Community Connections Events for Faculty

We’re excited to launch Kudos Recognition Cards as part of our ongoing commitment to fostering a culture of appreciation and engagement at Harvey Mudd College. To celebrate the launch, we invite you to stop by the Kudos Kick-Off Event.

The Cabinet is hosting informal coffee breaks in fall 2025 for students, faculty and staff. These coffee breaks will be attended by most of the Cabinet team and will provide an opportunity for the community to share ideas, express concerns and highlight successes.

All are welcome to stop by as schedules allow.

Reserve a fifteen minute spot with President Harriet Nembhard.

This learning community is for everyone, from those who are already experienced in community engagement to those who are curious about learning more about this high-impact educational practice. Faculty participants will discuss readings, meet with outside speakers, share ideas, and think collaboratively about implementing community engagement into the 5C students’ experience.

Introducing Hopper: On-Campus HPC Infrastructure for Computationally-Intensive Research
Paul Nerenberg, CMC; Jamie Haddock, HMC; Bilin Zhuang, HMC

In this presentation, we will introduce Hopper, a new NSF-funded high-performance computing (HPC) cluster shared by CMC and HMC. We will give an overview of Hopper’s hardware, some examples of current research use cases, and how it fits into the larger ecosystem of HPC resources available to HMC faculty.

Welcome to HMC’s Community Conversations for the fall 2025.

HMC Community Conversations* use conversation guides with a structured format to help people with different viewpoints and experiences build understanding. There will be 3–5 other people in a table group. It is not a debate, and the goal is not to change one another’s opinions. There are Conversation Agreements like “Listen and Be Curious” and “Show Respect and Suspend Judgement” that create the framework for diving into the questions. The questions are designed to draw out our personal experiences rather than opinions around the topic.

The overall purpose is to learn more about the experiences others have around the topic and build a sense of community.

Community Conversations will take place on Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to noon in Shanahan 1480; and each gathering will be on a separate topic. Gatherings will be in person only.

Increasingly common hotter and drier conditions cause drought stress on plants. The response of plants to these conditions is a significant source of uncertainty in hydrologic and water resources predictions, climate change forecasts, and wildfire risk estimates, among others. However, characterizing plant responses to water stress is challenging because of the large diversity of relevant vegetation traits (including root, xylem, and stomatal properties) within species, within ecosystems, and across the globe.

Alexandra Konings, associate professor of Earth system science at Stanford, will describe how remote sensing (i.e., satellite measurements) of vegetation water content—which naturally integrates over these sources of variability and provides data across the globe—may be a useful tool for better understanding plant water stress response. After describing the scientific challenges in quantifying plant-water stress, Konings will introduce microwave remote sensing and what data it can provide. She will then discuss several examples of the utility of this data: including for accounting for spatial variability in ecosystem behavior and better predictions of hydrologic cycle, and for understanding wildfire risk under different conditions. She’ll also briefly discuss emerging frontiers and opportunities.

This faculty panel will explore “dangerous questions” from a variety of disciplines to understand and respond to challenges facing American universities. The discussion will address the erosion of knowledge and expertise, as well as political forces that may attempt to limit intellectual inquiry and creativity.

Ambereen Dadabhoy, asssociate professor of literature, “What Would Shakespeare Say?”

Anup Gampa, assistant professor of psychology, “Invasive Species: Blaming Dysregulated Plant Neighbors Is a ‘Settler Move’ to Innocence” 

Rachel Mayeri, artist and professor of media studies, “What Can Art Do During a Fascist Takeover?”

David K. Seitz, associate professor of cultural geography, “Geography Against Immediacy”

Paul Steinberg, professor of political science and environmental policy, “Creative Politics as a Strategic Response to Authoritarianism”

David Wilson, assistant professor of music, “Sounding (Anti-)Authoritarian: A Few Vignettes”

“We don’t want to live in a society in turmoil. In the U.S., 93 percent of people want to reduce divisiveness, and 86 percent believe it’s possible to disagree in a healthy way. Yet with increasing political and social fragmentation, many of us don’t know how to move past our differences. Civil rights scholar john a. powell presents an actionable path through ‘bridging’ that helps us communicate, coexist and imagine a new story for our shared future where we all belong.” (description courtesy of Othering and Belonging Institute)

The Office of Civic and Community Engagement (OCCE) will be hosting a guilt-free book club this fall semester on john a. powell’s book The Power of Bridging: How to Build a World Where We All Belong. Our first gathering is on Friday, Oct. 3.