February is OSU's Food Drive and the HMSC will again be participating. There will be a box in the mailroom to collect canned and dry food for Lincoln County Food Share. Money donations can be turned in at the Switchboard. This year $1 will buy up to 15 pounds of food, instead of last year's rate of 6 pounds per $1.

As a special incentive, homemade hot soup will be served in the mailroom for a $1 donation on Tuesday beginning at noon during the month of February. It would be appreciated if those interested would bring their own bowl or cup and spoon.

In the past, others have brought baked goods to add to the menu to raise additional funds for Food Share. Other groups or individuals are encouraged to come up with other creative ways to increase our donations to feed the hungry in Lincoln County, many of whom are children.

Kathy Phipps has resigned as Executive Director of Oregon Pacific Area Health Education Consortium to get back into research. Steve Carr has been selected as the new Director. He brings a varied background to the position, ranging from managing magnetic resonance imaging centers, counseling in a chemical dependency program in South Dakota, teaching in the Psychiatric Technician Program at Portsmouth Naval Hospital and serving as development director for the Southside Area Health Education Center in Farmville, Virginia. His goals are to see AHEC develop collaborative programs in health, mental health and social services within all this region's counties, and develop ways to bring financial support to those programs.

Although not from South Dakota, Steve earned his bachelor's at Black Hills State University and also earned a certificate at the Academy of Health Sciences in Neuropsychology in San Antonio, Texas. He is also a trained EMT. For fun Steve enjoys camping and black and white photography. He is also a published playwright and short story author. Some day he plans to finish the novel tucked in a desk drawer.

Another new face at AHEC is Becky George. Becky is working on a special grant to produce video courses to teach Spanish to health professionals. This is the second year of the grant and she is working to produce the tapes and workbooks that will replace last year's live teleclasses. She anticipates have four series, each aimed at a different speciality: dental professionals, pharmacists, EMTs and emergency room staff. The ten hours of language instruction (how to say "Where does it hurt?") also includes one hour of cultural information (where is it permissible to touch a person during an exam?).

Becky taught English as a Second Language at the Oregon Coast Community College for almost ten years before going on a Fulbright grant to Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, Mexico. There she taught methodology to teachers of English by video to four separate
branches of the Universidad Autnoma de Tamaulipas. This video experience and her Spanish skills made her the perfect choice for this video series. Becky earned her B.A. at Western Oregon and her master's in applied linguistics and TESOL from Portland State University. She and her husband Scott Spinak have two children, 7 and 10, who learned a lot of Spanish last year.

Little did Doug Pyle know that going on a freshman geology field trip would change his life, interesting him in a whole new subject that he would pursue as a career. An Iowa native, Doug was attending Knox College in Illinois when the fateful excursion took place. After majoring in geology at Knox, he went on to earn his master's in geology and his doctorate in oceanography from Oregon State University. He even worked at the HMSC in 1983-84. His specialty is marine geochemistry, studying trace elements and isotopes in the earth's crust.

Doug works half-time with John Lupton of the NOAA VENTS Program, consolidating John's helium data. The other half of his time he works on his own projects. The first is studying the Oregon Coast Range, some 55 million years old, arising as part of the Yellowstone hot spot. A hot spot is a focused point source of volcanic activity and a spreading center is a long linear feature. The Juan de Fuca Ridge is a spreading center and places like Yellowstone and Hawaii are hot spots. The second area is the variability of mid-ocean ridges and the melting and accretion processes. The third is in Costa Rica, one of the oldest products of the Galapagos hot spot, approximately 90 million years old.

Before coming back to OSU, Doug worked at Woods Hole for two years and most recently at San Diego State for three years. He spends most of his free time either working or thinking about his work, but occasionally he enjoys tennis, running and listening to music.

Leah Feinberg has spent two and a half years on one of the tall sailing ships for the Education at Sea program, teaching oceanography and climbing rigging. Now that she is working for Bill Peterson of the National Marine Fisheries Service (Northwest), she has traded the tall ship for the Sacajawea. As a faculty research assistant, Leah sails off Newport, following a transect line one mile off the coast, collecting zooplankton and hydrographic data to study climate changes.

Leah considers Bill as her "academic grandfather", since her major professor, Hans Dam, was one of Bill's graduate students at SUNY. After completing her B.A. at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, she earned her master's in oceanography at the University of Connecticut. Her thesis was on copepod fecal pellets and the effect of diet on the weight of the pellets, which in turn affects the carbon cycle in the ocean.

A Boston native, Leah misses the diversity of the big city in Newport, but she finds it very beautiful. Once her moving van arrives and she is able to unpack her worldly goods, she will be back at her leisure activities: cooking, reading, sailing, camping, backpacking, canoeing, skiing and running.

Jim Bottom has recently been hired full-time by the National Marine Fisheries Service, Northwest Division, (NMFS) to improve the agency's communication with the fishing industry. His job is to break down communication barriers and let the industry know that NMFS is in partnership with them to protect our marine resources. Jim, along with colleague Bob Schoning, has been meeting informally with fishers at Cuppatunes on the Bay front. Meetings, workshops, press releases and townhall meetings are proposed ways to improve relations. Other colleagues in this effort are Gil Sylvia (COMES) and Ginny Goblirsch (Lincoln County Extension Service).

Jim brings a wealth of experience to this position. Most fcently he served ten years as the information officer for Clatsop Community College, but he worked for OSU Sea Grant for three years, Oregon Department of Transportation for four and worked as a freelance reporter for coastal newspapers and radio and as a science writer for the University of Missouri School of Vet Medicine. A Missouri native, he earned both his B.A. and his M.A. in journalism at the University of Missouri before leaving for the West Coast in 1975.

Commuting to Newport two days a week, Jim and his wife, Vicki, live in Keiser. Vicki works for the State of Oregon with teen parents. Besides playing with his grandchildren, Jim enjoys train travel, jogging and music.

The library catalog (OASIS) is now available on the web. It has a great new layout and is truly user-friendly. Check it out at: