The Baylor football team returns home this weekend for a Big 12 conference matchup with the Mountaineers of West Virginia.  The competition on the field will be intense as the Bears look to avenge their only regular-season loss from last year.  While Baylor and WVU will be opponents at McLane Stadium this week, faculty from the two universities share a number of connections in research and scholarship.

Water, water everywhere

Last week, we told you about Baylor’s participation in the Big 12 Universities Water Workshop, hosted by the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Faculty from West Virginia also participated in this important meeting, and in fact, WVU was the lead institution on a grant proposal that resulted from the workshop. Faculty from West Virginia, Baylor and other Big 12 institutions continue to collaborate on research in water conservation and safety.

Striking a chord

A number of Baylor and West Virginia faculty members have ties to both universities, with a particular concentration in the two institutions’ schools of music:

• Dr. Francesca Arnone, assistant professor of flute in Baylor’s School of Music, spent five years on the faculty at WVU.
• Dr. Harry Elzinga, professor emeritus of music at Baylor, served on the musicology faculty at West Virginia from 1967-1978 and again from 1970-1985.
• Stephen Hyde, the Mary Franks Thompson Professor of Orchestral Studies and Conductor-in-Residence at Baylor, is a former WVU faculty member. Hyde is also the music director/conductor for the Waco Symphony Orchestra.
• Two WVU faculty members — Dr. Mikylah McTeer, associate professor of violin, and Dr. David Taddie, professor of music theory and composition — held residencies at Baylor this year to exchange ideas and perform as part of the Big XII Faculty Fellowship Program.

Baylor and WVU also have connections in sociology research:

• Dr. Katie Corcoran, currently in her first year as an assistant professor of sociology at WVU, previously held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Baylor in the Institute for Studies of Religion.
• Dr. Carson Mencken, professor and chair of sociology at Baylor, was a faculty member in West Virginia’s sociology and anthropology department from 1994-2002.

We would like to thank Cindy Jarvis, assistant to the director in WVU’s Office of Sponsored Programs, for her assistance in gathering information for this post. To learn more about WVU research, visit http://research.wvu.edu/. You can also follow them on Twitter at @WVUResearch.