Other News

  • A research center dedicated to ending violence against women is building on its successes.

     Nine faculty and staff members are gathered around a conference table in Huddleston Hall. Each has carved out a space amidst the papers, bagels, laptops, bananas, and coffee for a four-hour retreat. Today’s goal? To plan the future of their research center, Prevention Innovations. The tenor of the room is hopeful, excited. The future is filled with possibility. That’s partly because the past has been such an unmitigated success for this collection of scholars.

    Established at UNH in the fall of 2006, Prevention Innovations has, in its relatively short life, established its faculty as national leaders in research and practices for ending violence against women. Though the center has a half-dozen projects going at any one time, one of its most widely...

  • The presidents and chancellor of New Hampshire’s public four-year colleges and universities have thanked Gov. Maggie Hassan for her biennial budget proposal, in which she recommends increasing funding on behalf of in-state students to $75 million in FY14 and $90 million in FY15. 

    “We are grateful to Governor Hassan for her leadership in re-establishing public higher education as a priority for the future of New Hampshire,” said Todd Leach, president of Granite State College, on behalf of the presidents of the four, four-year public colleges and universities. “Our students and their families deserve this investment, and all New Hampshire citizens will benefit. We look forward to working with the governor and the legislature to restore the budget fully as soon as fiscally possible.”

    In addition to his role at Granite State, Leach will serve as interim chancellor of the University System of New Hampshire when Chancellor Ed MacKay retires March 1. 

    The...

  • On Monday, Feb. 18, weekday bus service between Rochester and UNH began with the Wildcat Transit’s new Route 125/Rochester Express. Seven runs will be offered daily, Monday through Friday.  The ride between Rochester and UNH takes about 35 minutes. The one-way fare is $1.50; passengers with valid UNH student or employee IDs ride free.  

    A celebration of the Route 125/Rochester Express’s inaugural run was held Monday when the bus arrived at the bus shelter on Main Street near Thompson Hall.

     

  • Marty Scarano, UNH director of Athletics; Dr. Stephen Hardy and Donna Hardy, parents of Nate Hardy; Sgt. Christy Gardner, retired U.S. Army sergeant, member of UNH sled hockey team and U.S. National Team; Keely Ames, Northeast Passage operations coordinator; Dot Sheehan, UNH senior associate athletic director of external relations and Operation Hat Trick founder; and Moxie the dog. Photo courtesy Gil Talbot.

    Operation Hat Trick (OHT), UNH's athletics department and Northeast Passage (NEP) announced Monday the creation of the NEP Athlete Opportunity Fund, a collaborative partnership that will be funded in part by OHT to provide supplemental programmatic support for recruiting, training and coaching of student-athletes with...

  • In her office in Kingsbury Hall, Erin Bell is explaining her research. “When you go to a doctor, they don’t just look at you. They do blood work; they run tests. Bridge instrumentation and testing is almost like an EKG of a bridge. You gather data, and looking at that data you can tell if something needs to be done prior to a collapse.” 

    Bell delivers this explanation with infectious enthusiasm. An associate professor in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences (CEPS), Bell was chosen in 2007 as only the second-ever UNH civil engineering faculty member to receive a prestigious National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development award. Since then, she’s been hard at work on her project, “Integrating Structural Health Monitoring, Intelligent Transportation Systems and Model Updating Into a Bridge Condition Assessment...

  • Gail Fensom works in a laboratory. But, instead of pouring over beakers of bubbling concoctions, her experiments are human.

    "I would consider myself a teacher-researcher," says Fensom, assistant professor of English and director of the first-year writing program at UNH Manchester. "So my research basically is my students. My classrooms are my research labs and my students are my subjects."

    Fensom has used what she's learned in her classrooms at UNH Manchester to help college students pick up the writing and reading fundamentals they may have missed along the way. Her passion for her craft has led her to spread this mission of helping students to be prepared for college and careers throughout the state and nationally.

    Fensom started teaching at the University of New Hampshire in 1986 and is presently the director of the college’s first year writing program. Throughout the years, she's used her classes as research to figure out what made students unprepared time...

  • U.S. lodging executives were more optimistic about general business conditions in January than the prior month, according to the UNH Lodging Executives Sentiment Index (LESI) for the current month ending January 2013. The index increased from 53.8 in December 2012 to 61.7 in January 2013.  

    “This increase results from lodging executives’ positive opinions of the present general business conditions for their properties, as well as their positive sentiment for how they view general business conditions 12 months in the future. Expectations about room reservations during the same 12-month period also moved upward,” said Nelson Barber, associate professor of hospitality management, who manages the index. 

    Twenty-seven percent of lodging executives indicated current business conditions were good, an improvement from 15 percent last period, while 67 percent indicated conditions were normal, down from 69 percent during the same period. Seven percent of the...

  • Whether you are at home, at work, in a public place, or on the UNH campus, it’s likely you are often in areas served by natural gas pipelines. Across the U.S., more than 2.2 million miles of pipelines and mains deliver natural gas for use by residential, commercial and industrial customers. 

    Like all forms of energy, natural gas must be handled properly. Despite an excellent safety record, a gas leak caused by damage to a pipeline may pose a hazard and has the potential to ignite.

    On the Durham campus there are two underground gas piping networks beneath the roads and grounds of campus. EcoLine™, UNH’s landfill gas-to-energy project, delivers processed landfill gas to campus for use in our two gas turbines via a 12” underground transmission pipeline beginning 12.6 miles away at the Waste Management Turnkey Landfill in Rochester and terminating at the central heating plant on Library Way. There is also a distribution network of smaller diameter underground natural...

  • Abusive bosses who target employees with ridicule, public criticism, and the silent treatment not only have a detrimental effect on the employees they bully, but they negatively impact the work environment for the co-workers of those employees who suffer from “second-hand” or vicarious abusive supervision, according to new research from UNH. 

    In the first ever study to investigate vicarious supervisory abuse, Paul Harvey, associate professor of organizational behavior at UNH, and his research colleagues Kenneth Harris and Raina Harris from Indiana University Southeast and Melissa Cast from New Mexico State University find that vicarious supervisory abuse is associated with job frustration, abuse of other coworkers, and a lack of perceived organizational support beyond the effects of the abusive supervisor. 

    The research is presented in the Journal of Social Psychology in the article “An Investigation of Abusive Supervision, Vicarious Abuse Supervision, and...

  • NH SBDC launches its exporting e-courses at its advisory board meeting. From left to right: Tim Dining, Greenerd Press & Machine Co.; Janice Gregory, NH SBDC; Liz Gray, NH DRED; Erle Pierce, Pierce Public Affairs; Fred Kocher, Kocher & Co.; Maura Weston, MM Weston & Assoc.; Jonathan Smith, TD Bank; Mary Collins, NH SBDC; Scott Merrick, Office of U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen; Adria Bagshaw, W.H. Bagshaw; Jason Cannon, NH SBDC; Paul Creme, Hamblett & Kerrigan; Heidi Edwards Dunn, NH SBDC; and Greta Johansson, U.S. Small Business Administration.

    The UNH New Hampshire Small Business Development Center (NH SBDC) has launched two e-courses on exporting as part of its new exporting portal.

    “Basics of...

  • Abused children who are removed from their homes are likely to be placed voluntarily in the homes of other family members instead of other placement arrangements, according to new research from the Carsey Institute at UNH.  

    The new research is presented in the Carsey Institute brief “Informal Kinship Care Most Common Out-of- Home Placement After an Investigation of Child Maltreatment” conducted by Wendy Walsh, research associate professor of sociology at the UNH Crimes against Children Research Center and research associate at the Carsey Institute. 

    Walsh looked at placement patterns nationally in both rural and urban areas. She evaluated whether abused children were placed in foster care, formal kinship care (state has legal custody and places the child with a family member), informal kinship care (a parent voluntarily places a child with a family member), or group homes or other out-of-home settings, such as emergency...

  • Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership (PREP), a University of New Hampshire-based organization, has received a donation of $10,000 from NextEra Energy Seabrook Station for water monitoring and research efforts. This donation comes on the heels of PREP’s 2013 State of Our Estuaries Report, which called for increased investment in the data collection (monitoring) and research being conducted in the Great Bay and Hampton Seabrook estuaries.  

    “Funds for data collection are extremely limited, and it is more important than ever to have complete data sets from areas throughout our watershed to help provide a clear understanding of the health of our estuaries. This investment from Next Era will have a significant impact in terms of the information we can provide back to our partners and communities as a tool for local decision-making,” says Rachel Rouillard, PREP’s executive director. 

    NextEra’s donation will go to sustaining current...

  • 2013 Chinese New Year Gala sponsored by the Confucius Institute at UNH took place Feb. 4 in the Johnson Theater. Seven performers with Chengdu University were joined by seven local artists from China for the evening festivities, which included singing, dancing, musical performances, and martial arts.

     

    2013 Confucius Institute Celebration of the Chinese New Year

    2013 Confucius Institute Celebration of the Chinese New Year

    ...

  • The Office of the Senior Vice Provost for Engagement and Academic Outreach will be conducting an internal search for a UNH faculty member to fill the position of executive director for Engagement and Faculty Development. This is a full time appointment reporting directly to the Senior Vice Provost for Engagement and Academic Outreach. A position description with qualifications and expectations for the position are attached.

    This internal search will follow a process similar to other successful internal searches recently conducted.   

    Interested candidates should submit a vita, a letter describing their qualifications, interest and experience addressing the major position responsibilities as described in the job description and the names and contact information for 3-5 references by March 1, 2013. A search committee will evaluate and recommend 2-3 candidates for consideration by the campus community.  Finalists will be asked to participate in an on-...

  • The Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics is offering tax preparation help to low-income residents.

    The students, all accounting majors, are certified tax preparers with the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program, a collaboration among the university, Internal Revenue Service, Northeast Credit Union and the Creating Assets, Savings, and Hope (CASH) Coalition of Southeastern New Hampshire.

    UNH volunteers will be available:

    • Friday, Feb. 8, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the MUB, Room 207. 
    • Friday, Feb. 15, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the MUB, Room 207.

    The VITA program offers free tax help to low-income residents who need help preparing their own tax returns. The UNH students providing the help are graduates and undergraduates who are IRS VITA-certified to help prepare basic tax returns. This is the ninth year UNH students have volunteered for the program and over the years have helped hundreds of Granite Staters....