Tag: University of Vermont

Sisyphus is perhaps best known in Greek mythology for being condemned to an eternity spent rolling a boulder uphill, just to watch it roll back down and repeat the process. His punishment has inspired work from painters, artists and writers through centuries depicting the strength it takes Sisyphus to, quite literally, carry on with the task. But among philosophers, Sisyphus is perhaps best recognized as a symbol of the absurd condition, hinged on humanity’s greatest question: What is the meaning of life?

It’s this question that acclaimed poet and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Vermont Major Jackson contends with in his latest collection of poetry, “The Absurd Man,” published by W.W. Norton. Invoking Sisyphus’s struggle for happiness and even contentment, Jackson’s lyrical collection follows a speaker through poems and moments fraught with instability and whimsy, relationships stumbling on shaky ground and periods of life at its highest and lowest. Shifting between several personas, the speaker heroically contemplates love and loss, navigates a changing world and family dynamics, and reflects on past mistakes and redemption.

In a nod to French philosopher Albert Camus, who famously penned the absurdist essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Jackson’s new title implicates the speaker in his poems as “the absurd man,” who bravely grapples with his own Sisyphean task to understand his journey on earth, his condition of unknowability. “Where Camus lands is that, despite the absurdity of existence — despite Sisyphus pushing the boulder only for it to fall back down the hill and having to push it again — Camus writes we have to imagine that Sisyphus is happy and accepting of the irrational continuity of hardship and struggle. And, in fact, it is that very predicament that bonds us as human beings,” Jackson explains.

Like Camus, Jackson offers a glimmer of hope in “The Absurd Man” as poems reveal the speaker is anchored to his world through his capacity as a son, father, husband, friend and colleague. “I’m trying to assert that all life possesses worth, and its significance is most evident when we consider our relationships with other human beings — family, friends, co-workers, strangers —how we tend to each other, how we carry each other’s memories, how we bring solace to one another, how we laugh together through tears,” he says.

And in the fractured world in which we live today, Jackson argues that caring for others is becoming increasingly important — and so is the need for poetry. Comparing Sisyphus’s boulder to today’s prescribed sequence of daily routines and various forms of escape: “That particular cycle, as Camus says, is the very kind of life that does not necessarily invite reflection and authenticity.”

But just as the speaker in “The Absurd Man” is able to slip from the condition of unknowability by finding meaning in life’s relationships, the writer behind the poems — Major Jackson — slips from the absurd condition of life by connecting with others and the world through language.

“For me, writing poems is my way of leading an authentic life, a means to penetrate the void. So much of life feels tragically scripted, and making art is a way of disrupting the mundane and habituated cycles in life,” he says.

For instance, unexpected inspiration for poems in “The Absurd Man” struck Jackson in nature, surrounded by forests and trees; in his imagination, creatively building alternative worlds; and even in the simple way two sounds or words had come together. But don’t be fooled; depending on the day, writing poetry can be as challenging for Jackson as pushing the boulder was for Sisyphus—even after five books and a lifetime as a poet.

Source: UVM News

Schoolchildren know that the age of a tree can be measured by counting the number of rings in a stump. But rings in especially old trees contain data that can’t be measured so easily. For example, stands of old growth forest contain centuries worth of temperature data that can be a key to completing the picture of how the climate has changed over the past several centuries.

Shelly Rayback of UVM’s geography department, and two colleagues, Grant Harley of the University of Idaho and Justin Maxwell of Indiana University, are using a three-year $360,000 National Science Foundation grant to unlock this data and reconstruct summer air temperature in the Eastern United States.

“Our colleagues have been able to reconstruct moisture availability in this region, but no one has been able to reconstruct temperature on a large scale across the eastern United States,” says Rayback, principal investigator for the grant. “This has been a thorn in our side, because while we have fairly dependable temperature data recorded over the past 120 years or so, we don’t have a clear picture of what the temperature has been like over the past 300-500 years.”

The team of researchers will use blue light intensity methods applied to tree ring samples of several temperature-sensitive tree species from North Carolina to maritime Eastern Canada, like the red spruce. A simple flatbed scanner can extract the blue light data to create a deeper paleolithic temperature record.

“We know average temperatures are rising, but what we’re trying to answer, in a longer-term context is, are the temperatures we’re experiencing today somewhat higher than the past, or a lot higher than the past? We’re guessing the latter is true, but we need the data to support that hypothesis.” 

Rayback says the data will be relevant not only to understanding temperature trends in the Northeast, but can also contribute to our understanding of broader climatic trends in the Northern Hemisphere. The data could also contribute to developing better general circulation models (GCMS) that scientists use to predict climate in the future.

Grant Harley is assistant professor of geography at the University of Idaho. Justin Maxwell is associate professor of geography at Indiana University. Rayback is associate professor of geography at UVM.

Source: UVM News

On February 1, before tip-off of the Catamount women’s basketball home game versus UAlbany, Director of Athletics Jeff Schulman ’89 G’03 shared landmark news: the largest gift ever made exclusively to a UVM women’s athletics program would permanently endow the Elizabeth F. Mayer ’93 and Paul J. Mayer, M.D. Women’s Basketball Head Coach at the University of Vermont.

“We would like to thank these beautiful and wonderful student-athletes for using both their basketball and academic skills,” said Betty Mayer as the news was released. “Their drive for perfection and their special individual personalities working together as a team are evident. They share that personal relationship with us, their fans, and the young people who look up to them as role models.”

This next step for women’s basketball was years in the making, tracing to pioneering varsity athletes, the strides of Title IX in the early 1970s. Fittingly, the announcement of the gift was coupled with a broader celebration of girls and women in sports.

Considering Catamount women’s basketball, in particular, the breakout teams of the early nineties are foundational. Across the 1991/’92 season coach Cathy Inglese’s Catamounts piled up a 29-0 record in the regular season and earned a first-ever trip to the NCAA Tournament. Incredibly, the next season’s team repeated that undefeated regular season run.

“Looking back, we had such a level of trust and respect for each other that it became a transformative experience. Maybe it’s a comfort level, maybe it’s a defining-who-you-are level, but we have been through so much together that you feel you can just call each other up and it’s still like you are sisters,” Jen Niebling ’93 reflected in 2011 on the twentieth anniversary of the win streak.

Inglese, who passed away last year due to a traumatic brain injury suffered in a fall, also reminisced in 2011 on her thoughts competing in that first NCAA Tournament: “Win or lose, look at what we have accomplished. All these people are getting such joy and pleasure out of watching our team. We changed the attitude of what women athletes could do.”

Changed the attitude and fundamentally redefined what Catamount women’s basketball could do. Inglese’s coaching tree would keep it rolling, as assistants Pam Borton and Keith Cieplicki each led the program, setting the stage for outstanding teams and players to follow: 1997-98, America East regular season champions; 1999-2000, America East regular season and conference tournament champions, earning a trip to the NCAA Tournament; 2001-02, America East regular season champions, WNIT Tournament; 2008/09 and 2009/10, back to back NCAA Tournament bids.
 
Dr. Karalyn Church, a major force on the Catamount teams at the turn of the century, recalls the conference championship victory over Maine: “I remember the feeling when I realized that all systems were a go, every single player on the team was in full form and I knew we were going to crush them. Patrick Gym was packed, my teammates were on fire and I felt like I had the front row seat on a fully loaded locomotive.”

Ten years later, May Kotsopolous ’10 would be among the players helping lift the program to another first, a victory in the NCAA Tournament, with an upset of seventh-seeded Wisconsin. She was among more than twenty former Catamount women’s basketball players, a sisterhood across eras, who returned for the celebration of the new endowment and women’s athletics.

Betty and Paul Mayer’s love for UVM women’s basketball team began during the years when Kotsopolous and teammates such as Courtnay Pilypaitis ’10, Alissa Sheftic ’10, and Sofia Iwobi ’10 flourished playing for Coach Sharon Dawley. The bond would strengthen, as Dawley’s successor, Lori Gear McBride, introduced having players mingle with fans after games. “It is there we began to appreciate how really special these ladies really are, each with unique skill sets and aspirations,” Paul Mayer said.

A major health crisis in late 2016 left Betty Mayer unable to manage the Patrick bleachers. But, with sideline seats in front of the band, the Mayers were in the gym for a men’s basketball game. When the Catamount women’s team, watching the game from the bleachers, spotted Betty, they came down and rallied for a group hug. “That expression of love and concern was the ‘penicillin’ that facilitated Betty’s recovery and made us consider how we could give back to this program,” Paul Mayer said.

Second-year Head Women’s Basketball Coach Alisa Kresge becomes the first-ever women’s coach at UVM to hold an endowed position and also the first in the history of the America East conference. With their gift, the Mayers have added UVM to a short list of universities with endowed women’s basketball coaches that includes Stanford, Notre Dame, Cornell, Dartmouth, Drake, and the University of Miami.

The Cats defeated UAlbany by double digits on February 1, another big moment in a big day for UVM women’s basketball and another signal of a bright path ahead for the program. “As I look at our starting five who are playing today, I see flashes of that great team of 2008-2010,” Paul Mayer said. “We felt more was needed as a thank you to this team and the ones that will follow.”

Andy Gardiner G’75 contributed to this article.

Source: UVM News

University of Vermont Provost and Senior Vice President Patricia Prelock today announced the appointment of Leslie V. Parise, Ph.D., as dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS).

Parise has built a long and successful career at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), where she rose through the ranks from assistant to full professor. For the past decade, Parise has served as the chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, which currently ranks fifth in the United States for National Institutes of Health-funded biochemistry departments.

“Dr. Parise is a strong proponent of translating research to benefit society,” said Prelock. “She impressed the search committee with her understanding of the importance of UVM’s land-grant mission, and the critical role CALS—and UVM Extension—have played in advancing this mission. She has a track record of working with faculty to promote inventions, patenting, and licensing agreements. And her entrepreneurial mindset resonates with the innovative spirit so central to our UVM community. I have no doubt that Dr. Parise will be an exceptional leader and member of our community.”

President Garimella said of her appointment, ““We are delighted that Dr. Leslie Parise is joining the University of Vermont as dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She brings an impressive skillset to the university: great prowess in basic and translational research, longtime success promoting entrepreneurship and technology transfer, a commitment to student success, and a proven track record as a leader. We very much look forward to welcoming her to the UVM community.”

Parise said she is honored to join the UVM community. “CALS and UVM Extension play an incredibly important role in demonstrating the power of UVM’s land-grant mission,” she said. “I look forward to meeting and working closely with the world-class faculty, staff and students of UVM, along with residents of Vermont. Finding ways to further engage our constituents to strategically maximize the educational, research and service missions of CALS, and to increase its visibility across the state and beyond will be among my priorities. I look forward to further positioning CALS as a microcosm for positive global impact.”

Widely recognized for cardiovascular and cancer research, Parise’s work has been continuously funded, including more than $14.5M from the NIH. She is also a strong advocate for faculty and student advancement. As department chair at UNC, she worked with faculty, students and postdoctoral fellows to reinvigorate programs through a range of approaches including enhanced internal communication and planning, and increased mentoring.

Parise helped faculty maintain and grow funding through partnerships across campus and with neighboring institutions to facilitate greater investment from foundations and government agencies such the Keck Foundation, American Heart Association, National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She also facilitated partnerships with neighboring institutions to stimulate investment in a highly transformative technology for solving molecular structures called cryo-electron microscopy.

In 2017, Parise was elected Chair of the Faculty at UNC-CH, a role she held until May 2019. In this capacity, she represented all 3,800 faculty of the UNC-CH campus, interacting closely with the chancellor, provost, deans and faculty from within the university, as well as UNC’s Board of Trustees, system president, and a faculty assembly from across the state’s 17-campus system. She has worked closely on issues ranging from curriculum changes, to budget models, to advancing diversity.

Parise will join UVM on May 15.

 

Source: UVM News

As the power of extreme weather events increase with climate change, a team of scientists warn that lakes around the world may dramatically change, threatening ecosystem health and water quality.

And the international team reports that our limited understanding of how lakes—especially algae at the base of food webs—may respond to more-extreme storms represents a knowledge gap that increases the risk.

The team of 39 scientists from 20 countries on four continents investigated what is currently known about how lake ecosystems respond to extreme storm events. The scientists found they cannot confidently predict how lakes will respond to the more frequent and intense storms that are expected in a warming world.

“If extreme weather events significantly change carbon, nutrient, or energy cycling in lakes, we better figure it out quickly,” said Jason Stockwell, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Vermont who led the new research with support from the National Science Foundation, “because lakes can flip, like a lightbulb, from one healthy state to an unhealthy one—and it can be hard or impossible to flip them back again.”

The new study focused on phytoplankton—microscopic plants commonly known as algae. “Phytoplankton are of particular concern because they are the base of the food web,” said Stockwell, “and a critical driver of water quality.”

The new study, “Storm Impacts on Phytoplankton Community Dynamics in Lakes,” was published in the journal Global Change Biology on 5 March.

Algal Action

It is well known that extreme weather events damage property, infrastructure, and the environment, including freshwater resources that are critical to human health. However, lakes are especially sensitive to storm events because they experience storms directly and receive storm runoff from throughout their watersheds. Runoff includes sediments, nutrients, microplastics, and much more.

“We have a good idea of how lakes physically respond to storms: the water column mixes, water temperature changes, and sediments can be churned up from the bottom or delivered by rivers and streams to make the lake more turbid,” Stockwell said. “But the physical response of the lake is just a part of the story. The biological impact of storms on phytoplankton and other plants and animals is fundamental to how lakes behave—and, as our study reveals, poorly understood.”

In a search of thousands of scientific articles from around the world, the scientists found just 31 studies on 18 lakes that connected storms to freshwater lake conditions, and then to phytoplankton. Not only was the information sparse, but the few available findings were inconsistent. It became clear that the scientific community has a poor understanding of how phytoplankton respond to storms, or how their responses may differ by storm types, across different lakes, or even at different times of year.

Reseach Required

The scientists call for a collaborative, multi-disciplinary effort by modelers, limnologists, watershed experts and other scientists, through research coordination networks—such as the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON)—to develop and advance a research framework of storm impacts on phytoplankton.

The team of scientists suggest several research directions including integrating watershed and lake physical models with biological models to better predict phytoplankton responses to storm-induced changes to lake conditions. The scientists also recommend continued and expanded long-term lake monitoring programs, coupled with networks of electronic high-frequency sensors, to evaluate short-term changes, emergent patterns, and long-term responses of lakes and water quality to storm events.

Similar research is also required for zooplankton, tiny grazers a little smaller than a rice grain that are essential food for fish. The goal is to better understand the pathways by which storms impact watershed-scale processes and plants and animals in lakes.

“We must quickly learn more—so we can better respond to the very real and pressing threat of climate change on lakes around the world,” said Jason Stockwell, Director of UVM’s Rubenstein Ecosystem Science Laboratory and a member of a program looking at resiliency to extreme events in the Lake Champlain Basin through VT EPSCoR. “Without healthy lakes, we are sunk,” he said.

Source: UVM News

The University of Vermont Board of Trustees has elected Ron Lumbra as its new chair, and Cindy Barnhart will serve as vice chair.

“I am very thankful for the opportunity to serve as chair,” Lumbra said. “This is certainly an exciting time at UVM, and in higher education. I see plenty of challenges ahead, but I also feel confident that UVM is well positioned to capitalize on the opportunities that will allow us to continue to thrive in the years to come. This university has given so much to me and I am committed to continue to give back as much as I can for the benefit of current and future UVM students.”

Lumbra was elected to a six-year term on the University of Vermont Board of Trustees by the self-perpetuating trustees in March of 2014. This past December he was re-elected to fill the remaining two years of former Board Chair David Daigle’s term, who stepped down from the Board at the end of February.

Lumbra is managing partner of Heidrick & Struggles’ Center of Excellence, and a partner in the CEO & Board Practice based in New York. He was previously managing partner of the firm’s Americas region. He has more than 20 years of executive search consulting experience, and an extensive track record of recruiting board directors and chief executive officers to a broad variety of clients.

Born and raised in Vermont, in St. Albans and Montgomery respectively, Lumbra completed his undergraduate studies at UVM, and earned a master of business administration degree from Harvard University.

In addition to Lumbra’s election as chair at a special meeting on March 2, the Board also established the Sustainability Work Group. The group will advise the Board on rapidly changing circumstances around sustainable investment, and it will provide perspective to the Board on fossil fuel divestment. The group will be led by gubernatorial trustee Carolyn Dwyer. The rest of the members are: Student trustee David Gringeri; legislative trustees Carol Ode and Shap Smith; gubernatorial trustee Ed Pagano; self-perpetuating trustees Briar Alpert, Robert Brennan and Jodi Goldstein; and President Suresh Garimella. Vice President for Finance & Treasurer Richard Cate will serve as liaison to the work group.

The Board also welcomed two new trustees who began their terms on March 1:

• Berke Tinaz, a PhD student, class of 2022, studying plant biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, succeeds Sidney Hilker, who completed her term on Feb. 29. Berke was appointed by the Associate Directors for the Appointment of Student Trustees, Inc. for a 2-year term ending Feb. 28, 2022.
• John Dineen was elected by the self-perpetuating board for a six-year term ending Feb. 28, 2026, filling the seat vacated by Ron Lumbra who completed his first term of service on Feb. 29, 2020.

And the following trustees have been re-elected:

• Don McCree was re-elected by the self-perpetuating board for a second six-year term ending Feb. 28, 2026. 
• Cindy Barnhart was re-elected by the self-perpetuating board for a second six-year term ending Feb. 28, 2026.

Legislative trustee Curt McCormack was re-elected as Board secretary for another one-year term. All Board officer appointments are for one year.

Source: UVM News

University of Vermont President Suresh Garimella today announced the appointment of Kirk Dombrowski as vice president for research. Dombrowski will report directly to Garimella and will be a member of the president’s senior team.

Dombrowski comes to UVM from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), where he was associate dean for research and partnerships in the College of Arts and Sciences and John Bruhn Professor of Sociology. UNL’s College of Arts and Sciences has 400 tenure-track faculty and 1,000 doctoral students.

“Dr. Dombrowski’s energy, experience and impressive background align strongly with our goals to further elevate UVM’s research enterprise,” said Garimella. “He is skilled at supporting faculty in the grant application process and has extensive experience conducting and encouraging interdisciplinary research. He is a staunch advocate of land-grant universities and the important role they play in society. We’re excited to welcome him to the UVM community.”

“I believe the opportunities to grow research at UVM are significant,” Dombrowski said. “Coupling the university’s expertise in health and medicine with its land-grant mission opens up strong possibilities for strategic research growth in many of UVM’s academic units. Similarly, the longstanding focus of UVM on research in sustainability and the environment is at the top of the nation’s—indeed the world’s—priorities. Promoting broad social science and humanities scholarship in parallel, as I’ve done at the University of Nebraska, resonates with the progressive spirit of the State of Vermont and attracts the best and brightest students. I very much look forward to joining UVM during this dynamic period of its history.”  

Dombrowski held several additional leadership positions at UNL. He was director of the university’s Rural Drug Addiction Research Center, a Center of Biomedical Research Excellence; interim director of the Nebraska Center for Virology, a 94,000-square-foot biochemistry research institute; and director of UNL’s Minority Health Disparities Initiative, a university-wide faculty, recruitment, development and community engagement initiative that he was brought to Nebraska to lead in 2013.

Prior to joining UNL, Dombrowski was a faculty member in the Department of Anthropology at the City University of New York’s John Jay College. He was also an associate director at New York University’s Center for Drug Use and HIV Research, a National Institutes of Health Center for Excellence.

A cultural anthropologist by training, Dombrowski is also an active researcher whose work straddles the social and behavioral health sciences, a link he has used to address issues of public concern and social good, such as HIV infection dynamics, drug and alcohol addiction, minority health disparities, and suicide prevention in Native American/First Nation communities. Dombrowski’s research has received more the $12 million in NIH IDeA funding through the COBRE program. He has conducted team-based research in a range of disciplines and received significant funding from several National Science Foundation programs. His published work has appeared in social science, computer science and health science journals.

Dombrowski will take on the role from Richard Galbraith, who was appointed vice president for research in 2014 and is now interim co-director of the University of Vermont Cancer Center. Dombrowski’s official start date is April 1.

Source: UVM News

The seeds for Nikki Khanna’s new book, Whiter: Asian American Women on Skin Color and Colorism, were planted when the UVM Sociology professor was a child growing up in suburban Atlanta.

On Saturday mornings Khanna, the daughter of an Indian father and white mother, would often shop with her parents at the local Indian grocer. At her eye level were boxes upon boxes of whitening creams with light-skinned Indian models promising “total fairness” and “complete whitening.”

“Whitening creams were everywhere and still are, and I was deeply affected by them,” she says.

Khanna’s early scholarship focused on mixed race identity, particularly among black-white biracial Americans, but she always knew she wanted to return to the topic of colorism within her own community, in part because of her childhood memories but also because the subject was so little explored.

Though colorism—defined as prejudice or discrimination against individuals with a darker skin tone, typically among people of the same ethnic or racial group—affects just about every part of the non-white world, Khanna says, most research, including her own, has focused on African Americans and Latinos, with very few studies on Asian Americans.

The issue has stayed under the radar, Khanna says, because “Asian Americans, and Asians generally, are hesitant to talk about it.”

Khanna knew she wanted to bring this well kept secret out into the open by giving a voice to Asian Americans who had been affected by colorism, but how she would do it was unclear, especially since she hoped for representation from many different Asian ethnic groups. 

Social call

As with so many other things in 2020, social media offered an effective communications channel.

“I decided I would put out a call that I was working on a book and that I was really interested in hearing personal stories—particularly from women, since they tend to be the most affected by colorism,” she says. She posted to relevant Facebook groups, promoted the book among her colleagues, many of whom also posted to their networks, and used word of mouth to reach people who might not have seen the queries.

She had no idea what to expect. But then the essays started pouring in.

“I was so excited because as I was reading the essays, I felt a connection with the women,” she says. “I also realized these women have so many things in common with each other, and there aren’t a lot of spaces where you see their stories,” she says.

She picked the strongest 30 essays, with an eye to diversity. Some essayists are academics, most are not, and they range in age from 22 to 62. They or their families come from many different Asian countries, from Pakistan to Cambodia to Japan to Vietnam. Some of the women included in the book are also mixed-race, like Khanna, adding another dimension to the issue of skin color among Asian Americans.

The essays naturally grouped themselves into six themes, Khanna found, from those that examined the often unwanted privilege light skin confers, to writings on “aspirational whiteness,” to essays that focused on the anti-black attitudes common in many Asian American communities.  

All of the essays are poignant expressions of personal experiences, and many are full of hurt, recalling words Khanna heard as a child about dark-skinned Indian women: “It’s a shame. She’s going to have a hard time getting married. No one is going to want to marry her.”

in an essay from the book titled Too Dark, Miho Iwata writes, “When I was a little girl, my dark complexion was somewhat acceptable. However, having dark skin as a woman in Japan is seen as very problematic. My mom would make comments such as ‘You are already old, so you should take care of your skin’; ‘Tanning will give you more ‘aging spots’ and your face already looks dirty with shimi [a Japanese term for dark spots/freckles but it literally means ‘stains’].’ My peers would also make comments about my dark skin, and some of them tried very hard to convince me to stay out of the sun and to make sure to wear sunscreen all the time.”

What is the allure of whiteness?

“Sometimes it’s not about Caucasian-ness,” she says. “In many parts of Asia, light skin is associated with upward mobility and higher classes. The notion is that, if you have light skin, you must be wealthy or you’re successful. Darker skinned people are seen as the people work the fields.”

For others however, particularly those from post-colonial countries, whiteness is often revered. In those contexts, Khanna says, “Skin whitening cannot be completely separated from the elevated status given to white people.”

Khanna’s goals for the book go beyond the academic.

“I want to contribute academically with this research since this topic is rarely explored,” she says. “But even more, my hope is that the book sparks conversation about skin color. I don’t think this is something Asians and Asian Americans often talk openly about. I also hope that many women read the book and see themselves in it. They aren’t alone.”

Source: UVM News

Ben Ogden loves engines. “Jet engines, diesel engines, gas engines,” he says. “They’re fascinating.” Last fall, in a two-semester thermodynamics class, he studied “all the math, calculating power outputs, and a lot of theory,” the engineering major says. “But this semester it’s applied thermodynamics and we’re learning how all the math applies in the real world, to real engines—which I love.”

In another course he’s taking this spring, the Mechanics of Solids, Ogden finds himself thinking about his skis. “I can’t help but to think how they’re made. I know a lot about the construction of skis, especially skate skis, and it’s great to have a class about how different materials deform under pressure.”

This week, he’ll have another chance to test his skills in applied thermodynamics, the mechanics of skis, and what happens under pressure—skiing in the NCAA National Skiing Championships. On Thursday, in Bozeman, Montana, Ogden will represent UVM in the ten-kilometer freestyle race. And then, on Saturday, he’ll compete in one his favorite Nordic ski races: the twenty-kilometer mass start, using classic technique.

“My main goals right now are just to keep it simple and do all the little things right,” he says, “but if all goes well in the 20K, I’d like to be on a podium—top three.”

Seek the Challenge

Last week, Ogden was taking some tough exams—in Germany. He was there training and racing with the U.S. Ski Team. “I’m on the U.S. D Team—which stands for development—it’s an under-23 team,” he explains, that allows him to both compete for UVM most of the season and the national team as well. One of the academic exams was in thermodynamics—issued by his UVM professor, William Louisos, and proctored by one of Ogden’s U.S. coaches. “It was really challenging, but I did well,” he says.

“I appreciate the challenge of engineering. That’s, honestly, a major draw for me,” Ogden says. “It’s not easy and it forces me to push myself every day in school. A lot of times it’s incredibly frustrating and I have to kick myself to get through it—but then I look back at what I was doing at the beginning of the semester that was really hard and now it’s no problem—which I find immensely satisfying.”

The other test was a series of races against many of the best young skiers in the world. Ogden fared well in several individual races and was part of the men’s 4×5 kilometer relay that won gold, defending their title in the Junior Cross Country World Championships by finishing 35 seconds ahead of Canada.

“The next big test will be to come over from Germany and be able to throw down in Bozeman,” Ogden says. Like a well-trained engineer, Ogden approaches the problem with a clear goal and a flexible set of tools. “We’ve got a great UVM team and what I want to do is just ski as hard as I can and leave it all on the course—whether I feel good, bad or horrible,” he says.

Last year, in the 20K race at NCAA’s—held at Vermont’s Trapp Family Lodge—Ogden was just a freshman and he was sick. He got himself into the lead pack, but “I was hanging on for dear life!” he recalls.  Still, he stuck to the back of the front—for an eighth-place finish.

“I hope to be more in control in Bozeman, but you never know what’s going to happen,” he says, “you have to read the field.” In a mass start race—where everyone begins at the same time, instead of the solo effort of a time trial—Ogden often likes to go out aggressively and push over the top of every hill. “Think about how it works,” he said. “If I’m at the front of the pack and accelerate over a hill and into a downhill, then I only have to accelerate for maybe, like, five seconds, but someone farther back in the pack has to accelerate up the entire hill and then over the top—if they want to stay up.”

On the other hand, getting carried away too early can blow the race. “So I can totally see myself just camping out and waiting. I don’t know the Western skiers very well, so I’ll definitely want to pay close attention. I’ll mix it up at the front and maybe pull some tricks out of my sleeve. But no matter what, I just want to let the race unfold, and adjust to what the other guys are doing.” Some of Ogden’s professors might call this adaptive engineering.

Ski Vermont

Ben Ogden grew up in the village of Landgrove, Vt., population 154. His father skied for Middlebury College where his younger sister, Charlotte, is now a nationally competitive Nordic skier; his older sister Katharine is a three-time NCAA national champion in Nordic skiing for Dartmouth College. “We’re a big ski family, for sure,” Ogden says.

And Trapp Family Lodge is still one of his favorite places to ski. “Even though I have lived in Vermont my entire life, I always love seeing the sap buckets on the trees and all the maples in the woods,” Ogden says. “And the racing there is great—up and down with old-school, tight fast corners on the downhill, which keeps everybody on their toes.”

And after college? “I do want to take a crack at a professional skiing,” says Ogden, who credits UVM Nordic coach Patrick Weaver—two-time national champion and former Olympian—with helping him to build a strong training plan and to dream big. “The Olympics are coming up in two years. That’s the dream,” Ogden says. And then he seems to correct himself. “That’s the reach goal,” he says.

And beyond that? Ogden is not sure. His skis are made by Madshus and he knows another young skier, who studied engineering, that the company hired to work on new skate ski designs. “That’s the type of thing that I would love to do,” Odgen says, “to really get my hands dirty and design things.”

Source: UVM News