Saint Mary's Newsroom

During the suspension of in-person classes, students at the College now have two options for remote writing support: Through shared Google Document and follow-up phone or email conversation.

To submit your paper to a Writing Studio tutor via shared Google Doc:

1. Make an appointment at least three hours in advance by visiting the Writing Studio website at writing.smumn.edu/writing-studio. Select “Sign up for a Writing Studio appointment.”
2. Share your paper and your writing assignment description with your tutor on Google Drive before your appointment time. For instructions on how to use Google Drive, please see our Guide to Writing Support.
3. Be available during your appointment time for your tutor to call you with questions, to clarify your assignment, and to explain suggestions for revision. Appointments will be made in one-hour blocks. During that time, your tutor will read your paper, make comments, and ask questions. The tutor will call you before the end of your appointment time to discuss your paper.
4. Please complete a brief satisfaction survey that you’ll receive via email after your appointment.

To get written feedback from a writing consultant via email:

1. Visit the Writing Studio website at writing.smumn.edu/writing-studio. Select “Sign up for an online email review.” This will take you to the submission form.
2. Answer the questions about what you need help with, then submit a Microsoft Word version of your paper and your assignment description at the end of the form.
3. A writing consultant will email you written feedback by the date requested. Please allow a minimum of 24 hours.
4. You can submit your paper anytime, including weekends.

USPS mail

Since Saint Mary’s University is considered a business, students are unable to complete the change of address form with the United States Postal Service. We are advising students to reach out to their mail contacts (i.e., financial institutions, magazine subscriptions) directly to change their address on file.

Mail currently in mailboxes

The mailroom will forward personal first-class mail to your home address on file, unless you have provided a different mailing address. If you have a different mailing address, please contact the mailroom at mailroom@smumn.edu by Friday, April 3. We will not forward magazines, junk mail, or campus mail.

For returning international students, the mailroom will create mail packages for you to retrieve from the International Center upon your return.

Packages

Starting Wednesday, April 1, Saint Mary’s will no longer accept student packages, except packages designated for those students who are currently residing at the Alverna Center. Per policy, UPS and FedEx do not forward packages. The USPS permits package forwarding on select parcels and will charge postage due upon receipt.

Any packages that cannot be forwarded will be held until students can return to campus and retrieve their personal items. Students who wish to return packages to sender or forward will need to make the appropriate arrangements and provide the mailroom with the shipping label.

Saint Mary’s Campus Ministry continues to share spiritual offerings to provide much-needed perspective and a focus on faith in this time of uncertainty.

“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” – Romans 8:37-39

Find more resources, including prayer cards, from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Farhiya Farah, Ph.D.

Farhiya Farah, Ph.D., program director for the Master of Public Health, has been working with Somali populations in the Twin Cities area to promote public health actions and improve communications. This article details how public health promotion of social distancing aimed at reducing the impact of COVID-19 requires a crisis communication strategy aware and respectful of deeply entrenched values and norms of the targeted community.

By: Farhiya Farah, Ph.D.

COVID-19 has ushered the world into a precarious predicament demanding urgent interventions and community mobilization to successfully contain, mitigate, or suppress the spread of the virus. Numerous models have emerged simulating infection course trajectories examining the consequences of various intervention policies (Neil, 2020; Childs 2020; Kucharski 2020). However, model inputs and assumptions assume a uniform application of intervention policies and homogenous human behavior. Similar models using different target populations considering their unique attributes would yield starkly different infection spread outcomes.

Human behavior is extremely complex, with many factors contributing to public health intervention observance. It’s important to remember how intervention adherent subtleties could result in profoundly different outcomes, most often unfavorable, and especially with disenfranchised communities. Immigrants and refugees are often from such a community.

For example, crisis communications pertaining to social isolation directed to the refugee and immigrant community. The direction is to keep a 6-foot distance from one another, preferably accomplished by staying home and reducing non-essential trips. A homogenous society with the same cultural tendency would perhaps respond in a like manner to this directive. Unfortunately, this is not the reality of our heterogeneous society.

Health communication is the quintessential influencing tool of public health in promoting health and preventing diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes health communication as the vehicle “to inform and influence individual and community decisions that enhance health” (CDC 2020). Health communications experts have long recognized the success of health communication campaigns dependent on the dynamics of ‘interpersonal, group, organizational…” for effective health messaging (Kreps, 2008).

We can use the Somali community as an example. The Somali cultural concept of personal space is starkly different from mainstream America, as the cultural application of social distancing is gender-dependent. Most Somali interactions are typically tightly nested, infiltrated by hugs, cheek kissing, and kisses on the hands or heads of elders. Therefore, the public health promotion of social distancing aimed at reducing the impact of COVID-19 requires a crisis communication strategy aware and respectful of deeply entrenched values and norms of the targeted community. Moreover, the majority of the Somali community’s deeply-seated fatalistic attitudes negatively impacts reception to preventive messages if proper measures are not taken to respectfully address it. Considering the messaging urgency of COVID-19, public health and health care providers must be aware of the practical guidelines available, informed by the theoretical foundation for successful crisis communication with new Americans.

Below is a summary of such guidelines helpful for public health professionals to implement during the current pandemic. These guidelines are adapted from the 10 crisis and risk communication tips for public health professions working with native and new Americans (Littlefield, 2007).

1. Involve multicultural specialists in communicating about public health risks.
2. Use cultural agents as links to multiple communities.
3. Take time to build relationships with multiple communities before the crisis.
4. Utilize different ways to listen to and become involved with different communities.
5. Realize that views about a public health crisis vary across cultures.
6. Be mindful of religion and culture when communicating about risks with multiple communities.
7. Be mindful about cultural learning styles when communicating about risks with multiple communities.
8. Be mindful of literacy levels when communicating about risks with multiple communities.
9. Be sensitive to cultural groups’ feelings about disclosing information and talking with public health agencies and officials.
10. Exhaust the ways to communicate what you learn about cultural groups with other cooperating agencies.

Christopher Jordan, Ph.D., assistant professor of Chemistry, recently published two scholarly articles, one of which was co-authored with four Saint Mary’s students:

“Lasallians in the Lab: The Distinctively Lasallian Character of Undergraduate Research,” was published in AXIS: Journal of Lasallian Higher Education. The article describes the importance of undergraduate research in Lasallian education. The participation of undergraduates in scholarly research is an essential part of higher education in the sciences, but its connection to the Lasallian mission has not been described in detail. Dr. Jordan wrote this as his Capstone reflection at the end of his participation in the Brother John Johnston Institute of Contemporary Lasallian Practice, a formation program that brings Lasallians from across the country together to build a deeper appreciation of the Lasallian charism.

“Features of Vibrational and Electronic Structures of Decavanadate Revealed by Resonance Raman Spectroscopy and Density Functional Theory,” was published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. Dr. Jordan’s four co-authors were all Saint Mary’s students: Paula Avila ’18, Thomas Ripplinger ’17, David Kemper ’19, and Joseph Domine ’18. This article demonstrates how a combination of experimental and theoretical tools can be used to better understand the strength and arrangement of chemical bonds in decavanadate, which is a potential therapeutic because of its antibacterial, antiviral, and anticancer properties. In the future, Dr. Jordan plans to extend his work with Saint Mary’s undergraduates to see if the same techniques described in this article can help us study the decavanadate-enzyme relationship.

The StellarNet Raman 785-Vial System Spectrometer can be used for a variety of research, including determining the authenticity of gemstones and art work. Photo courtesy of StellarNet.

Before leaving the Winona Campus as part of the Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota’s COVID-19 policy, Nathan Lien, Ph.D., received some good news on March 18: He and his colleagues in the Department of Chemistry were one of a handful of schools to be awarded a $10,000 grant from the Pittsburgh Conference Memorial National College Program.

The acquired funding will go directly toward the purchase of a piece of state-of-the-art equipment that can be used to identify the composition of materials.

Some popular uses are to identify the authenticity of gemstones and impurities of pharmaceutical drugs, but there are a multitude of uses for the StellarNet Raman 785-Vial System Spectrometer. 

“It makes us feel good that we’re doing things to improve the educational experience of our students,” said Dr. Lien, an associate professor who has been at Saint Mary’s for 10 years. “We’re providing instrumentation and experiences in the lab that other schools might not have.”

The device works by shining a laser at a piece of material. It then observes the scattering of light to determine the molecular vibrations of that material. From these vibrations, the composition of materials can be determined, Dr. Lien said.

Nathan Lien

The new equipment, which will be housed in one of the teaching labs in the Science and Learning Center, will have uses for students from first-years to seniors in courses in the spring of 2021. The new spectrometer could lead to the creation of several new chemistry experiments, such as one that Dr. Lien is most interested in exploring: an experiment detecting art forgeries. 

Dr. Lien added that the equipment could also be beneficial to other research projects taking place on the Winona Campus, such as the computational research into how small molecules fit in with proteins, done by Christopher Jordan, Ph.D., assistant professor, Chemistry.