Mary C. Henry

As I've written on here before , I've always struggled with making the most of these wide open weeks in the summer and rarely feel that I've accomplished much by the time August rolls around and I have to get ready for Fall teaching. I guess I'm somewhat comforted knowing that I'm not alone in this , but I still don't know how to solve the problem for myself. There's so little time for research during the semester with my teaching and service obligations. For the last three years my family obligations have also required a huge and inflexible time commitment*, but I can't blame my lack of productivity on that and I really want to focus on summer for this post, anyway. As this article in The Chronicle explains , most faculty have unstructured summers without set schedules. Some people are off doing fieldwork or have the discipline to write on some kind of schedule. Some people continue coming into campus regularly over the summer to maintain a work sched...

Luna Lovegood's first Christmas at our house. I have been saying for years (since I was hired at Miami U) that I would love a couple more weeks between the Fall and Spring semesters and wouldn't miss a week or two less in the summer. This year, I finally got my wish! January 2014 will be the first winter term at Miami. It is three weeks long and we don't start Spring semester until January 27th. I am not teaching during winter session this year, so I can spend those three weeks doing research, getting ready for next semester, and any other work that's hard to get done during the semester. I'm hoping that three weeks is short enough that I don't have my summer problem of squandering my time.  My daughter will be back in school on January 7th, so that will add structure to my day (driving her to school and picking her up). My strategy will be to set a schedule for myself each day to help stay focused. I also have a specific project to work on since I need to g...

I'm at a workshop at Google Headquarters this week and testing out this map tool:

Is it really the middle the summer of already?? Well, by official seasons it isn't since we only had the June Solstice nine days ago, but Miami had graduation on Mother's Day weekend (May 11-12), which was seven weeks ago. We start classes again in eight weeks, so we're just about half way through summer break. This year is a little longer because of the calendar change happening next year- we are adding a winter term during January and shortening each semester by a week or two. We start classes about a week later in August than we have been and finish about a week later in May (hooray for no more final exam grading on Mother's Day!!!) That means this summer probably has an extra week (with the early spring graduation + late fall start date). Wow, that makes me feel better, actually! I've fallen deep into my usual summer wanderings, feeling like I have no focus- especially since I spent the last two weeks around downtown Cincinnati while my daughter did a theater ca...

Luna Lovegood joined our family on Star Wars Day! My sabbatical (or Assigned Research Leave as Miami likes to call them) officially ended when the semester did (graduation was Mother's Day weekend), but faculty are on 9-month appointments and I am not teaching this summer. So I have the summer off, right? Well, things have quieted down considerably since most of the grad students are out doing field work and have finished up with qualifying & comprehensive exams for the year. I was also asked to fill in on a PhD oral exam since a committee member is leaving the country* (need to go read the written exam ASAP!), but otherwise I don't have any formal grad student work going on right now, either. Since we're not doing a family trip to Kenya this year (too expensive!) I did volunteer to mentor a student in Miami's Ecology Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. I also have a grad student doing local field work this year. My plan is to have my REU ...

Well, I thought I would get back to this blog a bit more this semester since I have not been teaching, but that did not happen- and now the semester is almost over! Even without teaching, I have been very busy- I am advising four graduate students, submitted a NASA research proposal with colleagues, went on a few work trips, and am now finally trying to settle in to work on learning some new software before next fall. It's been a productive semester for me, but not as relaxing as I'd hoped. I'll see if I can muster enough energy to write a more detailed post about some of my recent busy-ness. Any topics that interest anyone? It's been a lovely spring so far- nice and cool (my favorite!) I hope that means this summer won't be too hot!

I have not been good about updating this blog, but plan to change that this year. I am on research leave (sabbatical) Spring 2013 and hope to share updates about my research here. Check back in the coming weeks!

Nothing like a big virtual pile of grading to make me feel like updating my blog! I have not been very good about blogging this semester, but I've been busy with lots of other interesting things (like revising a paper and submitting a proposal). Signs that the semester is winding down: I just gave the third exam in my GEO 121 (Physical Geography) class yesterday, so that just leaves the last one (which is taken on final exam day) and I only have two more class meetings with my GEO 333 (Natural Hazards) class (it meets once a week and we don't have class Thanksgiving week). Before this is all over, I will have a lot of grading to finish (bibliographies for GEO 121, final papers for both classes) and then it will be winter break. Over break I need to work. I am considering some changes to GEO 121 (see below) and have to make those decisions before classes start. I also have two other classes and one is a new prep. I am teaching a remote sensing seminar for the first time and need...

We're creeping closer to the halfway point of the semester and things are getting busy for me. My teaching load ended up being lighter than planned this semester, since one of my classes was canceled. However, I am busy with some research work right now. I have a paper revision due on October 8th, so I've been working on that the last few weeks- a little at a time. I am also working on a new proposal to the Ohio Board of Regents Improving Teacher Quality Program. We are hoping to partner with some local schools to develop some new approaches for teaching science and math. I have never applied to this program before, and it's been hectic trying to coordinate with colleagues and set up meetings with K12 teachers. I am very excited about the project, though- I hope we get funding!! Proposals are due October 27th. Yikes! The canceled class has made things easier on me for all the other things I am working on, but I am still feeling stressed. Proposal-writing is tough work and I...

In class this week, we were talking about remote sensing and I mentioned the cost of some of the image data (which can run into the thousands of dollars). A student asked "Who buys that?" I explained that people with research grants could afford it and mentioned that I had purchased some recently for a project. Later, another student asked "Did Miami [University] have to pay a lot of money for that?". I mentioned that the USDA did, since they funded our research. The discussion ended there, but I thought it might be a good idea to explain a bit more about the whole process of how we do research and get grants to fund that research. Here is how the process might go: 1) Someone has an idea for a research project. This can come from many sources, including earlier research, reading articles, talking with colleagues, etc. 2) This person looks for funding sources for this research. Depending on the field of the study, this person might look for funding with government ag...

We have just over four weeks until classes start, so I am trying to get things organized and finish a few things before the students get back into town. I am teaching three classes this semester and need to write the syllabi and plan those for the semester. This means I have to make my final decisions about attendance monitoring in GEO 121 , update reading packets for GEO 333 and GEO 444/544 and plan out the sixteen weeks that start on August 24th. It will be hectic when classes start, so the better I plan things now, the easier things will go then. I also need to think about how to revise assignments I've used in the past. For instance, I always have some kind of journal assignment in my hazards class, but usually tweak it a bit each year. I'm still not 100% satisfied with it, so I need to think about how I can modify the assignment. I also need to decide on some things for GEO 121: whether to keep the paper assignment this time (or put more weight on exams), decide about usin...

We've reached the halfway point of the summer here at Miami (we start classes on August 24th), so it seems like a good time to take stock of what I've accomplished and what I still plan to do this summer. Progress Most of my work this summer has focused on REU and with the help of my student, we have made some good progress on a project. After some debate, I decided to stick with using some methodology that we've already used in this research, but apply it to different data. Most of the work done so far on this project (and the pilot study before the grant) focused on using fall imagery to detect Amur honeysuckle in forested areas. This shrub expands its leaves earlier in spring and retains them later in fall than the overstory tree species, and thus far, we have used fall imagery in our analysis (we felt that too many other plants were also green in spring). Recently, I started to reconsider this approach and tested some spring images for a conference presentation this spr...

So academics have their summers off, right? We may not be teaching (although plenty of us teach at least some summers), but we have plenty of other things going on. Here's what I have on my plate this week: Meeting with my REU student to go over more preprocessing steps. We have five Landsat images to process and analyze and are just getting into the preprocessing now. It can be very tedious and requires great attention to detail. Attending a MA proposal defense. Graduate students have to have committee approval of their proposed thesis work before their travel funding is released. Most students finish this in April and May, but some are still working to plan their field visits in what remains of the summer. Attending a REU cluster meeting. We are going to be discussing articles from two visiting speakers. I still need to read the papers and they are on topics quite outside of my discipline and area of expertise. Reading like this is usually best done near a computer so that I can ...

We had a cluster meeting today and spent the entire hour letting the students update us on their research progress. The projects include lake water sampling, monitoring ant populations, relating plant cover to remotely sensed data, and modeling BTU output for potential biofuel applications**. Each student talked about what they had been doing so far and what kind of data collection and analysis they would be doing. Some common themes ran through each discussion, such as steep learning curves and struggling with defining and explaining research. In this program, we mentor students, but expect them to take ownership of their projects and ask them to explain their planned work early on. It's always a struggle for me to keep quiet when my student is talking about the work at this stage. I always worry that I am not providing enough guidance (or too much guidance without being clear about the big picture). It can be challenging for the students early on, but I thought they all did a goo...

One of the reasons that I wanted to start a work-related blog, was to give me an opportunity to do some less formal academic writing. All the wise academics recommend writing on a regular, even daily basis. This is not something that I have been able to achieve over my academic career, but I would love to get to that point. As an academic, I do a variety of writing: teaching related writing includes things like syllabi, assignments, lectures, and exams; and research writing, which means writing abstracts for conferences, full-length research papers, and proposals. And let’s not forget all of the email correspondence that is required these days: student emails, emails from collaborators, administrative emails, etc. When contentious issues arise, these emails can take a lot of time to read and compose responses. A lot of my research writing lately has been collaborative, so paper and proposal drafts have been emailed back ...

Global EVI Summer 2000. Image credit: NASA MODIS Gallery We are technically about to start week 4 of the summer around here (!), but I feel like I am still trying to get in gear. The REU students have arrived and I think we have another excellent group. We assign our student-mentor teams into research clusters. Sometimes these clusters work collaboratively and other times we are grouped by a common interest. I am part of the “Landscape and Ecosystem Ecology” cluster with four other faculty and three other students (in addition to mine). We meet in our clusters about once a week during the summer and discuss research articles and what progress we are making on our projects. My student will be working on part of my USDA grant to map Amur honeysuckle. She will do some field work, but will spend a lot of her time learning about and using remote sensing and image processing. For students who do not have a strong background in remote sensing, I usually start...

Miami University has a summer research program for undergraduates in Ecology, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program. Our REU Program was recently renewed for a third three-year term (2009-2011) and this year’s students will be arriving next week. Each student is paired with a faculty mentor from a range of departments like Botany, Zoology, and Geography. I will be working with a student this summer- the fourth student I have advised for REU. I am also now on the steering committee for our REU program, so I was involved in writing the proposal for the renewal, selecting student applicants, and helping with other planning. I am always impressed with the students that participate in our program. My three former students are all in graduate school now (the student from last summer will be starting this fall) and I have even been able to publish with one of them (a...