With Professor Peng at Queen’s College (Canada), David Kalist, assistant professor of economics, found smarter baseball players live longer as applied to Major League Baseball. “I noticed previous research on the longevity of athletes failed to account for the educational level,” said David, a former NCAA baseball player. The study involved 2,641 players who were born between 1945 and 1964. The results suggest the least educated players represented a higher percentage of the deceased. Their findings were published in the journal Death Studies.

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Mike Long, assistant professor of mathematics (right), presented workshops for the Pennsylvania and National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conferences using roller coasters and amusement parks to instruct other professionals ways to teach math. He developed his methods by combining his love of amusement parks with inspiration from the game Roller Coaster Tycoon while a doctoral student at West Virginia University and a participant in a National Science Foundation grant. “I always try to incorporate something about amusement parks or roller coasters into all of my classes,” he said. This is easy to do as his office is filled with K’Nex models of various rides. Currently he is working on a project with student Joe Gambino matching mathematical functions with the amusement rides that best illustrate them through the use of video clips.