It was a blue-sky morning, Aug. 24, 2006. Cpl. Staci Renee Smith, in the war-torn country only six months, was delivering ammunition to troops at a faraway combat post when her vehicle flipped over. She hit the ground, head first.

“My first thought was ‘I’m going to die,’” says Staci. “Then I passed out.”

When she woke up, an oral surgeon was hovering over her offering comforting words: “Your jaw is shattered. I can fix it.” After multiple surgeries, he did just that, inserting two metal plates – one in her chin, the other in her right jaw – and securing them with five screws.

The URI senior is so grateful to that doctor she plans to become what he is – an oral surgeon. She’s well on her way. While at URI, she was in the Honors Program, maintained a 3.75 grade-point average, volunteered at a local health clinic, interned in two dentists’ offices, and this spring, spent 10 days in Guatemala teaching dental care to villagers as part of her senior honors project. She graduates this week with a Bachelor of Science degree in biological sciences, and in September, she’s off to Western University Health Sciences College of Dental Medicine in Pomona, Calif., for a four-year dental program. Then she’ll continue studying another five to seven years to become an oral surgeon.

As the first person in her immediate family to graduate from college, Staci can’t wait to get started on the next step. “At age 19 my life was changed,” Staci says. “I was thrust into my future. That doesn’t happen to a lot of people so young. We take so much for granted.”

Her Iraq journey is always with her although the name of the Air Force oral surgeon who preserved her face is a mystery. “I think I like not knowing who the man is,” she says. “He knows what he did, and so do I.”

Professor Foster, who teaches philosophy and is associate director of the URI Honors Program, was one of only two university professors and seven teachers nationwide to receive the Sondheim Award in appreciation for their contributions to the field of teaching.

A founder of URI’s National Scholarship and Academic Opportunity Office, Professor Foster recently returned to the Honors Program, taking a special academic advising role for freshmen and sophomores.

As Sondheim has said in creating the award: “Teachers define us. In our early years when we are still being formed, they often see in us more than we see in ourselves, more even than our families see, and as a result, help us evolve into what we ultimately become.”

That certainly was how Rachel Walshe, a 2000 URI graduate who earned a Rhodes Scholarship in 2001, saw Professor Foster. Now a director at the Sandra Feinstein Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket, Rachel nominated Professor Foster to receive the award, telling about her years as a student and the ‘evolution’ that took place.

For example, when Rachel received word of her Rhodes Scholarship: “She was my first phone call that fateful day. Not to my mother or to my father. But to Dr. Cheryl Foster, the woman who I can say without a shred of doubt is the single most influential person in my life – inside the classroom and out,” Rachel said in her nomination. “As demanding as she is passionate, Cheryl requires the same high level of intellectual rigor whether you are a dean’s daughter or a mechanic’s son. Her fearless delivery of the carpe diem message of existential philosophy to her working class students was my call to action: Be moved. Be inspired. But for God’s sake, don’t be lazy!”

Comments like Rachel’s and so many others strike at the heart of what Professor Foster does to help students develop so they can discover their own goals.

“I have a whole box of notes from students who have written to me over the years,” said Professor Foster, the 1996 URI Foundation Teaching Excellence Award winner. “I have kept them all. On my hard days, I go look at some of them and they remind me why I do what I do. The students are very generous.”

Professor Foster is also the recipient of an American Philosophical Association’s Teaching Award Citation in 1998, and the College of Arts and Sciences Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising in 2008.

Professor Foster said every day she feels grateful to be part of a community where the choice to teach creatively is taken seriously.

URI is breaking the ice—and, once again, breaking new ground.

A team of 17 University of Rhode Island faculty and students are headed to Antarctica for a month to study krill, the small crustaceans that hold a pivotal role in the Antarctic food web. They’ll be joined aboard the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer, a 308-foot research ship with icebreaking capabilities, by six colleagues from University of Massachusetts. According to Oceanography Professor Edward Durbin, no one has attempted to conduct this type of study before.

How best to document this historic journey and invite us to join them? A daily blog. Here’s a recent entry.

Captain’s (b)log:  “The excitement level is rising, frantic packing for both personal and scientific gear is underway. Everyone is very busy. While New England has gone into full on spring mode, with color and warmth everywhere, we are headed south to study krill in the southern ocean. Just in time to catch another very late autumn. Leaving the tulips behind, we revert to fewer daylight hours, as little as 4 hours of daylight when we hit our research area, the Western Antarctic Peninsula.

The goal of our project is to see how krill, the small crustaceans that hold a pivotal role in the Antarctic food web, survive in different seasons, including late fall/winter. We want to determine how active they are, where krill swarms reside, whether and how much they move, both vertically and horizontally, and how much and what they feed on. It is a big project and we have assembled a large team of collaborators. We’ll be sharing our experience through daily blog entries. Until we leave however, there will be frantic decision making. Did I ship the right caps for the sampling tubes? Should I bring a picture of a tulip?” ~ Susanne Menden-Deuer, associate professor of oceanography.

A team of 17 University of Rhode Island faculty and students are headed to Antarctica for a month to study krill. According to Oceanography Professor Edward Durbin, no one has attempted to conduct this type of study before.

Professor Menden-Deuer and other members of the research team will be sharing their observations and impressions throughout the journey, which promises to be a great adventure as well as an important research project. “Krill are the link in the food web between the plankton and whales,” said Professor Durbin, who’s leading of the team of 11 students and six faculty. “The fjords around Antarctica have large populations of krill. We’re interested in learning about the swimming and feeding behavior of krill in different prey environments. We want to know where they go, what they eat, and how they survive in different seasons, especially winter.”

One important question the team is hoping to answer is whether krill feed on the seafloor when there is little other food available. “There have been long discussions among scientists about what happens to krill during the winter when it’s dark,” said Durbin. “Do they sit there and slowly starve? One suggestion is that they might gain nutrition by feeding on the seafloor through the winter period. The timing of our cruise is good for examining that phenomenon because there won’t be much food in the water.”

The researchers will also use several bioacoustics devices, camera systems, and nets to try to calculate the size of the krill population in the region. “Numbers are really important. If you want to know how an organism functions in an ecosystem, it’s really important to know how many of them there are,” said Professor Menden-Deuer. “If you want to know how much food is available or how much plankton biomass they might consume or how much organic matter may be moving in the water column, it all depends on knowing how many organisms are out there.”

The scientists plan to return to Antarctica in November or January to conduct similar studies to compare their results to krill feeding behavior during the Antarctic summer when plankton will be abundantly available for krill to feed upon. Unfortunately, we don’t think there will be tulips in Antarctica then, either.