Campus News
Science Labs and
Teleconferencing
Major renovations and upgrades
continue at St. Francis with the
complete overhaul of the sixth floor of
the Sciences and Technology building.
Four multi-purpose labs are now
complete for Biology, Chemistry,
Physics and Health Promotion courses
giving students the opportunity to take
part in state-of-the-art research and
experimentation.
A new stadium-seating lecture hall is
also on the sixth floor, with multiple
video screens, microphones and
outlets at each desk. The lecture hall is
also set up to be a teleconferencing
hub. Students can be a part of lectures
by experts from around the world while
our professors can broadcast their
lectures to audiences around the globe.
This is the second floor of labs to get
a top-to-bottom renovation in the past
two years.
A look at the new science labs and
lecture hall in action.
A Personal Look at
Historic Brooklyn
Five St. Francis College students
were given a window into the Brooklyn
of the mid-1800s this summer
working with original source material
at the Brooklyn Historical Society.
The Students and Faculty in the
Archives (SAFA) Fellowship gave
Veronica Benitez ’14, Sascha Ealey
’13, Glenys Rodriguez ’13, Krystal
Williams ’14, and Tenzin Yeshay ’12
access to the Society’s 19th century
Gabriel Furman collection.
“To our knowledge, this fellowship
program is the only one of its kind
for undergraduate students in the
United States,” said Julie Golia, public
historian at the Historical Society
and co-director of the fellowship.
“It was an extremely competitive
process selecting the fellows. We
asked a lot of them and they all came
through with excellent work.”
Furman wrote more than 13 journals
between 1816 and 1854 that covered
topics on early Brooklyn including
commerce and economics, agriculture
and food, gender and marriage, Native
Americans, Brooklyn neighborhoods,
and urbanization and development.
“As an English major, I enjoyed
researching the Gabriel Furman
journals. I found the cholera epidemic
to be most interesting. I took it upon
myself to try something new and do
further research in the medical field,”
said Benitez.
“The students who participated
in the fellowship had an extremely
diverse range of interests, and the
program allowed them to link all of
their unique fields and areas of
expertise to a theme from Furman’s
journals,” said History Professor
Sara Haviland who taught three
of the fellows last spring. “The event
showed how an archive of one man’s
reflections can expose students to
a wide array of fields of inquiry.”
At the end of the summer, the
students helped curate an exhibition
on their research and offered
presentations to a standing room-only
crowd at the Historical Society.
(See the presentations at http://safa.
brooklynhistory.org/fellowship2012/)
“Working together across
disciplines, the fellows crafted
an impressive tribute to Furman’s
fascinating life,” added P