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Grounded
(con't)
The
SIMA project is typical Gerencher. It’s ingenious. It’s
economical. It fulfills a teaching as well as a research function.
He is happy to have student input and to credit them as collaborators.
And it offers a service in which the whole is, literally, greater
than the sum of its parts.
“
We want this to be classroom-friendly,” he says. The computer
code that other users need to make their monitor compatible is
free of charge, and SIMA sends its data in real time over the Internet. “Most
seismic displays on the Internet are updated every 15 minutes,” he
says of other seismic monitors available on-line. His has a delay
of only two to four seconds.
A Bethlehem native, Joe came to Moravian in 1969, having finished
a bachelor’s and a master’s degree at Penn State. In
1975, he returned to Penn State for his D.Ed. in earth science,
which he completed in 1982. He and his wife, Jane, were a year
apart at Liberty High School, then the only high school in Bethlehem,
but “we have no recollection of ever having seen each other,” he
says. Jane [Siegfried] earned her bachelor’s degree from
Moravian in 1966, then went to Penn State for her M.A. That’s
where they met. Jane recently retired from teaching at Moravian
Academy.
They have two daughters, Kristen, a reporter for CBS
MarketWatch.com in San Francisco, and Jill, a courtroom clerk for
the Superior Court of Maricopa County, Phoenix, Arizona. Those
of long memory may remember that in 1982, the girls—then
10 and 7, respectively—sang the “Morning Star” solo
for all the Christmas Vespers services by alternating verses.
As the sole earth scientist in the Department of Physics and Earth
Science, Joe teaches astronomy, meteorology, and geology, as well
as supervising independent studies and special projects in those
areas. He received the Lindback Award for distinguished teaching
in 1972, after just three years on the faculty. Some of his interests,
as listed on the department website, are science education, coal
petrology, meteorite impact, geostatistics, and seismology. The
SIMA project unites the first and last of these.
When not in
the basement, crouching beside the big insulated pipes to peer
at his little army of seismometers, Joe might be found
on the roof of Collier Hall, where he keeps a collection of telescopes
ranging from the size you can prop on a tripod to the size of a
naval cannon. Whenever there’s a heavenly event—an
eclipse, a comet, an unusual planetary occurrence—the college
community will get an e-mail from Joe, inviting everyone to come
up to the roof in the middle of the night to view it.
Last October, when Mars was at its closest to Earth in 59,619 years,
Joe held several evenings of open telescope viewing. The metal
staircase that leads to the roof clanged away all night as Joe’s
students and former students, College faculty and their children,
and high school students and teachers, all part of Joe’s
greater community, climbed up to look at this planetary milestone
and to feel a part of the universe.
And every fall, when the College offers weekend days for students
in elementary science methods classes to get hands-on experience
with learners, Joe—who also is coordinator of science education
courses for those who want to become science teachers—almost
always has interactive science stations set up in Collier, where
children of elementary-school age can experiment on real problems.
All his activities, really, come under the heading of science education:
trying to pull the scary veneer off science so students (and their
parents) feel that they and the sciences are on the same page.
One result,
in which Joe’s enjoyment of science has played
its part, is that after years of declining interest in the sciences
(not just at Moravian but at colleges and universities across the
country), serious science studies are on the increase, according
to articles in newspapers and industry publications such as the
Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2002, there were 36 Bachelor
of Science degrees awarded at Moravian; in 2003, 67.
Just this year, Moravian has created a biochemistry major, using
courses and faculty from the Biology and Chemistry Departments
and hiring a new faculty member for the Chemistry Department who
is a specialist in this area. Other science majors, some with interdisciplinary
components, are in the works.
At a college the size of Moravian, where the emphasis is on the
individuality of student experience, it takes ingenuity and economy
to provide them with experience beyond the standard curriculum.
“
I’m at a small college, and I’m in a physics department,” Joe
says. “In this project, physics, geology, and computer science
work together. It’s showing some of the ways that you can
interact at a place like this.”
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