students

Four Score

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FOUR teams of Kalamazoo College students finished among the top 10 at the 2012 Lower Michigan Mathematics Competition
Standing (l-r) are Huang, Mulder, Fink, and Song. Seated are Adhikari, Hoang, and Esman.

By Maggie Kane ’13

Add ‘em up: FOUR teams of Kalamazoo College students finished among the top 10 at the 2012 Lower Michigan Mathematics Competition, with one K team bringing home the top prize. The three-hour competition held April 14 at Calvin College in Grand Rapids pitted multiple teams from 10 colleges against each other.

The ten-question exam “involved all branches of mathematics that undergraduates are familiar with,” said Rosemary K. Brown Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science John Fink, who accompanied the teams to the competition. He said unlike other colleges, K teams don’t practice before competitions because of their busy schedules.

“It’s like pickup soccer to them,” Fink said of his students, “Except they are people who like to play recreational mathematics.”

The K team of Dan Esman ’12, Trung Hoang ’12, Hang Nguyen ’14 took first place with a perfect score of 100. It’s the second straight year a K team has brought home the top trophy. Jinyuan Huang ’14,Renjie Song ’13, and Jiakan Wang ’13, finished third. Utsav Adhikari ’14, Sajan Silwal ’14, and Mojtaba Tafti ’15 finished sixth. The two-person team of Philip Mulder ’15 and Umang Varma ’14 finished ninth.

Two Earn Luce Scholarships

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Luce Scholarship winners Lauren Wierenga and Erica DominicClass of 2013 members Lauren Wierenga (left) and Erica Dominic have been selected to receive prestigious Clare Boothe Luce Scholarships for Women in Science and Engineering. The scholarships will cover tuition for each quarter they are enrolled on campus during the 2011-12 and 2012-13 academic years.

Erica Dominic, from Farmington Hills, Mich., is pursuing a double major in mathematics and English. She is a teaching assistant for a calculus class and works at the College’s Math and Physics Academic Resource Center as a math peer consultant. Through the College’s Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Institute for Service-Learning, she tutors elementary and middle school students in math. During summer 2010, Erica participated in a math Research Experience for Undergraduates at Michigan State University. During the upcoming fall and winter terms, she’ll study at the University of Aberdeen, in Scotland.

Lauren Wierenga, from Grand Rapids, is pursuing a biology major and math minor with a concentration in biophysics. She is co-leader of Kalamazoo’s student organization Sisters in Science, and is a member of the Women’s Ultimate Frisbee team. During summer 2010, she interned at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md. This summer, she will intern for nine weeks in the Princeton University molecular biology department. In the fall, she will attend Kalamazoo’s Budapest Semester in Cognitive Science at Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary. Eötvös is Hungary’s premier science and liberal arts university.

The Clare Boothe Luce (CBL) program is funded by the Henry Luce Foundation. Since its first grants in 1989, CBL has become the single most significant source of private support for women in science, mathematics and engineering. Thus far, the program has supported more than 1,500 women.

Clare Boothe Luce was a playwright, journalist, U.S. Ambassador to Italy, and the first woman elected to Congress from Connecticut. In her bequest establishing this program, she sought “to encourage women to enter, study, graduate, and teach” in science, mathematics and engineering.

Kalamazoo College was invited to apply by the Henry Luce Foundation, and was selected to receive the scholarships based on evidence of its strength in science and engineering, and of its commitment to Mrs. Luce’s vision of increasing the representation of women in these areas. Three Kalamazoo students received CBL scholarships in 2002, and three more in 2003. Additionally, Associate Professor of Mathematics Michele Intermont received a Clare Boothe Luce scholarship during her graduate school days at University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Ind.

Five “K” Students Compete in Poster Presentation for ASBMB

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Five Kalamazoo College students
Left to Right: Popli, Nagy, Diffenderfer, Parson, and McNamara

Kalamazoo College enjoyed a strong scientific presence at the Washington, D.C. meeting of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB). Associate Professor of Chemistry Laura Furge served as a judge in the 15th Annual Undergraduate Poster Competition, in which five “K” students competed against more than 200 other undergraduates from throughout the country.

Laura Diffenderfer ’11 presented a poster titled “Autodock as a method for predicting binding for substrates and inhibitors of human cytochrome P450 2D6,” based on a sliver of the research she’s conducted for the past two years in Furge’s lab. Diffenderfer plans to attend Wayne State Medical School this fall. Alyssa McNamara ’11, a four-year denizen in the lab of chemistry professor Regina Stevens-Truss, presented “Suramin discriminates between the calmodulin-binding sites of neuronal and inducible nitric oxide synthase.” She will work for the Schuler Family Foundation in Chicago before she enrolls in medical school in 2012.

Leslie Nagy ’09 and Diffenderfer presented “Mechanism-based inhibition of human cytochrome P450 2D6 by Schering 66712,” work recently accepted for publication in Drug Metabolism and Disposition. Nagy is completing a two-year appointment as a laboratory research associate in Furge’s lab.

Tanav Popli ’11 presented a poster based on his SIP work at University of California-San Francisco. His poster was titled “Tmtc4 interacts with C3G, Wntless, and Zfhx4: a yeast two-hybrid trap for proteins associated with development of the corpus callosum.” Tanov plans to work in a laboratory after graduation and then apply for an M.D./Ph.D. program.

Emily Parson ’11 presented a poster titled “Characterization of a real time PCR assay for the detection and quantification of Plasmodium malariae parasites.” She did her SIP, which was based in part on her study abroad experience in Kenya, at the Walter Reed U.S. Army Medical Research Unit in Washington, D.C. After she graduates this spring, Emily will return to Walter Reed to continue research in related areas.

“Attendance at a national meeting is a tremendous opportunity for students to hear and meet leading scientists, to see how scientists share ideas with each other, and to see how scientific research accumulates and allows for the formation of new hypotheses,” said Furge.

And it’s an opportunity that depends on philanthropy. Student travel to this meeting was supported by a grant to “K” from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Popli received a travel award from the Undergraduate Affiliation Network of Kalamazoo College headed by Stevens-Truss. Stevens-Truss organized the first annual ASBMB workshop titled: “Fostering Partnerships Between Colleges/Universities and Junior High School Teachers,” and she noted that it got off the ground despite her absence due to and airline grounding. “I was disappointed to miss the workshop when my flight was grounded in Kalamazoo,” said Stevens-Truss. “But I’m glad the idea is now a successful reality.”

The second offering of the workshop will occur next April in San Diego.

The Binary Strip

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Lillian Anderson ArboretumWhen it comes to the Senior Individualized Project, sculptor Daedalian Derks ’12 thinks BIG—as in the kind of installation measured by “chain” (a forestry metric of 66 and one-half feet), as in a three-dimensional sculpture stronger than the urge to procreate. No kidding!

“The Binary Strip,” the fourth and largest sculpture in Derks’ SIP quartet (the other works are called “The Purple Pieces,” “Primary Shapes Weather Vane,” and “Fractal Reflections”), was installed for one week only at the Lillian Anderson Arboretum “Magnificent Pines” trail (see photo). Any longer and it might have affected spring mating rituals of local fauna (who says art’s not stronger than sex?). The piece includes 228 freely spinning black-and-white square panels made from aluminum roofing flashing and grouped into sections of eight, like the binary language in computer science. Conceived at first as a way to “see the wind,” the project evolved into a deeper exploration of the way art interacts with a specific natural setting.

Said Derks (an art-major- classics-minor convert from a history-and-art double major from, originally, a biology major): “I wanted to install it as a flat plane, but the swaying of the pines would have destroyed anything other than a catenary,” a long architectural curve that, in the case of “The Binary Strip,” changes its arc as the trees move. What an interesting way to learn architecture from the natural world! (Derks one day hopes to do graduate work in a program that combines art, culture, technology, and architecture.)

Still, for many, one week was too short to see the piece. If you missed it at the Arb, you can see it at the Light Fine Arts Building on Thursday, April 26, at 4 P.M. when Derks will share his entire SIP sculpture project during an artist presentation open to the public.

Voice Performance Students Place in Regional Audition

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Three of Professor of Music Jim Turner’s voice students placed in the 2012 Great Lakes Regional National Association of Teachers of Singing auditions, which were held in early March at Grand Valley State University.

Hannah Shaughnessey-Mogil ’14 was awarded an Honorable Mention for First Year Women. Jenna Hunt ’’13 took third place in Junior Women. And Erin Donevan ’12 placed first in Musical Theatre.

Student Shines as Peace Corps Volunteer

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Megan Barnes
Megan Barnes ’10

Megan Barnes ’10 is featured in the March 21, 2012 issue of Harbor Light newspaper, published in her hometown of Harbor Springs, Mich.

Megan is a Peace Corps volunteer in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. Working in small communities of 10 to 100 homes, she trains community members to pass along preventive health information to their neighbors and families on topics that range from basic illness and care to more complex skills and issues, such as midwifery, first aid, mental health, and domestic violence.

While at K, Megan studied art history with a concentration in classical civilization. She played tennis for the Hornets, was a member of student commission, and studied abroad in Rome. She also assisted migrant farm workers during her senior year, was a mentor at a local elementary school, and completed a Senior Individualized Project on repatriation of artifacts, following a few months of interning at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Student and Mentor Receive Pierce Cedar Creek Institute for Environmental Education’s Nature in Words Fellowship

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Kate Belew ’15 and Di Seuss, English, have received the Pierce Cedar Creek Institute for Environmental Education’s Nature in Words Fellowship for the summer of 2012.

Following Fellowship guidelines, students apply with a mentor from one of the consortium institutions.  Kate proposed that she will write a collection of poems inspired by Professor Emeritus of English Conrad Hilberry’s object poems in his chapbook The Fingernail of Luck. (Hilberry was a formative influence on the poetic career of Seuss, whom he first encountered as a high schooler in Niles, Michigan, and who graduated from “K” in 1978.)  In Kate’s poems, she will observe objects in the natural world, do research on their origins and characteristics, and then write in their voices, finding the intersection between the natural world and her own emotional and spiritual evolution.

She will be provided with housing at the Institute and will be given a stipend to support her work.  Di will meet with Kate throughout the summer to mentor her through the experience, and Di also have the opportunity to work on my own writing project at Pierce Cedar Creek. Said Di, “Many students from the region apply for this fellowship.  It is a significant achievement that Kate has been selected.”

“K” Student and Alumni Earn Alpha Lamda Delta Honor Society Fellowships

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Two Kalamazoo College alumni and one current student have combined to earn three of the 23 national fellowships awarded this year by Alpha Lambda Delta honor society for outstanding students who are working towards a graduate or professional degree.

Emma Perry ’08, pursing a graduate degree in English at Boston University, received a $5,000 award. Amel Omari ’09, in the master’s of public health program at the University of Michigan, received a $3,000 award. Matthew DuWaldt ’12 earned a $3,000 award and will attend law school at a yet to be determined institution in the fall. Founded in 1924, Alpha Lambda Delta recognizes students who have succeeded in maintaining a 3.5 or higher GPA and are in the top 20 percent of their class.

Student Researches American Volley Ball Coaches Association

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Colleen Leonard class of 2012
Colleen Leonard ’12

Colleen Leonard ’12 examines results from the first-ever salary survey conducted by the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) in the February/March 2012 issue of Coaching Volleyball, an AVCA publication.

She drew valuable conclusions from coaches at all levels of NCAA competition for “Money Talks: AVCA Salary Survey Analysis,” an article she researched and wrote as part of her Senior Individualized Project at K.

Colleen is an economics major with minors in math and art from Mason, Mich. who studied abroad in Strasbourg, France and interned with AFLAC in East Lansing. She was an outside hitter on the Hornet volleyball team for four years, earning All-MIAA First Team honors as a junior and senior, Second Team as a sophomore. She also traveled to China with her Hornet team in 2009. Well done, Colleen!