Meet our faculty

Here's how our professors step off the syllabus

Nursing professor Martha DeCesere ’85 helps first-year students move into their dorm rooms. Gail Marchigiano brings pizza into the nursing lab on a Sunday night when she comes in to offer a review session. Steve Bridge plays basketball with students every Tuesday. Last winter, sociology professor Dale Brooker slept overnight in a cardboard box outside Alfond Hall to promote the student Habitat for Humanity chapter. In other words, engaging students at Saint Joseph’s often goes way beyond classroom instruction. Read full story.

Discovery of new species spurs biologist to expand Caribbean research

Now retired, biology professor Ray Gerber and Scott O’Donnell ’06 bushwhacked through mangrove swamps, slogged through mud-bottomed ponds and swatted mosquitoes, while gulping Gatorade to keep ahead of the steamy tropical heat. Dr. Gerber and O’Donnell were sampling ponds … on an island in the Caribbean. Okay, it was the stunning Virgin Islands National Park in January, but, still, it was scientific field sampling. Read full story.

Marine science professor targets harmful red tide in Casco Bay

Dr. Greg Teegarden wants to know much more about how red tide develops in nearby Casco Bay. A sophisticated tracking buoy purchased with a National Science Foundation grant should now give him and his students a much better picture of these toxic algae blooms by collecting new kinds of data in Harpswell Sound – a part of the bay that suffers from recurring red tides and the shellfifish contamination it causes.
Teegarden, a marine science professor who has published widely on red tide, relies on the buoy to send real-time profiles on weather conditions, tides, temperature, salinity, current speeds, nutrient concentrations, and chlorophyll concentrations in order to track how toxic algae blooms develop. The buoy continuously records and transmits these conditions, all of which can point to algae levels in the water. Read full story.

Art professor wins Olympic Ring Award

Art professor Scott Fuller was awarded a prestigious Olympic Ring Award in Beijing, China, as part of the Olympic Landscape Sculpture Contest. Fuller’s sculpture was one of 50 Ring Award winners out of 290 finalists selected as “Excellent Works.” The sculpture featured a series of towering gates, each designed to resemble a flame. Of the finalists, 29 entrants received gold, silver, and bronze medals, followed by the Ring Award winners.
Read full story.

On the front lines with the avian flu
Professor Sharon Martin gets proactive

Last summer professor Sharon Martin was preparing for her Community Health Nursing course when she discovered she had to make avian flu not only the focus of the class period on emerging diseases, but her own professional focus, as well. That’s because when she searched the nursing journals, she could find no mention of the flu – despite the fact that it could be “devastating and life-altering” if human-to-human transmission creates a world-wide epidemic, or pandemic.

Alarmed by the seeming lack of discussion in the broader nursing community, she began her own campaign to spread the word about a virus that could spread widely and rapidly. If the virus ends up transmitting from human to human, Martin says nurses will be on the front lines. “They need to know the symptoms, so they can protect themselves and their patients,” she says. “Otherwise, they become part of the contagion.” Read full story.

Oceanographer receives second National Science Foundation grant

Associate professor of marine science Mark Green has received a $419,000 National Science Foundation grant to continue his research on clam species in nearby Casco Bay. The three-year grant, which is the second Dr. Green has received from the National Science Foundation, will include field work along the shoreline in Freeport and South Portland.

The new study will definitively answer why so many juvenile hardshell and softshell clams die, says Green. His earlier study, which suggested tiny clams die because their shells dissolve under naturally occurring acidic conditions, countered a nearly 100-year-old theory suggesting predation as the dominant cause. Roughly 98 percent of clams die off within the first two weeks of life in the ocean sediment, leading to far fewer harvestable adults. Read full story.

Professor creates special program for rural children
When authors talk, children listen

Education professor Cynthia Mowles noticed at an author series at Portland Public Library how much the school classes attending enjoyed listening to children’s book authors read their work and talk about it. It made her think about how schoolchildren in rural Maine needed to hear them as well. She set about making that happen, and, for the second year in a row, it has. Dr. Mowles and grants coordinator Elizabeth Schran worked together to raise nearly $5,000 to bring authors to schoolchildren in outlying areas, among other programming. Read full story.

Blogging to a classroom near you

At the beginning of 1999, only about two dozen blogs appeared on the Internet. By April 2006, that number had skyrocketed to 35 million. Realizing the potential of blogs, history professor Michelle Laughran and criminal justice professor Dale Brooker put them to work as a teaching tool in the spring semester. Read full story.

The health of the Gulf of Maine?

To many people, the Atlantic Ocean is simply vast, open water. To Greg Teegarden and Mark Green – professors of marine and environmental science – it is a vibrant world with a complex ecology. And the Gulf of Maine is their neighborhood.
“As a boy I spent my summer vacations on Cape Cod, walking around tide pools, fishing, digging for clams,” Green says. “The passion never left me.” For decades, both men have explored the Gulf of Maine, a stretch of sea that lies between Cape Cod and the southern tip of Nova Scotia, including the historically rich fishing grounds of Georges Bank. As boys, both Green and Teegarden played along the shore and fell in love with the sea. Read full story.

Impressions from Skopje: Professor Beth Richardson writes about her first days in Macedonia as a Fulbright scholar

The Skopje airport was filled with feral cats, walking, climbing over radiators, counters and abandoned trunks….After a ride through what seemed in the dusk to be a series of war-torn neighborhoods, we arrived at my street. My landlord’s daughter, Svetlana, greeted me in perfect English and a warm hug. Her mother and father do not speak English (although both use “OK” and “No Problem” rather well).
I was excited. The apartment was small, clean, and had crocheted covers or a tablecloth on every surface, reminding me of my Albanian grandmother’s house – except for the DVD and VCR. The fridge contained the basics of Macedonian life – bottled water, clementines from Greece, butter for the bread and a can of Turkish coffee. Read full story.

Revamped math class for liberal arts majors
Why the last math course of their life could be the best

“Heart” is not a term often paired with “math.” But three years ago, two Saint Joseph’s professors adopted a radically different approach to the math course for liberal arts majors, one where equations don’t fill up the board and students don’t try to memorize them. What they do is learn to think in a new way – one embraced in a book called The Heart of Mathematics.

Dr. David Pinchbeck calls the book a gem. In his restructured Contemporary Math course, students learn about big ideas in math, like infinity and the fourth dimension, like symmetry and chaos theory. Or how any type of vote counting system becomes imperfect once there are more than two candidates. Read full story.

Ed Hellenbeck's marketing class is tough, but students love it.

Mix together a lot of energy with a little edge and you've got business professor Ed Hellenbeck. He spent 20 years as a vice president and manager at Unum, a major player in the disability insurance field. Much of that time he worked in marketing and customer service, a background that carries over in how he listens to students and meets their needs while demanding they perform at a high standard. In his words and in the students words- read full story.

Bringing John Ford home

John Ford, one of America’s most revered directors, won six Academy Awards for Best Director – more than any other director. In 1973, he was the first person chosen to receive the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award and is often credited with forging the career of John Wayne, his favorite actor whom he directed in films such as “Stagecoach” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” But long before his success in Hollywood, Ford was the scrappy 11th child of an Irish family from Portland, Maine. History professor Dr. Michael Connolly, another Irishman from Portland, has turned the spotlight on Ford’s early years in a soon-to-be-published book of essays, called John Ford in Focus: Essays on the Filmmaker’s Life and Work. Read full story.

faculty research

Dr. Marilyn Sunderman, RSM, (Theology) presented two papers, "Life in Mercy: The Call to be Ambassadors of Reconciliation" and "Thomas Merton and the Seasons of Solitude and Love" at the annual Mercy Association in Scripture and Theology conference. These papers were published in The MAST Journal. She also presented "Called to Community: Beckoned by the Trinity" at the Pines Spirituality Center, and published "Thomas Merton on the Ethic of Nonviolence" in The MAST Journal.

Sharon Martin (Nursing) published "Pandemic Economics: Financial Survival for Homecare Agencies in a Bird Flu Outbreak;" "Code flu: Common sense steps to the development of an agency pandemic flu plan for home care;" "Teaching evidence-based practice to undergraduate nursing students: Overcoming obstacles;" and "Infection Control Matters-Mumps Update" in a number of health care magazines.

Dr. Edward J. Rielly (English) published two books: Sitting Bull: A Biography and Old Whitman Loved Baseball and Other Baseball Poems. He contributes to Detectives in the Classroom, wrote poems for Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About the Game, was among the poets whose haiku were read on the program Selected Shorts on National Public Radio, and published poetry in six literary magazines.