2012-2013 Annual Report

Beyond Cedarville A team of seniors placed second for its airplane design at the international Society of Automotive Engineers competition in Fort Worth, Texas. Cedarville’s solar boat team won the Solar Splash Intercollegiate Solar Boating competition for the seventh time since 1997. The competition was held in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A team of engineering students won first place in the American Society of Engineering Education Autonomous Robotics Competition in Atlanta, Georgia. Four representatives from Cedarville’s School of Pharmacy attended the prestigious Ohio Pharmacists Association’s Young Pharmacy Leaders Conference in Columbus, Ohio. A team of Cedarville computer science students placed first in Ohio at the 2012 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. The team competed against 130 teams representing 63 universities from Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and eastern Ontario. Cedarville’s volleyball, men’s and women’s cross country, men’s basketball, and women’s tennis teams won G-MAC conference championships in the University’s first season in the athletic conference. Students’ accomplishments inside and outside the classroom create doors of opportunity for graduate study, career positions, and, most importantly, Gospel impact. In 2006, the Greene County Sanitary Engineering Department implemented a $1.7 million restoration project along a 2.2-mile section of the North Fork of Massie Creek (which runs through Cedarville) and the Little Miami River. The goal was to improve water quality for downstream cities by reducing phosphorus inputs from fertilizer applications. In the spring of 2012, I worked with four environmental science classmates on an ongoing research project. We compared an unrestored section of the creek with a restored section to determine what effect the restoration project had on fish and insect communities. Based on our findings, we concluded that fish and insect diversity was similar for both sites but more stable at the restored site, indicating that recovery is ongoing. We shared our results with Greene County officials so they could evaluate this and future projects. I was exhilarated to be part of a project that had a practical application to real-world issues. We presented our research at the Ecological Society of America conference in Portland, Oregon, and at Cedarville’s annual research symposium. These experiences led to a summer research position with Au Sable Institute of Environmental Studies in Michigan and, more recently, admission into the Master of Science in biology program at Loma Linda University in California. The research we conducted on Massie Creek was a highly formative and enlightening aspect of my Cedarville education. Christian Hayes ’13 Environmental Science Graduate Student at Loma Linda University BEYOND THE CLASSROOM 10