Oleg Kravchenko, Charge d’Affaires of Belarus in the U.S., invited RU geography professor Grigory Ioffe to visit his country in Decem-

ber. All of Ioffe’s expenses during the trip will be paid by Belarus’s government.

Kravchenko invited Ioffe, who published a book about the country in 2008, to lend his expertise about the country to a group of visiting American social scientists to help them better understand Belarus.

Representatives from the Center for Strategic and Inter-national Studies, the Carne-gie Endowment for Interna-tional Peace, the Heritage Foundation, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Congres-sional Research Service, the Jamestown Foundation and Yale University will be visiting Belarus December 12—15.

In the letter of invitation to Ioffe, Kravchenko says, “knowing you as one of the best American researchers of modern Belarus and the au-thor of the ‘Understanding Belarus and How Western Foreign Policy Misses the Mark,’ which I consider to be a fundamental and compre-

hensive book on my country, as well as one of the best books about Belarus pub-

lished in the United States, I would like to invite you to join this

group and visit Belarus with the main aim of further research on my country and its foreign and domestic policies, meeting the leadership of Belarus, other offi-cials and the people of Belarus, and making your own conclusions about what you have seen and heard in Bela-rus.”

In Ioffe’s book, he chal-lenged the conventional wisdom about Belarus as “Europe’s last dictatorship.” He says a major problem for Belarus is its weak na-tional identity. “For example, 80 percent of Belarusians do not even consider Russia to be a foreign country,” says Ioffe. The political regime in Belarus is now on the fore-front of shaping its country’s national identity.

According to Ioffe, the Bela-rusian leadership is keenly interested in a closer relation-ship with the US. Previously, they invited a group of Ameri-can businessmen to the country to speak with its lead-ers including president Alex-ander Lukashenka. Now the country is inviting American social scientists.

Ioffe says he was surprised when he received the letter from Kravchenko. “I was intrigued,” says Ioffe. “As most people, I never ever met a head of state (any state) in person. I have only seen them on television,” he adds.

Ioffe has family roots in Bela-rus. “My mother was born and raised in Belarus. My ancestors from my mother’s side live in Belarus for at least a couple of centuries,” says Ioffe. “When I lived in Moscow, Russia, for the first 39 years of my life, I traveled multiple times to Belarus to visit my grandparents,” he

says.

From 1999 to 2001 he started read-ing some English-language publications about the country and saw that he

could make a contribution to Belarus scholarship as a specialist in human geogra-phy.

Ioffe is looking forward to his upcoming international trip. “I am looking forward to the opportunity to meet the mem-bers of Belarus’s leadership, including the president who assigned two hours of his time to meeting the group of Americans, including myself,” he says.

He says he is also emotion-ally attached to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, which he visited more than 20 times.

Embassy of Belarus Honors Ioffe with Invitation

Upcoming Events: • Museum of the Earth Sciences Lecture,

Alton “Butch” Dooley from Virginia Mu-seum of Natural History, Dec. 7, 7 p.m. in Bonnie Auditorium

• Winter Commencement Dec. 18 at 10 a.m. in Bondurant Auditorium

CSAT Faculty Participate in STEM Conference 2

Students Create Website to Help Disadvantaged 2

Physics Faculty Present Barrow Research 3

Biology Students Research Medicinal Plant 3

CSAT STEM Club News 4

Inside this issue:

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December 2, 2010

Ioffe at a lake in central Belarus

Minsk, Belarus

is 50% to 80% of the AMI, and moderate status is capped at $5,500 above the low-income limit. Landes and Adkins created an online calcu-lator for Collinsville Section 515 apartment complex Longwood Village to be used on its website by prospective renters to help them determine if they qualify for the reduced rent program. The residents input information about how much they are paid per week for how many weeks per year and their preference for a one bedroom or two bedroom apartment.

Information technology students Jeremy Landes and Cameron Adkins recently pre-sented their project for Dan Spillman’s ITEC 485: Expert and Decision Support Systems class that offers low income residents in rural Collinsville, Va., assistance in determining if they qualify for Section 515 rental housing.

The Section 515 program is administered by the US Department of Agriculture and is specifically designed for rural areas. More than one-third of rural renters, about 1.9 million households, are cost burdened, pay-ing more than 30% of their income for their housing. Meanwhile, one in every ten rural rental households lives in either severely or moderately inadequate housing. Those living in substandard housing receive top priority for Section 515 loans; next pref-erence goes to very low-income households. Very low income is defined as below 50% of the area median income (AMI), low income

A decision support system (DSS) was used to create the rent calculator, and PHP: hy-pertext preprocessor (PHP) code and Word-Press was used to code the website.

Page 2

CSAT Faculty Participated in S.T.E.M. Conference at Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center

IT Students Create Website to Help Disadvantaged Find Housing

From the Dean’s Desk

CSAT faculty members Neil Sigmon, Agida Manizade, Laura Jacobsen, Carrie Case, Donna and Cliff Boyd and Brenda Hastings involved hundreds of sixth grade girls from Washington, Smyth and Russell Counties and the City of Bristol in activities such as map col-oring, math origami, forensic anthropology, fun with tessellations, cryptography and geofun for everyone!

The purpose of the conference held on Novem-ber 19 is to introduce more than 700 budding scientists and mathematicians to careers in science, technology, engineering and mathe-matics through hands-on workshops led by female chemists, engineers, doctors, program-mers and other professionals from ten indus-tries and four colleges.

Top left: Laura Jacobsen teaching Map Coloring

Top right: Agida Manizade teaching Geofun for Everyone!

Middle left: Brenda Hastings teaching Fun with Tes-sellations

Middle right: Carrie Case teaching Unfolding Mathe-matics with Origami

Bottom left: Donna and Cliff Boyd teaching Forensic Anthropology

Left to right: Cam-eron Adkins and Jeremy Landes

Physics faculty member Rhett Herman, RU physics graduate Jeremy McLaughlin, physics major Jason McLarty, Southwest Virginia Governor’s School and RU Arctic Geophysics special topics course student Biyuan Zhaogoing, and Southwest Virginia Governor’s School teacher and RU phys-ics graduate Dan Blake will present re-search conducted and completed during and after the spring 2010 Barrow, Alaska, trip at the annual fall meeting of the Ameri-can Geophysical Union Dec. 12—17, 2010. The poster presentations will be based on their ground penetrating radar work on the arctic sea ice in Barrow, Alaska.

Also, physics adjunct instructor Mythiane Shelton will present her poster about the educational outreach she coordinated in Barrow. Its title is “Good Morning from Barrow, Alaska! Helping K-12 students

understand the importance of research.”

While at the meeting, Herman will also chair a discussion session about inversion techniques in geophysics—how scientists reconstruct the world from the remote

sensing data they collect.

vested medicinal plants in eastern North America forests. Its roots and rhizomes are sold for use in hormone replacement therapies and treatment of menopausal symptoms. However, nearly all black cohosh sold commercially is harvested from wild populations, meaning that once it is uprooted from the grown nothing is being replanted. So, the conservation status of this species is unknown.

The team studied wild cohosh populations at two sites in south-west Virginia - Reddish Knob in the George Washington-Jefferson National Forest and the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. The plants were dug up and ex-

perimentally harvested by removing

This summer, 19 Biology majors led by biology faculty member Christine Small and Jim Chamber-lain from the USDA For-est Service continued the research started in 2007 on black cohosh (Actaea racemosa). With funding from the United States Department of Agriculture Forest Ser-vice and internal grants from Radford University, the team has been able to assess wild harvesting impacts on “Non-Timber Forest Resources” in U.S. National Forests.

Black Cohosh, a wild-flower native to the southern Appalachian Mountains, is one of the most widely har-

certain amounts of the plant and then placing the plants back into the ground at specific locations. The team wants to find out if the plant can replenish itself by leaving a certain amount in the ground when harvesting.

The group determined that intense harvest-ing of black cohosh has caused severed reductions in its population, it takes more than one year for the black cohosh to re-cover from harvesting, and further study of low to moderate harvesting is needed to establish sustainable levels of the plant. In addition, the plant was unable to replenish itself even after leaving a part of the plant in the ground during harvest.

-Cameron Elliott

Page 3

RU Physics Faculty and Students Present Arctic Research

Biology Students Research Medicinal Plant Black Cohosh

Biology students harvesting black cohosh at Reddish Knob.

The CSAT STEM Club collected 284 items for the Highlander Helper Backpack Pro-gram as a part of its community outreach efforts. The items were donated by faculty, staff and students and collected from CSAT offices and buildings across campus.

November 30 was the club’s last meeting for the fall semester. Meetings will resume in January. The exact date will be announced later. CSAT STEM Club president Arielle Reynolds will be graduating in December, so vice president Erin Fowler will become president. The new vice president will be Jonathan Pingilley, and Jonathan Gautney will become the new treasurer.

For our spring fieldtrip, we will visit the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. The choices for our trips were the Discovery Place in Charlotte, NC, the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., and the Zoo in Asheboro, NC.

Dr. Laura Jacobsen also provided the club members with information about internship opportunities from www.pathwaystoscience.org, which has both graduate and under-graduate programs funded by NSF and NASA and over 450 paid summer research experiences. The other internship opportunity was from NASA and more information can be found at http://intern.nasa.gov/.

There will also be a talk held on December 7 at 7 p.m. in the Bonnie Auditorium by Dr. Alton Dooley from the Virginia Museum of Natural History. His talk will be on “If there were no sexual dimorphism, sex wouldn’t sell-the first fossil beaked whale from the Carmel Church Quarry”.

Dr. Jacobsen is recruiting volunteers for the Science Exploration Day scheduled for Saturday, March 26 and for the CSAT Open House scheduled for Saturday, February 12. For more information or to volunteer please e-mail Dr. Jacobsen at Ljacobsen@radford.edu.

- Jasmine Jackson

Secretary, CSAT STEM Club

PO Box 6936 Radford University

Radford, Va. 24142

CSAT Bi -weekly New sle t ter

Phone: 540-831-5958 Fax: 540-831-5957

E-mail: jorogers@radford.edu

Innovation Inspired

www.radford.edu/csat

CSAT STEM Club News

CSAT STEM Club collected 284 food items from CSAT faculty, staff and students for impover-ished children in Radford as a part of the Highlander Helper Back-pack Program.