverse group of local grassroots activists. A related project, “Bridge Builders,” explores the synergistic nexus between the civil rights and women’s movements in Pittsburgh during the 1960s and 1970s.

When the project is completed, the collection of oral histories, recorded on digital video to capture participants’ expressions and gestures, will be donated to the University of Pittsburgh Library Archive, where they will be available to scholars as well as the general public interested in regional and national history.

Director and producer Patricia Ulbrich is a progressive social scientist, film student and visiting scholar in women’s studies at the University of Pittsburgh. For more than three decades, her research has focused on women’s issues, including how individuals’ race, class and gender shape their opportunities. She co-founded the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania and serves on the board of Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. Other team members include Dino DiStefano, sound recordist and documentary photographer; Mia Boccella Hartle, videographer and editor; Two Girls Working, multimedia artists; and Jenny Wolsk Bain, webmaster.

This exhibition is supported in part by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Additional support comes from the art department of Allegheny College, the William Beazell Memorial Fund and the Women’s Studies program. “In Sisterhood: The Women’s Movement in Pittsburgh” is part of the Year of Sustainable Communities at Allegheny College.

The exhibition, reception and lecture are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 12:30-5 p.m.; Saturday, 1:30 to 5 p.m.; and Sunday, 2-4 p.m. The Art Galleries are located in Doane Hall of Art, which is connected to the Campus Center on the Allegheny College campus, just east of North Main Street between College and John Streets in Meadville. The Art Galleries are wheelchair accessible. Gallery tours are available to groups by request. For more information, phone 814-332-4365.

Plato’s “Apology” is an account of Socrates’ defense in 399 BC when he was put on trial on charges that his philosophy was corrupting the youth of Athens and that he did not believe in the Greek gods. Socrates’ “apology” – apologia means defense in Greek – was a defense of his philosophy and actions and an affirmation of his belief that those who claim to know the truth, rather than search for it, are those who know the least.

Simonides adapted the play from Plato’s original text. An actor, writer and producer, he helped found the Greek Theatre of New York (GTNY) in 1979 and has continued to direct the GTNY. He won an Emmy Award for his documentary “A Light Still Bright,” on the historic Greek community of Istanbul.

Simonides travels around the world performing to a wide variety of audiences in many different theatrical settings, including the United Nations, Columbia University, Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the Apollo Theater in Athens.

Over the years the Greek Theatre of New York has become known for its festivals of new plays, its solo and ensemble performances, its children’s theater tours and its imaginative staging of Greek oratorios. Melina Mercouri championed it as “the longest living and most accomplished theatre of the Greek Diaspora.”

Simonides has performed “The Apology” to critical and audience acclaim. “Yannis Simonides gives a penetrating performance and brings history to life, making the immortal words of Plato as relevant today as they were when he first wrote them in ancient Greece,” said a reviewer in the National Herald. “This is a must see for lovers of Plato and Socrates and those who enjoy learning about the wisdom of the ancient Greeks—wisdom that still holds true today.”

Trained at the Yale Drama School, Simonides has served as professor and chair of the drama department at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, as executive producer of Greek Orthodox Telecommunications (GOTelecom) and as the executive director of Hellenic Public Radio – COSMOS FM in New York.

His performance work includes plays by Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Brecht, Korres, Kambanellis and others, along with solo and ensemble pieces culled from the writings of C.P. Cavafy, General Makriyannis, Nikolai Gogol and others. He narrated the PBS specials “Axion Esti,” “Visions of Greece” and “Return to the Homeland.”

Tickets for “The Apology of Socrates” are $3 for anyone with a student ID and $7 for general admission. Children 12 and under are admitted free. Simonides gives a lively and engaging performance that keeps children’s attention, and parents are encouraged to bring their families. Tickets will be sold at the door the night of the show. All proceeds benefit CHAPS.

Following the performance – which is 1 hour and 20 minutes without intermission – the audience is invited to interact with Simonides in an informal question and answer session.

More information on the Greek Theatre of New York can be found at ellinikotheatro.org. For more information on the production at Allegheny College, call Ion Simonides at 914-400-4212 or Nima Kamalpour at 724-799-3351.

“The Figure Untamed” is an exhibition of provocative works by three artists whose focus is the human form. Bodies are seen, experienced and represented through a nexus of powerful cultural taboos designed to regulate pleasure. Even in our contemporary western experience, ideas about decorum work to create unspoken myths and fantasies around bodies as loci of desire. What this exhibition explores instead are artworks that locate power in pleasure, celebrate sensuality of form and show the human figure without the usual controlling devices of modesty, shame and fear.

Erin Finley creates outrageous imagery with meticulous line work to bring the viewer into her compulsive, violent, gratifying dream-world, where pin-up girls unabashedly spread their legs to reveal that they are, in fact, menstruating, where innocent-looking nymphs torture hooded men, and where fresh-faced co-eds assault us with their casual disregard for themselves and others. Finley is influenced as much by Tarantino and Disney as by historical Dutch still-life painting and contemporary performance art. Each one of her discomfiting images implies multiple non-linear narratives and offers viewers an ambivalent, unsettling experience.

Heyd Fontenot jokingly claims to be “creat[ing] a little rest area on the highway of controlling, judgemental, porn-consuming, right-wing perversion.” Using paint on panel and paper, Fontenot strives to allow people to approach the shame and dissatisfaction they feel about their own bodies with empathy, kindness and patience. The nude figures in his paintings offer seduction and eroticism in their power. Their focused stares reject objectification and suggest that our secrets are not to be found in our pants but in our eyes.

Keira Sunshine Norton draws upon her experience as a sex worker when making her strange anthropomorphic ceramic sculptures. The works playfully encourage us to enjoy our animal natures, while also warning us of the Siren’s song. Inasmuch as the pieces evoke folk tales, they also suggest contemporary narratives about desire in which we are beset with confusion regarding how — or if — we might inhabit traditional roles.

The exhibition is supported in part by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Additional support comes from the art department of Allegheny College and the William Beazell Memorial Fund.

The exhibition, reception and slide lecture are free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday, 12:30 to 5 p.m.; Saturday, 1:30 to 5 p.m.; and Sunday, 2 to 4 p.m. The Art Galleries are located in Doane Hall of Art, which is connected to the Campus Center on the Allegheny College campus, just east of North Main Street between College and John Streets in Meadville. The Art Galleries are wheelchair accessible; gallery tours are available to groups by request. For more information, phone 814-332-4365.

Pictured artwork is by Keira Sunshine Norton

Dalton comes to Allegheny with almost 25 years of experience in higher education and a national reputation for his work in marketing, recruitment and retention. For the last three years he has been on the senior staff at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., first as senior vice president for enrollment management and most recently as senior vice president for strategic planning.

“We are delighted that Brian will be joining an already strong senior leadership team,” said Allegheny president James H. Mullen Jr. “Brian is known not only for his strategic thinking but for finding new ways to enhance the student experience at the colleges and universities where he’s served. We were particularly impressed by his emphasis on fulfilling the promises that colleges make to their students to ensure that their educations serve them for a lifetime. He is a great fit for Allegheny.”

Dalton was recently honored by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers as the sole recipient at an American college or university of an award for outstanding leadership in strategic enrollment management.

“I’ve known of Allegheny College — and the outstanding experience it provides to highly talented students — seemingly my entire life,” said Dalton, who is a native of Erie, Pa. “The opportunity to work with a visionary like President Mullen, his talented executive team, an extraordinary faculty and a committed staff is both humbling and motivating at the same time.”

As senior vice president for strategic planning at Mercer University, Dalton was responsible for the development, maintenance, evaluation and advancement of the university’s 10-year plan. During his three years as the university’s senior vice president for enrollment management, Mercer enrolled its largest freshman classes in a decade and its largest ever incoming class of international students.

Dalton served for 10 years, from 1998 to 2008, as vice president for enrollment management and associate academic dean for program development at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minn. From 1993 to 1998 he worked at the University of the Incarnate Word/Incarnate Word College in San Antonio, Texas, most recently as dean of enrollment management. Before that Dalton served as associate director of admissions at Gannon University in Erie.

He holds a B.A. in political science and a master of public administration from Gannon University. He earned a Ph.D. in education administration from the University of Texas at Austin.

Dalton’s wife, Diana, is also an Erie native. They have three children: Abby, 19; Shawn, 17; and Ian, 14.