Myles Drance, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, received a grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund for his project entitled “Upconversion of Feedstock Chemicals by Iron in a Strong Ligand Field.” His research is focused on developing new iron-based catalysts for upgrading liquid alkanes.

The United Way of the Dutchess-Orange Region awarded a Community Fund Grant to the Office of Community Engaged Learning (OCEL), led by Elizabeth Cannon, Director of OCEL, to support the Vassar English Language Learners Outreach Program (VELLOP), part of the Vassar Education Collaboration now a core program of OCEL.

Dutchess County Youth Services funded a grant to the Environmental Cooperative, led by Director Jennifer Rubbo, for a new outdoor recreation club for local youth, which in partnership with Poughkeepsie-based Community Matters 2, Inc., will offer guided hikes at the Preserve.

Justin Touchon, Associate Professor of Biology, is the author of Applied Statistics with R: A Practical Guide for the Life Sciences and Beyond, recently published by Oxford University Press. The book uses the statistical language R and a real-world dataset to teach data manipulation skills and prepare readers for more advanced statistical analyses.

Yvonne Elet was awarded the Elizabeth Blair Macdougall Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for her book Urban Landscape in the Third Rome: Raphael’s Villa and Mussolini’s Forum, which explores the twentieth-century recreation of the “Renaissance” gardens of Villa Madama, planned by Raphael, and “details how the restored villa came to be integrated into one of the most significant urban initiatives of the 20-year Fascist rule.”

Abigail Coplin, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Science, Technology and Society, was selected by The Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations as a 2025 Project Fellow. She is currently completing a book manuscript entitled Domesticating Biotechnological Innovation: Science, Market, and the State in Post-Socialist China.

Michael Reyes Salas, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, has received fellowships from the Institute for Citizens & Scholars and Camargo Foundation in support of his book project Fragments of Carceral Memory. This comparative visual and literary study examines French Antillean-Guianese, Puerto Rican, and Northern Irish photo-texts—books straddling serial photography and writing to create narratives—of prison ruins in order to interrogate why we make museums out of prisons.