Page 14 - The Bell Tower - Summer/Fall 2015

FACULTYHIGHLIGHTS ACADEMIC HIGHLIGHTS
Gauvin Leads National Panel
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) has asked University of Maine at Fort Kent’s Tony Gauvin to serve as manager of the national panel for the Rural and Community Development topic area of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.
Previously, Gauvin served as a pan- elist for the program, which reviews funding proposals from grant appli- cants.
“I have been serving as a panel- ist on this program for the last two years and was humbled to hear that I am being invited to lead the panel for the next two years,” said Gauvin.
As manager of the panel, Gauvin will be responsible for the peer review process and assembling the panel of experts that will select grant applications that merit funding for the upcoming fiscal year.
Professor Gauvin’s areas of expertise include community devel- opment, e-commerce, computer sci- ence, rural economic development, and rural sustainable development.
Gauvin will begin his part time duties as the panel manager in September.
The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) offers competitively awarded grants to qualified small businesses to sup- port high quality, advanced concepts research related to important scien- tific problems and opportunities in agriculture that could lead to signifi- cant public benefits.
Gauvin has been a member of the UMFK faculty since 2002.
12 | The Bell Tower
Dubis Launches Website
Jeff Dubis, instructor of forestry, who is on sabbatical for the 2014-2015 academic year, has spent much of that time creating a website designed to help people identify different types of wood.
The website was officially launched on April 3 and will assist people in identifying different types of wood based upon grain characteristics.
“Identifying wood can be quite difficult because many species look very similar. In many cases the only way to accurately identify it is by looking at cell structures,” said Dubis.
“The best thing to do if you’re uncertain is go to the cross section. If you look at
a piece of wood, for example a 2 X 4, look at the very end of the piece of wood. So when you’re looking at the cross section, what you need to first do is make sure you can clearly see the cell structure. So you use a sharp knife in order to make a clean cut across the wood grain, and by doing that you can actually see the different cell structures. In most cases you don’t need a microscope, so this is a technique that can easily be done in any lab. It can be done indoors or outdoors. It’s fairly easy to do in somebody’s workshop.”
The website (woodidentification.net) currently depicts images of 58 types of wood, along with their cell structures, and presents detailed, as well as scientific explanations of what people can look for while trying to identify a piece of wood. Included on the website is a glossary of terms to aid the layman in understanding the information.
Dubis also said that the website has broad applicability - noting that forestry stu- dents, people doing home restoration, and scientists from other parts of the world who are unfamiliar with wood in North America can benefit from the website.
“Basically, I acquired all the different wood samples, some which I had and some which I got from other people in different parts of the country,” said Dubis, adding that he spent 12 weeks completing the website. “The first thing I had to do was pho- tograph the wood, which was probably the hardest part because it takes sometimes eight to ten photos to get one good shot. You’re looking at very small structures, so they’ve got to be clear. After I was done with the photos came the research part. Some of these woods I was not at all familiar with either. I had to do quite a bit of research learning the characteristic of each of these species and recognizing the different cells.”
Dubis began working at UMFK in 1999. He will return to teaching at UMFK in the fall.