News

Ten Siena College students spent a week in the Dominican Republic during winter break. Rather than relaxing on the beach they were working with Franciscan sisters in Santo Domingo as part of a service trip sponsored by the Sr. Thea Bowman Center for Women. The group worked in health clinics and taught young children in the community of Los Tres Brazos.

After receiving a certificate of attendance in 2011, former Siena student Pierre-Louis Joizil returned to his hometown of Fontaine, Haiti with a strong plan for change that has led to involvement from the College community.

A standing-room-only crowd in the Sarazen Student Union erupted last Saturday night when history major Andrew Ford ’13 was crowned Mr. Siena. Ford won the annual contest, a beauty pageant of sorts, which gives eight men from Siena College a chance to show off their talent to benefit Habit for Humanity, an organization that has helped to build or repair more than 600,000 affordable houses for low-income people.

Economically and ecologically minded, Jason Hofstein, Ph. D. developed a completely paperless course using iPads instead of paper for every aspect of the class, including his lectures, student note taking, exams and quizzes.

During winter break, 22 students joined eight faculty members on a trip to Italy, the birthplace of the Franciscan tradition on which Siena College was founded. The trip, called “Religious Treasures of Italy,” took the group on a tour around the country, exploring the historic and religious aspects of each city visited, including Rome, Venice, Florence, Assisi and, of course, Siena.

Siena College Assistant Professor of Physics John Moustakas, Ph.D. was recently awarded two grants from the Space Telescope Science Institute to analyze observations obtained using NASA’s premier space-based observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope.

Siena College is promoting leadership among its women students through the “Saint Clare Leadership Series: Ours to Do – Women Leading the Way.” What started out as a lecture series has become a springboard for other opportunities and initiatives.

Todd Snyder, assistant professor of English, speaks with a West Virginian twang and doesn’t care for the term “pop culture.” He is perhaps the last person that you would expect to be teaching a class studying hip-hop as poetry, called “Rhetoric(s) of Hip-Hop Culture.”

Siena College has been awarded a highly competitive grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to design and deliver the workshop titled “Heaven on Earth: Shakers, Religious Revival and Social Reform in America.” The NEH grant is worth more than $175,000.

The Eastern New York State Chapter of the Fulbright Scholar Program recently celebrated Siena College students, professors and alumni who have received the prestigious, government-funded award.