Even the casual follower of academic science and industry R&D will recognize that most areas of scientific inquiry are quickly becoming interdisciplinary in nature. The reason for this is both simple and exciting. Technology and broad experimental proficiency have allowed the scientist to start asking bigger, more complex questions. The tools of molecular biology and genetics are helping in...

Dr. Marc D. Guerra, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in Theology at Ave Maria University, has been awarded a $150,000 grant through the New Sciences of Virtue Project at the University of Chicago. Guerra and his project’s codirector, Dr. Peter Augustine Lawler, Professor of Government and International Studies at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, wil...

Classics professor Daniel Nodes loves searching for treasure and sharing what he has found with scholars and students.  The finds are written in Latin and Greek, buried in manuscripts.  Unearthing them is done with tools of philology (being a word-lover), paleography (reading early handwriting) and philosophy (love of the wisdom sought by those writers).

Some treasures are lar...

The new major in Global Affairs and International Business gives students the intellectual foundation to think about global interactions.  The program coordinator, Dr. Gabriel Martinez, is an economist specializing on global economic interactions, particularly the effect of the quality of institutions on living standards across countries.

We know that we live a "globalized...

Dr. Michael Pakaluk, chairman of the AMU Philosophy Department, was pretending to be upset with his publications for last year: besides half a dozen scholarly papers, "only three books of mine were published last year," was his mock-complaint, "when I was trying to finish twelve!"

Whatever one's judgment on the number of books published, one can't help being impressed by the range of...

When Catherine Ruth Pakaluk received her Ph.D. in economics in 2010 from Harvard University, it was an easy decision to accept a job offer from Ave Maria University. Besides the evident personal attractions—such as living in a terrific community just a bike-ride away from campus, where it would be easy to raise her six young children, aged 2 to 11—she was attracted to the possibilit...

Political Economy and Government, a truly exciting new major, brings together the disciplines of politics and economics to explore their mutually supportive dimensions.  It provides students, as aspiring policy-makers, with the ability to understand the importance of institutions in shaping public policy as well as the sometimes agonizing trade-offs involved in responsible decision-making....

The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge is widely known for his famous poems "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan". The familiar term "psychosomatic," and the phrase "the willing suspension of disbelief," have passed into popular modern usage, while most are unaware of their origin in Coleridge. In fact, Coleridge, along with his friend and collaborator William Wordsworth, who tog...