WLSON, N.C. — March 28, 2018 — Books will be set aside in classrooms on Tuesday, April 10, as students and professors gather with administrators and staff to celebrate academic excellence during the 2018 Day of Scholarship on Barton College’s campus. Kicking off the Plenary Session for the Day of Scholarship at 8:30 a.m. in Hardy Alumni Hall will be Dr. Gary Daynes, provost and vice president for academic affairs, and Barton alumnus Jonathan Brent Clayton, Ph.D., D.V.M., this year’s featured keynote speaker.
This annual day away from classes will showcase extraordinary presentations of research and academic collaboration by some of our best and brightest on campus as they share their passion for study and scholarship. At 10 a.m., students, faculty, administrators, and staff will move to Case Art Building to hear from students who will deliver detailed poster presentations, representing their research during the 2017-2018 academic year. Following lunch, student scholars will showcase their research at 1 p.m. in Hines Hall. And, at 2:30 p.m., faculty will follow suit, also presenting their research work in Hines Hall.
From 4 -5 p.m., there will be simultaneous exploration sessions across campus in the new anatomy lab in Moye Science Hall, and the K.D. Kennedy, Jr. Rare Book Room, the Center for Excellence in Teaching, and the Oral Communication Center in the Willis N. Hackney Library. The exploration sessions will round out the Day of Scholarship with opportunities for lively discussion regarding specific topics related to these learning spaces on campus.
Also, appropriately held on the Day of Scholarship, will be the 14th annual Scholarship Recognition Luncheon, bringing together both student scholarship recipients and scholarship donors, by invitation, to celebrate how “scholarships work” at Barton.
The Scholarship Program at Barton represents more than $1 million in annual funding, which directly benefits our students and their education. As a result of donor generosity, Barton currently offers more than 265 endowed scholarships and approximately 30 annually funded scholarships to support students’ educational pursuits.
The Day of Scholarship will be a celebration of academic scholarship and research, as well as an opportunity to say “thank you” for continuing financial scholarship support by our Barton College donors.
About the speaker —
Dr. Clayton serves as a postdoctoral associate in the Knights Lab, where he is studying host-microbiome interactions in humans and nonhuman primates. He received his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and his Ph.D. in Comparative and Molecular Biosciences from the University of Minnesota. For his Ph.D. thesis research, he used nonhuman primates as a model system for studying the effects of emigration and lifestyle disruption on the human gut microbiome. During his Ph.D., Dr. Clayton and his collaborators started the Primate Microbiome Project (PMP) with the intended purpose to develop a systematic map of variation in microbiome structure and function across all primates and to relate this to primate health, evolution, behavior, and conservation. Prior to his graduate studies, Dr. Clayton earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Religion & Philosophy and a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology at Barton College, and a Certificate of Primatology at Duke University. While at Duke, he studied slender loris feeding behavior at the Duke Lemur Center.
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