October 27, 2012

Professor William K. "Bill" Mahony and Donna Molinek became the the 11th and 12th faculty members to receive Boswell Family Faculty Fellowships. The award was established in 2005 by Tom and Cheryl Boswell, parents of three sons who graduated from Davidson, to help professors afford a full sabbatical. College policy supports just a half-year salary for sabbaticals.

Professor Donna Molinek, chair of the mathematics department, has wide-ranging interests in differential equations, dynamical systems, mathematical modeling, and topology, including their applications in biology and neuroscience. The Boswell Fellowship will be applied to three projects during her sabbatical next year.

First, she plans to develop a new entry-level course combining statistical and mathematical techniques that can be applied to a deeper understanding of environmental issues. She will also continue an earlier project on modeling the incompletely understood process by which HIV spreads in the lymph system. Finally, she will continue work she undertook with students on "tensegrity" structures. The phrase, coined by Buckminister Fuller, is a combination of tension and integrity. She plans to write introductory curriculum material to help students learn about these self-stressed structures, which are important in the fields of biology, architecture and art.

Molinek received her B.S. degree from the University of Alaska at Anchorage and her M.S. degree from Northern Arizona University. She earned her Ph.D. at UNC-Chapel Hill, and joined the Davidson faculty in 1992. She regularly teaches in the July Experience program for high school students, and was the faculty leader for Davidson's summer program in Ghana in 2006.

Excerpted from page on all convocation winners.