FGCU

A sophomore at Florida Gulf Coast University has launched a new website for her art business, making $400 over the past few weeks.Dagny Van Aken is a student majoring in entrepreneurship with a minor in art. She displays her art during downtown Fort Myers Art Walks. She was making little-by-little at these art walks, every first Friday of the month.

A professor at FGCU who researched Koreshan music is bringing their music back to life.Dr. Thomas Cimarusti, a professor of musicology at FGCU, specializes in 18th and 19th-century Italian vocal music, world music, and public musicology. In 2018, he went to the FGCU archives and found a Koreshan soundbook with just the text. He and a student were able to track down the songs and link the music and text.

“The Wolves” was created by Sarah DeLappe and is directed by FGCU’s Barry Cavin and is a coming-of-age story about young women who share the common goal of being the region's best high school soccer team. It is being presented at FGCU's TheatreLab through April 27.

On April 10 WGCU hosted an event at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Water School that featured NOVA Executive Producer Chris Schmidt. That day we screened parts of the NOVA episode Weathering the Future for an audience of about 200 people. Between the segments we chatted with him, as well as two FGCU professors about issues raised in the film and the challenges we face in Southwest Florida when it comes to adapting to our changing climate. Chris talked about the challenges NOVA faces in communicating science to a broad audience, and Dr. Win Everham and Dr. Molly Nation helped tie it all together.

Immigrants living in Florida are in threat of being deported, due to protective status being removed. One family risks being sent back to Venezuela, despite a decade building a life here in America.

For FGCU's University Police Department, the work can get a bit wild.From time to time, UPD has to deal with animals that have wandered onto campus.The most recent animal case was on March 25, when a 6-foot alligator wandered onto the South Village (SoVi) boardwalk.

A group of FGCU students is working on a project focused on addressing the loneliness epidemic amongst our senior citizen and Gen Z populations, while promoting more kindness and compassion through storytelling. The ROCK of Ages initiative seeks to address social isolation amongst older people, and diminished in-person social skills amongst younger people, by pairing students with older people to share stories, on camera, to build bridges between generations and create transformative experiences that hopefully create ripple effects of social change.

Dr. Jerry Jackson is known to WGCU listeners as the creator and host of With the Wild Things, heard weekday mornings at 7:19 and weekday afternoons at 5:18. He’s a professor emeritus of Ecological Sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University, and a professor emeritus at Mississippi State University. Nick Penniman is a retired newspaper publisher, and he is chair emeritus of the Conservancy of Southwest Florida and a Florida Master Naturalist. He and Dr. Jackson gave a talk together at Florida Gulf Coast University last week as part of the school’s Provost’s Seminar Series titled Getting to Know the World Around You: an Illustrated Conversation” so we had them come by the studio to chat.

Doug MacGregor has been an editorial cartoonist for more than 40 years. He got his professional start at the Norwich Bulletin in eastern Connecticut in 1980. He moved to Florida in 1988 and drew cartoons for the News Press in Fort Myers until 2011. Doug created five cartoons every week, year in and year out, for nearly a quarter century. He has donated a large collection of his original drawings (mostly pertaining to the local environment) to Florida Gulf Coast University’s “Archives & Special Collections” at the school’s Wilson G. Bradshaw Library and students have completed the process of digitizing them and the team at the Archives helps students use Doug’s work in their studies.