biochemistry

Roads Back Home

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Alumni home for Homecoming 2015 reconnect with Professor Emeritus of Mathematics Jeff Smith.
Alumni home for Homecoming 2015 reconnect with Professor Emeritus of Mathematics Jeff Smith.

May the wind be at your back during your journey “home” to Homecoming 2016–October 14-16. Registration is open (with the schedule posted), and more than 300 persons plan to attend as of this writing (September 16). And why not! The autumn weekend is packed with events for all (and all ages).

Among the highlights:

Story Zoo at the Cavern Fire Circle (next to Stetson Chapel). Everyone has a favorite K story, or a S.O.B. in the closet. All alumni, students, faculty and staff are invited to stop by, enjoy a cup of hot chocolate and record your favorite K memory. All recorded stories will be sent to the College Archives as well as being available for future K publications. Individual or group stories are welcome!

The Alumni Association Awards Ceremony and Dessert Reception in Dalton Theatre. The event includes honors for distinguished achievement and distinguished service as well as new inductees into the athletics Hall of Fame. Of special note: Professor Emeritus of Biology Paul Sotherland will receive the Weimer K. Hicks Award.

And speaking of opportunities to reconnect with faculty, make sure Saturday’s departmental receptions make your calendar (see photo). It’s your chance to catch up with current and emeriti faculty in the Hicks Center.

It’s likely you know your alma mater has a new president (the institution’s 18th): Jorge Gonzalez. You can meet him and his wife (K alumnae Suzie (Martin) Gonzalez ’83) at an open house in the Kalamazoo College Field House Hornet Suite.

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry finalist Diane Seuss ’78 will read from her most recent collection of poems, Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015). Di is a longtime professor of English at K and her readings are unforgettable. And you’ll be able to purchase a copy of Four-Legged Girl at the Kalamazoo College Bookstore.

Professor of Chemistry Regina Stevens-Truss will discuss the ongoing Science and Social Justice project, work that has engaged some of the best minds in the country since 2011. Project collaborators include the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership, Harvard Medical School, the SENCER group and Massachusetts General Hospital. What social justice questions should be explicit in all scientific research and STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)? Help us come up with ideas.

On Sunday join Binney Girdler, associate professor of biology and director of the Lillian Anderson Arboretum, for a tour of “the Arb,” 140 acres of marsh, meadow, pine plantation and second-growth deciduous forest in Oshtemo Township. Not only is it a site for active research and ecological monitoring, it’s a grand place for a Sunday stroll. And it features the College’s brand new off-the-grid education pavilion named after Dr. H. Lewis Batts, Jr. ’43 and Jean M. Batts ’43. You gotta see it!

And these events are just a few of the highlights. Register now, and come home for Homecoming.

Summer Science Shared

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Summer ScienceScientific inquiry takes no summer break at Kalamazoo College, and a culmination of the summer’s work occurred at the Dow Science Center Mini Poster Session (August 26). In the chemistry department alone some 17 students worked in the laboratories of five chemistry faculty–Professors Bartz, Furge, Smith, Stevens-Truss and Williams. Those students include first-years, sophomores, juniors and seniors, many of the latter working on their Senior Individualized Projects. The mini poster session included 12 presenters explaining the science they had conducted during the summer. Quinton Colwell ’17 (in the red tie) is pictured discussing his poster, titled “Molecular Dynamics and Real-Life Drug Metabolism.” Molecular dynamics is the study of real life systems using computer models and simulations. Colwell’s work involved a relatively novel technique,biased molecular dynamics, which, he wrote, “brings an additional layer to computer simulations relevant to bench-top experiments. It has the potential to be a game-changer.” In addition to Colwell, other presenters included Sarah Glass ’17, Myles Truss ’17, Shreya Bahl ’17, Suma Alzouhayli ’17, and Blake Beauchamp ’17.

PUI Paragon

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Kalamazoo College Chemistry Professor Laura FurgeLaura Furge, the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Professor of Chemistry, is a feature profile in a recent ASBMB Today, the professional development magazine of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. The article, titled “Working at a PUI,” focuses on the demands and rewards faculty face at “primarily undergraduate institutions.” Turns out rewards and demands may be so intertwined they’re indistinguishable.  For example, Furge’s academic wheelhouse is biochemistry, and yet she also teaches classes in organic chemistry and general chemistry and even a first-year writing seminar on cancer. The latter has become one of her favorite classes, a case in point of the demand-and-reward hybrid. Furge also notes that at PUIs the professor is the inter-generational “continuity of knowledge.” That vital function requires patience and broader skills on the part of the professor (demand) and makes a PUI professor-investigator-mentor like Furge the progenitor of generations of chemists and chemistry educators–think of Sarah in the Book of Genesis or Celeste in Edward P. Jones’ novel The Known World. That latter reference underscores another for Furge’s great strengths (one the PUI article misses): a fierce commitment to the liberal arts. The Known World was Kalamazoo College’s Summer Common Reading choice in 2007. Furge sits on the committee that selects these works. She also will begin her duties as associate provost at Kalamazoo College beginning July 1.

Professor Receives Lucasse Award for Teaching Excellence

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K Professor of Chemistry Regina Stevens-Truss
K Professor of Chemistry Regina Stevens-Truss

Kalamazoo College’s highest teaching honor is the Florence J. Lucasse Lectureship, awarded to a K faculty member in recognition of outstanding classroom teaching. The 2015-16 Lucasse Lectureship recipient is Professor of Chemistry Regina Stevens-Truss. And for this honor, she gets to deliver a lecture! Hear this outstanding teacher talk about her love of teaching – and celebrate her award – Thursday May 19, 4:00-5:30 p.m., in the Olmsted Room of Mandelle Hall.

“I love what I do every day, and I wake up every day looking forward to it,” says Professor Stevens-Truss. “I get to learn with young people and share my love of learning with them. For now, life doesn’t get better than this.”

Professor Stevens-Truss is a medicinal biochemist who has taught at K since 2000. She previously taught at the College of Pharmacy, University of Michigan. Her teaching responsibilities at K include Antibiotics: Global Health and Social Justice, Introductory Chemistry II, Biochemistry, and Principles of Medicinal Chemistry. Her research focuses on understanding the enzyme nitric oxide synthase and its involvement in Alzheimers’ disease, research she enjoys carrying out with her students.

She has also been involved in numerous outreach programs that have taken her and her students into the Greater Kalamazoo community and bringing the community to the K campus. These have included Art & Science of Medicine, a summer workshop for high school students intending to pursue a career in medicine, and Sisters in Science, a K student group supporting young girls who demonstrate an aptitude for math and science.

She currently helps lead the Science and Social Justice Project, an initiative of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (ACSJL) at Kalamazoo College and the Division of Medical Sciences at Harvard Medical School. The Project aims to study and promote the value of social justice in scientific education and research, and to identify, connect, and coordinate scholars doing science and social justice teaching and research.

Professor Stevens-Truss recently helped coordinate a three-day “Science and Social Justice Think Tank” at the ACSJL attended by professors, scholars, scientists, public health and environmental leaders from across the country working at the intersection of science and social justice, as well as stakeholders in academic institutions and scientific organizations who can speak to diversity in the STEM fields and to the changing landscape of science and society.

Professor Stevens-Truss earned a B.A. degree at Rutgers University and a Ph.D. degree at University of Toledo. She is a married mother of two children who enjoys photography, bowling, watching sports (“especially those involving my kids”), and watching CSI.

The Florence J. Lucasse Lectureship (for outstanding classroom teaching) and Fellowship (for outstanding achievement in creative work, research or publication) at Kalamazoo College were established in 1979. The awards were created to honor Florence J. Lucasse, alumna of Kalamazoo College Class of 1910, in recognition of her long and distinguished career and in response to the major unrestricted endowment gift given to the college in her will.

Life’s Imperative: Social Justice in Science

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Social Justice Conference AudienceA seed—call it science-and-social-justice—has been germinating in the mind of Regina Stevens-Truss since December of 2009. In truth, Stevens-Truss (the Kurt D. Kaufman Associate Professor of Chemistry) has been thinking on that matter long before then. But the occasion of that December seven years ago—a faculty workshop sponsored by the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership (ACSJL) on the topic of incorporating social justice into the undergraduate curriculum—and a conversation at the event with Harvard University professor Jonathan Beckwith (well known for uniting social justice and science in his science courses) gave Stevens-Truss a language for her thinking.

That small seed has come to fruition in several ways over the years, most recently (in a very big way) with the April 2016 Science and Social Justice Think Tank (SSJTT), which gathered from across the country some 60 experts and advocates for social justice consideration in the conduct of research and science education.

The SSJTT, like so many previous fruitions, was sponsored by the ACSJL. “It is so vital to have the social justice center here,” says Stevens-Truss. On the issue of science and social justice, as with so many others, the center provides “a language, a name, if you will, a platform for what needs to be done, and the national reach to do it,” says Stevens-Truss. Language, platform, reach. “The social justice center is indispensable.”

According to Stevens-Truss, in recent years scientists and science educators have improved in the area of science and ethics. Both groups have become better at considering and carefully answering questions like: am I doing research (or teaching research protocols) in a way that respects the human rights of research subjects as well as the integrity of the scientific process? Comparatively, science has been less effective in its consideration of social justice matters.

“We must become better at framing and answering social justice questions,” says Steven-Truss. Is the research we are considering good for society? Who will benefit? Will different communities benefit disproportionately? Will there be adverse burdens to bear and, if so, who or what communities are most likely to bear those burdens?

Social Justice Conference ParticipantsA similar battery of social justice questions for science educators certainly includes this one: What course content is required to ensure that students from various backgrounds see themselves as stakeholders in science to a degree that is sufficient to keep them involved in the discipline?

That last question inspired at least one living ancestor of April’s SSJTT. In 2011 Stevens-Truss, Beckwith and Lisa Brock, academic director of ACSJL and associate professor of history, began collecting the syllabi of science courses that integrate social justice. Two K undergraduate students and a Harvard graduate student searched colleges and universities across the country and compiled the various ways science professors fit social justice into the academic content of their courses. The trio made these ideas available as a resource to all on science and social justice website, part of ACSJL’s Praxis project.

Work on the SSJTT soon followed. Eliza Jane Reilly, deputy executive director of the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement; Karen Winkfield, radiation oncologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, and Anne Dueweke, director of faculty grants and institutional research at K, joined Stevens-Truss, Beckwith and Brock to form a planning committee. Senior Shannon Haupt, an environmental activist and anthropology and sociology major, served as project assistant.

“We wanted to gather professors, scholars, scientists, public health and environmental leaders working where science and social justice intersect,” says Brock. “We also sought experts on diversity in the STEM fields and people thinking about changes underway in society and science.”

SSJTT participants engaged with three questions: What benefits will accrue when social justice is included in undergraduate, graduate and medical school science courses? What are specific strategies for integrating social justice issues into scientific research? What disciplinary and institution reforms will most effectively advance social-justice-in-science nationally?

“We need to train the next generation in a way that these questions are second nature,” says Stevens-Truss. Particularly gratifying for her was the liberal arts diversity of the SSJTT’s presenters and participants. Attendees included researchers, science professors, policy makers, lawyers, journalists, writers and philanthropists.

“Our evening keynote speakers were a writer [and English professor Debra Marquart, “Owning Our Future: A Poet’s Response to Extraction”] and a visual artist [Mary Beth Heffernan, “Ebola, Culture and Social Justice Through the Lens of a Photographer”],” says Stevens-Truss.

Such diversity matters a great deal, she added, because social justice connects to art, poetry, the social sciences and the hard sciences, a fact with “deep implications for how we teach and practice science.” The committee is currently tackling how to extend the SSJTT’s momentum. The Praxis Center will help. And the language, platform and reach of the ACSJL will be critical.

Stevens-Truss has long been an activist, albeit (perhaps) without the sobriquet. Her work on campus with Sukuma, locally with Sisters in Science, and nationally in a program that connects practicing scientists and middle school teachers comprise distinct expressions of her preoccupation with matters of social justice and science. And now, through the Praxis Center and programs like the SSJTT, the cause and (yes!) its activists have a growing magnitude and unity.

“As scientists and educators we must help each other see our impact on people,” says Stevens-Truss, “and on communities. Especially the marginalized people and communities who often are the most adversely affected by our choices in boardrooms, laboratories, classrooms and scientific funding committees.”

K at EB

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Victoria Osorio '16 and Sarah Glass '17
Victoria Osorio ’16 and Sarah Glass ’17

Two Kalamazoo College chemistry majors, Victoria Osorio ’16 and Sarah Glass ’17, attended the annual Experimental Biology meeting in San Diego, Calif. Experimental Biology is a joint meeting of six different societies including the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) as well as societies for physiology, nutrition, pharmacology, pathology, and anatomy. “The meeting is a great opportunity for students to present their work and attend a variety of engaging scientific talks,” says Laura Furge, the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Professor of Chemistry. “There were more than 15,000 scientists in attendance.”

Osorio and Glass presented results of their research as part of the Undergraduate Poster Competition and as part of the regular scientific session for ASBMB. Their presentations centered on recent work in the Furge lab with protein variants of an important human liver enzyme called CYP2D6. CYP2D6 helps the human body process drugs. The titles of the Osorio and Glass posters were, respectively, “Susceptibility of Four Human CYP2D6 Variants and One Active Site Mutant to Inhibition by the Mechanism-based Inactivator SCH 66712” and “Activity and Kinetic Characterization of Human CYP2D6 Polymorphisms with Bufuralol and Dextromethorphan.”

There were more than 225 undergraduate posters in the ASBMB competition from students across the country and from a variety of college and universities. One Grand Prize and four Honorable Mention awards were presented to students in each of the four research topic categories (proteins and enzymes / metabolism, bioenergetics, lipids and signal transduction / DNA, chromosomes, and gene regulation / cellular and developmental biology). Glass won an Honorable Mention for the “Proteins and Enzymes” category and was recognized the next day in front of an audience of hundreds of scientists, educators and students at the award lecture for outstanding contributions to education. Glass’s presentation was based on the culmination of nearly three years of research in the Furge lab; Glass will complete her SIP with Furge this summer and the lab hopes to publish the results later in 2016 along with co-author Osorio and other recent Furge lab research assistants.

After graduation, Osorio will enter the Post-baccalaureate Research Education Program at Case Western Reserve University. Glass will complete her degree in Fall 2016 (two terms early), and she plans to start graduate school in biochemistry or pharmacology in 2017.

Travel to ASBMB for Osorio and Glass was supported by a grant to Furge from the National Institutes of Health. Glass also received an ASBMB Travel Award of $500.

Next year’s Experimental Biology meeting will be in nearby Chicago, Illinois, says Furge, “and we hope to take a large group of students from the Departments of Chemistry and Biology.”

Happy Birthday, Center for Civic Engagement

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Center for Civic Engagement turns 15 this yearThe Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) turns 15 this year, and its hard to imagine better origins. It began as a joint brainstorming effort between students, faculty and several community partners with the intent on redefining what a liberal arts education was all about. Students were not just de facto city residents while they studied at K; they were community assets as well. Annually, about 600 K students participate in service-learning in some way with the CCE.

From work on sustainability issues to girl’s and women’s empowerment to health and economic equality to food justice, CCE programming engages students in work that promotes social justice, further pushing the College’s mission to create lifelong learners.

“For some of our students, it’s the first time they’ve witnessed first-hand a variety of ‘isms,’” says Alison Geist, CCE’s director. “We put students on the front lines of many societal issues in a way that sitting in a lecture or classroom just can’t.”

Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) turns 15 this yearSusmitha Daggubati ’16 mentors a second-grader at Woodward Elementary School in Kalamazoo’s Stuart Neighborhood, adjacent to K’s campus. Daggubati, a senior majoring in chemistry and earning a concentration in biochemistry and molecular biology, is in her second year at Woodward and serves as a Civic Engagement Scholar, a kind of on-site leader who mentors other K students working at sites across the community, scheduling their shifts and organizing meetings to brainstorm programming ideas.

Daggubati moved with her family to the Kalamazoo area from their native India ten years ago. Still very much tied to her Indian roots, her time in service-learning has also given her a greater understanding of the complex social issues at play in American society “In many classes, we learn the theories about the roots of so many social problems,” she says. “But I am able to make those connections to the real world when I’m involved. It keeps me rooted in the realities of the world, and it has given me a greater understanding of American culture.”

Tom Thornburg is the managing attorney at Farmworker Legal Services, a non-profit agency based in Bangor, Mich., a small community about 25 miles west of Kalamazoo, in an agricultural area where hundreds of migrant workers flock each year to work in fields and orchards. His agency assists these workers – overwhelmingly Hispanic – with everything from language services to information on their legal rights to informing them of resources available to them. He’s been working with the CCE for almost a decade, and the K students who’ve come through his doors have become an invaluable resource.

“The students from K are some of the brightest, best-equipped and most professional volunteers we get,” Thornburg says. “They come here with a sense of enthusiasm to help, a sense of what to do, an autonomy. They’re excellent, right up there in many ways with the law students we have working here.”

Over the years, hundreds of the nearly 2,000 students Associate Professor of Psychology Karyn Boatwright has taught have participated in service-learning programs, in a diverse group of local agencies, from the Kalamazoo Public Schools to Planned Parenthood to Goodwill Industries.

Through more than 30 different courses at the College designed with community partners, faculty at K have engaged thousands of students, community residents and leaders to create opportunities for experiential learning and impact derived organically and intentionally from service-learning work.

Says Boatwright, “The CCE and their students consistently impress upon us the need for reflection to ensure that we are not only connecting the proverbial dots, but understanding the political and social connections between success and social factors. Civic engagement experiences improve the quality of learning for our students and strengthen our community.”

The College’s solid commitment to developing the next generation of leaders who are observant, lifelong learners intent on crafting solutions to problems plaguing a suffering world is stronger now than ever. Concludes Geist: “The founders of K were always interested in social justice, and our programming is a manifestation of that. It’s the idea that we should be creating a fellowship of learning, not just working in ivory towers tucked away from society.”

(Text by Chris Killian; photo by Keith Mumma)

Research Reveals Enzyme’s Role in Shifting-Eyed Fish

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Rina Fujiwara '14 and Leslie Nagy '09
Rina Fujiwara ’14 and Leslie Nagy ’09 in the Vanderbilt University laboratory of Dr. Fred Guengerich. As Leslie was completing her rotation in the laboratory Rina was just beginning hers, so Leslie helped train Rina. Both scientists did important research on a key enzyme in fish and humans.

Sometimes science uncovers a pretty interesting “what” long before researchers learn that particular “what’s” equally interesting “how.”

Two Kalamazoo College alumnae are among the authors of a recently published paper describing HOW certain fish change their eyes to see more effectively in different water environments. Such a shift in visual acuity is a pretty cool “what” that’s been known for a while. Even some of the “how” had been elucidated–like knowing the components of a room’s light switch for example. What had been unknown–until now–was the enzyme responsible for the change, or, in other words, the finger that flips the switch.

The two co-authors who share K science ancestry, so to speak, are Rina Fujiwara ’15 and Leslie Nagy ’09. Both did the research described in the paper while working in the laboratory of Fred Guengerich at Vanderbilt University. Guengerich happens to have been the thesis advisor of Laura Furge, the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Professor of Chemistry at Kalamazoo College, when Laura was earning her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt. Both Nagy and Fujiwara worked in the Furge Lab during their undergraduate years; talk about scientific ancestry! The paper–titled “Cyp27c1 Red-Shifts the Spectral Sensitivity of Photoreceptors by Converting Vitamin A1 into A2”–appeared this week in the high impact scientific journal Current Biology. The Atlantic also published an article on the research.

It was in the Furge Lab that Nagy and Fujiwara were introduced to the cytochrome P-450 family of enzymes. They are critical mediators of many human physiological processes. “Today we know there are 57 P-450s in humans,” said Furge. “Many were known and their functions elucidated, but with the sequencing of the human genome, scientists discovered 13 unknown P-450s, which were dubbed ’orphans,’” she added. “Because the family is so important to human health, we’d like to know what these orphans do.” Fish and human share kindred P-450s, including the orphan, Cyp27c1, that’s the subject of the Current Biology paper.

For a full appreciation of the paper’s findings, a very simplified “Vision 101” may help. That we see–and how we see–depends in part on chemicals called chromophores. These share a common chemical backbone: vitamin A. Chromophores differ depending on modifications of their vitamin A, modifications that change an eye’s sensitivity to certain colors. For example, the vitamin A of sea fish–known as vitamin A1–help them better perceive a different spectrum of color than do freshwater fish, whose vitamin A2 allow for clearer vision in the red-wavelength light characteristic of rivers and lakes. Some fish–like salmon, that live in both marine and freshwater environments–can change their eyes by converting their vitamin A’s, from 1 to 2, sort of like gaining night vision goggles according the article in the Atlantic.

Just how they accomplish this conversion is the discovery that resulted from the research described in the paper. A single enzyme member of the cytochrome P450 family (one of the so called orphans, it turns out) converts A1 to A2, thus changing the color tuning of the fish eyes when the fish enters different water environments. And the human analog of that eye-changing P450 orphan in fish, the Cyp27c1 of the paper’s title–has also been studied by Guengerich Lab at Vanderbilt. A second paper on that analog is expected to be published in 2016, and Nagy and Fujiwara will co-authors of that paper as well.

Furge noted the impact and importance of scientific mentoring across generations, citing the example of Guengerich, herself, and Fujiwara and Nagy, representing three generations of cytochrome P-450 research. “Another K [and Furge Lab] alumna, Thanh Phanh ’15, is currently a technician in the Guengerich lab,” said Furge. “She hasn’t contributed to eye project but I’m sure she’ll have her own project in the future.”

Professor of Chemistry Jeff Bartz is the new Kurt D. Kaufman Chair at Kalamazoo College

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Professor of Chemistry and Kurt D. Kaufman Chair Jeff Bartz with some of his students in K's Dow Science Center
Professor of Chemistry and Kurt D. Kaufman Chair Jeff Bartz with some of his students in K’s Dow Science Center…

Professor of Chemistry Jeffrey Bartz, Ph.D., is Kalamazoo College’s new Kurt D. Kaufman Chair. His appointment—made at the recommendation of Provost Mickey McDonald and confirmed by the College’s board of trustees—becomes effective July 1, 2015, and runs through June 30, 2020.

The chair was established through a gift by late Kalamazoo College Trustee Paul Todd ’42 in recognition of Kurt Kaufman’s significant leadership and wide influence as a faculty member at K. It’s awarded to a K faculty member to “recognize and honor campus leadership and excellence in teaching.” Regina Stevens-Truss (Chemistry) has held the Kaufman Chair for the past five years.

“I offer my warmest congratulations to Professor Bartz,” said K President Eileen Wilson-Oyelaran. “Provost McDonald’s recommendation highlights Professor Bartz’s ongoing excellence as a teacher in the classroom, in the laboratory, and as a mentor. He is known as a teaching innovator on campus and for mentoring and supporting students of color and first-generation students.”

Professor Jeff Bartz with three students at K's laser lab
…and in the College’s Laser Lab.

Jeff Bartz joined the K chemistry department as an assistant professor in 1997 and became a full professor in 2011. He teaches courses in physical and general chemistry and works with K students in the research laboratory. His research is in the area of chemical dynamics.

He earned a B.S. degree in chemistry with a minor in mathematics from Southwest Minnesota State University in 1985 and his Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992.

Visit Professor Bartz’s webpage.

Kurt Kaufman was a professor of chemistry at K from 1956 to 1980 who was lauded by students and faculty colleagues as an accomplished researcher and gifted communicator who loved to teach. He died in 2008.

Chemistry Explosion at Kalamazoo College

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Three chemistry students wearing goggles in the laser lab at KSome chemical reactions are simply impressive—the vibrant flash of light when magnesium is ignited or the blast and subsequent grains of salt that appear after mixing sodium metal and chlorine gas.

Equally impressive is the reaction to the chemistry major at Kalamazoo College in recent years.

Sixty-eight students—41 males and 27 females—declared chemistry as their major at Declaration of Major Day. The annual event, held the fifth week of winter quarter, requires sophomores to declare their majors, minors, and concentrations.

“Fifteen percent of the sophomore class [the class of 2017] chose chemistry,” says Laura Lowe Furge, the Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Professor of Chemistry and current chair of the department. “On a per capita basis, it probably makes K the largest chemistry program in the country.”

To accommodate the growth of chemistry majors, a new faculty member will join the department this fall, and additional classes and lab times have been added to the schedule, Furge explains.

“It’s a good problem for us to have,” she says.

Space, she admits, is an issue as labs and lecture halls in the 23-year-old Dow Science Center were built to house a much smaller student population. In 1998, for example, only six students at K graduated with a chemistry degree.

“We’ve had to make some allowances,” she says. “The hope is to eventually expand the building to provide additional lab space, classrooms, and faculty offices.”

While the number of recently declared majors is impressive, it is part of a growing trend. The class of 2016 includes 55 chemistry majors and this year’s senior class will graduate 30 students with degrees in chemistry.

According to Greg Slough, professor of chemistry, the faculty has worked to change the perception of difficulty associated with a chemistry major.

“We’re making chemistry doable for students,” Slough explains. “There is a real student focus among every faculty member. The students know that we’re here for them, we’re approachable, and we’re here to help when the work gets tough.”

Professor of Chemistry Jeffrey Bartz adds that the department’s deep commitment to evidence-based education has helped it evolve.

“Every class changes, every single year,” Bartz explains. “We’re not teaching students the same thing, the same way, year after year.”

One of those students is Bryan Lara, a sophomore from California, who selected chemistry on Declaration of Major Day.

“Every chemistry professor knows my name,” Lara says. “I’m not just a number. There is a real sense of community among the faculty and students.”

He adds that extracurricular chemistry activities such as the Dow Open, a miniature golf event held inside the Dow Science Center, the October 23 Mole Day celebration, and the annual Dow-B-Q help keep students engaged and excited about the major.

And if recent years are any indication, this excitement won’t be waning anytime soon. (Text by Erin Dominianni ’95)