Category: Alumni

Research Published on Alzheimer’s Molecules

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Biology professors Jim Langeland ’86 and Blaine Moore join one K student and three K alumni as authors of an important paper that will soon be published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. The co-authors are Nathalie Botezatu ’14, Maddie Gillentine ’13, Ashley (Boehmke) Benson ’08, and Kyle Wilson ’08. All were (or are) biology majors at K, and in the case of some, the scientific work—which describes the evolution of key molecules involved in Alzheimer’s disease—was part of a Senior Individualized Project (SIP). The work is groundbreaking in at least two ways. First, it approaches Alzheimer’s disease from an evolutionary perspective. And second, it illustrates a particular niche approach to research that the scientific environment at K is well positioned to pull off.

“The experiments that culminated in this paper began in 2007 with the SIP work of Benson and Wilson,” says Langeland. “The six-year duration shows that science can take a long time to come to fruition.” That duration derives, in part, from the complementary expertise of the two collaborating labs—Langeland’s expertise in gene evolution and Moore’s background in Alzheimer’s disease research and experience with cellular expression of proteins.  According to Langeland, for most of the larger labs the exigency of understanding Alzheimer’s in order to development treatments for it may not favor such an extended timeline or evolutionary approach. Indeed, Moore says, “Most researchers in the Alzheimer’s field are exclusively focused on inhibiting the production of protein fragments that have been linked to the progression of the disease. One of the exciting aspects of this project was the chance to take a broader view of the proteins involved in the disease process.”

A broader view allows for unique approaches (suggesting that time and creativity are the two pillars of the particular niche approach to research for which K is so well-equipped). Six years ago Langeland decided to investigate the evolution of two molecules associated with Alzheimer’s—APP and BACE. BACE acts like a scissors to cut (or cleave) APP. The excess accumulation of one of the “cut pieces” (a.k.a. products or substrates, this particular one known as A-Beta) is linked to the development of the disease. Benson and Wilson sought answers to how far back on the evolutionary tree of life these molecules could be found. Turns out that APP is nearly a billion years old. BACE (and its cleavage effect) is much younger, about 500 million years old. Just down the hall, Moore’s lab had been studying the regulation of enzymes that produce A-Beta, and had well-developed systems for expressing Alzheimer’s proteins and analyzing cleavage products. Put the two together and you have a unique project that would have been unlikely at a larger institution or medical school.

The principle of natural selection suggests that BACE’s action on APP is vital to life in ways we don’t yet understand, according to Langeland. The A-Beta substrate may be some kind of mistake that natural selection is unable to “correct” because Alzheimer’s expresses so late in human lifetimes, usually long after reproductive success has been achieved. Moore says, “It’s essentially a wrong place, wrong time phenomenon. The APP substrate evolves the A-Beta motif, then comes in cellular contact with preexisting BACE. The result is a devastating disease process that is most likely an accidental by-product of some normal, as yet unknown, cellular process.”

Moore and his lab (including Gillentine and Botezatu) conducted an elegant experiment to confirm the importance of the BACE molecule. They expressed the BACE molecule from an organism—in this case a primitive marine dweller called amphioxus—that diverged from the human evolutionary branch some 750 million years ago. Amphioxus has no A-Beta. Then, Moore’s group discovered that amphioxus BACE nevertheless acts as a scissors to the human APP molecule. The result adds evidence to the biological importance (albeit unknown) of BACE’s cleaving action.

According to Langeland, an evolutionary approach to diseases may suggest molecular targets for treatment intervention, and, just as important, the limitation of a non-nuanced approach to potential targets.

The paper is titled “Asynchronous Evolutionary Origins of A-Beta and BACE-1.” The work was supported, in part, by a Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Directions Initiative Grant, a program that supports professional growth of mid-career liberal arts faculty, with particular emphasis on projects outside traditional boundaries.

Rare Books Living

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A tiny Bible in the palm of a hand
A tiny Bible, strange denizen of the A.M. Todd Rare Book Room

It’s time for me to start living, which means a visit to the Upjohn Library’s rare book room. Detroit Free Press Staff Writer Zlati Meyer makes it a priority to discover and visit interesting locations on the campuses of Michigan’s colleges and universities. She often writes about these must-sees in her column “You haven’t lived here until:” The November 3 column’s feature is none other than K’s A.M. Todd Rare Book Room and its curator Paul Smithson ’68. Because I’ve visited the rare book room, one could say I do “live” in Kalamazoo, but perhaps that purchase is more precarious than I thought. After all, there are many artifacts about which I had no knowledge until reading Meyer’s column–the hand-lettered “Raven,” Pope’s Homer, and the discovery of oxygen, to name just a few. Time to reinvigorate my lease on life; a rare book visit! Stat! The collection is open 1 PM to 3 PM, Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, or by appointment with Paul. The current exhibit–“What the Dickens? Victorian England in the A.M. Todd Rare Book Room Collection”–continues through November 26.

K Alumnus Wins Dissertation Award

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The W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research annually honors the best doctoral dissertation on employment-related issues. The 2013 Dissertation Award is shared by Gregory Leiserson and Will Dobbie. Dobbie is 2004 graduate of Kalamazoo College (major–economics and business; study abroad–Nairobi, Kenya; athletics–varsity cross country). His dissertation comprises three essays in the area of labor economics. The first essay estimates the impact of Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection on subsequent earnings and mortality. The second explores why market failures may exist in subprime credit markets. The third asks whether high quality primary/secondary schools are enough to significantly reduce social disparities. Dobbie earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University. The W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan, independent research organization devoted to investigating the causes and effects of unemployment, to identifying feasible methods of insuring against unemployment, and to devising ways and means of alleviating the distress and hardship caused by unemployment.

Alumnus Wins Nobel Prize

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2013 Nobel Prize winner Robert Shiller in 1963Robert Shiller, who became famous for calling the housing and Internet stock bubbles, was one of three Americans to win the 2013 Nobel Prize in economics. Today, he’s a professor at Yale. In 1963, he was a freshman at Kalamazoo College (see photo at left). He stayed at K through fall of his sophomore year before transferring to the University of Michigan. A true liberal arts learner, he took classes during his five K quarters from Don Flesche (political science), Jean Calloway (mathematics) and Conrad Hilberry (English). Five quarters? How does a student accumulate five quarters by the end of fall of sophomore year? That’s a little known fact of the early K-Plan. One could opt to complete one’s undergraduate studies and graduate in three years. Very few students elected that option and it dropped from disuse. “My experience at K was great,” wrote Shiller recently, “and helped set me on my path. I remember that it was my admiration of Bruce Timmons, an economics major at K, that got me into economics. It wasn’t so much my experience taking economics at K, I only got a B+ in intro econ, as I recall, which I thought, momentarily, might mean that I just did not have talent in economics.” Regarding his transfer to University of Michigan: “The reason I did so is a little complicated to explain,” wrote Shiller. “My foreign language was Russian, and so I did not have any place to go for my junior year abroad, and all my classmates would be gone, so I thought I might just switch to U of M. Another reason was that I signed in to the K three-year program, originally to graduate in 1966, but began to think I wanted to experience more years as an undergrad, and I thought joining a big college newspaper staff (the Michigan Daily) would be great fun. More fun than staying behind when my whole class went abroad. So, that is what I did.” At K, Shiller was a member of the Delmega Society, a student organization that attracted mostly math and science majors and serious students. Another K connection was provided by Professor of Economics Hannah McKinney. Shiller and another professor team taught McKinney’s macroeconomics class during her first year of graduate school. Congratulations on the Nobel Prize, Professor Shiller. We’re proud of your K roots.

“Three out of four … like a coffin or a door”

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Writer-in-Residence Diane Seuss won the Indiana Review 1/2K Prize for prose of 500 words or less. Brief nonfiction, prose poetry, or short-short stories are eligible for the prize. Di’s winning entry is titled “Wal-Mart Parking Lot,” and about it the contest judge wrote: “[It] offers readers an unexpected vision of American culture filtered through consumer culture and 20th century art history.” Di also was a finalist in three prestigious poetry competitions: the Orlando Prize (from A Room of Her Own Foundation); the River Styx Poetry Prize, 2013; and the Able Muse Poetry Prize, 2013. Last fall she was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the English department at Colorado College.

New poems of Di’s appear in Unsplendid, Rattle, North American Review, and The Missouri Review. The latter journal featured the four poems in its online Text Box anthology, which includes an introduction to the poems (from which comes the Di Seuss quote that serves as title to this post) as well as questions and writing prompts. Di’s next public readings will occur November 4 (in Mount Pleasant, Mich., as part of the Wellspring Literary Series) and February 6, 2014 (at the University of Michigan, as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series). Her third collection of poems, Four-Legged Girl, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2015.

Active Autumn in Career Education

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Bret Linvill, Jerry Mechtenberg-Berrigan and Amos
Bret Linvill ’15 (center) during his summer internship, flanked by alumni supervisor Jerry Mechtenberg-Berrigan ’97 (right) and Jerry’s son, Amos. Linvill’s was a Community Building Internship organized jointly with the College’s Center for Civic Engagement.

Autumn’s active in the Center for Career and Professional Development (CCPD). The Recruiting Expo and the Professional Development Institute are hard-to-miss fall events. And you often find CCPD staff speaking in upper-level classes and first-year seminars. Every day CCPD staff members help students with career counseling, with assessment tools, and with application materials. And fall’s the time CCPD reaches out to alumni and parents to invite their partnership in providing summer career development opportunities for students.

Alumni and parents, let us know if you will host a summer student, either through the Discovery Externship Program or as a K Intern in the Field Experience Program.

Externships: Short Homestay and Job Shadow

Past externship hosts, who have housed students and hosted them in their workplace for up to four weeks in the summer, become enthusiastic advocates for the program.

“John and Tyler were wonderful externs! Not only did we enjoy them tremendously, but we received such positive feedback from our colleagues who graciously spent time with them. The days were long and hectic, but our dinners were relaxed and full of conversations about their days, their impressions, the state of medicine, and more.” – Sherri Seifert ’83

“It is always great to connect with a current K student and to spend time sharing my home and work life. As I have become more professionalized in my career, I find I can more comfortably provide advice and insight into working in the arts.” – Bethany Whitehead ’98

“Discovery Externship is a special program that I highly endorse. I wish all college students could have such an experience. The students come well prepared and ready to try out new things. And we seem to benefit just as much as they do.” – Anne Dayanandan ’75

Other comments:

“I found it a lot of fun. I enjoyed showing our student what practicing medicine is like. It helped me reflect on what I was like at 19 trying to make similar career decisions.”

“Hosting a K student was a lovely experience. It was fun to get to share my experiences at and beyond K with her. When I was at K, wondering what I might do next, I had no idea what graduate school was all about. I enjoyed being able to offer a K student a glimpse of that next step and to provide some guidance about how to get there.”

“I enjoyed the opportunity to talk with the extern about my own scattered career path. I reassure students that career paths do not need to be defined at graduation and do not need to be linear. I wish I had someone to talk to about such concerns when I was a student.”

“It’s great to see the level of intellectual curiosity that I remember as a hallmark of my time at K is still alive and well in the current student body. My extern made me feel as if the DNA of the college was still much the same–the students are there because they are truly engaged and committed to learning. That was nice to see.”

Internships: Summer Workplace Immersion

Externship host Bridget Blough with her two summer externs
Externship host Bridget Blough ’08 (right) shares a day at the beach with her two summer externs.

Alumni and parents who select and supervise student interns for at least six weeks through the Field Experience Program are similarly effusive. They cite many benefits of involvement, including:

– Engagement with talented, idealistic, dedicated students;

– Enhancement of the projects to which interns are assigned;

– The real and valuable work undertaken by the students;

– The learning that goes both ways;

– The opportunity to see future leaders learn and grow by doing.

The program’s structure–a sliding-scale stipend, a learning contract, regular contact with the CCPD through reflective assignments, final evaluations, and official transcript notation–ensures that learning goals and mutual expectations are established and met.

The CCPD is currently fielding inquiries and confirming participation for both extern and intern hosts for summer 2014. Alumni and parents may indicate their interest in either program online, and a CCPD staff member will respond by mid-November. As fall turns to winter, our students will head off for winter break, and the CCPD’s summer line-up will be complete.

Social Justice Networks in Action

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Alyssa Rickard ’12 works for the Africa Department of Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization that supports democratic change, monitors the status of freedom around the world, and advocates for democracy and human rights. The organization’s Johannesburg (South Africa) office–and Rickard–are working on a project seeking people in southern Africa to serve as mentors to 20 Fellows of a Freedom House program called Empowerment of a New Generation of Leaders in Southern Africa (ENGLSA). The Fellows (and prospective mentees) are men and women between 25 and 45 years old from government, private sector and civil society organizations in Namibia and South Africa, all of whom are committed to ethical leadership and accountable governance. Prospective mentors will use one-on-one and group meetings as well as virtual interactions to mentor, drawing from their personal experiences and professional backgrounds to serve as trusted counselors, loyal advisors, sounding boards and coaches to mentees. Mentors will help the Fellows reflect on their developing competencies and enhance their leadership capacity. In her work, Rickard, who earned her B.A. as a political science major, is drawing on some of her own undergraduate mentors as resources, specifically the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership’s Lisa Brock and Prexy Nesbitt. Rickard took the College’s course on Nelson Mandela, co-taught by Brock and Nesbitt, and later joined one of Nesbitt’s trips to Africa. Both Brock and Nesbitt have extensive networks of social justice leaders in southern Africa that might help Rickard and Freedom House recruit the mentors for ENGLSA. The connection is one example of the worldwide impact of the ACSJL.

Shaping Space and Social Interaction

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Hannah Knoll's ArtPrize entryHannah Knoll ’13 is a recent Kalamazoo College graduate with a passion for design and an aspiration to be an architect. She majored in physics with minors in mathematics and studio art. “I am interested primarily in the relationship between community and the physical landscape, leading to my desired career in architecture or urban design, fields I began to explore through jobs, internships and my study abroad experience in Copenhagen, Denmark,” said Knoll. She is currently updating architectural drawings for K’s facilities management department and serving as the Post-Baccalaureate Fellow in Art for the 2013-2014 academic year. Her busy schedule nevertheless left her time to enter ArtPrize. Her submission is called “Spaces Between.” The entry includes five bench-like objects that together outline a single rectangular form that relates to the room it is in.

“The fragmentation of this rectangle creates spaces between the individual pieces, spaces that can be experienced by the viewer as they sit and interact with the work. This is part of a series of projects exploring how physical elements and objects that shape space can influence social interactions.”

Healthy Body May Mean Healthy Bacteria

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Rob Dunn ’97 is extensively quoted (and his best-selling book cited, The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today) in an article by Nancy Churnin that appeared in the Dallas Morning News’ “Dallas News Life.” The article, “Be nice to your bacteria and they’ll be nice to you, doctors say,” notes a growing belief among experts that good health is strongly influenced by the ecology of the multitudes of bacteria that reside in our bodies and in our natural environment. It cites examples of probiotic treatment, or the introduction of bacteria as a therapeutic measure to restore the balance of bacterial populations in the body. It is a fascinating read, and Dunn is at his curious K best, equating excitement with the new found extent of all we don’t know. Dunn is a scientist and professor at North Carolina State.

The Art of a Scientist

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Kalamazoo College alumnus Dan Van HornWhen Dan Van Horn ’50 earned his degree in biology, focusing on ornithology, at Kalamazoo College, he came to science with an eye for art. A visit to the Indiana Dunes during his college years intrigued Van Horn, drawing his eye to plant life, but also to the resident birds. Alongside biology, Van Horn studied watercolor painting, but after graduating and going into military service, he switched from watercolor to photography.

Van Horn went on to graduate school to earn a master’s and then his doctoral degree in zoology at the University of Colorado. He was a professor of biology at several colleges and universities, later also a founding member of the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs biology department shortly after the branch opened in 1966. Since retiring from teaching, he has immersed himself in art again, winning many awards. He is a signature member of four national watercolor societies, and in 2013, Van Horn was selected for the American Watercolor Society’s 146th Annual Exhibition. The show is traveling to many venues across the United States throughout 2013.

Van Horn lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with his wife, but because he grew up in Chicago, many of his watercolors feature that city.