Kandyce Aust, director of alumni relations, received this grant for a series of events to reunite the women from the Hartford College for Women and celebrate the legacy of women's education.

Mary Christensen, director of Educational Main Street, will be creating a program for a cohort of young women in grade nine to participate in a year-long academy focusing on leadership skills, academic development, and personal communication skills. After the first year, this group of young women will in turn act as mentors for the incoming cohort.

Susan Grantham, assistant professor, Communications, has been awarded a grant to support the creation of a leadership program for female graduate students as well as an assessment of the need of a similar program for undergraduates. Susan is supported in this project by the inaugural participants of the Laura Johnson Initiative for Women Leaders program.

Jonathan Hill, and Clara Fang, assistant professors, CETA, will be using a WELFund grant to provide female computer and civil engineering students with a collaborative interdisciplinary research opportunity. The students will be mentored as they develop a significant project involving embedded microprocessor systems and automobile traffic management. Additional support for this grant is being provided by Xilinx Corporation.

Abby Ilumoka, professor of electrical and computer engineering, will be creating and implementing after school program to discover best practices for teaching STEM in mixed gender situations using the vehicle of a single gender STEM classroom. Dr. Ilumoka will be collaborating with several schools in the Greater Hartford area on this grant.

Eleta Jones, associate director, Center for Professional Development, has been awarded a grant to support the creation of a series of programs to bring local experts to campus each year to speak about issues of concern to women in order to increase awareness about women's issues throughout the University of Hartford and the Greater Hartford communities.

Susan Mardinly, Hartt Community Division, has been awarded a grant to fund her work transcribing fifteen scores written by seventeenth-century Venetian composer Barbara Strozzi into modern notation. In addition, Dr. Mardinly will present an all Strozzi concert in conjunction with Hartt faculty.

Lynn Pasquerella, provost, Susan Coleman, professor, Barney School, and Mala Matacin, assistant dean, CETA, has been awarded a grant to create a summer day camp to introduce incoming high school first year, sophomore, and junior girls to engineering, technology and architecture at the University of Hartford. The camp will take place over two weeks during the summer of 2009; women students from CETA will work as counselors and student mentors for the campers. Faculty and administrators from the University Magnet High School of Science and Engineering are partners to this effort.

Ying Yu, assistant professor, CETA, will work with two student researchers to design and organize a series of presentation and survey sessions at area high schools, participate in several brain-storming game-design sessions and ultimately conduct a seminar to present the research results.