For the Record provides information about recent professional activities and honors of University of Delaware faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Recent presentations, awards, appointments and publications include the following:

Presentations

Julie L. McGee, associate professor of Africana studies and art history, was the guest speaker at the Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. McGee gave a gallery tour and lecture in conjunction with the exhibition “Rhythm and Resilience: The Artistry of Sam Middleton.” McGee is a scholar of the African American artist Sam Middleton (1927-2015), who was born in Harlem, New York, and lived and worked in The Netherlands from 1962-2015. Middleton is best known for his collage paintings.

On Wednesday, June 5, the annual Delmarva Freight Summit took place in Newark, Delaware, presented by the Delmarva Freight Working Group, which includes the Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT), Dover/Kent County Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), Salisbury/Wicomico MPO, University of Delaware’s Institute for Public Administration (IPA), and WILMAPCO. Troy Mix, associate director of IPA, hosted and helped to coordinate the gathering. The first session’s presenters included Bayard Hogans, president of Enstructure Mid-Atlantic; Keith Kucharek, senior transportation planner, Baltimore Metropolitan Council; Kristen Scudder, freight program manager, Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC); and Daniel Farina, senior transportation planner, DVRPC. The second half of the summit included presenter Drew Morrison, policy advisor for Planning and Project Development, The Secretary’s Office, Maryland Department of Transportation; and the StripezTruckStop Travel Centers team, which is comprised of Charlene Poe, founder/CEO; Tiana Walker, co-owner/food service operations/hospitality director; and Daevon Byrdie, corporate communications director. The Freight Summit commenced with speakers from the Regional Trucking Community, including James Minner, owner of Minner Farms and president of Kent County Farm Bureau, and Bryan Ward, department chair of Commercial Transportation Studies, Delaware Technical Community College. The annual Delmarva Freight Summit enhances awareness of major freight planning programs by sharing information regarding significant freight and goods movement trends while encouraging partnership development. IPA is a research and public service center in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration.

Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, and Mark Samuels Lasner, Senior Research Fellow, UD Library, Museums and Press, both delivered invited lectures at the University of Essex on June 11, 2024. Their in-person presentations were sponsored by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Literary Studies at the university in Colchester, UK, which is dedicated to connecting literature in general and theatre in particular to legal studies, politics, gender studies, media studies, and material culture studies. Mark Samuels Lasner's lecture, titled "Why The Past Must be Preserved for the Future,” focused on the importance of printed material, original documents, and archives as crucial and irreplaceable sources of information, offering researchers knowledge that digitized versions are unable to supply. Several of his examples came from items in the Marks Samuels Lasner Collection in UD Library's Special Collections. Margaret Stetz's lecture, "Staging Secrets: Documenting 'Comfort Women' of WWII in The Apology (2022)," dealt with the question of what happens when a human rights issue, such as the military sexual slavery of Asian girls and women by the Japanese Imperial Army in the 1940s, has been incompletely documented and/or when physical documents have been destroyed. How can theatre respond by producing a form of "emotional documentation" onstage? Her talk used the example of The Apology, by a South Korean-born British playwright, which was performed recently in London and centers on the recording of a survivor's testimony in the early 1990s. 

Appointments

The past 18 months have been a period of innovation in sustainability, particularly in operations-related projects. Lessons learned during that time have led the administration to assess and evaluate the most optimal organizational structure for UD’s Office of Sustainability. Effective July 1, Jeffrey Summerhays will lead UD’s Office of Sustainability as its director.

Awards 

Jill Gugino Pante, director of the Lerner Career Services Center, was selected as one of the inaugural recipients of the Harris Wofford Joint Service Award. This award celebrates individuals who have demonstrated an extraordinary commitment to fostering a culture of service at home and abroad. Pante was honored for her dedication, hard work and impactful contributions in the U.S. and abroad through Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. The award is named after U.S. Sen. Harris L. Wofford, who was a tireless advocate of civic engagement. His significant contributions to the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps laid the groundwork for a tradition of service that has enabled generations to pursue and achieve meaningful impact. Wofford's vision was of a world where everyone could contribute to and benefit from the shared journey of making our communities, nation and globe places of opportunity, justice and peace. 

Researchers from UD’s Center for Composite Materials were recognized with awards at the annual conference of the Society for Advancement of Materials and Process Engineering (SAMPE), which took place in Long Beach, California, in May. Associate scientist Sagar Doshi and research and development engineer Sai Aditya Pradeep were recognized at the SAMPE Young Professional Emerging Leadership Awards, highlighting their significant contributions and achievements in the field of materials and process engineering. Doshi was further honored with the SAMPE Young Professional of the Year Award, given to top finalists who have demonstrated exceptional leadership and notable success in the field. UD SAMPE chapter members Andrew Brown, Shagata Das, Lukas Fuessel and Andrew Stack participated in the Student Bridge Contest, which involves designing, building and testing a miniature structural bridge using various composite materials. The team won first place in the Carbon I-Beam and Sandwich I-Beam categories and second place in the open design category.

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