Research Initiative Extended: SUNY Potsdam Fellowship Program continues through 2025
POTSDAM, N.Y. (WWTI) – The T. Urling and Mabel Walker Research Fellowship Program has been extended through 2025, with the approval of the Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at SUNY Potsdam.
April 3: SUNY Potsdam hosts Author Robin Wall Kimmerer
This program's goal is to inspire faculty from 11 institutions of higher education in the area to do research on important problems facing North Country communities and offer suggestions for potential fixes, according to SUNY Potsdam.
Teachers and non-teaching staff from the colleges may apply. The 11 institutions include:
Paul Smith's College;
St. Lawrence University;
SUNY Canton;
SUNY Plattsburgh;
SUNY Potsdam;
Adirondack Community College;
Clarkson University;
Clinton Community College;
Jefferson Community College;
SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry; and
North Country Community College.
The program is designed to increase academic and community collaboration. Preference will be given to proposals with a compelling statement of support from a local person or group that outlines the ways in which the project's outcomes would benefit the community.
This program is funded by the SUNY Potsdam Provost's Office through the Campaign for the T. Urling and Mabel Walker Research Fellowship Program. The college says that each year, a maximum of two $5,000 research projects may be granted. Each approved project's prize amount will be decided by the Walker Fellowship Steering Committee.
SUNY Potsdam Law Enforcement Training Institute launches spring police academy
The deadline for proposals is April 15 at the close of business, says SUNY Potsdam.
For additional details and to apply, you can visit SUNY Potsdam's website or call the Provost's Office at 315-267-2891.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Fast Company
4 days ago
- Fast Company
I'm an emergency physician turned corporate leader. Here's how I led our team after a employee's suicide
My plane had just landed. I was anxious to get to the office after the departure of our team leader, a reduction in force culling hundreds of jobs just days before, and an organizational move to an unfamiliar part of the enterprise. As my team's senior ranking member, I needed to help process everything together. I turned on my phone to a deluge of texts. 'Please call as soon as possible,' my colleague wrote. 'Is everything okay?' I responded. 'No,' she replied. I called her as the plane taxied my crammed flight to the gate. 'Priya,' she said, 'Ashley died. She took her own life.' The words echoed in my head—strange sounds that made no sense and didn't feel real. Ashley had been a valued member of the team, a well-loved and developing leader whose deep empathy, perpetual curiosity, and strong work ethic were constant reminders of the nature and value of our role within the company. I didn't quite believe what I was hearing. Sobbing from the other side of the line pulled me back. I instantly donned the mantle of doctor. I had to help my friends and colleagues through this—and separate my own emotion from what needed to be done. It was going to be my job to tell the rest of my team. As an emergency physician, I was the one who told people their loved ones had died. I never expected to do the same in corporate America. And despite working for a healthcare company, I'd soon learn I'd have to do it with little support. The systems I was used to in the hospital were not in place here. Every Company's Duty We live in volatile times. Suicide rates in the U.S. spiked 36% over the past two decades, with nearly 50,000 deaths in 2023 alone. Across the country, job stability is tenuous, risking employer health insurance coverage. Mental health services are beyond capacity. Amid billions slashed in mental health funding and threats to Medicaid coverage, the situation will likely worsen. These tragedies impact the workforce, though precisely how depends on the level and caliber of systems-level organization and preparedness. Even in healthcare companies, clinical expertise and informed leadership can be systemically lacking. When I ran into this absence of coordinated systems, I used skills honed in the emergency department—through treating gunshots, heart attacks, and COVID-19—to help my team. But what if corporate America turned lessons from emergency medicine into a systems-level approach to suicide? We might turn tragedy into psychological safety—improving employee loyalty, productivity, and longevity—to the benefit of the business. Here's how. 1. Build a Coordinated Team and Established Process When a patient presents to the emergency department in a critical state, the team springs into action. The doctor, nurses, and emergency techs focus on the patient, while security, social work, and pastoral care workers support loved ones. In crises, everyone has a role. Under high-pressure circumstances, a single decision could result in death. Protocols such as American Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) and American Trauma Life Support (ATLS) standardize our approaches and maximize opportunity for survival. Large companies should adopt crisis management protocols describing who and how they'll support employees after suicide and other workplace traumas, instead of avoiding such in hope that suicide would be a rare event. Delineating processes, roles, and responsibilities mitigates variation and disorganization while enabling prompt response and engagement. That's fundamental because failing to quickly address a suicide can increase misinformation, distrust, and anxiety. 2. Communicate Immediately and Clearly After communicating with her family, I wanted to tell my team about Ashley face-to-face, just as I would in the emergency department. I also wanted to secure resources should anyone need support. On the cab ride from the airport, I engaged our human resources team and asked for crisis counseling on-site. I reserved a private space on campus for the entire team to gather. Out of respect and dignity not only for Ashley but also for the team as a whole, it was critical that the news was shared in a safe space from a trusted source. Hearing such through the rumor mill would undermine the honor I held central to the process. Human resources teams and leaders should model dignity and respect—and not be the source of word-of-mouth spread. Death-telling is an evidence-driven process that includes a few key actions: gathering loved ones together, providing resources, and meeting people where they are, which means immediately setting context, using clear words such as died, and allowing time and space to process the information. A few hours after I got to the office, it was time. Given the recent reduction in force, I had to stave off my team's top-of-mind fear. 'First,' I said, 'our jobs are secure.' Then I told them Ashley had died. 'We don't know all the details,' I said, 'but we know she died by suicide.' I fell silent, giving space for the shock and emotion that followed, while my own heart broke for everyone. As a close-knit team, sadness shrouded all of us, settling into the room. The air felt heavier. The silence was replaced by gasps and tears. After some time, I made a simple promise: 'I'm here for anything you need. We'll get through this together.' 3. Provide Visible and Tangible Support Suicide is a contagion. Exposure may increase the risk of suicidal thoughts, behaviors, and depression. In the aftermath, companies typically provide information about employee assistance programs or counseling services to help people cope with grief. But merely pointing to resources rather than providing them can make the people processing shock feel overwhelmed. They may perceive it as absent support. Postvention is a process designed to quash the contagion. It alleviates the effects of stress, helping survivors through immediate, short-term, and long-term responses. Visible and strong workplace leadership, with a willingness to discuss and serve as an ongoing resource, is effective in postvention efforts. But when leaders neither acknowledge nor offer safety following the suicide of an employee, that void can feel dehumanizing and propagate stigma. 'If an organization cannot talk about suicide,' experts have noted, 'it cannot properly support those impacted by it.' Silence from leaders and HR can feel deafening—further undermining survivors' sense of psychological safety and spurring feelings of isolation and neglect. Leaders who support collective mourning, through memorials or gathering events, connect people while dispelling stigma. 4. Help Managers Through It As we began grieving, I did everything I could to give the team space and permission to care for themselves. I cleared noncritical work and nonessential meetings and absorbed parts of their workload. As a physician, I knew each person would have different needs, based on their beliefs, cultural norms, and behaviors. High-pressure postventions usually fall to direct managers, who often have minimal to no training. They may overlook their own trauma and grieving process while tending to the needs of the team and the business. While strict hierarchical structures pervade corporate culture, leaders, including those in HR, should break rank amid crises. They should reach out beyond their direct reports to support the larger team. The better trained and available HR leaders are, the more they can alleviate the pressures on any one manager. 5. Debrief, Learn, and Improve Organized debriefings with leaders to review processes, execution, and opportunities for improvement are standard practice in medicine and for first responders. This not only allows for continuous quality improvement, but also provides an opportunity for various members to voice their personal experiences. Time and space from an acute event brings clarity and refinement. Following the suicide of a colleague, an organized debriefing supports the long-term aspect of the postvention. This is a collaborative exercise, anchored in safety and humility and based in learning and a drive to improve. Through honest feedback and critical evaluation, processes can be honed and the company can benefit as a whole. Helping Employees Heal From Crisis At a time when systems across the U.S. appear to be crumbling, corporate America has a valuable opportunity to assimilate humanity and empathy. Through processes and protocols, organizations can navigate crises by nurturing compassion, vulnerability, and shared healing. That's essential to employee wellness—which is, in turn, essential to engagement and productivity. But systems can't solve everything. Medicine's most refined processes can't prevent the guilt that plagues most survivors of suicide. I still struggle with the questions. Had I seen Ashley in the emergency department rather than the workplace, could I have spotted a warning sign and intervened? Had I fully understood how deeply the reorganization disrupted her sense of safety, what might I have done to mitigate it? I'll never have all the answers. I have only the lessons learned from a tragedy no leader wants to endure but for which every leader must prepare. Ashley left an indelible mark on all of us, both in life and in her absence. The shock and grief may never be gone, and a disappointment in company culture may linger. But our team got through the crisis together—just as I'd promised.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signs new laws retooling elections. Here's what they'll do:
Iowa's election officials will have new tools to verify voters' citizenship and will be empowered to question voters at the polls about whether they are citizens under a new law signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds. The legislation, House File 954, also bans ranked-choice voting in Iowa and makes it harder for third-party groups such as Libertarians to qualify as a major political party. Reynolds, a Republican, also signed a separate law, House File 928, overhauling Iowa's election recount procedures. She announced the signing of both bills in a Monday, June 2, news release. The legislation comes in response to the chaotic weeks leading up to the 2024 election, when Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, instructed county auditors to challenge the ballots of 2,176 registered voters who he suspected were not citizens based on a faulty list from the Iowa Department of Transportation. The directive resulted in hundreds of registered voters being challenged at the polls and casting provisional ballots, which were only counted if they provided additional proof of citizenship. In March, Pate said an audit of the state's voter registration list confirmed 277 noncitizens on Iowa's voter rolls, including 35 noncitizens who successfully voted in the 2024 election and five more who tried to vote but had their ballots rejected. Pate praised lawmakers and Reynolds for enacting the legislation, saying the laws "add additional layers of integrity to our robust election procedures." "Keeping Iowa elections safe, fair and accurate is a team effort, from the Iowa Legislature and Governor Reynolds to our county auditors and local election officials on the frontlines of our elections," Pate said in a statement. "Today, we saw a clear consensus that upholding consistent, statewide procedures and ensuring voter eligibility are key to balancing participation by all eligible Iowans with election integrity." During legislative debate, Democrats raised concerns about election workers being able to ask voters about their citizenship status at the polls and said Iowa's elections are already secure. Beginning July 1, election workers may challenge a voter at the polls on the basis of their citizenship status under the law, which adds to a section of current law that allows election workers to challenge voters on their age and residency. The law also gives the Secretary of State's Office the ability to contract with "state and federal government agencies and private entities" to check voters' records. And it requires the Iowa Department of Transportation to send the Secretary of State's Office a list of everyone 17 years old and older who has submitted documentation to the DOT saying they are not a citizen. If a registered voter's citizenship status is in question, they must provide documentation affirming they are legally eligible to register and they will be designated as an active registered voter. The law bans ranked choice voting in Iowa at the state, federal and local level, although the voting method is not currently used in any elections in the state. It says any statewide or local government cannot conduct elections using ranked-choice voting, sometimes known as instant runoff voting, which involves ranking each candidate in order of preference and reallocating votes to a voter's second choice if their first choice fails to win a majority. Political parties will now need to receive at least 2% of the vote in three consecutive general elections in order to be recognized as major political parties in Iowa. That's a change from Iowa's previous law, which allowed major party status to be awarded to parties whose presidential or gubernatorial candidates earn 2% of the vote in one general election. Libertarians have objected to efforts to make it more difficult to qualify as a major party in Iowa. Libertarians gained major party status following the 2016 election, lost it following the 2018 election, gained it again following the 2022 election and lost it again after last fall's presidential election. The party's presidential or gubernatorial candidate has never received 2% of the vote in three consecutive general elections. After a razor-thin congressional race in Iowa was decided by just six votes in 2020, Iowa has finally taken steps to overhaul its election recount procedures. The law places county auditors and their staff of election workers in charge of conducting recounts, doing away with Iowa's current system which uses a recount board with members appointed by the leading and trailing political candidates, as well as a third agreed-upon member. Under the new law, candidates can only request recounts in local or state legislative races if the election was decided by 1% or 50 votes, whichever is less. For statewide and federal races, candidates can only request a recount if the election was within 0.15%. Iowa's previous law allowed candidates to request a recount regardless of the winner's margin of victory, but the state would only pay the costs if the results of the election were within one percentage point. Had it been in place last year, the new recount threshold would have prevented Democrat Christina Bohannan from requesting a recount in her 2024 race against U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks in southeast Iowa's 1st Congressional District. Miller-Meeks won the race by 798 votes, or 0.2%. The law says the state will pick up the costs of the recount in all cases. The law requires recounts to be conducted using Iowa's vote tabulators. Recounts can only be conducted by hand in extraordinary circumstances, defined to include machine failures, a discrepancy between the results of the election and an initial recount and a number of overvotes that exceeds the margin between the candidates. Stephen Gruber-Miller covers the Iowa Statehouse and politics for the Register. He can be reached by email at sgrubermil@ or by phone at 515-284-8169. Follow him on X at @sgrubermiller. This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Kim Reynolds signs Iowa election laws on voter citizenship, recounts
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
Bulletproof glass saves Leon County deputy from gunfire
LEON COUNTY, Texas (FOX 44) – A Leon County Sheriff's deputy is okay after the bulletproof glass of the patrol unit prevented a terrible situation. Sheriff Kevin Ellis says dispatch received a 9-1-1 call from an individual in Jewett at approximately 1:53 a.m. Saturday. The caller advised they needed help in the 1000 block of County Road 320. A deputy arrived on scene and found a man with a rifle, who fired eight .223 rounds into the front windshield of the deputy's patrol vehicle on the driver's side. Fortunately, the deputy was not hurt thanks to the vehicle's bulletproof glass. The man identified as Allen David Clutter, was taken into custody without further incident. Sheriff Ellis says the Office wants to especially thank the citizens of Leon County, as well as Operation Safe Shield, for preventing harm to the deputy. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
