Dr. Laura Baker
Professor of Computer Science, has been the program/papers chair for the Consortium for Computer Sciences in Colleges South Central Conference since 2004.

Dr. Eamonn F. Healy
In 2004 Dr. Healy supervised four students in undergraduate research with three of these presenting the results of their undergraduate research projects at last spring's twelfth Annual Senior Seminar Symposium. Subsequent to this he accompanied these, and four other students, to the 227th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim. In all St. Edward's was represented by seven student posters at the Undergraduate Research sections of the ACS meeting. In Summer of 2004 the Chemistry department had a total of thirteen students involved in our summer research program, with funding supplied both under our Welch departmental Grant and under our US Dept. of Education Title V grant. Dr. Healy was also an invited speaker at a symposium "Beyond Michael Dewar's Legacy: Modern Semiempirical MO Theory", organized by the Division of Computers in Chemistry, and held in conjunction with the ACS Meeting in Anaheim. The presentation focused on his research experiences here at St. Edward's, and was received well by a near capacity audience. A paper titled Quantitative Determination of DNA-Ligand Binding using Fluorescence Spectroscopy has submitted for publication in the Journal of Chemical Education, with a second, titled Isolation and Characterization of Lysozyme using Ion-Exchange Chromatography, High Performance Liquid Chromatography, and Capillary Electrophoresis, being readied for submission in Spring '05.

Dr. Allan Hook
Publication:
Starr, C.K. and A.W. Hook  2003.  The Aculeate Hymenoptera of Trinidad, West Indies.  Occasional Papers of the Dept. of Life Sciences, Univ. of the West Indies. No.12, pgs 1-31.
This paper lists 639 species in 17 families (wasps, bees & ants) from the islands of Trinidad & Tobago.

Field Work:
From 8 July-12 August I studied and collected insects in Trinidad.  I managed to bring back over 1400 pinned insect specimens for further study.  This work was supported by a St. Edward's faculty development grant.

On September 15, 2003, Allan Hook gave a talk on solitary wasp biology to Boy Scout Troop 10 in the Comanche District in Austin, Texas. Dr. Hook also assisted other entomologists in the organization of an insect collection at the Wild Basin Preserve of
Austin, Texas on September 23, 2003.

Dr. Fidelma O'Leary
Associate Professor in Biology, did funded research this summer with Stephen Chen and Kara Clark (Title V funding) and with Monica Ramirez, McNair funding.

Dr. William Quinn
William Quinn works with students on a wide variety of research topics.  Recently, his students have presented the results of their research at the annual meetings of the Texas Academy of Science, The American Society of Plant Biologists and the Ecological Society of America.  The focus research by Dr. Quinn's students has ranged from the effect of deer browsing on recruitment of overstory tree species, effects of leaf age on photosynthetic efficiency, and testing the accuracy of several diversity measures in the forests of the Neotropics.  Within the past three years, he and his students have conducted research in Central Texas, the mountains of southern Colorado, and the highlands of western Chiriqui (Republic of Panama). With the opening of the John Brooks Williams Natural Science Center, Dr. Quinn and his students are expanding their field research into controlled environments provided by our new state-of ­the-art Jimmy T. Mills Greenhouse aand several growth chambers.  They are also working in partnership with ecologists at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin.  Dr. Quinn and Dr. Allan Hook are also working with students under the auspices of the Br. Lucian Blersch Endowment and under a multi-year United States Department of Agriculture grant that funds student research and paid United States Forest Service internships.

Faculty and student joint endeavors:
Faculty member Dr. Michael P. Saclolo and students Andrew Beck, Heather Bruch, Bobby Grizzard, and Will Jaramillo, attended the Texas Oklahoma Research Undergraduate Symposium (TORUS) held at the campus of East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma. All four students presented their research.
Eight students presented their undergraduate research results at the School of Natural Sciences Senior Seminar Symposium in March 2007. They were Steven Ayala (Dr. Edward Early), Jesse Barbour, Andrew Beck, Erica Miller (Dr. Jean McKemie), Bobby Grizzard, Daliah Maurer, (Dr. Michael Saclolo), Will Jaramillo, and Omar Mohammed (Dr. Michael Engquist), with the faculty supervisor given in parentheses after each student or group of students. See http://www.stedwards.edu/science/events/senior.html
for the titles and abstracts.

Ten students and five faculty members attended the MAA TX section meeting in Edinburg in April. Students Heather Bruch, Daliah Maurer, Caitlyn Phillips, Steven Ayala, Andrew Beck, Adam Castillo, Bobby Grizzard, Will Jaramillo, Michael Johnston, Xavier Renteria attended. Faculty attending were Dr. Michael Engquist, Dr. Jean McKemie, Dr. Cindy Naples, David Naples, and Dr. Michael Saclolo, all of whom served as judges for student talks.

Six of our students spoke on their research:
Andrew Beck (worked with Dr. Jean McKemie) gave a talk on Much Ado about Nothing-Zeros of the nth Partial Sums of the Complex Exponential Series.
Heather Bruch (mostly from Iowa REU but also Dr. McKemie and Dr. David Wright ) gave a talk on Bringing the Symmetries of String Theory to Life: Geometric Action of Kac-Moody Algebra. Her talk won a prize for best in her session.
Steven Ayala (worked with Dr. Edward Early) talked on Nice Polynomials,
 Bobby Grizard (worked with Dr. Michael Saclolo) talked on What does Sperner's Lemma tell us about Positive Matrices, and
 Will Jaramillo (worked with Dr. Michael Engquist) talked on RSA Cryptography.
Daliah Maurer (worked with Dr. Michael Saclolo) spoke on Mathematical Analysis of HIV.

Faculty research and scholarly activity:

Dr. Edward Early
Dr. Early gave a talk on Posets and Mobius Functions, to the Austin Math Circle, sponsored by the UT Saturday Morning Math Group, on April 12, 2008. This summer he attended the 20th Annual International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (FPSAC) in Valparaiso Vina del Mar, Chile.

Dr. Carol Gee
Dr. Gee's research student, Caitlyn Philips, gave a research presentation at the Texas Section MAA meeting at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, TX, April 3-5, 2008.  Her talk was entitled "Computing S-equivalence in Knots and Links". 

Dr. James McGuffee, Associate Professor of Computer Science, works in the area computer programming languages.  He has several recent publications and presentations.

• McGuffee, James W. “Programming Languages and the Biological Sciences”, The Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Volume 22, Number 4, April 2007.
• "Try Ruby!", James McGuffee, Jay Blanco*, and Franz Wambach*.  A tutorial presentation at the South Central Regional Conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, April 2008.  (note: Blanco and Wambach are St. Edward's University students)
• "Ruby in the Computer Science Classroom", James McGuffee, Technical presentation at the Lone Star Ruby Conference, September 2008.

Dr. Jean McKemie 
Dr. McKemie attended the Lars Ahlfors Centennial mathematics conference in Helsinki Finland, August 17-Aug 25, 2007 and served as session chair for one of the parallel sessions on Tuesday Aug. 21. She presented Using Technically Speaking Videos to Help Students Prepare Talks" and served as student paper judge at the Texas Section MAA meeting at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, TX, April 3-5, 2008.   Two of her research students gave presentations at this meeting.  Jonathan Sanders, gave a talk entitled "An Exploration into the Efficiency of Genetic Algorithms", which was selected best undergraduate presentation in the session on Biomathematics: Amphibians, Insects, and Genetics.  Xavier Renteria gave a talk entitled "Sudoku Puzzles and Cayley Tables of Small Order n “.  Dr. McKemie also attended the Quasiconformal Mappings and Analysis on Metric Spaces conference at the University of Michigan, May 12-16, 2008.

Mr. David Naples
Mr. Naples attended the Texas Sectional Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers in October 2007 where he participated in two workshops: (1) Using PhET (Physics Education Technology) Simulations in  physics classes; (2) Radiation and Health Science Teachers' Workshop. In April 2008 he attended the TSAAPT at Texas A&M Kingsville. This year St. Ed's Physics lab was a field trip option for CAST. The Conference for the Advancement of Science Teaching sent 6 participants to SEU to experience some computer assisted lab experiments, "Picket fence" method for determining the acceleration of gravity and a projectile motion experiment.  He also attended the Texas Section MAA meeting where he served as student paper judge.

Dr. Michael Saclolo
Dr. Saclolo attended the Texas Section MAA meeting where he served as student paper judge.  His research student, Adam Castillo, gave a research presentation entitled "Revealing the Mysteries of Pandiagonal Magic Squares", which was selected best undergraduate presentation in the session on Number Theory, Probability, and Combinatorics.  Dr.  Saclolo also attended the MAA Professional Enhancement Program workshop on Expository Writing in Mathematics (June 30-July 3, 2008), at the MAA Carriage House in Washington, DC.

Dr. Donald Wharry
Worked with three students in 2007-8 school year of biodiesel production and pesticide analysis. Kara Strickland presented paper at spring ACS convention - Conversion of triglyceride to methyl ester in improved process for production of biodiesel.