Majors & Minors

"My objective is to encourage students not only to simply learn and investigate more deeply into their own studies and preferences, but also to develop a personal, independent critical point of view that they can bring to class and discuss with their peers."

"We want to come up with technologies that can be deployed in the marketplace today to replace traditional energy sources. We should be able to do it in a way that could compete with the types of gasoline prices you might pay over the next 10 years or so."

"We study history in different ways. One way is to see history as full of change. Another is to see history as continuous. What's going on in China is a combination of both. The past always finds way into the present, yet with new meanings and new looks."

"I am confident that every student benefits from learning to think mathematically as part of the process of becoming a more informed citizen of the world."

"Transportation planning affects all aspects of civil engineering. By learning about green design principles, students learn to test solutions in an engineering environment with unknown factors at work.

"The sustainability of human civilization on earth is an ideal to which we should strive. Our work helps balance the need for equitable quality of life for all with an environment that is not threatened by human impacts."

"Errors aren't random; they're systematic and constrained. Every 'error' is a window into the underlying mechanisms that are involved in producing speech."

"If you want to be an artist and a craftsperson, you have to be able to understand a piece of artwork as a result of specific choices made by the writer. The other side of that coin is I do want to maintain some of the magic and mystery and the sort of intangibility of the art-making process."

"When people understand the relations between countries to be one of war, then when they come to power, that's what they want. But what if you start thinking about the impact of that war and start looking at the local scale, and you put people at the center?"

"My whole idea was that the image of nature or decoration of nature actually removes us from an authentic experience with the outdoors. We get a false sense of connection from our surroundings."

"I can read English and French, but if I cannot read in Arabic, for instance, people working on Arabic can give me a definition by using the mathematical tools and I can understand the definition of that sentence in Arabic even though I don't speak the language."

"We stand at a very unique time in the electric grid's evolution and at the same time we stand at a very critical time for taking action on climate change."

"Imagine water flowing over a wall as in a waterfall. If you stare at the waterfall, you'll notice the flow tapers at the lateral edges where it breaks up into droplets. In fluid mechanics, we call this an instability."

"When students get to the point where they can say 'I don’t know' – that's when they really can begin to learn and their minds open."

"Most humans seek answers to deep questions about ourselves, the world we live in, and whether there is an ultimate reality or truth that transcends us."

"I am most passionate about how philosophy can help people live lives that are more meaningful, more just, more careful – literally more care-full."

"I want students to have a good appreciation of historical narrative and the way that people have thought about history, that there isn't just one way to tell a story."

"Not a single day goes by without China being covered in the news. China is already affecting our daily lives, and it is going to shape the future of the world."

"Over the course of this challenge students learn that they are not trying to uncover how the world works, as they would in science. Rather, they learn the design process of transforming an idea into reality."

"I am a firm believer that students learn best by doing, and that's how I teach. We work on solving problems together. I try to keep them interested and engaged by showing them the possibilities of engineering."

"If you pull an inscription out of the ground, you have in front of you a text that was written at an exact historic moment. That's as close as you can get to shaking hands with an ancient person."

"The hospital is a very complex system. Moving patients is like moving chess pieces. We take that information and look at all the dynamics and interplay and put it into a logical form. There may be a hundred options, and you have to figure out what works best."

"By the time students graduate, a language may not have been invented yet. But when they start a job, they're going to be expected to pick it up -- and quickly."

"The students will come out with more advanced skills that typically they would not get until later in their college career."

"Ideally when my students leave the classroom, they have learned something about the history of Hinduism and its amazing classical scripture, but they are also prepared to travel to India, or just to interact with friends and classmates they may meet who are Hindu."

"The biggest difference is that electrons cannot travel as fast as photons. In this world, there is nothing that can travel faster than light."

"In my lab, I focus on micro- and milli-fluidics, or the flow of liquids through channels about the size of human blood vessels."

"The difficult questions that educational researchers must address are ultimately broader than methodological and disciplinary boundaries. We must have multiple disciplines working together."

"It’s important for the EU to work with non-state entities and take into account the viewpoints of civil society, so that its policies are relevant to the people who are affected. We’re at a point where NGOs, international organizations and individuals want a piece of the decision-making process."

"What I've found is that to really make environmental improvements that will last, there has to be an increase in prices of the things that pollute. We can try to educate the public, but in the end people will do what's cheap."

"How we reconcile the self with what is beyond the self is something students struggle with all the time."

"For me, a truly successful class is one in which the professor and the students have developed between them a rich and complicated dialogue about the subject under debate."

"It’s important for students to be able to live with questions and ambiguities, and to have the capacity to draw their own conclusions. Bucknell’s undergraduate environment allows me to help them to do that."

"I don’t know of any other artist of the period who expresses himself as clearly across the centuries. This is utterly fascinating to me."

"We do a lot of signal processing in engineering. Why can't we apply that to biological phenomena?"

"We contribute over half the water to the (Chesapeake) Bay and well over half the nitrogen and phosphorus, so the nutrients (that those who fish) care about are coming from us."

"It is so rare that an entirely new class of materials like metallic glasses comes along, that just on a scientific level, it is very interesting to think about."

"There is an assumption in the field that estrogen modifies oxytocin in a clear-cut manner, and that is it increases oxytocin across the board. That is not what I'm finding."

"If you want to do good design, it has to make good business sense, or else it is not going to happen."

"I wanted to look at how this phenomenon of military outsourcing and privatization is happening, in contexts that are more perhaps long-range, perhaps less on the front pages and sensational. It may serve as a kind of window to what we can expect if this trend continues in places like Iraq and Afghanistan."

"If your organization feeds people, you don't have time to sit back and analyze your organizational structure — people are dying."

"In order to accomplish anything today, you must work with others who don't have the background that you have. You have to be able to complement each other's strengths and weaknesses."

"I'm studying model reactions but I want to find a place where they are applicable. It is not that useful to study a model unless there is a real-world situation where that model applies."

"You don't want students with one-track minds. You want students who can talk to all levels of people about all types of ideas and be open to learning things that may not be their subject matter. That is one reason the liberal arts environment does well to prepare one for business."

"The educational system is a significant gatekeeper in terms of further integration, in terms of the opportunities students will have. We need to work toward structures in which students of all kinds of groups have equitable access."

"Understanding which factors are most important for a given behavior could not only improve our theoretical understanding of health decision-making but also could tell us how to help adolescents make better decisions."

"What really brought me to studying theater was how radically different the experience of theater-going was in the 18th century compared to our idea of a nice quiet night at the playhouse. It was an interesting period."

"Students can come into my lab and say they are interested in behavior, physiology or molecular biology, and we've been able to craft projects for them, no matter what level of biology they are interested in."

With grants from both the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Research Laboratory, she is studying a new nanomaterial and coating system to prevent and repair corrosion on military vessels and vehicles, including the F-35 joint strike fighter.

From the personal stories and interviews he collected, he's weaving together a model of Inuit identity. Hunting camps, such as the one where Searles stayed, reflect an Inuit respect for silence and are a vital part of Inuit culture.

"There are more questions than answers for sure with white-nose syndrome. As soon as we figure out one thing, it raises 10 more questions. Meanwhile, it marches on."

"Women’s and Gender Studies is attracting more and more men into the program. We want to raise the profile in terms of its ability to speak to issues that concern men."

"In doing science, you can't just use a black box; you have to know what is inside, understand it, and be able to explain how it works."

"I think that opera going high-definition can, if it's done responsibly, enrich the art form immensely. It can create a new boom of opera in the 21st century because it makes opera accessible to a lot of people."

"We have gotten so far away from an integrated mind and body that we don't necessarily know how to tap into creative responses and how to express ourselves. Dance provides that. It's a wonderful outlet — I've never seen anybody leave a dance class who wasn't glad to be alive."

"It is not just my job to educate a manager; it is also my job to educate a citizen, an investor, a consumer, a parent – to educate somebody who is going to occupy all of those roles and may see all of them as opportunities for making a change in the way we do business with each other."

A better understanding of gliding motility in parasitic species could lead to medicines that prevent disease. In diatoms, Matthew Heintzelman is driven by scientific curiosity.

Enyeart hopes his students not only learn to think more honestly and profoundly about issues; he also wants them to recognize that nothing about history is inevitable.

"Students discover that in order to understand today’s Spanish society, one has to look back at political and social events taking place at the beginning of the 20th century. The same is true to understand U.S. history, as many U.S. citizens fought in defense of democracy during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s."

"I feel strongly that future school psychologists should be prepared to be child advocates. The reason school psychologists do what they do is to facilitate the success of all kids."

"I believe universities have an obligation to help our students become aware of the need for sustainable systems."

"It is not the iron laws of capitalism, but the purposive actions of economic actors and the inertia of capitalist institutions that drive economic and social change, for better or worse."

"Every place has a particular set of institutional structures. In the African context, one of the interesting questions is, given various models for development and given the unique cultures and institutions of African countries, what actually might work? Given that so many things have been tried in Africa and not worked, that's a question that has always fascinated me."

"When I was in graduate school, popular music history wasn't taught. That's changing, thank goodness. Popular music studies is a rapidly expanding branch of musicology."

"Which is more effective, public policy aimed at moving people from locations with high crime rates or poor schools, for example, or improving the location by spending more on lowering crime and improving schools? This research sheds light on these questions."

"Persistent racial tension in France is symptomatic of 'un passé qui ne passé pas' — a past that will not pass."

With the help of modern molecular tools, Associate Professor of Biology Matthew Heintzelman is teasing apart the secret of how cells move about with no obvious means of propulsion.

"One of many reasons Harry (Potter) ultimately triumphs is because of his ability to understand the past and integrate it into his present."

"Trying to study this thing on the nanoscale is really trying to help the world on a global scale."

"Having that opportunity to do that kind of one-on-one teaching where you are actually showing students how to do chemistry — not just learn about chemistry, but how to do chemistry — is really rewarding."

"Those trees are going to be here for hundreds of years. Every time the students come back, they are going to go look at their trees."

"The literature that most moves me are the works that help us to not be confined by the experiences we've had, but to imagine something greater."

"If these drugs are found to specifically block transplant rejection without generally suppressing the immune system, it would be very exciting."

"In the last 15 years, we have seen the digitization of almost everything written in the U.S. from 1639 up to the 1850s. We can do full text searches of newspapers, periodicals, books, novels and poetry and use our imaginations to see connections that were invisible 15 years ago."

"Modeling the atmosphere is very difficult because there are so many different interactions that have to be considered. It's like trying to put together a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. The problem modelers face is, up to one-third of the pieces of their puzzle are not defined very well. My group tries to work on individual pieces of the puzzle to help make the modelers' job a little easier."

"Modern engineers would look at these old bridges and say that doesn't make sense. My approach is to look at it almost like an archeologist, where this is a historic artifact of engineering, and you can learn something about the people that designed it and built it. You can learn something about their culture — what they knew, what they didn't know, what they understood and maybe what they misunderstood."

"My main interest always was in trying to understand how people's well-being can be improved."

"I think that Bucknell is the kind of environment where if you have a sound idea and a lot of passion, the resources will be there to fully explore it."

"I'm not interested in films that deal with the 1980s but were shot in 2008. That is a reinterpretation of history, which is interesting in itself, but what I'm examining in my research is what does this film tell me about Germany at a certain time."

"There have always been problems, but bridge safety has been brought to the public forefront by the collapse in Minnesota."

In Perspectives in Health and Healing, students are introduced to the holistic techniques of complementary medicine, including reiki, yoga, shiatsu, and herbal medicine.

"Bucknell has been incredibly supportive of my research, both my work in ecophysiology and in mammalian taxonomy."

"The reason I wanted to come to Bucknell is because it has a reputation of doing high quality research with undergraduates."

Service-learning is "real in a way that goes beyond the theories and ideas in the class; there's actual application, relevance, and resonance when students see theory and ideas present in real social situations that matter to them."

"The more people you work with, the broader your work becomes."

"Soap dispels bacteria, but if you rinse, they come back and stick. It’s annoying."

"I’m interested in how animals get around in the world — and bees are a good model for that kind of behavior."

"Understanding what happened geologically 1 to 2 billion years ago is like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with only half the pieces."

"I’m trying to understand how memory works at the 'front end' as information is entered into our brains."