Hanna Stengl and Tiffany Tavares, senior Women and Gender Studies majors, never turn down an opportunity to learn. So when Professor Kristen McHenry told them about the 21st Annual Women's Studies Conference at Southern Connecticut State University, they knew they only had one option - go. "I'm excited about connecting with other Women and Gender Studies students and hearing their ideas on feminism," Stengl said. Plus, Stengl and Tavares are doing more than just observing; they're presenting their own research.

Under the guidance of McHenry, Stengl and Tavares submitted their senior capstone papers to the conference and waited with fingers crossed. Stengl's paper, "Miley Cyrus and Celebrity Culture's Influence on Young Women," argues media is an influential factor in women's lives and the things celebrities do or say impact women. Tavares's paper, "Hurting Women: Constructions of Body Image in the Media," argues that negative images of women in magazines directly impact women's self-esteem, self-worth, and level of injurious behavior. "This topic is really important to me and I would like to be able to try to make a change," Tavares said. "I want to be able to represent the women from my research, so they can have their voices heard."

Stengl and Tavares will learn a few things at the conference too. The New Haven, Connecticut conference, titled "Ecology, Spirituality, Sustainability: Feminist And Indigenous Interventions," focuses on the connection between nature, the environment, and various intersecting oppressions. It aims to evaluate feminist and indigenous ideas surrounding the abuse of our natural world and suggest ways to end the environmental crisis. "I hope to take home a new and changed perspective from this conference because the topic is ecofeminism," Stengl said. "I hope to learn something that I can become passionate about."

Hidden down a quiet, scenic Dartmouth road, Urban Initiative questions policy development within the Gateway Cities - New Bedford, Fall River, and Taunton. Directed by Colleen Dawicki, it investigates new and/or current public policy programs and discovers ways to analyze their effectiveness within the community.

Urban Initiative boasts an indicators website, SouthCoast Urban Indicators Project, that provides some important Gateway City statistics - demographics, educational attainment, homelessness rates, etc. Using this website and social media, Urban Initiative informs surrounding communities and organizations with numerical data on issues that matter - poverty, education, homelessness.

But when organizations need more than just data, they ask Urban Initiative to do what it does best - plan, develop, and measure. Recently, the United Way reached out to the UI team and requested help with their Hunger Commission. The United Way's Hunger Commission, the only area program that provides food to emergency shelters, hopes to find ways to measure their effectiveness in reducing hunger.

Mike McCarthy, senior English major and Urban Initiative research assistant, is engaged with several of these projects, including his first solo project with the Veteran's Transition House. "I'm trying to identify not only the needs of the homeless veterans in the area, but also those who could be considered at-risk of becoming homeless," McCarthy said. To him, this is important work. "That's part of our mission as researchers at a public university - to inform and enlighten people not only with statistics, but with methods for producing cities."

College students are especially susceptible to intrusive thinking. What time is my doctor's appointment? Even when doing an important assignment or research project, thoughts creep in unexpectedly. I can't forget to get laundry detergent today. According to UMass Dartmouth psychology professor Dr. Aminda O'Hare, this is normal, and she hypothesizes that it's manageable.

Using one of the EEG labs, O'Hare investigates mindfulness - the mental state of being present and focused - and its effectiveness on cognitive control. "We expect mindfulness meditation helps," O'Hare said. "It helps develop the part of the brain that maintains cognitive control." To test her hypothesis, she collaborates with Professor Maureen Hall of the STEM Education and Teacher Development Department and utilizes Hall's graduate students as participants. By measuring the students' abilities to stay on task before and after mindfulness training, O'Hare can prove just how useful mindfulness is to the learning community.

Faculty and students can really benefit from mindfulness skills, and O'Hare's hopes to see it used in the classrooms. "Our goal is to develop this into applied research," she said. "We want to find ways to help student learning." In order to accomplish this, O'Hare has reserved the meditation room (Fridays at 10am) in the campus center until the end of the semester. She wants to facilitate a faculty group to teach mindfulness training and ways of incorporating it in the classrooms. "As psychologists, we have this obligation to apply this information to help students learn, because we know how to do it."