MCLA to hold sixth annual undergraduate research conference
NORTH ADAMS – Gerol Petruzella ’01, a teacher at Mount Greylock Regional High School, will deliver the keynote address at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts' sixth annual Undergraduate Research Conference on Thursday, April 24, in Murdock Hall conference room 218, 2-3 p.m. The conference is free and open to the public.This year’s conference features the research of students from across academic disciplines in several different formats. For this professional event, student submit an abstract of their work for review by the faculty conference committee. Students have the option of presenting their work visually through a poster session or orally with paper presentations.
New disciplines to the conference this year are environmental science and physics. Other disciplines represented at the conference include chemistry, psychology, history, sociology, biology, English and philosophy. “We are trying to make it as broad-based as possible to encourage undergraduates who want to be challenged to go beyond the classroom setting and be a part of a professional presentation, which would be part of a graduate program,” said Anthony Daly, MCLA history professor. “The conference highlights one of the strengths of the College in that students have the opportunity to do research with a faculty member.”
The event will begin with poster presentations from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. Paper presentations will happen from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. A Philosophy Mini-Conference will take place from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., following Petruzella’s 2 p.m. address. Petruzella will speak on “You Want Me to What? Research, Graduate School and a Real Life.” A native of Pittsfield, he earned his bachelor of arts degree in philosophy from MCLA in 2001. Soon after, Petruzella was awarded a Presidential Fellowship to enter the Ph.D. program in the philosophy department at the University of Buffalo, in New York. In 2005, he moved to Williamstown to write his dissertation, which he successfully defended in 2007.
Petruzella has an article under review in the New England Classical Journal, and is working with the American Philosophical Association and the Squire Foundation to bring philosophy to pre-college education, with a high school Ethics Bowl team. He has been an adjunct professor at MCLA in the philosophy department, and teaches Latin, English, Greek, and Sanskrit at Mount Greylock High School in Williamstown.
For more information about the sixth annual Undergraduate Research Conference at MCLA, go to www.mcla.edu/urc or contact MCLA Psychology Professor Maria Bartini, (413) 662-5463.
