BOONE—The College of Arts and Sciences has selected nine students and seven faculty to receive funds from the newly created Student and Faculty Excellence (SAFE) Fund for the 2016 year.

The SAFE Fund, an endowment and annual fund that was created to expand the Dean’s Fund, provides support for undergraduate research opportunities, undergraduate and graduate student travel to present at professional conferences, publication support for faculty book contracts and other student and faculty projects.

Grantees of the first SAFE Fund awards include: Senior Sarah McMillan, junior Madison Walter and freshman Brandon Schwartz who are members of Verses, Appalachian’s poetry slam team, an offshoot of Lyric, the Spoken Word Poetry Club. They are using their SAFE Fund grant to compete at the national level in the College Unions Poetry Slam Invitation (CUPSI) in Austin, Texas, where they will be presenting their work. Last year this team won the award for “Best Love Poem” out of 68 universities from across the country.

Huntley Hughes, a senior English major, used his grant for travel to present his paper “Voices of Paradox: The Heteroglossia of Crisis in Borges and Dostoyevsky,” to the Northwestern Undergraduate Conference on Literature.

Dr. Xioafei Tu, Department of Language, Literature, and Culture, will use his grant to travel to China this summer to present at an Asian studies conference on “Moral Responsibility and Humanity” in Shanghai and “Hermeneutic Understanding of Translation of Early Buddhist and Christian Scriptures” in Wuhan.

Dea Kamberaj, a second year graduate student in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Human Resource Management (IOHRM) program was nominated by the IOHRM to attend the Annual Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Master’s Student Consortium in Anaheim, California. Her SAFE Fund grant will allow her to attend.

Other student and faculty grantees are:

• Ryan M. Gillespie, graduate student, IOHRM
• Jamie Kirkpatrick, senior psychology major
• Victoria Olender, senior anthropology and political science major
• Haley Hansen, freshman anthropology major
• Dr. Gregory Reck, Department of Anthropology
• Dr. Jennifer Burris, Department of Physics and Astronomy
• Dr. Eric Karchmer, Department of Anthropology
• Dr. Andrew Bellemer, Department of Biology
• Dr. Kendra Souza, Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
• Dr. Jon Carter, Department of Anthropology

For more information about how you can be part of the support of the SAFE funds, please contact David Taylor at 828-262-6721 or by email at [email protected]. To receive academic support through the SAFE Fund visit the College of Arts and Sciences SAFE Fund online.

About Appalachian State University

As a premier public institution, Appalachian State University prepares students to lead purposeful lives. App State is one of 17 campuses in the University of North Carolina System, with a national reputation for innovative teaching and opening access to a high-quality, cost-effective education. The university enrolls more than 21,000 students, has a low student-to-faculty ratio and offers more than 150 undergraduate and 80 graduate majors at its Boone and Hickory campuses and through App State Online. Learn more at https://www.appstate.edu.

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