Assistant Professor of History Janelle Werner has been appointed the Marlene Crandell Francis Assistant Professor in the Humanities, effective July 1, 2012.
Werner earned her Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Here teaching interests include medieval Europe, early modern Europe (1500-1789), Reformation Europe, and British history to 1660. Her thematic fields focus on cross-cultural contact (Byzantium, Europe, Islam); popular religion and lay piety; social and cultural history; and women, gender, and sexuality.
Péter Érdi, Psychology and Complex Systems Studies, was a keynote speaker and a round table participant at the European Meetings on Cybernetics and Systems Research that took place at the University of Vienna in April.
His talk was a memorial lecture on Luigi Ricciardi, a longstanding participant in the EMCSR, against the background of the development of systems thinking in biology. The round table in which Érdi participated focused on the past, present, and future of cybernetics and systems research.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has approved a four-year $500,000 grant to Kalamazoo College to support faculty development and curricular enhancements within the College’s Shared Passages Seminars, a program that helps students focus on critical thinking and writing skills, delve deeply into cultural issues, integrate their K experiences, and prepare for life after graduation.
Shared Passages Seminars are a unifying arc through K’s more open liberal arts curriculum introduced in 2009, and serve as both preparation for and integration of all of the K-Plan components: depth and breadth in the liberal arts; learning through experience; intercultural and international engagement, especially through study abroad; and independent scholarship, culminating in the Senior Individualized Project.
Seminars are required in each year except the junior year at K when more than 80 percent of students complete a study abroad or study away experience lasting an average of six months.
“This grant will afford faculty the opportunity to individually and collectively explore innovative and effective pedagogies, and develop new and revised course offerings in the seminar program,” said Kalamazoo College Provost Mickey McDonald.
(Left to right) Regina Stevens-Truss, Lindsey Gaston, Sandrine Zilikana, Laura Lowe Furge, and Mara Livezey
Majors Sandrine Zilikana ’12 and Mara Livezey ’13 and biology major Lindsey Gaston ’12 joined chemistry department faculty members Regina Stevens-Truss and Laura Lowe Furge at the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Meeting in San Diego in late April. The students presented results of their summer research experiences (part of the Senior Individualized Projects for Sandrine and Lindsey) as part of both the Annual Undergraduate Poster Competition and the regular scientific sessions of the meeting.
More than 200 students from schools across the country were part of the undergraduate poster competition. Zilikana’s research measured differences in reducing the potential of cancer cell types to affect drug delivery. She conducted this scientific work at the University of Michigan with Professor Kyung-Dall Lee. Gaston’s showed that a specific hormone prevented nerve cell death after brain injury. Her research, conducted with Professor Vishal Bansal at the University of California-San Diego, will be included in a manuscript just accepted to the Journal of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology. Livezey presented the results of a study she has worked on for the past two years in Furge’s lab modeling the interactions of inhibitors with human cytochrome P450 enzymes. That study was recently published in Drug Metabolism Letters. While in San Diego, Stevens-Truss directed a teaching workshop for middle school and high school science teachers in the San Diego area. Her innovation in development of the workshop has drawn increasing numbers of teachers to the workshop and provided a new platform for scientists to collaborate with and mentor the nation’s secondary school science teachers.
The workshop was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Next year’s meeting will be in Boston, and Stevens-Truss and Furge plan to attend with another group of students. Stevens-Truss will also lead another teaching workshop there.
In addition to Associate Professor of Chemistry Laura Furge, the senior and corresponding author, the manuscript has six student co-authors: Mara Livezey ’13, Leslie Nagy ’09, Laura Diffenderfer ’11,Evan Arthur ’09, David Hsi ’10, and Jeffery Holton ’13.
Their work described in this paper contributes to the understanding of how some drugs can halt the activity of an enzyme. In this case, the enzyme studied is one that is important for the body’s processing of about 20 percent of medicines, particularly treatments for arrhythmia and other heart diseases, depression, and other maladies. Such understanding is vital because many people’s health depends on daily regimens of multiple medicines. Sometimes one drug can interfere with the very enzymes responsible for the processing and clearance of other co-administered drugs. This and other unwanted side effects are the number one cause of hospitalization in America.
The paper’s contribution to the understanding of how certain classes of drugs cause this interference with key enzymes will hopefully lead to more effective prevention of the phenomenon in the future.
The K research was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and by the Department of Chemistry Hutchcroft Fund. The latter was established by a gift from alumni Alan ’63 and Elaine (Goff) Hutchcroft ’63.
The final version of the study was presented at the San Diego meeting of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
It’s no surprise that Associate Professor of Economics Chuck Stull, like most of his faculty colleagues, has a wide-ranging liberal arts-ish curiosity and sense of wonder. His biology and ornithology interests were piqued recently by a successful Red-Tailed Hawk predation of a Quad squirrel, which Stull managed to capture on camera.
In late December, the Kalamazoo Gazette carried an article about a Snowy Owl taking residence at the Battle Creek/Kalamazoo International Airport. Turns out, this year is an irruption of Snowy Owls, one of the largest on record. Often, Snowy Owls will take up residence near airports, which remind them of their tundra hunting grounds. The owl at the Kalamazoo airport died, most likely of starvation. Such an occurrence is sad, but not surprising. Up to 70 percent of the raptor offspring perish during their first winter—many from starvation. The hawk Professor Stull photographed may have better luck if he or she keeps in mind the campus’ squirrel-stocked Quad.
Carmen Pérez Romero died on May 17, 2012. She was English professor for the Colegio Universitario de Cáceres, which was the seed of today’s Universidad de Extremadura. Romero helped establish the university’s first international programs in the 1980s, which brought students from several different North American universities to the classrooms of the Universidad de Extremadura.
Kalamazoo College signed an agreement with the University in 1992, creating a program of Spanish language and culture studies that was directed by Romero until her retirement in 2002. She devoted herself to books, articles and conferences on English literature, and North American literature, and she was a pioneer in the Spanish university system on comparative literature.
She was also a writer and translator. Her passion for poetry and her love for knowledge inspired many students. Her dedication to her students, her intellectual and personal honesty, and her integrity made her an exceptional human being. She will be greatly missed by the College and the many Kalamazoo students who studied in Cáceres.
Charles H. “Chuck” Ludlow, a former member of the Kalamazoo College board of trustees, has died at age 89. An article in the May 12 edition of the Kalamazoo Gazette traced his long and distinguished career as a business and civic leader. Chuck Ludlow was a College trustee in the late 1960s and was the father of Gregory Ludlow ’74.
Jaime Grant, executive director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, has coauthored an op/ed in the May 15 Huffington Post that describes “A Gender Not Listed Here: Genderqueers, Gender Rebels, and OtherWise,” an article she and her coauthors recently published in the Harvard Kennedy School’s LGBTQ Policy Journal.
Grant and coauthors Jack Harrison and Jody L. Herman present new research focused specifically on genderqueer people and describes the risks and resiliencies of those who identify outside the male/female gender binary. Their Policy Journal article shows that genderqueer people have unique demographic characteristics and experiences of discrimination and violence when compared to transgender people who identify as “male” or “female.”
Professor Emeritus of Economics Phil Thomas enjoys his retirement in Northport, Michigan. He also keeps Kalamazoo College informed of events that may be of interest to K alumni in northern Michigan. One such event is Northport Trinity Church’s eighth annual Peace Lecture, which this year features former Kalamazoo College Professor of Religion Gary Dorrien (who currently teaches at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University).
Dorrien will speak on Saturday evening, June 2, at 7 PM, and on Sunday morning, June 3, at 11 AM. The theme of his talks will be “Economic Crisis, Social Ethics, and Economic Democracy.” Dorrien is the author of 14 books and some 250 articles that range across the fields of ethics, social theory, theology, philosophy, politics, and history.
