Notables

Former Truman women’s tennis player Lindsy Blair has been awarded one of 58 NCAA Postgraduate Scholarships given to spring-sports participants. Blair, a senior this past season, is the 14th Bulldog student-athlete since 2003 to pick up the prestigious award. The NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship program awards up to 174 grants annually (87 men, 87 women) regardless of division. The awards of $7,500 apiece are given to student-athletes who excel academically and athletically in their respective sport season. Created in 1964, the program promotes and encourages postgraduate education by rewarding the Association’s most accomplished student-athletes through their participation in NCAA sports. Blair recently graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and is pursuing her master’s in education.

May graduate Elizabeth Bonanno, student president of Truman’s chapter of Sigma Delta Pi, the National Collegiate Hispanic Honor Society, received the prestigious Gabriela Mistral Award for her academic achievements as a Spanish major and her role in her chapter’s activities. The Gabriela Mistral Award is granted by Sigma Delta Pi’s national headquarters and may be presented to only one person per chapter annually. The honor is reserved for outstanding graduate or undergraduate students of Spanish who are active members of Sigma Delta Pi.

Accounting faculty members Debra Kerby, Keith Harrison, and Sandra Fleak had their article “Teaching-A Win-Win Opportunity,” accepted for publication in The CPA Journal.

Students Chelle King Porter and Kurt Warnhoff, along with Tim Walston, assistant professor of biology, attended the 17th International Caenorhabditis elegans meeting at UCLA June 24-28. King Porter, a master’s student in biology, presented a poster entitled “Effect of folic acid on cell migration during hypodermal morphogenesis.” Warnhoff, a biology student and member of the Math-Bio community, was supported by the NSF RLC grant to present a poster entitled “Segmenting early embryogenesis in Caenorhabditis elegans.”

Tim Walston, assistant professor of biology
had two papers published recently in the journal Developmental Biology. They are titled: “The N- or C-terminal domains of DSH-2 can activate the C. elegans Wnt/beta-catenin asymmetry pathway” and “CWN-1 functions with DSH-2 to regulate C. elegans asymmetric neuroblast division in a beta-catenin independent Wnt pathway.” Both papers investigate the genetic mechanisms driving cell polarity and migration during embryogenesis.

The Truman women’s basketball team was recently ranked at No. 17 on the WBCA’s Academic top-25 team honor roll. Under first-year head coach Michael Smith, the Bulldog women’s squad compiled a team grade point average of 3.461 and were just three one-hundredths of a point from reaching the Division II top-10. Truman was the only squad from the MIAA to crack the top-25. The award marks the third time in five seasons that Truman has finished in the WBCA Academic top-25, following back-to-back 24th-place finishes in 2005 and 2006.
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