The root of the word sabbatical is “rest,” but Jan Tobochnik, physics and computer science, was in great demand as a lecturer during his sabbatical (June 2012 to March 2013). He gave five invited talks while on sabbatical. Three of the talks were titled “Network Analysis of Patent Citations,” and were based on work he did with fellow Kalamazoo College professor, Peter Erdi, physics and psychology, and others. These talks were given at Clark University, the Boston University Center for Computational Science, and the Northeastern University Center for Complex Networks Research. In addition, Tobochnik gave two talks titled “Physical Insight from Computational Algorithms,” at Universidad de Murcia in Murcia, Spain, and the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth.
Category: Faculty & Staff
K Trustee Ronda Stryker Receives YWCA Lifetime Award
Kalamazoo College Trustee and Kalamazoo-area philanthropist Ronda Stryker will receive the 2013 YWCA Lifetime Woman of Achievement Award at an award celebration May 21 at the Radisson Plaza Hotel in downtown Kalamazoo.
The YWCA Award is given to an area person who has demonstrated a lifetime of outstanding contributions to the well-being of the community, state or nation, and has a record of accomplishment, leadership and positive role modeling as a volunteer and/or in a career.
Stryker has volunteered in various capacities with numerous organizations including Kalamazoo Community Foundation, Women’s Education Coalition Fund, Pathfinder International, Girl Scouts, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, United Way, Communities in Schools, Spelman College, University of Northern Colorado, Western Michigan University, Lakeside for Children, Kalamazoo County Juvenile Home Foundation, and YWCA of Kalamazoo.
She has served as a Kalamazoo College trustee for more than 20 years. In 2001, she helped establish the College’s Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Institute for Service-Learning, named for her grandmother. Through the Institute, K students contribute more than 30,000 hours of community service-learning and civic engagement each year.
Read more about Ronda Stryker and the YWCA award in a recent Kalamazoo Gazette/MLive article.
Kalamazoo Poets
If you like poetry and you like Michigan, check out a recent post (Awesome Mitten, Michigan Books Project) that includes a short review of four books of poetry, each with strong Michigan connections. The first of the four reviewed is Writer-in-Residence Di Seuss’s award-winning Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open. Other poets featured are John Rybicki, Laura Kasischke, and Jared Randall. Rybicki and Kasischke have done poetry readings on campus.
And in other news of Kalamazoo poets, Gail Griffin, the Ann V. and Donald R. Parfet Professor of English, won the annual poetry contest sponsored by FOLIO, a literary magazine published by American University (Washington, D.C.) Gail’s submission was her first ever “glosa,” a Spanish form of four 10-line stanzas based on a quatrain from another poem. Gail wrote, “I took some lines from a news story that particularly disturbed me and broke them into four lines of poetry. I’ve been working for a few years on poems and short prose inspired by weird, funny, or otherwise outrageous news stories.”
The contest judge was Martha Collins, a widely published poet who is affiliated with Oberlin College. Collins wrote, “I greatly admire the way [Griffin’s] ’Glosa: Man Held in Burning of Homeless Woman in Los Angeles’ moves through time, going back to Adam and forward to a ’millennium hence’ to elucidate a bit of news. The glosa form and a Genesis-inspired movement through the week are among the poetic strategies the author uses to create a richly-collaged reflection on the (gendered) need ’to love and loathe,’ as well as more generally disturbing aspects of our contemporary society.”
We look forward to sharing Gail’s poem when it is published in FOLIO later this year.
Kalamazoo College Will Soon Have First Female Board Chair
Charlotte Hall ′66 is slated to become the first woman to lead the Kalamazoo College Board of Trustees in the 180-year history of the College.
A K trustee since 1999, Hall will take over from current Board Chair Don Parfet, at the June board meeting. Parfet has been chair since 1999 and will remain on the board. He served a prior term as chair between 1988 and 1993.
Hall is a retired journalist who spent 40 years at newspapers in New Jersey, Boston, and Washington before landing at the award-winning Newsday in New York, where she served for 22 years. In 2004, she moved to the Orlando Sentinel in Florida, from which she retired in 2010 as editor and senior vice president.
Thank you, Don. Congrats, Charlotte.
Read more in the Spring 2013 issue of LuxEsto, the K magazine.
Mill Art Features K Professor
Associate Professor of Art Sarah Lindley has an exhibition with her husband, Norwood Viviano, opening this month at Western Michigan University’s Richmond Center for Visual Arts. The show, set for April 25 to May 23, will explore the way industry affects communities and the environment.
Lindley’s sculptures, made from clay and handmade paper, deal with abandoned paper mills in Allegan County and their impact on the Kalamazoo River. She and Viviano became interested in the mills after moving to Plainwell, where they have a home studio. Viviano commutes from there to his job as an associate professor of art and design at Grand Valley State University, in the Grand Rapids area.
Viviano will display glass sculptures modeled after abandoned Detroit factories and their surrounding landscapes and may exhibit drawings from a piece in last year’s Art Prize competition in Grand Rapids. The two artists also plan to exhibit at least one collaborative piece that was in the 2011 Art Prize contest.
Richmond Center gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Thursday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and noon to 6 p.m. Saturday in April and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday in May.
Works for the exhibition were created with support from the Arts Council of Greater Kalamazoo KADI grant, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Directions Grant, the John Michael Kohler Center Arts-Industry program and/or the Peter S. Reed Foundation.
Girl Scout Leader Dawne Beougher Is One for the Books
Girl Scout Cadette Troop 80683 led by Troop Leader Dawne Beougher, administrative assistant to the vice president of Advancement at Kalamazoo College collected more than 2,000 books for “Literacy Night” at Maple Street Magnet School in Kalamazoo.
Kalamazoo College’s Career Center Growing Stronger
Two new reports recently released by the Center for Career and Professional Development (CCPD) document an increase in student and alumni use of CCPD programs and chart the first post-graduate destinations of the Kalamazoo College class of 2012. The 2012 CCPD Annual Report is the unit’s first. CCPD has conducted “Life After K” surveys since 2009. Highlights of the two reports include the following findings.
Of the reporting 2012 graduates seeking employment, 80 percent had secured it by the end of the calendar year.
Of the reporting 2012 graduates seeking graduate education, 95 percent had secured it by year end.
The CCPD supported 98 students’ career development opportunities in summer 2011, including 30 externships and 68 internships.
Alumni engagement in CCPD programs and services rose by 40 percent in 2011-12.
Membership in the Guilds of Kalamazoo College, as measured by new additions to the group on LinkedIn, grew by 554 individuals, or 42 percent, in 2011-12.
Lamprey Research Unlocks Secrets of Vertebrate Evolution
The work of biology professor James Langeland, as part of a large international consortium, was published in the journal Nature Genetics, one of the top 10 science journals worldwide.
Langeland has been part of the consortium working on sequencing and elucidating the genome of the sea lamprey (the simplest of living vertebrates and a species on which Langeland has worked for 16 years).
The title of the article is “Sequencing of the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) genome provides insights into vertebrate evolution.” The paper is the first presentation of lamprey whole-genome sequence and assembly. Lampreys represent an ancient vertebrate lineage that diverged from our own some 500 millions year ago. Scientists have studied the sea lamprey genome to gain insights into the ancestry of vertebrate genomes, the underlying principles of vertebrate biology, and evolutionary events that have shaped the genomes of existing organisms.
Langeland is the Upjohn Professor of Life Sciences at Kalamazoo College.
K Professor Wins Routledge Prize
Dennis J. Frost’s article, “Tokyo’s Other Games: The Origins and Impact of the 1964 Paralympics,” has been chosen the winner of the Routledge Prize for the best article published in the International Journal of the History of Sport in 2012. The article appeared in the March issue of the Journal that year.
Frost is the Wen Chao Chen Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies at Kalamazoo College and the author of the book, Seeing Stars: Sports Celebrity, Identity, and Body Culture in Modern Japan.
Many Happy Returns: Recyclemania 2013
Recycling an old tradition, Kalamazoo College is off to a good start in Recyclemania 2013, the friendly annual competition and benchmarking tool that allows college and university recycling programs to promote waste reduction activities to their campus communities.
“We still maintain our dynasty and I am happy with it!” said longtime K Recycling Coordinator Rob Townsend. “I have a great crew of students who lead the campus recycling effort throughout the year. And they always step up their game during Recyclemania.”
According Rob, results after two weeks of competition show K is at or near the top of several categories, including “Bottles and Cans” (#1), Corrugated Cardboard” (#3), and “Per Capita Classic” (#2) in which schools try to collect the largest combined amount of paper, cardboard, and bottles and cans on a per person basis.
More than 600 colleges representing 49 states, four Canadian provinces, and 7.5 million students now participate in the eight-week competition.
And remember to reduce, reuse, and recycle!