Special Students Hosted at Summer Sport Camps

ITALIAN ATHLETES GET A TASTE OF AMERICAN STUDENT-ATHLETE LIFE

Penn State Behrend Athletics is typically busy all summer, hosting a range of youth summer camps. One group, in particular, really went the distance to spend a week at Behrend.

A group of swimmers and water polo players, age 12 to 18, from Trieste, Italy, had the chance to learn firsthand what it’s like to be a student-athlete at a U.S. college. For a week, they lived in Behrend’s residence halls, worked out in Junker gym, watched movies in Reed, ate at Dobbins Dining Hall, experienced American cuisine, and spent a lot of time in the pool learning from Behrend water polo coaches Joe Tristan and Gina-Bella Mata’afa.

Universities in Italy do not have athletics programs, so it was an eye-opening experience for the visiting swimmers and water polo players, some of whom hope to study (and play) internationally one day.

The program is coordinated by Marco Vecellio, director of CollegeLife Italia, a college sports recruiter based in Rome.

Twenty swimmers and water polo players from Italy spent a week at Behrend this summer.

Vecellio said that Behrend has exceeded their expectations, describing the campus, facilities, and accommodations as firstrate. He paid Housing and Food Services what might be the highest compliment, considering the source: “The food is very good,” he said, “and we’re Italians, so we are very picky about food.”

BLIND ATHLETES COMPETE AT PENN STATE BEHREND

Envision camp introduces junior athletes to hockey, horseback riding, and more

In August, more than sixty vision-impaired junior athletes, ages 5 to 18, visited Behrend for the Envision Blind Sports summer camp.

The camp introduces students to sports they have never tried, such as archery, rock climbing, and horseback riding. Some events are modified to keep the athletes safe. In the pool, for example, counselors tap swimmers’ shoulders with a foam pool noodle to signal that they are close to the wall.

Campers spent a week at Behrend, traveling from ten states, including Colorado and Hawaii. They played soccer and floor hockey and threw foam-tipped javelins. They bounced at a trampoline park and navigated a treetop ropes course.

“Some of these kids have been sidelined their whole lives,” said Wendy Fagan, an instructor in Slippery Rock University’s adapted physical activity program who founded Envision Blind Sports in 2007. “Our campers learn they can play sports that maybe they thought were closed off to them. That builds a lot of confidence.”

Student Success

Fungus bears Behrend name

This summer, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint Genome Institute, in collaboration with Penn State Behrend, completed sequencing of the genome for the fungus Gnomoniopsis castanea Behrend v1.0. It is the first time that the genome of a fungus in this genus has been sequenced, meaning it will act as the reference for the sequencing of other species of fungi.

The fungus was discovered on American chestnut trees being studied by EMILY DOBRY ’20 when she was a Behrend undergraduate student researcher for the Lake Erie Regional Grape Research Extension Center in North East, Pa. Dobry isolated the genome for the fungus as part of her master thesis research in horticulture.

“Initially, we assumed this was an unusual presentation of chestnut blight infection,” she said, “but after taking samples and doing research, we did not find blight, but a pathogen commonly known as chestnut brown rot. At the time, there had been no published report of this fungus in in our hemisphere.”

Dobry, who is now a Ph.D. student in Penn State’s Agricultural and Environmental Plant Sciences program, continues to study the strain.

Outreach program, engineering student featured in magazine

Sophomore Mechanical Engineering major ELLEN SHADE was featured recently in Progressive Railroading magazine for her involvement with the Wabtec Girls Who STEAM camp, a summer camp for middle-school age girls who are interested in science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math. The camp is a partnership between Wabtec, which has a locomotive manufacturing plant in Erie, and Behrend, where most camp activities take place.

Shade spent camp week as a STEAM volunteer, helping dozens of campers and the Wabtec interns who mentor them find their way around the Behrend campus. Shade attended the very same camp as a seventh-grader and thought it would be fun to help the younger girls have the experience she had at that age.

STUDENTS DESIGN RACE AWARDS

Student researchers in Penn State Behrend’s James R. Meehl Innovation Commons designed and 3-D printed Nittany Lion awards for the college’s first Run for Women 5K run/walk hosted by the Women’s Engagement Council this summer.

BEN FAHRNEY, a senior Mechanical Engineering student and product design

engineer in Innovation Commons, oversaw the project, while engineering students

EMMANUELLA IWERE, MATT ROCKAGE, and EVAN LANG did the printing in the lab.

It was no small job. More than fifty awards were created in three different sizes.

Innovation Commons is an open ideation, product development, and prototyping center staffed by students guiding innovators and entrepreneurs through early product development. It is open to entrepreneurs and innovators throughout the region who are looking for a place to organize, collaborate, compose, and construct their ideas.