(Posted March 10, 2008)

HUNTINGDON, Pa. -- Jerry Kruse, associate professor of mathematics and computer science at Juniata College, will talk about his academic adventures, taking inspiration from the TV reality series "The Amazing Race," by spanning the 2006-2007 academic year in the lecture "The Amazing Year: Muenster, Covington, Bethlehem and Huntingdon" at 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 18 in Neff Lecture Hall in the von Liebig Center for Science.

The lecture is free and open to the public. The talk is part of the Bookend Seminar Lecture Series, which features afternoon lectures each month by Juniata faculty.

Kruse will trace how each travel experience added up to a significant sum of knowledge and opportunity. He will talk extensively about his semester abroad in fall 2006 as part of a faculty exchange with the Muenster University of Applied Sciences in Muenster, Germany. He taught two courses at Muenster, "Algorithms and Data Structures," and "Graphical Programming." Inspired by an interesting result in his student projects, Kruse decided to delve into a sorting algorithm known as Heapsort.

His work on the Heapsort algorithm led him to a conference in Covington, Ky., where he made a presentation on Heapsort to the Special Interest Group of Computer Science Educators of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Kruse's spring 2007 semester was spent on sabbatical in Huntingdon, where he spent the semester updating Juniata's Qualitative Methods course. As part of his work, Kruse attended a Qualitative Literacy workshop in Bethlehem, Pa. on the campus of Moravian College, where he attended a workshop by the authors of a new textbook he had chosen for the course.

Kruse joined the Juniata faculty as an assistant professor in 1999. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Illinois and went on to earn a master's degree and doctorate in applied mathematics from Brown University. He is a member of numerous honor societies including Sigma Xi, Tau Beta Pi, Golden Key, and Phi Eta Sigma. He was promoted to associate professor in 2005.
Before starting his career in higher education, Kruse served as software engineer for Compaq Computer Corporation in the Mathematics Library Group, where he developed high-performance numerical routines. He also worked for the DuPont Company in such positions as database administrator, information center analyst, and data center supervisor.

Contact April Feagley at feaglea@juniata.edu or (814) 641-3131 for more information.