We are an inclusive academic community committed to excellence in the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge. We advance intellectual and creative discovery through transformative learning experiences that positively impact our lives and communities.
Dr. Bob Kolvoord
Interim Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs
A Message from the Interim Provost
Dear Colleagues,
Thanks for your efforts in bringing a new semester to life (and for bearing with some very non-Harrisonburg-like temperatures this week). In my native New England, we’d always mark the end of such a week by saying “one week closer to Spring!” Please stay warm and enjoy these highlights from your colleagues:
- Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Ethnogeology & Karst Science Dr. Ángel García (GES) for his funding award from the Virginia Natural History Museum (VMNH) to support “Karst Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Cave Shields Formations,” an undergraduate research opportunity designed to answer key questions about cave shields. According to Dr. Joe Keiper, Executive Director of VMNH, “The Pete Henika Memorial Fund was designed specifically to help facilitate the type of impactful research that Dr. García and his students are conducting.”
- Interest in artificial intelligence is at an all-time high, and Associate Professor of Geography Dr. Xuebin Wei, along with co-author Dr. Xinyue Ye (Texas A&M University), are poised to advance the field. Routledge just published their new textbook, Social Data Analytics in the Cloud with AI, which is the first to integrate cloud computing and Generative AI into social data analytics education, offering students and professionals a comprehensive guide to leveraging these transformative technologies.
- Dr. Carol Dudding, Professor of Communication Sciences & Disorders, has been invited to the University of Canterbury in New Zealand as an Erskine Fellow. This prestigious fellowship invites international scholars to New Zealand to lecture and collaborate on their areas of expertise. She will work with researchers and academics there in the area of competency-based clinical education.
- Assistant Professor of Management Dr. Sara Krivacek recently co-authored articles in two peer-reviewed journals that appear on the Financial Times 50 List, which includes highly prestigious academic and practitioner journals used by the Financial Times to rank faculty research in MBA, EMBA and online MBA programs. “When There’s No One Else to Blame: The Impact of Coworkers’ Perceived Competence and Warmth on the Relations between Ostracism, Shame, and Ingratiation,” was published in the Journal of Business Ethics, while the other appeared in the Journal of Applied Psychology and is entitled “Making the Grade? A Meta-Analysis of Academic Performance as a Predictor of Work Performance and Turnover.”
- School of Music associate professor Dr. John Peterson’s book, Modeling Musical Analysis, which is co-edited by Dr. Kimberly Goddard Loeffert (Virginia Tech), was recently published by Oxford University Press. The second volume of the book received support from a 4VA grant.
Please continue to send teaching and scholarship highlights or other accomplishments for you and your colleagues to provost@jmu.edu so we can recognize your work! We’d especially love to hear about innovations in your classes.
Sincerely,
Bob
Have Question for the Provost?
Academic Affairs faculty and staff can use the options below to contact the provost directly.
This is an open line of communication allowing faculty and staff to ask questions, but it is not a substitute from the crucial interactions they have with their academic unit head, department head and dean.
Students should contact AcademicQuestions@jmu.edu with questions.
