Bruce Maylath, professor of English, delivered a plenary address Oct. 1 at the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication (CPTSC) annual meeting at Boise State University in Idaho. A past president of CPTSC, Maylath joined several other past presidents in their joint address, titled “Programmatic Trends in Times of Change.”

Erika Beseler Thompson, assistant director of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Prevention in the Office of Orientation and Student Success, was selected through a peer review process to present at the Department of Education’s National Meeting on Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse and Violence Prevention. Beseler Thompson’s presentation, “We told your parents you got busted! What will they do now?” reported on findings of her master’s thesis, which examined parent responses to the current practice of parental notification of alcohol or drug-related violations involving university students under the age of 21. The meeting was held in National Harbor, Md., from Oct. 18 to 20.

Preeti Sule, a student in the veterinary and microbiological sciences department, placed third in the student oral presentation competition at the North Central Branch of the American Society for Microbiology meeting in Mankato, Minn. Sule presented her research on biofilms, which constitute sessile communities of bacteria that cause problems in environmental, clinical and agricultural settings. She presented an assay that determines biomass in biofilms that were grown in the presence of very defined nutrients.

The research is part of a larger project conducted by Sule’s adviser, Birgit Pruess, assistant professor of veterinary and microbiological sciences, which aims to determine the chemical properties of specific nutrients and their effect on biofilm amounts.